There's not big challenge here - just don't buy AAA games.
It seems to me that a lot of people think the old Microprose's and Id's were the AAA of their day and the nature of AAA games has mutated from something simple, fun, and authentic into the horrible monstrosity of today's overblown games.
I rather think that today's AAA games are a new phenomenon that overshadows but doesn't replace the kinds of games & game studios that most of us grew up loving. Those simpler, less overproduced games never went away.
Id started out as a shareware outfit which was the indie of it's day, instead of marketing games through app stores they distributed demos on floppy disk through intermediaries who advertised in the back of computing magazines and encouraged people to share demo versions by copying the disks with their friends. They used the shareware model for every game they released up until Doom 2. The original doom had a full 1/3 of the game available for free. I don't think early id games like Commander keen were even available in retail stores until much later.
Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games, where live movie footage was mixed into gameplay. Night Trap and Rebel Assault are early examples of this.
The problem they had was that there was too jarring a difference in realism between game sprites and movie footage.
> Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games
Not just that - fancy animated cut scenes for intros and finales like in Dune 2 (1992) for PC. For a game that was maybe 10 MB on disk, those short animations were about 10 - 20% of the total installed size.
In any case, a team of ten people over the course of a year is typical for the time. The whole CONCEPT of a megabudget game with a hundred people solely dedicated to art and design for several years is something I've first associated with Final Fantasy VII.
The term "AAA" for me has implications of "Three million copies sold and we didn't even make back our IT budget".
What were the ads? The untouchables, michael jackson's moonwalker, ghouls 'n ghosts, what's the score? (Microprose soccer game), f29 retaliator, ...
The games we remember most fondly aren't the mainstream games of their time, they're the ones that we kept playing long enough in order not to forget about them.
To be fair, most of the magazine is still dedicated to action games in ancient platforms, which have aged poorly. C64 and Spectrum were still the top bill, with some space dedicated to Amiga and Atari ST, both of which were rather short lived. The PC giant that was about to wake up was nowhere to be seen.
We also have to remember that Shareware games only really got real traction with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, which would not come out for years. Keen was always more of a cult classic than anything else.
And despite this, I see an ad for one Sid Meier's Pirates, which is a classic. An Amiga review for Cinemaware's It Came From The Desert, another big classic, getting a 95%. An entire page of clues on Indiana Jones 3, a tremendous adventure game. An ad for an old Dragonlance RPG/Action hybrid, which was pretty fun. A once page ad for one Sim City, which is about as important a game as it gets.
The top sellers for C64 and Spectrum are dismal, but on the Amiga/ST charts, I can't blame people for liking the Strider port, but we see one Space Quest 3 in there, and more Indy, Bloodwych, and the pretty good for it's time TV Sports Football, another Cinemaware classic.
Action games sold very well, and yet, like all action games, they are quickly surpassed by some of the same with some gameplay tweaks and better graphics. It's just an issue of genre longevity.
So based on my reading of the magazine, the games we remember from the era, barring a few exceptions, just happened to be the most popular games of the era outside of the action genre. They are all over the magazine.
So yeah, the great games were still there, and well reviewed.
It seems to me that a lot of people think the old Microprose's and Id's were the AAA of their day and the nature of AAA games has mutated from something simple, fun, and authentic into the horrible monstrosity of today's overblown games.
I rather think that today's AAA games are a new phenomenon that overshadows but doesn't replace the kinds of games & game studios that most of us grew up loving. Those simpler, less overproduced games never went away.