That’s survivorship bias tainting your nostalgia. We collectively remember the passion poured into games like this but forget all of the the movie tie in games, cereal box games, unplayable tier of poorly made games, and games that were so mediocre to not even fall into the previous categories. Some of them get remembered but often more because of how exceptionally bad they were, such as E.T., Superman 64, Pepsiman, Phillips CDi LoZ, etc.

It’s easy to remember years like 1998 for games like LoZ OoT, Half Life, Spyro, StarCraft, Final Fantasy 7, Goldeneye 007, and DDR. It’s harder to remember the other 158 major titles released that year. While I don’t doubt there were at least some passionate people on the team of most if not every one of those titles, I’d sooner believe many of those titles were just being pushed out the door closer to release than they were passionate works from a team of faithful devs able to fully realize their vision.

I will agree that I think there’s a larger volume of no-passion games today that companies are just churning out to try to make a quick buck, but I think that’s more because it’s easier to do today than it was back in the day. I don’t think it’s because the devs of days past were more passionate about their titles. I will also agree that because of the aforementioned churned out titles that it can be harder to find titles made by truly passionate teams.

Source for my number of games released in 1998, by my own count as I didn’t see one listed: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_in_video_games

Maybe I’m missing years of video game discourse but I don’t know what you’re talking about being alone on this hill. I’ve been using VR since the Google Cardboard and as long as you temper your expectations it’s been plenty fine since even all the way back then. The experiences on the Vive and Index are a bit clunky but otherwise I have fun with them every time I use them.

The first generation Pokemon games all used significantly less power to maintain their RAM battery saves than Pokemon Gold, Silver, and Crystal by virtue of not having a real time clock constantly ticking the power away. RBY saves only needed to maintain the power for the save itself and did no additional work on top of that.

Original GSC cartridges would last about 10-15 years, whereas RBY could last 20-30 years. We’re currently in the span of time where many RBY cartridge batteries will be failing but it’s still possible to find ones with functional original saves on batteries just barely holding on.

Many people like to try using physically larger batteries when doing replacements, but most of them don’t realize the batteries aren’t losing charge at the end of those many years because they’re drained and out of power. RBY saves use so little power from the battery in the cartridge that they won’t fully drain it after 30 ish years. Instead the battery saves fail because the batteries themselves fail after 20-30 years. Picking the larger button cell batteries won’t help since they’ll still have the same total lifespan and will still lose charge at almost the same rate as the spare batteries that weren’t installed in your cartridge of choice.

Planning on not buying it, that being said I was likely never going to even if this controversy didn’t happen. I’m apparently part of 3% of Subnautica players on steam who really didn’t care for the game. Gave it a decent chance (7 hours playtime) and talked with several people who adore the game but found many aspects of the game to be overrated, poorly designed, or frustrating. Just about the only thing I can remember honestly enjoying about the game was the aesthetic, which even then was held back by some sometimes downright bad graphics.