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Classic games that have aged badly
- Thread starter FireBeaver
- Start date
Gaming is unique among art forms. It is an inherently technological and interactive medium. Movies and to an extent music benefit from technological advancements, but not to the same extent as games.
Which means games certainly age over time, and sort of experiences you can have and resulting level of entertainment change quite drastically. You can never truly replicate the experience of playing vanilla WoW back in 2005, or Diablo II on Battle.net in 2001. The later are among my all-time favorite experiences, not just in gaming, but in life. But I have no desire to play WoW today, or Diablo 2 for that matter, and wouldn't recommend them in 2017.
Even single player games are similar. It was mindblowing playing Mario 64 in 1996, or OoT in 98. Sure, these games may hold up, but playing them for the first time in 2017 just wouldn't even be remotely close to the same experience you would've had playing them in the 90s.
Goldeneye may be a shit game today, but if you were a 13 year old kid in 1997 hanging out with your friends, it was magical.
In terms of artistic expression, I would say video games lie somewhere between a movie and a live music performance. You'll never know how great a concert was unless you were actually there to experience it at the time.
Which means games certainly age over time, and sort of experiences you can have and resulting level of entertainment change quite drastically. You can never truly replicate the experience of playing vanilla WoW back in 2005, or Diablo II on Battle.net in 2001. The later are among my all-time favorite experiences, not just in gaming, but in life. But I have no desire to play WoW today, or Diablo 2 for that matter, and wouldn't recommend them in 2017.
Even single player games are similar. It was mindblowing playing Mario 64 in 1996, or OoT in 98. Sure, these games may hold up, but playing them for the first time in 2017 just wouldn't even be remotely close to the same experience you would've had playing them in the 90s.
Goldeneye may be a shit game today, but if you were a 13 year old kid in 1997 hanging out with your friends, it was magical.
In terms of artistic expression, I would say video games lie somewhere between a movie and a live music performance. You'll never know how great a concert was unless you were actually there to experience it at the time.
Liliana Eileen
Member
Fight me irl
For me it will have to be Jet Force Gemini. Went in nostalgia heavy and yeesh...
Psychoward
Banned
You can change the controls to modern ones
I haven't played much but that makes it easier although some people say it ruins the game because it trivializes the challenge
To me, a good game is a good game. I tend to not think of games aging in any traditional sense. After all, I can go grab my Ocarina of Time cart off my games' shelf, put it in my N64 and be playing the exact same thing I played back in 1998. The only thing that's aged is me. I expect beautiful graphics and detailed worlds and smooth 3D camera controls.
I find gamers are generally inept at managing their expectations when revisiting old games. You'd almost never hear an avid reader whine about antiquated language in a literary classic or a cinephile criticizing black and white visuals or poor special effects of an old film. You should know what you're getting into if you watch a movie from the 1940s. And you should also know what you're getting into if you play a game from 1998.
I find gamers are generally inept at managing their expectations when revisiting old games. You'd almost never hear an avid reader whine about antiquated language in a literary classic or a cinephile criticizing black and white visuals or poor special effects of an old film. You should know what you're getting into if you watch a movie from the 1940s. And you should also know what you're getting into if you play a game from 1998.
Ritzboof
Member
its like, games we love today might actually be bad but we just dont know it because its the current year
daTRUballin
Member
I agree with everything you just said. Great post. I said something similar earlier in the thread, and it's nice to know I'm not the only sane person in this thread.
Dagobert Duck
Member
Does it? How many hours have you put in when the game came out?
I wouldnt say it aged badly you can still whip MK64 out at parties and everybody gets easily into it. For sure its not up to todays standards. But its still as good of a party game and Mario Kart game as it was when it released...
In other news, most of the good tracks are in MK8D, so jump over there and play them in 60FPS 1080p (or 60FPS 720p on the go)
GlamFM
Banned
Basically every PS1 game.
The messed up geometry stuff (something something z-buffer?) makes every early 3D game on PS1 unplayable.
Other than being kinda hard by todays standards I think both games hold up fantastically.
The messed up geometry stuff (something something z-buffer?) makes every early 3D game on PS1 unplayable.
Other than being kinda hard by todays standards I think both games hold up fantastically.
from the same people too
Randy Monk
Member
with the lights on
WiiRevolution1
Member
Most would disagree but Mario 64. For alot of small reasons but mainly I feel like I can almost never tell where I'm going to land after a jump when I replayed it a couple years ago.
Zelda 1 & 2 aswell. Especially when I played a dungeon in 1 where I got all the keys and still had locked doors. >_< Both games need a remake imo.
Zelda 1 & 2 aswell. Especially when I played a dungeon in 1 where I got all the keys and still had locked doors. >_< Both games need a remake imo.
xviper
Member
except for RE games
Soulblighter31
Banned
Computers invented first person shooters. Everything that exists today in the genre is from PC's. Halo and Cod wouldnt exist without goldeneye ? You're giving credit to the game when there isnt one. Halo was a PC only game for years until Microsoft bought Bungie and made it for console. Its design is an amalgam of Half Life, Unreal and Tribes. Call of Duty was a PC only game for years ... Its design that uses ultra scripted sequences came from Allied Assault, two years prior, which design was a transformation of Half Life's concepts.
If Goldeneye woudnt have existed at all im confident the world we live in would be exactly the same. It influenced nothing and changed nothing.
Octavianus
Banned
None.
Sonic Adventure has always been awful.
Sonic Adventure has always been awful.
HerroRygar
Member
I could easily play a SNES game right now and have fun, but NES...nope. With very few exceptions, they've aged badly enough to be unplayable for me.
Chinbo37
Member
Gotta disagree. I played this a couple years ago emulated and I thought it was great. It was my first time playing it as well.
TGO
Hype Train conductor. Works harder than it steams.
I'd say other than visually all games hold well once you adjust to the controls.
Playing a game in HD in Emu helps too as a lot of what puts us off is the visual eyesore of playing a sub 576p game in a 1080p TV
it's off putting and you'll always be comparing it to newer games in your head.
A lot of games are perfectly playable with enhanced resolution and framerate once you adjust to how games played back than, for most it's like riding a bike.
It all comes back after a bit.
Playing a game in HD in Emu helps too as a lot of what puts us off is the visual eyesore of playing a sub 576p game in a 1080p TV
it's off putting and you'll always be comparing it to newer games in your head.
A lot of games are perfectly playable with enhanced resolution and framerate once you adjust to how games played back than, for most it's like riding a bike.
It all comes back after a bit.
baudelinog
Member
There are a lot of NES games (a lot of 8 bit games) that I still find playable and enjoyable - in fact, more than most modern games. I assume that's a matter of taste and age-fondness.
Some of the NES titles I've completed and enjoyed in the last months:
Adventures of Lolo
Adventures of Lolo II
Fire and Ice
Little Samson
GeordieMark
Member
Skyrim hasn't aged well in my opinion. The deficiencies have really had a light shone on them by games that have followed it, specifically The Witcher 3 and Dark Souls. They make the questing and combat of the Elder Scrolls games look really outdated and shallow by comparison, which makes Skyrim pretty dull to play these days.
grfunkulus
Banned
Jeez, someone's gotten their panties in a wad early today...and I think what he means was it made FPS on a console palatable to broad audience. In that sense, it had undeniable influence
whalleywhat
Member
I thought the remaster was fun as shit. Never played the original.
Honestly, I think Goldeneye and Perfect Dark are still the perfect console FPS. I've not played an FPS on console since then that I can say I genuinely think is a better game. Especially Perfect Dark.
daninthemix
Member
This is true, but it's because we lack the necessary skills and muscle memory to play it. We're conditioned into using dual-stick FPS controls with movement on the left, camera on the right so Goldeneye feels completely alien.
Back in 97 we managed just fine though, because our muscle memory wasn't ingrained. As the chap above says, it's we that change, not the games.
kqedequalsvolvo
Member
Came to post this. No fault of the game, just a symptom of how shooters have moved on. I remember ploughing dozens of hours into this with mates when it came out but tried to play it recently and found it borderline unplayable.
Edit:
Exactly what he said.
Comrade Crunch
Member
Totally agree on this one, Fallout 2 is one of my all time favorites, but it and 1 take way too long to get used to due to their age.
Jack The Nipper
Banned
Mk64 isbgrwat this thread was painful on page one.
Controls for that time and how good mk64 was... Much better than 8
Controls for that time and how good mk64 was... Much better than 8
old manatee
Banned
Power Stone (especially 2)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with challenging someone's post when they widely over-attribute GoldenEye's importance to console FPS (or just FPS games in general). There's no clear pre/post scenario for GoldenEye. None of its mechanics have prominently influenced the FPS games of today on any platform. It was successful for itself, nothing more. The FPS genre was already deemed palatable before without GoldenEye, and had been since DooM hit the SNES. Stuff like Alien Trilogy, Exhument/Powerslave, Quake, Doom, Duke Nukem, Turok and more were all already being made for the console market, and GoldenEye had basically no effect on such titles after release. The Dreamcast and PS2 continued on business as usual (with the Dreamcast more opting to copy from PCs directly), until Halo came along and actually laid down a real template for the rest of the industry, and the effects of its release today are entirely clear.
Generally everything early 3D, most PS1 3D Games, they look so horrible nowadays, Final Fantasy VII especially is completely unplayable, they should have made it a 2D sprite based game on that console. (to be fair, FF VIII looked a lot better)
The N64 had a few games that are still playable to some extent, I think Mario 64 is the best example of such a game, the comic look Nintendo goes for with their Mario games surely helped a lot.
If you have a CRT still, you will likely be able to enjoy the game very much
Ocarina of time didn't age well though, while it was graphically blowing minds at its time it's looking pretty bad nowadays, it was one of the first games to incorporate facial animations of some kind.
Also: look at the HUD, half of the screen is the interface
Goldeneye didn't age well either, still it's one of the few games that actually have something like different dying animations for your enemies, they will show their pain if you shoot their hands and animate in a certain way then, it's also a game where you can actually shoot their weapons out of their hands. From a technological point of view the game is still competitive, graphically it looks horrible nowadays even through an emulator:
Deus Ex is another one of those prime examples, such a great game but it has aged badly, still gameplay/story-wise it's better than most games in the genre and in my opinion better than all its successors so far.
The N64 had a few games that are still playable to some extent, I think Mario 64 is the best example of such a game, the comic look Nintendo goes for with their Mario games surely helped a lot.
If you have a CRT still, you will likely be able to enjoy the game very much
Ocarina of time didn't age well though, while it was graphically blowing minds at its time it's looking pretty bad nowadays, it was one of the first games to incorporate facial animations of some kind.
Also: look at the HUD, half of the screen is the interface
Goldeneye didn't age well either, still it's one of the few games that actually have something like different dying animations for your enemies, they will show their pain if you shoot their hands and animate in a certain way then, it's also a game where you can actually shoot their weapons out of their hands. From a technological point of view the game is still competitive, graphically it looks horrible nowadays even through an emulator:
Deus Ex is another one of those prime examples, such a great game but it has aged badly, still gameplay/story-wise it's better than most games in the genre and in my opinion better than all its successors so far.
I'm playing xenogears right now and I agree, awful camera, a pretty bare bones battle system. I'm liking it more since the plot has picked up and there are less dungeons. The dungeons are just uninteresting and the game suffers from a lack of pointing where the player needs to go next. A lot of traveling around town to trigger the right npc or traveling across the map to the next point in the story.
I will finish it, but it's clearly suffering from this transitional era of 2d and 3D. At least the mech boss battles are cool.
Aside from the controls mgs1 has aged quite well. Vagrant story looks nice but I really dislike its battle system, very obtuse and difficult to wrap my head around at times.
NinjamicWZ
Banned
You could still have fun with MK but the control scheme in those games never made any sense. All the move inputs and the block button made moment to moment gameplay feel like trying to remember and enter in an endless succession of random, short cheat codes to get to a random, ultimate cheat code at the end.
There was no flow of execution to it like Street Fighter II had, where what you're doing with the controls, matched the directional animation and application of your character, and all motioned in and out of each other seamlessly.
Castlevania SotN says hi 😉
I really disagree on any JRPG answer
FF VII (for example) has terrible graphics, but the gameplay is still great as always (only if you hate turn based games, but then you gonna hate almost any JRPG)
But the action games and platformers of PS1/N64 era...almost all of them have some camera or strange controls problem
FF VII (for example) has terrible graphics, but the gameplay is still great as always (only if you hate turn based games, but then you gonna hate almost any JRPG)
But the action games and platformers of PS1/N64 era...almost all of them have some camera or strange controls problem
It's kinda endemic of what the general zeitgeist was for fighters in pop culture at the time. The whole idea of flashy special moves was such a big novelty at the time that stuffing as many of them as possible into a game became one of the main marketing bullet points. For Street Fighter 2 it was there to complement the fundamental gameplay, and not be the whole point of it. It's easy to see how such a nuance would fly over the head of people looking to cash in on the sudden fighting game craze.
lmao whaaaat
ienjoyrawfish
Member
Playing Golden Axe on one of those Sega Compilation packs reminded me how bad it is. The gulf in class between Golden Axe and Sega's other flagship 16-bit beat 'em up Streets of Rage is really startling, especially considering there was actually some argument about which one was better at the time.
Unfortunately, the song you hear most frequently (the battle music) is really horrible. It's a shame because the soundtrack is 98% great, but the 1 or 2 bad tracks are the ones you probably end up having to suffer through for like 20% of your playtime.
I feel like, for dreamcast games, sonic adventure 1/2 aged pretty well
For GameCube/ps2 games, heroes and shadow are fucking trash.
Shadow wasn't praised at launched but it hasn't improved with time
Looooots of NES/SNES/Genesis games for kids that I played as a lil boy have aged to be borderline unplayable when I dug back into em recently
Most any movie tie-in game that I've revisited have been real bad
For GameCube/ps2 games, heroes and shadow are fucking trash.
Shadow wasn't praised at launched but it hasn't improved with time
Looooots of NES/SNES/Genesis games for kids that I played as a lil boy have aged to be borderline unplayable when I dug back into em recently
Most any movie tie-in game that I've revisited have been real bad
Zap Rowsdower
Banned
Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder is actually a really good beat-'em-up but its arcade exclusive.
It reads a slight bit out of context. My original reply was stating that I thought that the Konami side scroller beatem ups had aged poorly. Not sure what the OoT and MGS3 came from.
The fly by commenter just stated opinions can be wrong.