Image alt text: An image of Steam's top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as "prepurchase"
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there's three games that aren't even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it's three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
Meeeeh, I'm with you on some bits, not so much in others.
I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn't understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was "fast" or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn't parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.
But design wasn't universally bad at all, we've just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.
I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That's up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what's good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that's a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.
It's just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn't even realize.
To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn't tell what good looked like on that area, either.
It was probably regional, but here there was definitely a split between the computer-focused print media and the console-focused one. PCs tended to get top billing among computer platforms in that space before the micros died out altogether and it was just PC and consoles.
It was all marketing/hobby stuff, though. The Atari ST-specific media feeding into their mini console wars with the Amiga and so on... I don't see it as the computer brand magazines being more informational and the console ones being more arbitrarily marketing. It was more that the branded magazines were worried with selling you the computer and the multiplat publications were selling you the games.
The mismatch I remember was less between reviews and end result (reviews were less the point than maps and walkthroughs anyway) and more the mismatch between advertising frequency and quality/availability. I don't remember Night Breed the movie from watching it or from the marketing of the movie or even from playing the game, I remember it from the six month long carpet bombing of magazine advertising we all endured from it.
The review stuff was mostly about them being written by kids who didn't understand game design, were given something to play for free and seeing something the market had arbitrarily decided mattered in isolation. There were exceptions and people who had the writing skills or the insights, but it didn't matter because the readers didn't have the ability to differentiate the two, either.
I would argue a lot of them still don't and treat whatever vestigial reviews we still have as a shopping catalogue instead.