Are older games better? Or is that just the Nostalgia talking?

[TheXRatedDodo]

I don't think older games are better or worse, and I don't think newer games are better or worse, but the state of the industry is fucking shocking.
In the "olden days" (har har) the sense that the games were a real labour of love seemed far more potent than nowadays.
Milking franchises and squeezing development time to be as short as humanly possible is the law of the land in this day and age, and I think this is really sad. Games could be so much more than they were, but as it stands, I feel they're being held back more by the industry than anything else.

 

[Nazulu]

Yeah, just like everything else. I can't even find anything that interests me anymore (except maybe Portal 2), and I just keep digging and digging and digging.

Nintendo used to do it all for me but for the last 4 years they've just been really disappointing. I'd kill all of you for another Melee.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Maybe when pro graphics get less time consuming the gaming will come back up to speed we can only hope :3

 

[EHKOS]

Well, they are really cheap, like $3 for a PS2 title. (Although older than that and you have to sell your freaking soul, $40 for harvest moon on the psone no thanks.) They didn't pay all that much attention to graphics and instead worked on the stuff that counted. But I still think it's the nostaliga.

 

[Zantos]

They were a lot more story driven since there wasn't the same multiplayer capacity and the smaller storage space meant they had to be careful not to put in too much crap. Mostly though I think it's just because we only remember the good ones.

That said fable was made in 2005 and is the greatest piece of human accomplishment ever. Crash and spyro were also awesome, so yea, those oldies definitely are better

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

Does anyone remember fade to black the original it might be nostalgia talkign but that game was pretty pro

 

[DudeistBelieve]

Depends, plenty of old games still hold up. Hell there was a full month where I concentrated all my effort on beating Tiny Toons Adventures for the NES. I got as far as the final boss.

I know the boredom your talking about though. My tastes for game playing as diffently changed. I perfer now to play games where I can alter the appearance of the main character.

 

[Netrigan]

I don't think older games are better or worse, and I don't think newer games are better or worse, but the state of the industry is fucking shocking.
In the "olden days" (har har) the sense that the games were a real labour of love seemed far more potent than nowadays.
Milking franchises and squeezing development time to be as short as humanly possible is the law of the land in this day and age, and I think this is really sad. Games could be so much more than they were, but as it stands, I feel they're being held back more by the industry than anything else.

So, we're talking pre-Mario, right?

I think it's easy enough to find examples of this sort of attitude right back to the earliest days, when everyone and their brother was putting out their own version of Pong. And that was back when truly new and innovative gameplay was a fairly regular feature of the video game landscape.

But the reality was one truly original game comes out, immediately followed by a couple of dozen attempts to cash in on the new idea... occasionally resulting in a game that was arguably better than the original... such as Galaga being far better than the Space Invaders that inspired a large part of its design.

In the Nintendo era, there are a lot of samey platformers. Recently someone made a mock-up of a NES Great Gatsby game, which works brilliantly because it reminds absolutely everyone of every NES platformer ever made.

Sadly, original ideas are really few and far between, which I think has everything to do with video games having successfully picked all the low-hanging fruit. And as we've hit the point of diminishing returns when it comes to graphics, we don't even have a new console to look forward to that makes everything look so much better. The unoriginality and greed of the video game industry, which has always plagued the industry, now lays exposed for all to see.

 

[Kathinka]

i'd say they were. arround the golden age of pc-gaming, 2000-2006 or so maybe..the age of half-life and system shock 2. back before the influence of consoles took over pc-gaming.

to clarify, i have nothing against console gamers, consoles per se or console games. i just don't like the way they influence pc-gaming. dumbed down games lacking complexity so they can be played on the gamepad of consoles, shorter and shorter games that can easily be beat in a few hours, pay-to-play dlc, stagnation in the technological field so the outdated hardware of console still can play the newer games, lacking possibilites for mods, dedicated servers, lan-gaming..all that died when games became half-assed console ports.

*awaits da flame*

 

[gundamrx101]

I prefer older games. Now games are still fun but older games took risks, they had charm, and color. Now everyone wants to be gun metal grey and US soldiers blowing up Russians.

Maybe when pro graphics get less time consuming the gaming will come back up to speed we can only hope :3

And this.

 

[bjj hero]

In a rush to be more mainstream and sell more copies games have gotten easier and less complex.

Games used to have huge manuals that had to be consulted constantly when you were new. These are no longer needed.

This level of depth and challenge is missing in todays games. I can't remember the last time I hit a brick wall in a game. I fly through them now a days. I would like to think Im now a better gamer but thats just not the case.

Old games are great, just keep in mind you only tend to go back to the best games of that era. There are still good games released now, the difference is you probably play more of the trash too.

 

[Kilo24]

When you're thinking of older games, you're thinking about every game that's come out before a few years ago. That's a much bigger library than all the games that came out after your cutoff point, and, as a result, your memory has more more to cherry-pick examples of great games from. Therefore, an older player will have many more old games than new ones that he has fond memories of.

Time distortion is another important factor. Whether a game was released in 1999 or 2000 is not as important as distinguishing between games that came out this year and games that will come out next year. You'll see the same things in movies - it's much easier to name three movies that came out last year than it is to name three movies that came out in the whole decade of the 50's - and books (of which old ones are commonly lumped into centuries.) The huge relative size difference between the past releases and the present releases mean that the vast majority of the best material will always be in the distant past (except for very recent mediums.)

Very few people play the "average game" from a decade ago. They play the ones they still hear about, or the ones that they remember loving. The mere fact that you can find any significant amount of information about a given old game is a testament to its influence, and usually to its quality. New games are valued by their pre-release hype, their reviews, and how pretty they look on the shelf. They're much more likely to be talked about because they're new, not because they're good.

Games are actually slowly improving, IMHO. As new things are tried, game developers see what works and what doesn't work (though it is mostly mindlessly following a lot of fads like regenerating health, the current genre of the day, scores and life systems in earlier games, RPG elements today, free-to-play microtransaction models - a lot of things). But cheap deaths, completely faceless characters, mind-numbing difficulty caused by stupid game design, and aimlessly wandering about to try to figure out what the designers want you to do next are examples of old-school gaming staples that are all on the wane. I can't think of anyone unhappy to see them go.

 

[Dfskelleton]

(I'm kinda ranting on FPSes, so...)
Older games were neat because there wasn't really anything to rip off, so developers had to be more creative. For example, Wolfenstein 3D and Mecha Hitler. Using Hitler as a boss is something that would never happen in a modern WWII FPS. Why? Another reason: They're trying to be realistic, and fighting the Furher in a robot suit isn't exactly realistic. It's fun. It's amusing. It's completely without worry and over the top, and that's why older games were nice. Are there plenty of good new games? Of course, they can just be harder to find.

 

[Ubermetalhed]

To much style over substance nowadays.

Because graphics sucked back in the day it seems like developers spent more time on the gameplay, level design, story etc. Although there are alot of new games which do all of these things well, these are usually games made by developers who made some of these 'nostalgic' games in the past.

Also too many games are becoming too 'casual' or easy. There is to much guiding by the hand for most games nowadays. Older games tended to be pretty challenging and overcoming those challenges on your own was extremely rewarding, now if you get stuck the game will help you or point something out which will help you advance easier.

Tbh the best new games are the ones which have the graphics but also have alot of the qualities of the 'old' games.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

A lot were, now they are just copying what makes money and lacking the originality and innovation (and fun).

As for FPS games, this pretty much sums it up:

 

[Celestico]

Certanly not. To shake your fist and say that games was better before is as ignorant as anything gets. Judge games by quality, not by age.

And for gods sake, stop milking old franchises. Yes, I'm looking at you nintendo. If we want to expand this medium we need to think in other ways, even if an easy buck is tempting.

 

[DarkRyter]

No more so than any one game can be better than another.

Age really has nothing to do with a game's quality.

 

[ImperialSunlight]

Neither are better, when it comes to old games we only remember our favourites, when we think of new games we see them all, even the ones that are complete garbage. This creates the illusion of old games being better.

 

[Astalano]

I just started playing the original Stronghold...games released 10+ years ago are just better, sorry. They're deeper, more focused, often more fun.