Free access to all past media online caused culture to suddenly halt just after the turn of the century, and turn from a directed timeline, where fashion mimicked the advancement of technology, into a weird swirling self-referential ironic vortex of ahistorical relativity.
I've always wondered about the relationship between america's opiate habit and the afghan poppy harvest. The US army was burning millions (billions?) of dollars worth of poppies every year, to deny profit to the taliban. Could that not have been used to make pain pills? How do the incentives flow here?
I wonder what the process is, as a google engineer, to get the artwork done for something like this? Do you just put in a ticket and some time later the SVGs turn up in your repo? Is there an artwork queue, or is it a political fight for access to the illustrators time?
Hyper Light Drifter, released this year, comes close for me. Imagine a cross between alttp and dark souls, with the art style and music of fez. It's superb.
It's not as expansive or elaborate as the snes marios or zeldas, but the gameplay is very polished and deep, and the plot is... well I won't spoil it ;)
The reason it still looks good now is because they created a timeless art style with clear, readable sprites which didn't need many colors. Compare that with 16-bit era attempts at photorealism which look muddy today.
The same is true of Metroid Prime on the gamecube, which looks better than some modern games despite hardware which was underpowered even at the time, due to masterful art direction.
There are people out there making new NES games and selling them on real carts. They go for about $40; obviously they don't typically include ARM coprocessors. Sometimes they have blinkenlights though.
It attempts to describe certain aspects of human cultural interaction, broadly defined.
I'm not defending it, I share the opinions of many of it's detractors, my point is only that to describe a technical subject you don't understand as incomprehensible nonsense is silly.
This made me extremely anxious for a good while, fortunately the emergence of PC music has basically cured that: https://soundcloud.com/shhsecretsongs/gfoty-my-song https://soundcloud.com/pcmus/wannabe