Some video games have aged better than others.
What games would you say have not aged well?
Custer’s Revenge
“Myst” was at one time the best selling PC game ever made.
The game was, at the time, visually spectacular, and used the then-novel CD ROM tech to maximum capability. It was an enormous commercial success, and it’s said it even helped to accelerate the sales of CD ROM drives. Those aren’t innovative things anymore and so its paper thin “game” mechanic is now all you notice. Games like it essentially don’t exist anymore, and no one plays it out of nostalgia.
I don’t think that really counts. It aged poorly the moment the first cartridge rolled off the assembly line.
Assassin’s Creed I (The mechanics are really just awful. And Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad’s story was rather boring, when compared to Ezio Auditore, for example. In fact it took an Ezio game to actually make Altaïr’s story interesting.)
Mass Effect I (The Mako. My god the Mako! And combat in general was clunky. Good plot, though.)
Mortal Kombat
Fallout 3 (Fallout: New Vegas is still the best FO game, because it was done by the crew that made the first 2 Fallout games but using modern UI/UX paradigms. FO4 was better than 3, because Bethesda learned a bit from Obsidian as to how to make a good FO game. Still, FO4 won’t age as well as FO: NV.)
Just about anything that came out for the Wii.
A lot of games that utilized new technologies didn’t age well. There was a move from 2D to 3D in the 90s, and most of the 3D games from that era have not aged well graphically. A lot of the 2D games that were “less advanced” from that era look better to a modern eye.
Bad Dudes (aka Bad Dudes be DragonNinja). Very successful in the arcade and the NES port as well, and it even made it into the Steve Martin film Parenthood. But it’s best known now as a meme for the awful premise and dialogue. (Rescue President Reagan from his ninja kidnappers using your street fighting skills.)
I was feeling nostalgic one day and downloaded Dragons lair. (And Space Ace)
At the time when it came out it was BEYOND cool and seemed so futuristic.
Yeah, that ship has past. Think I beat in less than an hour. Lol
Prepare for HERESY :
The original X-COM. I know. I know. But still having played the modern remakes to death, I just can’t get back to fucking TUs (haha you wanted to change facing AND overwatch ? Fuck you !) and hell-is-real inventory management. I can’t. You won’t make me.
Fallout 3 was dogshit the day it came out. Fight me IRL.
For me the GTA III era. I got San Andreas as a free bonus for ordering RDR2, and loaded it up. The controls are so horrible and non-intuitive, and non-responsive. After about 15 minutes of trying to retro-degrade my head to handle, I decided it just wasn’t worth it. Same issue with 90’s era games like Tomb Raider with the tank controls, and shitty camera. Completely miserable experience now.
Jared’s Pants Dance
Almost all FMV games did not age well, though Wing Commander III and IV aged well. They are not mainly FMV is probably the main reason. Phantasmagoria and countless others look lame now.
King’s Quest I-IV were great games, but they have major flaws, as does King’s Quest V. You can get stuck in no-win situations. LucasArts eliminated all dying and no-win situations with games like Monkey Island and they have aged much better. Any adventure game that allowed you to get stuck with no way back was inexcusable then, but we just lived with it.
Phantasmagoria was a bold, admirable effort that produced something technically impressive, yet still really bad, at launch. Adrienne has only been dethroned as my most-despised game protagonist within the last year. (And it took a horribly translated, badly voiced, randomly sexist, criminally incompetent, and possibly delusional FBI agent to knock her out of that slot.)
I will grant that it has not aged well, in that it also looks bad now, but I hated it when it was new.
cough I have all five Myst games and while it has been a while, I do go back and play them.
Yes, count me as another who has replayed Myst.
I was the same with Resident Evil 2 before the remake came out.
Also, old low-res untextured 3D has aged *very *poorly. Much like with RE2 I tried replaying FFVII in preparation for the upcoming remake and ugh. Nope. I can do ugly sprites (I still play the old Fallouts & Infinity Engine games once in a while), but I can’t do naked polygons any more.
All right I’ll bite : who are you talking about, in which game ?
It’s hard for me to imagine any video game “aging” well. I was in Barcade in Brooklyn a couple months ago. They have all the old vintage games from the 80s and 90s. While they are cool to see for their nostalgia value, I don’t think it’s particularly fun playing Asteroids or Pac Man.
Even 3D games that I played back in the day like Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, GTA Vice City or the early Battlefield and Call of Duty games are going to look like shit compared to their modern equivalents.
And there’s no way I can go back to an orthogonal view sprite-based city building like SimCity 2000 or SimCity 4 after playing fully 3D city builder like Cities Skylines.
I’ll get flamed to hell, but I played Half-Life 2 probably a decade after it came out and it was awful after about level 22 or so. Just one stupid jump puzzle after the next. I got frustrated and switched to god mode, progressed to the end and confirmed the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. (You have to do a certain jump and shoot a rocket into a baby brain and then it’s all a dream or something)?
But games like Pac Man and Tetris are awesome in and of themselves; I think it’s fair to say they have “aged well”. So is a game like Doom still fun to play today, even if it does not max out a latest-gen graphics card with real-time raytracing. The good games still keep getting up-to-date variants released, too: witness Tetris Effect, Doom 4, Satellite Reign, XCOM, Borderlands 3, Portal 2…