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Astral Rag

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Which PC classic was just too old to enjoy when you finally played it?

By PC Gamer, Samuel Roberts 4 hours ago

Without nostalgia, older games can be tough to love.

In today's PCG Q&A, we're talking about the games we missed the boat on at the time. One of the best things about playing on PC is being able to access a vast archive of classics, so you can check out the games that were fundamental in the development of different genres. Sometimes, though, those games are just too old to enjoy in 2018, whether it's the controls, outdated systems or something else.

We're definitely showing our age a bit in our choices here: most of us were born in the mid-late '80s, hence most of the games mentioned were released during our younger years. Soon it'll be our turn to be appalled by people who thought Oblivion was too dated when they tried to pick it up.

Let us know your choices in the comments below.


Andy Kelly: Thief: The Dark Project

Man, I want to love Thief. Everything I read about its atmosphere and level design makes it sound like exactly my kind of thing. But when I try and play it, my stupid, spoiled modern brain can't deal with the archaic visuals and controls.

And I've tried so many times, even with mods that update the controls, and it still won't click. It makes me wonder if it's one of those games where you had to be there at the time to really appreciate how special and different it was.

I played Deus Ex when it first came out and I have no problem with its clunky idiosyncrasies. So I think I just missed the boat with Thief, which is a shame.


Philippa Warr: Thief: The Dark Project

I tried so hard to get into Thief when I came to play it a billion years later than everyone else. But without an existing fondness for it, I just couldn't lose myself in it, despite finding moments of enjoyment in the levels I did complete. Instead I had one of those experiences where you're super aware of how much time has passed, like receiving a job application from someone born while you were at university, or finding out that DJ Luck and MC Neat are no longer considered mainstays of the hit parade.

I caught up on some PC games from this era happily, but far fewer years had passed. Somewhere along the decades what we expect when we play changed slightly. The way A and D turn my character feel weird to my hands and I realise that I'd have been used to using the number pad instead, treating it as a kind of body compass. I can't remember the last time I used a number pad for movement. On the visual side, Thief's sharp corners feel weird in today's world of curves, and its textures seem more like strange stone-patterned giftwrap than convincing simulations of walls. These tiny touches join hundreds more and root the game firmly in 1998. It's a game language I no longer speak fluently enough to play Thief's stealth.


Phil Savage: World of Warcraft

When World of Warcraft was original released, I knew I'd love it, which is why I decided not to play it. I was just starting my final year of university, and figured that, for once, I'd put off instant gratification in favour of earning a degree. Years later I became a game journalist anyway. There's probably a lesson there somewhere, but I don't care to learn it.

Skip forward ten years and the Warlords of Draenor expansion is tempting my girlfriend away from Guild Wars 2 and back to her original obsession. I decide, hey, maybe now's the time to figure out what the fuss was about and... instantly I realise my mistake. Everything feels old and awkward. I'd played plenty of other MMOs in the years since, many of them shameless copies of WoW, but most introduced a few quality-of-life tweaks that made the original experience feel dated in comparison. I managed to push through this initial barrier, but even as I'd attuned to its idiosyncrasies, there was little that captured my imagination. I had no memories of this world; no nostalgia to draw me back. Like any great phenomenon, if you miss it the first time, it's nearly impossible to recapture that magic.


Tom Senior: Baldur's Gate

I have started the original Baldur's Gate so many times, and rarely made it past the first dungeon full of Kobolds. The idea that a companion might die forever in a fight freaked me out more than it should have. My hyper cautious approach to every damn screen slowed my progress to a crawl. Then I found out that companions could simply leave you if they decided they didn't like you. Not only was I afraid that some wolves are going to fuck me up on a random stretch of road, but I also had to be super nice to Minsk because he could take his rat and jog off at any second.

I got used to Baldur's Gate eventually, but instead ploughed time into the sequel. Baldur's Gate 1 will always seem a little too rough and cruel for my tastes, as silly as that sounds. Maybe I'll get over it and give it another shot, but I still have Pillars of Eternity 2 to play, and I'm a total mark for all that pretty, high-res art.


Wes Fenlon: System Shock

When I tried to play System Shock, I didn't even know what to do with my hands. That game uses practically every key on the keyboard, half the screen was covered with UI, and I believe by default didn't support real mouselook, so you'd click and drag on the screen to look around as you moved. I know there's an Enhanced Edition on GOG that probably makes many of these things more palatable to my soft modern sensibilities, and I do want to play it someday. But I don't think I got more than 20 minutes into the original version before deciding that I could enjoy all the games System Shock has influenced without actually having played System Shock, after all.


Samuel Roberts: X-Com: UFO Defense

I grew up with PC gaming in the '90s, and if I played a game back then, I have no struggles with it now. Hence being able to pick up Theme Hospital this year again, or all the old, decent Star Wars games like Dark Forces or X-Wing. I'd love to play Civ 2's busy and chaotic WWII scenario once more, for example. This year, though, I tried to play 1994's X-Com for the first time, which wasn't a series I sampled at the time, and I just couldn't quite get into it after a few hours of trying. I don't think I have the patience for '90s difficulty that I used to.

I've seen a few people complain that Firaxis's versions are a little too simple relative to the original, but I don't think there's any shame in modernising something that people loved so more people can enjoy it, not when that team has such obvious love for the original games. I'll just have to stick to those for now, but I was excited by what I played of Phoenix Point's backer build earlier this year.


Fraser Brown: EVE Online, I guess


I've been racking my brain all day and the truth is: I can't think of anything. I'll still play an adventure game with a text parser and find something to love. OK, maybe not a text parser. There has to be a line drawn somewhere. It's always a bit tricky to get into an established MMO, though, especially when that MMO is EVE Online. I've played quite a lot, but it never really clicked. I never felt like an insider. And catching up to all the people who had invested countless hours into it seemed like an insurmountable task. It's not too old, but its longevity does make it seem more impenetrable.
 
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FeelTheRads

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Soon Oblivion will be too complex for the "modern audience".

But yeah, PoliticallyCorrect Gamer. Pretty much anything from them reads like "old games sucked, play new games from the developers that pay our wages".
 

Jaedar

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Project: Eternity Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pathfinder: Kingmaker
80s games, sure, but late 90s, early 00s WTF
To be fair, both system shock and x-com have fan made enhanced edition that add in all reasonable modern sensibilities such as tooltips, high resolutions, mouselook etc.

And it is really hard to get into SS without mouselook, at least for me.
 

markec

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Codex 2012 Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Dead State Project: Eternity Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
I dont mind people not being able to play old games due dated visuals or UI but I do mind this shit:

I've seen a few people complain that Firaxis's versions are a little too simple relative to the original, but I don't think there's any shame in modernising something that people loved so more people can enjoy it, not when that team has such obvious love for the original games

This reminds me of gaming journalists that often said that "Fallout 3 is a necessary evolution of Fallout series". Which is nothing but an excuse of retards who are unable to leave rat caves so they want games to hold their hands.
 

Grimlorn

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Soon Oblivion will be too complex for the "modern audience".

But yeah, PoliticallyCorrect Gamer. Pretty much anything from them reads like "old games sucked, play new games from the developers that pay our wages".
It kind of already was by Skyrim's release, that's why they removed stats, and created that annoying quest compass that showed every place around you on it.
 

Zenith

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The thing to realize here is that the contents of that article is what they thought to be an acceptable public-faced truth, while the reality is probably even worse. Basically, we're just "officially" catching up to what was true a decade ago.
"Polygon plays Doom4/Cuphead/Duke3D" videos aren't some aberration, they're the very best effort they can muster, and it's going to get worse every year.
 

Pika-Cthulhu

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Find me a stealth game with as mechanically sound and capable as Thief released in the last 10 years. These dipshit fuckwads are concerned with how the game looks and not how mechanically sound it is, purely because their puerile tastes are all about the form over function. Long passed are the days when game reviews would mention how the games mechanics interact with the world, how the player character, the players avatar, interacts and functions with the game world and logic. Its all about FPS, rounded corners, cinematic experience and cutscenes with AWESOME BUTTONS.

These fascile fascists have forgotten about how a game plays because they are too busy with their heads up their arse talking about political and societal parallels with a game world instead of HOW THE GAME FUCKING PLAYS. They dont write reviews for games and how they play, they write critiques about how the games world is presented, and thus cannot comprehend mechanics. Fuck this gay earth
 

SupremeLaziness

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Man, reading that PC Gamer article I kinda wonder how much of that is legit and how much of it is clickbait. Some spicy picks there with impressive mental gymnastics to justify them. It also reminds me just how much I look forward to a good recession so these places go under and we don't get bombarded with idiotic articles anymore.
 

Darth Roxor

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Its all about rounded corners
But it's most important part in cover shooters. It's what you see 90% of playtime.

and chest high walls, nothing says impending firefight like convenient architecture that you can duck behind and fire a gun over

4689B35700000578-5100087-image-a-67_1511180004201.jpg
 

Unkillable Cat

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At least they talk about a topic most players avoid like the plague: admitting that old games aren't necessarily better.

No mainstream publication wants to tear down a big AAA release after a major hype train unless safely vindicated by an ongoing public outcry; in the same way, no one wants to rake up downvotes, dislikes and unsubs by shit-talking a "classic", to the point where you cannot tell whether someone truely likes or dislikes a game, because they might just as well be worried about their standing in whatever community they are a part of.

I'm surprised that they picked the games they did (though me needing to mention it is precisely the problem I'm talking about) but I have played a lot of old games during my night shifts and I have done a lot of catching up on "classics" and "legendary games". Many of them are pure garbage, and since I have no nostalgia to clog my eyes, I find myself unable to relate to all of the people who swear by them.

The fact that the best games ever are somehow always the ones they played when they were kids is probably just a coincidence. The fact that they replayed a game countless times is probably because the game was just that good, not because they had like three games and wouldn't be getting a new one until Christmas four months away.

Wait, actually behind all their posturing, I do relate to them: notice how almost all Steam reviews for old games follow the same pattern? Positive review, "I played it countless hours as a kid"... and time played: 23 minutes. Because the game is so fucking awesome that they ran it and barely a few minutes in they went "actually, fuck that shit".

You hope to recapture the "magic", but the "magic" was simply you being a fucking kid. Only a dumb kid cries when Aeris dies, only a dumb kid is afraid of going down that ladder in Eternal Darkness, only a dumb kid finds the plot and characters of Tales / Final Fantasy to be anything other than vapid Japo bullshit.

Notice none of these examples have anything to do with the evolution of technology, because it doesn't matter, it doesn't change the fact that they would have fetishized any game that checked the proper boxes at the right moment in their videogame personal history. In high-school with the only 2600 on the campus? NEET with your 486 and no Internet? Only one NES game from your uncle? Withdrawn abused kid with your Game Boy Color as your only friend? Freshly moved in after a divorce and you brought your Saturn? The games could be the shittiest piles of shit ever and you would still revere them.

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug: The novel.

"We had been staring at the Ocean Loader for 6 minutes on the Commodore 64, when the drugs began to take hold."

It's amazing to watch small groups whose interests are centered around a specific old console or home computer. On one hand such a group has a lot of resources on hand for dealing with hardware issues or refreshing people's memories, as this helps keep the platform alive. Hell, with luck there's someone in there building neat little devices to help overcome some of the platform's hardware shortcomings and offer some modern amenities. But on the other hand there's always a certain self-delusion going on, how they're talking about game titles either exclusively as they appeared on that platform, or only in relation to similar platforms of the day. Very rarely does anyone speak of them in the Big Picture, and those that do tend to get shushed at a lot.

A good example I saw recently were people in such a group talking about all the fond memories they had with the bundled software that came with a brand new, store-bought computer... a bundle I was unfamiliar with personally, so I looked closer at the software in that bundle... and despaired. There's a fun game in there alright, but everything else is truly horrible. One of them is even consistently voted "Worst Game of All Time" for the platform... and it's bundled with the computer! That goes a long way towards setting the bar for people's expectations: The launch titles are shit, so upcoming titles that even rate as average are gonna seem awesome by comparison (which most of them ended up being) and people liked them as a result.

So it was interesting to see a guy pop up in that group a while back who pointed out the obvious: The platform is plagued with either bad games or bad conversions, and finding a decent title on the platform was actually a challenge. It turns out he didn't get the bundled software package with his machine, but got a handful of store-bought titles instead from the previous owner... who clearly had some
rating_prestigious.png
taste, as those handful of titles are the ones consistently voted among the Top Games of the platform. For the longest time he thought those handful of games set the bar for the overall quality of the platform's software, but once he realized the truth he decided to share with the others his discovery about the Emperor Not Wearing Any Clothes. (That didn't end well.)

And you would be in your right to do do, until you decided to wall yourself off many potentially great more recent games because they failed to recapture the feeling that you lack the introspection to accurately identify and swear just has to be an undescribable "magic" that was miraculously only ever present in whatever you played when you were extraordinarily receptive.

Because games didn't lose their magic, you did.

This is where we differ in opinion, at least somewhat.

If anything, the ratio of Good Games among All Games has been somewhat consistent through the decades, though the sheer volume of titles nowadays is bringing the ratio down. Worse than that, the number of games that are copying one another to the point that you can't tell them apart anymore is making a lot of people realize just how similar many games are. If you've played one 'tactical' FPS game, odds are really good you've played them all. There's no magic at all involved in playing a Battlefield title, then a Medal of Honor game, then a Halo game, then a Rainbow Six title, then PUBG and then CS:GO. It's masochism, if anything.

And then it gets downright depressing once you realize that there were some truly deep and engrossing games released 20+ years ago that sold well back in the day, but have no modern contemporaries... solely because the Marketing department doesn't see them as viable financial investments. This creates a trickle-down effect that discourages developers from taking risks, meaning we end up with scores of titles that are All The Same... and there's no magic to be found in that.

Games did lose their magic, and as such we lost our magic as well. That's one of the reasons I'm doing the same thing you are: Sifting through the games on these older platforms to try to find some decent titles worth playing today. It's a challenge, but a fun one that offers up plenty of surprises.
 

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