Games that have/have not aged well

[Juan Aguacate]

This is the thing that makes me love re-releases and remakes. The new Odin Sphere is a markedly better game than the original, and the new version of Wild Guns has new characters and levels to flesh it out a bit more. The new characters have different play mechanics

Re-releases are a great way to update old classics and I would love to see more of them. Shake the dust off of some older games that haven't aged well and bring them into the modern era!

[Anayo]

Anayo agreed, why I keep around Ninja Gaiden Trilogy over the originals. While not heavily 16bit polished, they restored the NG3 difficulty to the famicom cart and put in per stage passwords.

And I'll agree into that argument that 8bit RPGs aged horribly as did most (not PS4) of the phantasy star games. One can be tolerable but 2 and 3 are just grinding abusive (both grinding levels and on your patience.) I experienced them within the decade of them coming out (PC smash pack for PStar2) and even I couldn't tolerate that garbage more than a 1/3 into the game as it just felt awful after coming off of some other stuff from Square, Enix, and even others like say Grandia 2.

I'll throw another nod to early 3D stuff, much hasn't aged well. N64 fares a little better than PS1 in some aspects as least when the AA filter was used right and not abused, plus not horrid FMV with all the issues it had. But I'm sure not to please people throwing the pre-NES era 2D under the bus as it's just so bad you have to draw a line somewhere where no amount of imagination would make some crappy blocks become what they intended or the overly dumbed down gameplay even weaker than the arcade games of the era. Colecovision (being after Famicom) is about as far back as it gets before you can forget it. I can deal with some 2600 titles and Fairchild but that's about it, and only because I liked them back then.

16-bit games pretending to be 3D haven't aged super well either. I enjoyed Sonic 3D Blast around age 8, but not today.

Oddly enough, the soundtrack for the Sega Genesis version of Sonic 3D sounds waaaay better than the soundtrack for the Sega Saturn version to my ears in 2017, even though the Saturn one uses higher fidelity instruments.

Genesis:



Saturn:

[Xeogred]

Still shocked at how casually some are throwing titles out here.

But it's amusing nobody has really suggested the 16bit era. You'd have to have a black heart to think any of that era has aged bad.

[Sarge]

Zelda II. Fuck that game. I loved/hated it as a kid. Now, it's just hate. I almost did not opt into the 3DS ambassador program because they included that title.

Ha! I had the same love/hate relationship when I was younger, because I got stuck. Now? It's one of my favorites. Nothing but love now.

[alienjesus]

Still shocked at how casually some are throwing titles out here.

But it's amusing nobody has really suggested the 16bit era. You'd have to have a black heart to think any of that era has aged bad.

Plenty of that era has aged badly. Most of the racing games, pretty much all of the FPS games, any cinematic platformers, about 80% of the fighting games.

Generally, I think the genres that hold up worst are games where one (or both) of these things happened:

- Technology seriously expanded what they could do in the genre (polygons are not to be underestimated in their contribution to FPS and racing games for example, and CD media basically birthed the Rhythm genre for home consoles)

- The genre became more popular over time, meaning more improvements or modifications to the former were made, making the old ones feel dated.

Neither of these is a hard, fast rule mind, there's plemnty of exceptions. But games in those types of genres generally aged the worst in my opinion - platformers generally hold the test of time, whereas older racing games are pretty meh on average imo.

[Xeogred]

16bit FPS's... the two of them?

I can't give early polygons too much credit. I think PSX games have aged 10x better than most N64 games that were fully true 3D. The PSX was less is more with their trickier use of pre-rendered backdrops for a lot of titles, that enhance them far better than some triangular alien looking trees or something you'd get in Quest 64 or whatever.

No doubt on racers. But the ones that were good are still extremely good. I'd take Mario Kart SNES over 90% of the series to this day.

Cinematic platformers are awesome. Another World and Flashback are still fantastic.

[alienjesus]

16bit FPS's... the two of them?

I can't give early polygons too much credit. I think PSX games have aged 10x better than most N64 games that were fully true 3D. The PSX was less is more with their trickier use of pre-rendered backdrops for a lot of titles, that enhance them far better than some triangular alien looking trees or something you'd get in Quest 64 or whatever.

No doubt on racers. But the ones that were good are still extremely good. I'd take Mario Kart SNES over 90% of the series to this day.

Cinematic platformers are awesome. Another World and Flashback are still fantastic.

Well, I think there were more than 2 16 bit FPS, but it probably says something that people only remember 2.

I personally tend to prefer N64 games to PS1, but I find that I enjoy quite a lot of games on both systems. I don't tend to agree with the idea that the 32 bit era has aged the worst, other than graphic fidelity - the controls and gameplay are normally pretty solid imo.

With racers, yup, like I said, there ARE exceptions. I like Mario Kart, I love F-Zero. I think those are the best of the gen though, and that's because mode 7 allows them to do something more like the later 3D releases do. That said, some of the old school racers can still be fun - OutRun and Road Rash are some I enjoy.

I never thought cinematic platformers were good even when they were current, so I'm probably biased there. I think it's noteworthy that the genre pretty much died after the PS1 era though, although I could see an argument made that stuff like Uncharted is basically the new version of the genre. After all, Uncharted is basically just Tomb Raider, and the original Tomb Raider was essentially Prince of Persia in 3D, right down to the horrible finnicky controls that never do anything you bloody want them to.

[Fragems]

No doubt on racers. But the ones that were good are still extremely good. I'd take Mario Kart SNES over 90% of the series to this day.

Mario Kart SNES has the most aggravating rubber banding AI of any game ever release .

[Xeogred]

Won't deny it.

alienjesus: For the record you probably don't want to know... but for 16bit FPS's all that came to mind for me were Doom and that Noah's Ark game.

I had a feeling you didn't like cinematic platformers, seems like there were mixed reactions about it in a recent discussion about them. I can see how they're really subjective though even for their time.

Well I'll stop playing the devil's advocate here and say that FPS's are one of my favorite genres, which never seems too popular among retro fans sometimes and whatnot. But I'm easy to please and always really happy with a good FPS campaign. That said I do feel it's one of the genres that can have some issues with age, I just don't really associate the 16bit era with it at all or anything so that threw me off. But stuff like Goldeneye or Perfect Dark on the N64... phew oh man, going back to a single joystick control layout, and those games get like what 15 frames per second maybe? (the XBLA release of Perfect Dark is fantastic though). But even for something way more current, I feel like early 360/PS3 era FPS's have aged terribly as well. Muddy, brown graphics, bad framerates, controls that can't be customized much (sensitivities and such), and whatnot. Luckily the majority of the genre is available on the PC, and I have repurchased a lot of old favorites and enjoyed them again on the PC in superior form. I actually played Deus Ex originally on the dreaded PS2 version haha. For something even just recently, I just got through Serious Sam First/Second Encounters HD on PC and think I had more fun with them than I did on the Xbox originally. I loaded up my Xbox copy and kind of laughed at all the screen tearing and other issues. So technical advancements go a long way for this genre specifically to me.

It can be a complicated and tricky take on things though. It's more about the technical aspects for FPS's to me, rather than age perhaps. Since like, I just played Quake 1/2 and their expansions last year and they blew me away. But if you go and look up the PSX version on youtube... then compare that to Dark Places Quake, you kind of see what I'm getting at. Same game, but the difference in performance is insane. Same with Duke Nukem 3D and the new World Tour release, with its new rendering technique making verticality look better. So well optimized and enhanced ports can go a long way.

For the record, Doom ages like a dream. I think I'm just going to start calling it my third favorite game of all time after Super Metroid and Link to the Past. It seems like I replay Doom and megawads yearly and it never tires me. Timeless magic and I think it's thanks to the fact that it's technically all 2D. For me personally it has a very appealing style and look that holds up.

[alienjesus]

I assumed it would be Doom, but suspected Wolfenstein for the 2nd! There's also stuff like Faceball 2000 and Zero Tolerance.

It's not 16 bit, but early 3D systems like the Jaguar and the 3DO are overflowing with crap FPS as well