I loved Doom back in the day but I played it again not long ago in an emulator and ugh. I have been so spoiled over the years.
Nicole Bennett, of the Art of Murder point-and-click murder mystery series. Her lines were apparently written by someone who hadn’t the faintest idea how humans communicate, in Polish, then fed through Google Translate, and the output voiced by Google Maps. And she’s dumber than Adrienne on her worst day, which is saying something, because Adrienne was painfully oblivious and dumb enough to repeatedly poke the contacts on an electric chair, no matter how many times it shocked her. Nicole is not helped by the fact that the games themselves are also incredibly stupid. I expect a lot of moon-logic and silliness in point-and-click, but most of them are deliberately funny and silly. These try to present themselves as drama. They just have writing that would be embarrassing in a hidden object game (and the series degenerated into an actual HOG by the fourth game).
I’m not talking about so-bad-they’re-good games. They’re just really bad, and listening to Nicole is just twisting the thumbscrews.
I suppose they aged well in that fancy graphic upgrades wouldn’t enhance the actual game play much.
What would be interesting is if you remade many of the later classic games using modern gaming engines:
Metal Gear Solid original Playstation intro
Metal Gear Solid 4k with Unreal4 engine
I’d still love to play the original Deus Ex that has been updated to a modern engine.
I feel like this is maybe more complex of a topic than people give it credit for. I really, really appreciate a lot of things old games did that faded with modern, more "polished’ design sensibilities. Old CRPGs, for instance, are notoriously finnicky, easy to fuck yourself in, and require doing laborious tasks. But, they also try to simulate the world and their arcane mechanics are typically in service of systems that are meant to reflect the difficulty or lore of the world they’re related to. While it’s much easier to pick up and enjoy a modern RPG, it can be really interesting to me to pick up some of the old games and immerse myself in the weirdness.
It’s why I hold the unpopular opinion that I respect the Witcher 1 more than the Witcher 2. Witcher 2 is a more streamlined tight game, and Witcher 1 had some er… missteps (the horny trading cards), but Witcher 1 had a much better relationship with the tone of the Witcher books (superbunnyhop said it best “It’s more Shrek than Game of Thrones”), but from a gameplay perspective its annoying, repetitive, obtuse mechanics like alchemy just so much more interestingly captured the feel of the world I got from the short story collections.
I feel for AAA blockbuster games you can almost always just remake them with better graphics and a few concessions to modern design sensibilities, but a lot of games can be remade, or updated, or get a modern sequel, but lose something very unique and precious in that transition. So like… to some degree and in some sense no Witcher 1 didn’t age that well, but in other senses it’s still… well… the only game that does the stuff The Witcher 1 did, and that’s super neat and interesting and makes me still interested in revisiting it occasionally for the very specific things it simulates and the specific unique feel it gives.
E: There’s also a lot of small itch.io tier indie games where the lo-fi graphics are a very important part of the aesthetic, if not the game itself, and you can’t even really “remake them with HD graphics,” because they occupy a very specific cultural and technological context as works of art.
The worst offender was Space Quest 1. About 20% of the way through the game, there’s a spot where you’re trying to outrun an alien, and since it can move faster than you, it’s almost impossible, and requires perfect timing. And then, if the alien does catch you… it kisses you. That’s it. So eventually you decide that the alien was just a joke, give up on outrunning it, and continue the game, which goes on just fine.
…Until the penultimate scene. If you let the alien kiss you, then at that point, suddenly a chestburster, well, chestbursts you, and you die, and all of the gameplay to that point has been for naught. So you have to, at best, revert to a save before the alien chasing you, get the timing perfect this time, and then replay everything else. If you even figure out that that was the cause. Or more likely, restart the entire game, because you had a limited number of save slots, and you’ve probably already overwritten everything that old.
The worst offender was Space Quest 1. About 20% of the way through the game, there’s a spot where you’re trying to outrun an alien, and since it can move faster than you, it’s almost impossible, and requires perfect timing. And then, if the alien does catch you… it kisses you. That’s it. So eventually you decide that the alien was just a joke, give up on outrunning it, and continue the game, which goes on just fine.
…Until the penultimate scene. If you let the alien kiss you, then at that point, suddenly a chestburster, well, chestbursts you, and you die, and all of the gameplay to that point has been for naught. So you have to, at best, revert to a save before the alien chasing you, get the timing perfect this time, and then replay everything else. If you even figure out that that was the cause. Or more likely, restart the entire game, because you had a limited number of save slots, and you’ve probably already overwritten everything that old.
Since the Xbox One has backwards compatibility with the original Xbox for some games, I thought I’d go back and try some oldie goldies. Unfortunately, I gave up on replaying Knights of the Old Republic and Morrowind, despite the fact that I played the hell out of those games back in the day. The gameplay just seemed clunky and repetitive.
(Then again, I like Mass Effect 1 and Fallout 3, so what do I know.)
Return to Zork from 1993 had a lot of things that you could do that would render your game unwinnable and you wouldn’t necessarily find out until almost the end. Also, if you broke a law, the Guardian would come and punish you by taking all your stuff, thereby rendering the game unwinnable. And like all puzzle adventures the standard “pick up everything that isn’t nailed down” paradigm mostly applies. Except for one object that you need to get permission to take, but it’s just lying on the ground. And if you take it without getting permission first, the guardian shows up. And the reason losing your stuff makes the game unwinnable (even if all you lose are items that serve no more purpose) is one of the last puzzles involves you throwing into a pit every single item you can pick up in the game that doesn’t disappear from usage, and if you miss even one object you can’t get past that puzzle.
But, you can get revenge near the end of the game by dumping everything but the sword (or the letter opener, take your pick) into the pit, and then going on a killing spree to all the defenseless denizens (who will magically be back alive in the closing credits). After you kill one, drop your weapon since the Guardian won’t show up until you move. He’ll take all your stuff (which you don’t have) and despite the warning that “The Path to Victory is Now Blocked”. It’s not. You can still win the game and enjoy your cathartic sprite-based slaughter.
That’s the original Half Life. Half Life 2 ended up with you using the upgraded gravity gun to blow up the citadel.
Final Fantasy VII on the PS1 just doesn’t hold up anymore. I think Final Fantasies IV and VI on the Super Nintendo, and possibly even the original on the NES, have held up better. The plot is still great, but the graphics and game mechanics don’t feel old fashioned, they just feel old.
I kind of have to give Return to Zork a pass on that one, though, because that’s part of the essence of a Zork game. And aside: Where might one find that? I thought I’d played all of the Zorks, but apparently not. Is it a zcode game?
It’s on the Internet Archive, Abandonia and many other sites. I don’t know if it’s also in the Infocom Github repository which has the source code to most of the Zork games. It may not be, which suggests it’s not in zcode format (I have no concrete information though), but you can play it in your browser or in a standalone emulator.
Maybe a bit of a hijack, but are there any truly innovative games that HAVE aged particularly well?
Groundbreaking games don’t have the luxury of refinement, so they’re bound to be surpassed by other games doing it better. Assassin’s Creed (mentioned above) is a pretty good example. I remember reading a review of its immediate sequel that referred to AC1 as little more than a proof of concept for the freerunning/climbing gameplay (which really did feel amazing at release).
My contribution to the thread: Battle Arena: Toshiden. I remember staring at it in slack-jawed wonder at a mall display, with the sure and true knowledge that video game graphics had reached their peak. It was nearly photorealistic!
It, uh, it was not photorealistic.
I’d say that Portal was pretty innovative, and while the gameplay and graphics in the first one isn’t quite as good as the second, it’s still perfectly playable.
Going further back, one might also nominate Tetris, but then you have to ask whether all the countless ports and re-writes (even the ones with the exact same rules) count as the “same game”.
The original Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest are still both quite playable. They’ve done well enough that they have both been updated for modern systems numerous times.
ETA. The original Pokémon games are still really fun as well.
Re. Zork, at least one of the original authors has gone on record that those games did not have “a plot… they had a goal…”, that “they were just supposed to be fun” and “not somehow intended to replace fiction or to be a great art”. None of that would keep them from aging well, of course, all other things being equal, any more than, say, Super Mario Brothers 3 or Sonic the Hedgehog lacking a compelling plot.
Defender and Robotron: 2084 were innovative and are still fun as hell to play today. Eugene Jarvis is one of my minor deities.
I agree about Mass Effect 1 and would like to add that having to go through and destroy all your old weapons over and over gets tedious very quickly. I would also have liked to see the N7 logo appear on all of Shepard’s armor instead of just the starting one. If it weren’t for ME2 and ME3, I wouldn’t play ME1 ever again. Ironically, I bought a 360 to play ME1.
If you used an emulator like DOSBOX and were stuck with the original keyboard controls, then I agree it wouldn’t have been fun. You should get a source port like GZDoom to take advantage of modern 3D graphics capabilities like OpenGL and, most importantly, WASD-style controls and full mouselook.
There are a couple of mods that enhance the original game with high resolution textures, better AI, revised skill tree, and the like:
[ul]
[li]GMDX “Give Me Deus Ex”[/li][li]Deus Ex: Revision[/li][/ul]
Which one to install depends on how close to the original gameplay you want to be, with GMDX sticking closer to the original.
Eh. It’s not a matter of aging badly, I think…the annoying elements (bad map design, unforgiving twitch elements) were obnoxious when it was new, too, the gay stereotypes in the Honey Bee Inn were always cringy*, and I always thought the low-poly graphics looked ludicrous, especially when compared to the still simplistic but more detailed cinematic graphics.
- Oddly, the Miss Cloud sequence as a whole, not so much. But maybe that was just closeted me reveling in the idea of being ‘forced’ to wear women’s clothes.