It's old, so what?
In my early twenties reviewing and playing many new releases each week, I was a much harsher critic than I am today. I have noticed doing this magazine that games that I previously had problems with I now enjoy and games that reviewed poorly at the time I now feel were judged too harshly.
So I began wondering why had I become less critical with age and this is what I found out.
Price
The first thing I realized was that price is no longer a key consideration, at least when it comes to thinking about most of these PlayStation 3 titles. I picked up each of our review titles for this issue, Thief and Murdered: Soul Suspect for around £5-8 each. Prices in the region of getting some food for lunch. There is much less jeopardy when buying for that amount. But when these releases were new and at the £40 mark, £40 being worth even more then than it does today, if you purchased a game you really wanted it to be good and to keep you occupied until you could afford to buy another one and as such you were much harder on the quality of that purchase.
This is one reason why video game criticism, youtube channels and magazines exist, to help inform the buyer on which titles are most likely going to appeal to them. I know a lot of games in this era were judged harshly because of their story length. We often heard about games whose main story could be completed in 4-6 hours which is not great if that’s the only game you can afford for perhaps another month if not longer.
But with modern day time constraints of being an adult with a job and kids, a 4-6 hour tight gaming experience is honestly kind of appealing, but only for the right price.
Passage of Time
I think there is also the issue of distance. We become unable to notice the small differences between titles as time and technology advances. When these games were brand new we were riding a wave of graphical and performance improvements, but that improvement was a long term trend and from game to game the wave could either go forwards or backwards and it felt very important at the time to work out which was which.
When a new title dropped you would compare it to titles that had recently come before it, how do the graphics compare? The lighting, the controls, the multiplayer offerings - all of it mattered and the minor differences were played to be bigger than they feel today.
Now when I play a lot of these PlayStation 3 games they look and play very similar to each other. My theory is that my brain simply says “They all look and play much worse than the PlayStation 5” and just puts them in the same mental bucket. But at the time, the small differences between titles would be a huge discussion point.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still PlayStation 3 games that look appalling and play even worse but for the rest there isn’t enough in it compared to modern standards to really say too much about.
If I have chosen to play a PlayStation 3 game, it means I have mentally prepared myself that I have to accept certain technological limitations, like watching an old black and white movie. You can enjoy it for the plot, the dialogue or even for appreciating the effects they used with the technology they had but you know those aren’t as impressive as modern effects but you can still enjoy and appreciate it for what it is.
Positivity
The final reason is purely mindset. I started this project to explore the PlayStation 3 and celebrate it in a positive way rather than simply pick up bad games and then talk about how bad they are. There definitely are games on the PlayStation 3 that are bad but for the most part I don’t see the point in me revisiting them and therefore I don’t pick them up.
Whether the mindset shift has changed due to age or just life experience I do not know but being negative for long periods can get a bit draining. Looking for the positives in something or simply accepting “this isn’t for me” is enough, without having to tear it to shreds. I’ll leave that for someone else. For now I am going to continue trying to enjoy as much as I can.