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

[spm1138]

Mmmm. Generally older games are "worse" and a lot of classics have not aged well at all if you dig the box out.

The older games that I still enjoy are either: still good because they have strong writing and stuff outside of the "game" portion of them (if that makes sense - I am thinking of stuff like DX* or Planescape: Torment); from a genre not really being serviced now so you can't see how far they've fallen behind (tactical shooters) or else from a genre where the technology isn't such a big deal anyway (Front Mission).

When I go back and play anything that I can directly compare to a new game I find myself missing really obvious gameplay features, the better graphics or little conveniences that games have now.

Nostalgia and taking a really selective view of an era does make older games look way better than they should. You have to remember that picking out the best 1% of anything can make it look OK in retrospect even if it was pretty dreadful at the time:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/12/the_best_feature_films_of_2010.html

There's acres and acres of really mediocre releases which were perfectly solid 7 or 8 / 10 releases but which nobody even remembers now. Also most games are terrible. Sewer Shark was an older game. Is it better? :E

* Deus Ex is a really good example of nostalgia overcoming better judgement. It's more than the sum of it's parts which is good because some of those parts were embarrassing even when it came out. Look how bad the AI is. A bomb. For a game about choice why does the storyline not branch till the last level? But listen to some people talk and it's apparently got no faults at all. I find myself wondering if half of those people even played it.

 

[Yopaz]

If we're thinkign games in genral compared to games in general now, old games are better, do not take this the wrong way, but they are because the game industry used to be small and almost dead until Nintendo managed to breathe life into it (Actually a fact, odd as it may sound to some). Since the gaming industry was small they couldn't fart out games like they do today, but needed to make sure every game made it good. Now there is possibly more good games, but they drown in the ocean of all the mediocre and crappy games. Most of the ideas have been done and the new material is wearing thin.
In percentage you find more good games on older system, but that's mostly because there are fewer games.
Nostalgia does have a lot to say, so do not take it too lightly, but the most important part. All of those who grew up with a NES, SNES, N64/PSX are older now. Kids are more easilly entertained, so a lot of our fond memories come from nostalgia, the fact that we couldn't be too picky and that there actually was pretty good quality.
I still have to say my favourite games are on the GC, but the SNES got a lot too. There will most likely always be good games. Enjoy them for what they are, don't play them if you don't enjoy them. *Goes to play Super Mario World*

 

[Flac00]

It would mainly be nostalgia, but I also prefer playing older games for other reasons.

The ones I remember playing and have been playing through recently had nice stories and gameplay, and instead of alot of them being very similar to mainstream games (CoD clones and the like)

Also some games are classic, that everyone loves and remembers that haven't had anything similar in recent times (Hogs of War springs to mind)

It seems that older games also don't try to copy other games to make a profit as much.

I think that is untrue. Sure, now COD is the main game companies are trying to copy. But before it was any popular game. There were Counter-Strike clones, Unreal Tournament clones, Battlefield clones, Halo clones, etc. Really, I think nostalgia has made people forget that the industry has actually gotten pretty far (of coarse graphically), storyline wise, and even gameplay wise. At least with FPS's, people look back on BF 1942 as an amazing game, and yet if you play that game and then play BFBC2, it plays horribly. Then again I might have misunderstood what you were saying, but I gotta rage somewhere.

 

[CarlsonAndPeeters]

There are a lot of good games nowadays. They are just obscured amidst the large amounts of crap.

When we look back at old games, we only look at the good ones, as the crap has been, for the most part, forgotten.

So, the "good games" are probably just as good now as they were back in the 80s. Its just a matter of perspective.

 

[Vykrel]

older games are usually not "better" but they do bring back nostalgic memories

i do, however, see them as great candidates for downloadable titles... whether they are sequels or hd remakes or just ports

 

[ArchBlade]

The rose tinted glasses do make that question difficult. What makes it more difficult is that the industry has changed a great deal since then. It's kind of hard to gauge quality of older games when the standard for quality has gone in just about any direction in the last 5 years alone, not commenting on the time between now and the 80s.

 

[SpiderHam666]

Someone else may have said some of this but I am still going to put it out there.

In my opinion the difference in retro gaming and curgen gaming all comes down to what you are looking for. I am almost 30 so i have seen pretty much the full evolution of gaming AS IT WAS HAPPENING making my view of the older games different from say.... my brother who is 10 yrs younger than me. He firmly believes anthing from before the 90s sucked even though he played some of those games. We had the atari disk for the ps2 and i totally whooped on him cause he had trouble with the concept of simplicity. It got worse when I found an Atari 2600 at a yard sale and played it against him, he just couldn't handle the one stick one button concept.
Yes, part of the retro game is that lovely shield of nostalgia but another is the simplicity. You look at a game like Fallout 3, Red Dead Redemption, Heavy Rain and the like and they are steeped in story almost tothe point that the story is the only thing. But there are times that one just wants too blow up the alien ships attacking your home. Or maybe you just want to stomp on mushrooms and turtles during one of the greatest acid trips ever recorded.
For me the desire to play the older games is all about getting the feeling from when I was younger about games. Not achievements, not trophies, just the desire to reach the end of the game and see what is probably a game over screen but still. It's all about the time put into the game not the game itself. So no, the games aren't necessarily better than the newer ones but that doesn't mean they are necessarily less enjoyable.

 

[Continuity]

there were good games, there were bad games; much like now there are good games and bad games. However many kids these days make the colossal mistake of dismissing older games because the graphics don't match up to their expectations, or other complaints of the same sort.

Bottom line is that a game can be good, great even, with low tech graphics and archaic controls. High tech graphics are a nice add-on, they rarely hurt a game, but at the end of the day a game will be good or bad gameplay wise despite its graphics.

Plus older games in general have a lot more originality and in many cases more depth and complexity. Modern games tend to suffer from homogenisation, simplification, cliches etc.. Which isn't to say that games back in the day had no problems, there were myriad games that were awful and sank without a trace, there may only of been 20 good games in a year and 200 really bad ones, but you could be sure that those good games were awesome. These days we get 40 mediocre games and if we're really lucky 2 or 3 good games a year.

 

[ShakyFiend]

Still havent played a better mario game than sunshine and that was years ago. And I still think halo 2 online experience was best, mainly cos you didnt need a godly internet speed and the reflexes of a cat on meth to get a kill back then.

 

[Grufflenark]

Well I have yet to see a game that is anything like Populous (and expansions) so in SOME cases older games were better

Also CoD 1 was better than CoD 7 IMHO.

 

[xDarc]

Heroes of Might and Magic 3 is one of the best games ever.

Back when you didn't have eye candy, pixel crack, and rappers doing voice overs- you had to try a little harder to actually make a good game- imagine that.

Most games, as with all things entertainment these days, are also primarily decided fit to live by accountants. It's a business run rampant with efficiency experts and the like- consultants... all our favorite air-selling services we invented since we moved away from manufacturing.

There are plenty of reasons, plenty, why older anything is generally better than the garbage movies, music and video games we produce today.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Older games are certainly not definitely better, but they're not definitely worse either. Personally, one thing I do find is that older games (talking 16 bit and earlier here) age much better than anything PSX and onward. I'm fairly certain that in even 5 years time a lot of what we look at today will seem out of date, at least as far as animations and how things appear when in motion. In 5 years time, however, those old 8 and 16 bit classics will still look great.. if even more lo fi and retro.

 

[icyneesan]

A lot of older games haven't really aged well over the years. And some newer ones are just not good. It's probably Nostalgia talking most of the time. Take Pokemon for example. Red and Blue were great at the time. But they can't really hold a candle stick to the newer ones.

 

[Wolfenbarg]

As many others have said, some are, some aren't.

The reasons some are: Development costs were way lower, and that was only a decade ago, so inflationary costs don't really factor into it. Because of lower development costs, quite a few studios weren't afraid to tell stories that couldn't be told today in a new IP without being a huge risk (Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Arcanum, Gothic). Not only that, but it gave developers room to take risks with mechanics that eventually gave us the formulas that became standard in the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era. We were always exploring for new things until average development costs shot through the roof.

The reasons some aren't: Standards were lower. It was very rare that someone would compare a game with artistic merit in the same way they would speak of a book or a film unless it was a huge title like Final Fantasy or Baldur's Gate. For this reason, many studios pumped out painfully average games that we only remember so fondly because there weren't a wide variety of internet publications telling us which games were worth the most of our time and which were absolute pig slop.

 

[jrubal1462]

I read something about looking back at classic rock, and I think it applies here. When you turn on a classic rock station, if you're into classic rock, you might think, "wow, all the songs in the late 70's-80's were phenomenal, not repetitive mundane crap like what's on the radio now." The problem is, that's not the only stuff that radios were playing back in the day, that's just what gets remembered 'cause they were great. When you think of old games you're probably thinking of the Zelda's, the Mario 3's and the Contra's....What gets lost to oblivion are the cheap clones and poorly coded mediocre knock-offs that were probably just as prevalent as they are today. The article stressed the point by saying something like, the year Gimme Shelter was released, the top song was something like, Sugar Sugar....That hurts. Sadly, I can't remember where the hell I read all this.... Oh well, food for thought

 

[katsabas]

Depends wholly on the game. For example, I gave Soul Reaver 2 another chance and finished it a couple of hours ago. But at the same time, I am a sucker for the Power Of Chaos Trilogy of YuGiOh. From someone else's POV, POC is far inferior to Soul Reaver 2. But for me, it has one hell of a nostalgic value.

 

[Warforger]

I love playing older games but I cant really say why. Whats everyones thoughts?

Some are, but not all. I mean the mainstream titles hold ground to having fun like Megaman and Super Mario nowadays, but still alot of their flaws have been ironed out with the new handheld games like for say THE DIFFICULTY CURVE.

I'm playing Legend of Zelda on a online site which was copyrighted so I can tell it's legal and it's really fun, but now I'm stuck I can't figure shit out even with walkthroughs and alot of the fighting gets boring, sure there's a large variety of enemies which still makes it fun it's just boring when you have to go through the same places just to get somewhere.

 

[Caligulove]

For most games, I would say that it's just nostalgia. Future sequels in a series, or just games in the same genre released later are often better than those that came before them. For instance, I Wind Waker is still the best of the Zelda games in my opinion. Also, I enjoyed Donkey Kong 64 and Banjo Kazooie far more than I liked Super Mario 64.

Same thing went for the Donkey Kong Country series over the SNES Marios. They're all great games, but if I had to rank them, well..

Sometimes, though, nostalgia MAKES playing something fun. A lot of feelings of old games being superior is just from that fact that the person in question hasnt played said game in years, or cannot. If they actually sat down and played the game, they would see the differences/improvements that have been made since its release. A lot of games we like to play simply because of the nostalgia, and that fact will always make them better to us. It's a mix of both feelings

 

[DarthFennec]

Older games were created with us ubernerds in mind. New games are for `everyone', so they make them easier to play casually. I think this is what makes older games more fun, for me at least. I like that challenge and that extra dimension of interaction that comes out of actually devoting substantial amounts of my life to the game. That might be just me, but that's what I think.

Also nostalgia.