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Games that aged badly.

catfood

AGAIN
Joined
Aug 28, 2008
Messages
9,313
Location
Nirvana for mice
Age of Empires 1: Pathfinding, no queueing of production, farming mazes make the first one a chore to play.
They added queuing of production in the expansion.
 

The Dutch Ghost

Arbiter
Joined
May 26, 2016
Messages
681
Metal Gear Solid aged... to play in HD and 4k.

I haven't touched a Metal Gear title in ages and I used to be quite a fan of that series.
But after Metal Gear Solid 3 I honestly just not could continue with the series any more, especially when I heard how long the cutscenes were in Metal Gear Solid 5.
I did play Peace Walker which was pretty okay (I tried playing MGS Portable Ops but the controls are just not very good on the PSP, still I really would like to play and finish it one day), but Revengeance was such a different beast and I hated how annoying the camera sometimes was.
MGS6... well Metal Gear Solid is no longer my thing.

Digging deep into the past but enjoyed Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake and Metal Gear Ghost Babel/MGS on the Gameboy a lot and I honestly feel that despite their looks these games have not aged that much. Still fun and playable today.
 

v1rus

Arcane
Joined
Jul 14, 2008
Messages
2,253
My vote goes to Moonstone. What a shitty hack&slash experience today...


Blasphemy! I still play Moonstone with meh homies, every month or so, and I enjoy it very much. Them monster sounds <3 ~urgh, eeeh, aaaah~

The fact that i played it for the first time 5-6 years ago prolly helps, but still...

tl;dr Moonstonz > rockz
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

Self-Ejected
The Real Fanboy
Joined
Jan 21, 2015
Messages
1,865,419
GoldenEye.

I think that has to be the steepest decline from playing it at the time and being completely amazed to playing it recently and wondering how the fuck I ever even used an N64 controller.

99% of N64 games looked like shit from day one.
 

Trotsky

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
2,831
Metal Gear Solid aged... to play in HD and 4k.

I haven't touched a Metal Gear title in ages and I used to be quite a fan of that series.
But after Metal Gear Solid 3 I honestly just not could continue with the series any more, especially when I heard how long the cutscenes were in Metal Gear Solid 5.
I did play Peace Walker which was pretty okay (I tried playing MGS Portable Ops but the controls are just not very good on the PSP, still I really would like to play and finish it one day), but Revengeance was such a different beast and I hated how annoying the camera sometimes was.
MGS6... well Metal Gear Solid is no longer my thing.

Digging deep into the past but enjoyed Metal Gear 2 Solid Snake and Metal Gear Ghost Babel/MGS on the Gameboy a lot and I honestly feel that despite their looks these games have not aged that much. Still fun and playable today.

Metal Gear Solid 3 was the pinnacle of the series with the best combination of story to gameplay ratio. The first and third game were also popular because they were self contained stories. Hideo Kojima is good at the big picture stuff like direction, graphics, and gameplay but Tomokazu Fukushima made the earlier games shine into one cohesive narrative with great characters, memorable atmospheres, and excellent themes.

What made MGS good was a unique blend of espionage, action, politics, and the supernatural. Kojima and Fukushima were a great team. The brand has been in major decline ever since the latter left for unknown reasons after MGS3. Portable Ops was actually one of the better games and possibly the last good game in the series.

MGS4 ruined the story/universe with shitty twists, retcons, and unnecessary cameos plus the boring cutscenes. Peacewalker was also awful. That's not to say there weren't decent elements in the latter games but they don't match the caliber of the earlier installments. MGS5 actually redeemed the series somewhat although it felt incomplete.

Portable Ops was the turning point in the series and probably worth another play through. It's a very underrated game despite a few shortcomings which turned people off.

cs8RGkL.jpg
 

Adon

Arcane
Joined
May 8, 2015
Messages
667
I still want to go through Portable Ops one more time to see how it holds up. Gonna have to go through it on an emulator so I can reconfigure the controls. That way I don't have to deal with the shortcomings of a game designed around the idea of one analog stick for movement and the d-pad for the camera and having to stop moving/running awkwardly just so I can adjust the camera.
 

Beastro

Arcane
Joined
May 11, 2015
Messages
7,938
Remembered this one today: Robinson's Requiem.

I dunno if it qualifies as having aged badly when it always was bad, especially if like me you rented it alongside Road Rash and the usual 3DO games for a weekend. The control were bad enough on a computer, but trying to use them via a controller made the game unplayable.

It's a shame though, it had a lot of good ideas for gameplay that have gone pretty much untouched since then and the atmosphere of otherwordliness is top notch.
 

80s Stallone

Arcane
Joined
Dec 8, 2013
Messages
796
Location
The Bunker
Warcraft II is still pretty cool, especially "Beyond The Dark Portal" - really challenging missions. Okay, for multiplayer you have to set some extra-rules to make it work. But I do not care.

I like it that there are only two units with "special skills" you have to micromanage. And not so much unit upgrades. I hate it when virtually every unit has "spells" (turn those into separate units) and to me unit upgrades kinda suck. Because in some ways you have to research certain upgrades to begin with.

And Warcraft II is one of the few sequels that make the first part truly obsolete, by keeping everything that works and improve it. Not one thing is better in WarCraft I (okay, some units looks scarier, I like that about the game). That's a rare thing. Usually some parts are always fucked up in sequels.

The first C&C is also still good, don't get the complaints. Cool, puzzle-like missions (done that way because the AI is horrible) - play it in VGA, not "high-res", it is not designed that way, much faster-seeming gameplay. Red Alert I is also good but there are some very annoying missions (power plant, stuff with lots of water units). And of course it's horrible unbalanced. Tiberian Sun is better than ever IMO. It's just the best atmosphere ever, like the world is going into apocalypse any time, cool cutscenes (okay, the story is a mess and slows down to much after the furious beginning of each campaign). When the game came out it was mostly thrashed because many features that they claimed to be there were absent and everyone wanted "THREE-D" graphics where you could rotate the camera, so the game was ugly. But you know which games are ugly to look at these days? Earth 2150, Dark Reign 2, Warzone, and the like, while voxel/sprite TS still looks good.
 

The Dutch Ghost

Arbiter
Joined
May 26, 2016
Messages
681
Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine. The storyline and the voices are great and I can even live with the modified Sith engine for the graphics, but the gameplay is just ass, even in the time the game was released.
Basically you play the game with a controller and some minimal input on the camera, with the combat being rather auto aimed. Seeing as Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight used WASD and mouse aim this feels like a serious step backwards. (most likely done as the game was also released on the N64)
I think for that reason alone a lot of gamers will not be able to get into this game, the game would have been better if it had adopted the control system of its sequel Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb. (that game suffers in the fact that it has not quick save system and save points are way to far spread)
 

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