noticing it more and more. i like to play retro video games but i don’t actually do it that often. 5 years or so ago i got a SNES mini and a playstation classic and one of those anbernac handhelds in the span of a year or two, so I was spending a lot of time reading lists online of games people thought were notable, underrated, good games for genre newbies, etc.
i have been playing games again recently so i have again been looking up games and the difference in content you get now is astounding. five years ago if you searched something like “best nes RPGs” or “obscure ps1 games” you would find lovingly handcrafted lists and articles by people who were passionate about it and wanted to share, make readers laugh, or ignite interest in something. Now there’s like 20 different sites that each have ai generated “best (genre) games for (system)” lists for every system and genre combination possible, with generic game descriptions, list orders likely cribbed from one of those ranking sites, and nonsensical filler copy (“every RPG enthusiast loves the N64” type words just mashed together)
photographs are also no fun to take or look at anymore, accelerated by new ai image generation but honestly ever since smartphone cameras started automatically editing the shot out of your picture before it even showed it to you.
when i was a kid i wanted to be an author, glad i just got depressed and useless and never pursued it, considering what that space looks like today.
internet was a mistake
You must log in or register to comment.
It genuinely pains me how much capitalism has ruined internet spaces.
It genuinely pains me how much capitalism has ruined
internet spaces.
it seems like every time i search for anything it comes up with a million ai-generated wordpress pages with the same basic structure. obviously being churned out as someone’s “passive income” scheme. I wonder if there is a search engine with a way to filter out all wordpress sites…
This predates LLMs and the current AI fad, but yeah it’s a pain in the ass. I think they’ve gotten worse because at least 10-15 years ago when you searched “X release date” the actual real release date was sandwiched somewhere in the autogenerated garbage.
it
fucking
SUCKS
Like I know people have memed that AI conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2 to death, but my god is it more relevant than ever. Just this unending churn of junk. There is no humanity left online. There’s not much in the real world either. Fuck AI.
AI conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2
I must have missed this. Could you link me
It’s this conversation from the end
It’s famously pretty prescient with regard to the internet and what it’s become since 2001 when the game came out. Not really about AI as we understand it, but AI is accelerating and worsening these trends.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I like the rankings at snesrankings.com. I disagree to some extent or another with basically all of his takes, but I really appreciate that it’s just one guy who actually played every last one of the things, and it’s not like he’s ever so far off that, if you started playing from #1 down, I’d ever be like “oh no don’t play that play this other game.”
Thank you for sharing that site. I disagree with the order of some of the rankings, but I won’t argue that every single game in that top 25 is a masterpiece.
Except for Legend of the Mystical Ninja. What the hell? That game stinks.
I haven’t actually played Legend Of The Mystical Ninja, but I have seen it appear near the top of many lists, where not a single one of those lists has done anything to convince me to actually try it.
I am 100% convinced that game is just a bit that’s been going on for 30 years, and nobody has actually played it.
I mean, the franchise is really popular in Japan. Maybe that’s why it’s on the list?
The labour theory of value applies to AI slop.
Nobody wants to use their time on something that someone else wouldn’t use their time creating. People unconsciously value it based on the time and skill involved in creating it which is fundamentally fuck all. This is why there has been a very clear and obvious negative trend towards AI over time. Even if the AI became magically good people would still value it as slop.
That reminds me of how AI art is so samey looking. It’s like everyone uses the same prompts and the same filters. I get that it was already creatively bankrupt but come on you have the power of the entire internet.
It’s because most people using image generation aren’t artistically minded, and aren’t putting in effort to get a result better than “close enough” (and corporate ai tools have built-in prompts to give things the “ai look.”) If you run an image generator locally you have more control over the output, with loras or whatever.
i dont think this type of seo blog spam is particularly novel, its been a problem for probably 20 years. It’s easier to do now that you dont have to hire a bunch of people in the phillippines to write these articles though.
total, automated, enshittifcation. Truly the glorious innovation humanity needed now more than ever.
https://retro-sanctuary.com/Top Games Main.html has some good top 100 lists. They have some left-field picks too, which I always appreciated.
Thanks for sharing! Grabbed a few GameCube games from this that I hadn’t considered checking out before
