Games that aged badly.

[NotAGolfer]

All of them

 

[Isiloon]

It's not a video game, but nowadays it sucks.

http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net...391766a.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100823035919

 

[Karellen]

Eh, I have a really hard time thinking of old games that I ever genuinely liked that would have aged poorly; the late 80s, early 90s games that I played as a kid still hold up pretty well, mostly because games from that time tend to be so short and briskly paced that you can generally finish a game before something about the basic game mechanics starts to wear you out. More often than not, the games that I have a hard time playing in this day and age are games from the early 00s on, which already start to suffer from content and feature creep and an emphasis on graphics and animation which, all together, can really turn a game to a slog. One might, of course, question whether those games were ever all that great in the first place, but already some classic games from the late 90s start to have this issue where, even if the game is actually good, they're boring the play in practice because you're spending so much time not playing it.

In any case, this is a large reason why I still play the original Civilization more often than any of the sequels; sure, the AI cheats shamelessly and isn't very smart, but all in all, it's simply faster to play than any of the sequels, in which everything, starting from moving units, is slower than in the first game. Simply for that reason, that "tedious Civilization endgame" is a great deal less tedious in the first game, and that classic one-more-click feel really comes through. On repeated play, the goofiness of the AI almost become a feature in itself - exploring the world with your first sailing ship is a lot more exciting in Civ 1, since sometimes you run into two-city Civs that are still building phalanxes while you're up to battleships, whereas in other games you'll find out that Russia got a whole continent all to themselves and is steamrolling you with a massive tech advantage thanks to Civ 1's "no negative feedback loop from empire size" policy. I even kind of like that the AI gets random Wonders, since it removes that "beelining to best Wonder techs" thing that really bores me about Civ 4, and makes the game a little more reactive and adaptive instead.

The only thing that's really wrong about some otherwise excellent old games is that some of them have questionable control systems, like the objectively sub-standard original controls of System Shock 1 that were designed for the exclusive enjoyment of Zaphod Beeblebrox. Of the really old Macintosh Plus games of my youth, Cap'n Magneto (which otherwise is a genuinely entertaining and surprisingly original openworld-y adventure RPG, one of these weird Cambrian offshoots of early gaming that never really took off) stands out for having perhaps the shittiest movement system ever devised by mankind, in the form of an on-screen D-pad that responds to the mouse cursor being positioned over it - this, in a real-time game which required near-pixel-perfect control to avoid traps and escape certain enemies. Still good though.

Finally, let this be said: Resident Evil 1 isn't just a good game, it's a great game and easily the best Resident Evil game.

 

[Snufkin]

The fact that enemy cheats and builds wonders without any cost in one turn and later you see chariots beating submarines is enough for me to not defend this game. None of this would matter if i would not saw Ben hur and Das boot. But since i saw i cannot accept this nonsense.

 

[Karellen]

Oh come on now. In Civ 1, land units can't attack naval units, and submarines, unlike other ships, can't even attack units on land, so in fact you've never seen a chariot sink a submarine, and the scenario of the epic battle between Ben Hur and U-96 exists only in your fevered imagination.



Of course, you could've used battleships losing to a phalanx as an example. Which has happened to me too (and much more often when I was being cheap and forgot to build barracks like a scrub). But tell you what - I like the Civ 1 wars in which there's no unit HP and battles always lead to destruction of either unit (or the entire defending stack). In the later Civ games - Civ 5 most of all, but the others too to varying degrees - it's trivially easy to inflict enormous losses on any enemy Civ while barely losing any units of your own, because the player is always much more capable at circulating units to keep them at top health and thus also reaping far greater benefits from units with high bonuses due to experience. In Civ 1, you can't do this - to fight a war and to conquer cities, you often have to shift to a full-on war economy, because you are going to lose a lot of units and you will need replacements. Now this makes wars a lot more fun, because you actually end up having to deal with the infrastructure of building and moving new units to the warzone. Which, by the way, is why it shouldn't matter if you lose a battleship in a freak accident against some very lucky spearmen; because why build only one battleship when you can have two for twice the price? Wars were never great in Civilization games, but it works a great deal better when the emphasis is on logistics instead of just moving one invincible stack of doom around until you win.

 

[Endlösung]

Mechwarrior 2s slide walking was offputting even at the time. Despite that the games still damn fun and makes up for the bland visuals.

Wat. MW2 is for me the game that took off the rose tinted glasses rather hardcore.

(Interestingly, pixel graphics games suffer MUCH less. I remember playing Contra on the NES (even managed to beat it with 2 players, unlike for Battle Toads...) and then replaying it with emulators and it pretty much looked how I remembered it, maybe even a bit better due to details.)

And a few years ago I tried MW2. I thought it looked great and played great and was überhot when it came out. Holy shit, I must have had texture modules in my brain.
Its a gazillion missions of 'run at them, shoot everything' over and over and over and over again. You have access to the superiour mechs from the get go. The earliest 3D possible...
The power of imagination...

This must be the feeling the autists get when they hear "open world". I never got the hype for Zelda, Metroid, etc. Now that I think about it, Unreal had a world of appended levels. Desu Ex has this crawl where you want shit with level reuse. And I dont even remember why I liked Half life...

 

[Beastro]

On repeated play, the goofiness of the AI almost become a feature in itself - exploring the world with your first sailing ship is a lot more exciting in Civ 1, since sometimes you run into two-city Civs that are still building phalanxes while you're up to battleships, whereas in other games you'll find out that Russia got a whole continent all to themselves and is steamrolling you with a massive tech advantage thanks to Civ 1's "no negative feedback loop from empire size" policy. I even kind of like that the AI gets random Wonders, since it removes that "beelining to best Wonder techs" thing that really bores me about Civ 4, and makes the game a little more reactive and adaptive instead.

You'll encounter the cripples AI civs a heck of a lot more than the OP ones. If they could be consistently produced then yes, it would be fun.

Wonders aren't a problem if you build up a stockpile of trade units, park them by your wonder city beforehand, and then rush build the wonder in one turn.

Mechwarrior 2s slide walking was offputting even at the time. Despite that the games still damn fun and makes up for the bland visuals.

Wat. MW2 is for me the game that took off the rose tinted glasses rather hardcore.

It does look very bland and crude, but the gameplay is still fun while the cockpit voice and music really add to the atmosphere.

 

[octavius]

Was the before or after George Constanze got the same treatment in Seinfeld?

 

[Cadmus]

Guys I wanna play some Settlers, which one is the best? I don't want it to be ugly, S4 looks nice from screens. I played it when I was a kid and dun remember nuffin.

 

[Snufkin]

Yea, play S4. Music and graphics are still amazing.

Btw anyone remember when S3 came out and that pirated copy would give you smith making pigs on anvil + nasty virus when installing indeo codec.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

Finally, let this be said: Resident Evil 1 isn't just a good game, it's a great game and easily the best Resident Evil game.

It's dated since 2002 whem REmake made it obsolete (rare thing!).

 

[Karellen]

Finally, let this be said: Resident Evil 1 isn't just a good game, it's a great game and easily the best Resident Evil game.

It's dated since 2002 whem REmake made it obsolete (rare thing!).

Oh, if only that were true. The original Resident Evil might be dated - graphically, it certainly is - but, sad to say, while REmake is really a noble effort, it's inferior to the original in some crucial respects. Now I've played through it a couple of times, and I certainly enjoyed it a great deal - not only is RE such a great game that even a lesser version of it is pretty good, but moreover, it actually did have a couple of additions that were really clever and add something to the game. Overall, though, there's a lot about it that I resent; most of all, the new game is a great deal more linear, since there are actually very few optional areas and situations in which you can take multiple routes (which Jill, in the original, had quite a few of), which is an awful design choice for a game in which the whole point is exploration and route selection. Incidentally, they also removed a good half of the interesting little bits of narrative C&C which the first game had, which admittedly the game didn't really need, but it just goes on to show that the original RE comes from a classier time when developers would put in clever little touches like that just because they felt like it.

Beyond that, REmake is a considerably easier game, which wouldn't even matter - the original Resident Evil isn't that hard to begin with - except that it trivialises resource management. In particular, zombies and hunters do much less damage, so you need healing much less, though you might never even notice it since the defense items (especially Chris's flash grenades) basically break the game's economy anyway. Adding the Crimson Heads doesn't really help, and it's a prime example of feature creep tampering with mechanics that didn't really need improvement. Shame, too, because the whole idea of burning of corpses to prevent them from respawning could have worked, since it really reinforces the concept of creating safe areas in the Mansion, but the execution is middling; since the normal zombies do so little damage, while the Crimson Heads are kind of a pain in the ass, you find yourself wondering if you should just stop killing zombies in the first place, which (in my opinion) really messes with the mood of the game. But actually, there's more than enough oil in the game to burn all the zombies in the areas you'd be backtracking to anyway, so to a large extent you just end up with some extra busywork in the game instead. It's barely even relevant unless you play Real Survivor, which unfortunately is a horribly tedious game mode.

There's more, but I think this suffices illustrates the point. It turns out that a lot of classic games often aren't classics just because they "started a famous franchise" or something, but because they're really really good, and improving on them isn't easy to do, certainly not by just piling new mechanics and content on top. It's nice they tried, since REmake is still a good game, but it does bug me a little bit that developers apparently have so little faith in their original classic games. Maybe they were just fine the way they were? The 3DS version of Ocarina of Time was the exact same game, with improved character models and a few bug and interface fixes, and Nintendo sold millions of copies because, I assume, someone thought that it would be a stupid idea to try and tamper with the greatest game ever made.

 

[janior]

Age of Decadence

 

[Lios]

Still it's a great game

 

[index.php]

Guys I wanna play some Settlers, which one is the best? I don't want it to be ugly, S4 looks nice from screens. I played it when I was a kid and dun remember nuffin.

Settlers 2 is the best in the series - by far. It also has a pretty faithful remake called Settlers 2: 10th Anniversary. It's expansion pack was only released in Germany, but there's a fan translation available: http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...lish-Version?p=1832447&viewfull=1#post1832447

 

[Gerrard]

This thread made me throw up in my mouth a little.

It made me update my journal.

 

[Psquit]

Such a disappointment.

 

[e-mailio estevez]

For me personally it's Death Rally. The rubberband AI cheating became really hard to ignore.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Imho in the case of good games the only ones that age badly are those that are utterly obliterated and made redundant by newer games in the genre. That's rarely the case though, since PC-games have descended into total retardation.

As others noted, the main candidate is the RTS genre, where the early classics offer little unique value in exchange for their clunky graphics and interfaces. There's little reason to play Dune2 except for nostalgia or curiosity, because later RTSes improved on it in literally every way.

Other than that, I can't think of many games. Most classics have those unique traits and elements that you just don't find in any modern games, so they're still relevant. If you want that kind of experience, you'll have to play them, because there's no modern replacement. You'll learn to deal with Darklands' primitive graphics and interface, because there's no other game like it. You want to play a RPG game where you have to explore, navigate and think on your own, find clues hidden in the game world that are not pointed out by quest markers or too detailed journal entries? There's no way around early and mid 90's RPGs, newer games won't give you that satisfaction. You want shooters with big, sprawling levels that you can get lost in? Good luck looking for those in Call of Duty, try Dark Forces II instead. There's no better space-themed 4X/Civilization game than Alpha Centauri for myriads of reasons. You better deal with its antiquated graphics if you like that kind of game, because your only alternative is crap like Beyond the Stars. The list goes on and on.

Other than that, older graphics often have their own unique charm. I find mid-90 graphics like in Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Might & Magic genuinely pleasing to the eye. Also 3D games from the early graphics acceleration era seem more and more appealing to me.

 

[sser]

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.

 

[pippin]

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.

Multiplayer was the only thing that made Goldeneye good. The rest is shit.

 

[SniperHF]

Such a disappointment.

The single player was always shit. But MP? Other than most of the maps being mediocre it's fucking great. Just something you can't play now as you did back in the day since the community has long since moved on.

 

[A user named cat]

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.

I agree about the controls. Used to be no problem breezing through the game on hardest difficulty. Even unlocked everything from the paintball mode to the golden gun by speedrunning every stage while drunk. Trying to play it nowadays, I can barely complete the first couple levels at a snail's pace. The music is still awesome though.

There's actually a mouse and keyboard setup for 1964 emu.

 

[Hobo Elf]

I want to say Betrayal at Krondor, but that game looked like shit even back in the day, so it's not like it suddenly became bad.

 

[:Flash:]

Guys I wanna play some Settlers, which one is the best? I don't want it to be ugly, S4 looks nice from screens. I played it when I was a kid and dun remember nuffin.

Settlers 2 is the best in the series - by far. It also has a pretty faithful remake called Settlers 2: 10th Anniversary. It's expansion pack was only released in Germany, but there's a fan translation available: http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...lish-Version?p=1832447&viewfull=1#post1832447

I'll second Settlers 2, but I recommend the original over the remake. The remake isn't bad, but the charm of the original cannot be recreated.