Chanticoblues said:
I'm not sure how much I buy into games not holding up.
When I think of that idea, I think of games that got by on their novelty. Playing a video game at home rather than at the arcade was novel, so back in the day we enjoyed games on the first two generations of video game consoles. Playing a shooter with four player split-screen was novel, so we enjoyed Goldeneye. But what does that say about the games? Nothing really. It's just what's novel to us changes.
I think it's a little unfair saying "game x doesn't hold up". Just say it's not good, it'll provoke more discussion and make you feel more accountable for what might be your own hangups.
For me, I think it's more in regards to standards. Technological limitations obviously means that an older game will not look as good as a successor 20 years on. So I don't think it's fair to judge an older game based solely on graphics or in-game physics or anything else dependent on processing power.
However, I would argue that standards for quality in games have changed quite a lot - especially as games are a pretty recent medium. There's a lot of crap in older games that we were willing to put up with because we didn't expect games could do any better. Because, well, games were kind of a trashy medium, really, and quality wasn't really something people looked for.
As a personal example for me, I'd say "Megaman Soccer" - a poorly made soccer game (even for the time) which was an obvious Megaman-related cash tie-in. Its graphics were actually pretty good considering it was SNES, but everyone ran really slowly - their animation cycles were literally two sprites, so everyone looked like paper cutouts gliding across the screen - and the mechanics of passing and shooting didn't make sense. Because of this, there was only one way to score a goal, and that was by using a special superpower that made the ball unblockable and kill everyone who got near it including the keeper - which then made the game ridiculously easy.
Point is, it was a bad game, but I played it religiously - because I had very few other games for the SNES, and I had a low bar for quality.
As a counter-example, I think "Deus Ex" actually holds up pretty well. The graphics are terrible, the maps are tiny, and gameplay can get repetitive - that's a restriction of processing power and hardware at the time. But the mechanics of the game are mechanics that are still used today - stealth by crouch-walking outside enemies' vision, lockpicking, hacking security terminals to gain control of cameras and turrets, extra exposition revealed through diary logs you find around the environment, sniper scopes that swayed, aiming reticles changing in accuracy based on your movement and whether you were crouching, non-lethal weapons that let you play without killing people, modding weapons to add silencers or whatever, interactive cutscenes that allowed you to choose your responses, a basic relationship mechanic that changed how characters reacted to you based on whether or not you'd done something they liked or disliked (eg. my first playthrough, having Paul berate me for killing so many people in the Statue), hub-based maps where you had a central location from where you could go to linked areas for missions and sidequests - and that's just some of the core mechanics that you see in a lot of games now.
You could even argue that Deus Ex did some things better than many modern games - like maps that truly had player freedom to reach an objective any number of ways (sniping enemies from roofs, lockpicking the back door, blowing up the front door, convincing a hobo to tell you about the secret underground tunnel, using super-strength to move a fridge out of the way, or ... being really good at swimming). Or, Deus Ex's master stroke - having a branching storyline that really did change depending on your choices, with multiple endings that were more varied than "Good Ending vs Evil Ending". Deus Ex confronted you with tough moral choices and gave you a story that played out depending on your personal moral beliefs without hamhandedly telling you you were a good/evil person.
Of course, it helps that the creative staff behind Deus Ex have now been distributed throughout the industry, planting its influence into many current studios.
Getting back to the topic of games that don't hold up: Lords of the Realm 2. I loved that game so much, and I really do wish there was a modern game that simulated the experience of commanding a siege of a castle at a tactical level like that. However - the game was a lot of crap, really. Base management amounted to putting the right number of resources into the right area and then checking the numbers the following turn - it was basically a very fancy complicated spreadsheet. And combat amounted to just getting a huge horde of archers who could then shoot everyone dead before they even got close.
