Games that haven't aged well.

[Canadamus Prime]

Most early 3D games haven't aged particularly well.

 

[Igor-Rowan]

snip

This quote perfectly sums up auteur developers, they're the ones never satisfied with technology, because when you develop games you have to makes sacrifices, because their "vision" is something abstract that has to fit inside the disc/cartridge/whatever of the time, which will never happen. This is why Kojima so throughly bows down to the movie industry, because he doesn't think his own creations are art.

OT: Add to what I'm saying, some games are timeless, others are not, it quickly springs to mind Resident Evil, or realistic looking games of the time because of how "off" and uncanny they look or control, if you raise suspension of disbelief, they're still playable, but games like Crash, Mario, BK or even Goldeneye are somewhat timeless because the graphics look pleasant to look at, or in Mario and Goldeneye's case, the controls are snappy and fluid helping players to get immersed. ANd in the end immersion is the word.

 

[Elijin]

I don't believe that. The cameras of the N64 games were always... limiting. They didn't become limiting by comparison. Black and white didn't become bad after filmmakers began using color. If a game looked good or played well twenty years ago, it still looks good or plays well.

Lol, okay captain revisionist.

I mean you're fundamentally wrong due to how quality and functionality is measured against the possible benchmarks, and in respect to the previous limitations.

But I'm sure small child you totally knew the flaws of the hardware, which at the time were staggering leaps forward in what was possible and seen as the exact opposite of flaws.

 

[VG_Addict]

I think gaming has its own suspension of disbelief in regards to technological limits. Imagine if Mario 64 ended up getting critically panned just because it didn't have the graphical technology of today. It simply wouldn't happen, because obviously people aren't stupid enough to expect standards which at the time would have been outrageously unattainable.

 

[Zydrate]

Hard thing to answer, but I do know that I have a certain graphical and mechanical threshold to what I am capable of playing.

I started gaming with Starcraft, Unreal, Quake, and Morrowind. Stuff in the mid 90's onward. Anything below those on a technological level I can't really handle. Marios, Zeldas, etc are either too boring or too hard to keep my attention. There's an occasional exception like Stardew Valley. Evoland also comes to mind because it functions to subvert most game types.

I can still go play Morrowind, the first Fable, etc with a straight face. They're fine to me. Anything made before those is just "ew" to me.

 

[gsilver]

I mostly played Dos shareware when I was a kid.

*Sooo* much of that stuff is just ludicrously bad and dated at this point. And wasn't even that good at the time, but it was what I had.

Single-screen games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn7sSc7Nmks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n39SbydSPug

Racing games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enHy87iyyt0

Generic Donkey Kong rip-off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3llYl50jwxs

Generic Double Dragon rip-off
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvRxH3xS9J0

Sidescrolling platformers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbiIRJs_rFc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6-G6Nc9S30

RPG stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sj8SjoMIeOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7VnokcpRR0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaKtZYMBbwM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1MNrDgr7ow (oh my god look at that "art")

IN SPAAAAACE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31ZwzxycUM4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jPEOigMP-w (actually, still pretty good)

Adventure games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4_C8i5V8Dw

Actually held up kind of decently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adwCCeNvpDw

Some of them are still awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e8Ys1ZPVcw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI1GU73KxEg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMumSgis-Jg (greatest game of all time, yo!)

And those were some of the more notable ones. Most of them, I can't even find videos of.

 

[DarklordKyo]

Many a game that aims to look "realistic," since "realistic" games tend to age like milk.

 

[Callate]

I've recently been re-playing Warlords Battlecry II courtesy of GOG, and it's still fun, but the glaring inadequacies of the AI- both unit and enemy player- stand out more to me now than they did the first time I played it. And the ability of computer players to multi-task a sprawling base make me feel less embarrassed to exploit those inadequacies. But the tendency of units to stand in place and allow themselves to be shot to death because they can't reach their attacker- or to fail to react because something is repeatedly shooting them from just outside their visual or missile range, despite every shot coming from the same direction- really begins to pall, after a while.

More broadly, I think the biggest offenders are often the games that occurred just at the cross-over where sprite-based games became polygon-based games. Games like Escape from Monkey Island particularly stand out. There wasn't enough computing power available to make things look as good as their sprite-based counterparts, there wasn't enough power to make as many objects/characters as in the sprite-based counterparts, and many basic problems with things like cameras and clipping were still works in progress. Having perfectly good sprite-based predecessors to compare to the lumbering polygon-based successors didn't help things much.

The games that fared the best in that era were often ones that understood they were working with something fundamentally different in the switch to "3D." The ones that didn't were like trying to use the medium of television to display Impressionistic art.

 

[09philj]

Quake. Not GLQuake, which is fine, but the regular version. Everything devolves into a blurry mess at range, and with the limited colour palette it's only worth looking at once to demonstrate why GLQuake is better.

Also, Fallout 1 and 2. I want to like them, but they feel extremely sluggish and flat, and not being welcoming to new players.

 

[The Madman]

Recently decided to replay the Saints Row series and frankly the first game in the series hasn't aged very well. 2 is still damned good, but 1? Yeah. Skip it.

Also decided to try the original Ghost Recon and first impressions were grim, however I have been made aware of some mods and tweaks that supposedly bring the game up to more modern standards so the jury is still out on that one.

 

[BrawlMan]

Everything from the N64/PS1 era.

Just about, the only exception are couple of 2D/2.5D games here and there. Especially if we're talking about controls. While we're at it, a lot early to midlife of the PS2/GC/XBOX era. As far as 7th gen games go, any of them that tried to be like COD (in tone, gameplay, or over focus/forced online multiplayer). Good luck playing any of the online mulitplayer (unless the game was released on PC) when the servers go down.

 

[Rangaman]

Almost any game that was praised for being a "technological marvel". Ocarina of Time, Morrowind and Half-Life 2 come to mind.

Nothing. Games don't "age". What was good then will always be good and what was bad then will always be bad.

N64 and PS1 games don't magically look worse over time. I always knew their graphics were simple.

If I can no longer appreciate a game, it's because my standards were lower back then. Everything or Nothing was never good. I just didn't know better.

Yeah, no. Games do appear worse as technology advances, compared to newer tech. This isn't a simple graphics thing, this is about game mechanics in general. For example, Super Mario 64 was praised when it was released because it laid the groundwork for how to do a 3D game. Nowadays? Well, the controls are arse, for one thing. The life system is incredibly archaic, for two. Game mechanics age as the industry advances, that is a simple fact.

Because of how dependent games are on technology, you can't really compare them to, say, film. A black an white silent film can still be a masterpiece if it has good acting and writing. A game with those things would be good, if it weren't for dated mechanics that make the experience a chore.

 

[Evonisia]

"Crash Bandicoot" didn't age well. It's a game that desperately needs thumbstick control[footnote]So thank God its being released on the PS4[/footnote], revised save system and the removal of the lives system. Most of my issues with the game on replaying it of late can lead back to those three issues, the formermost and lattermost of which are a symptom of being a 3D platformer on the PS1.

 

[Bad Jim]

Quake. Not GLQuake, which is fine, but the regular version. Everything devolves into a blurry mess at range, and with the limited colour palette it's only worth looking at once to demonstrate why GLQuake is better.

Not really true. I find GLQuake is incredibly difficult to run at anything other than 640x480 on most hardware, while the DOS executable gets decent framerates at higher resolutions even using Dosbox.

GLQuake also has a number of other minor issues that regular Quake does not have:
-Fullbright textures, used for lights, are shaded. So a light in a dark room can be nearly as dark as everything else.
-Overbright lighting is not supported, so highly lit areas aren't.
-Textures must be powers of 2 (16,32,64 etc) while the original Quake has many textures that aren't. This is handled by scaling the textures to powers of 2 with point filtering which looks awful close up.

https://www.quaddicted.com/engines/software_vs_glquake

Good source ports fix all these issues, so if you use them it's easy to forget that GLQuake itself isn't that great.

Of course DOS Quake has it's own issues, most notably the fact that if your framerate exceeds 70 with vsync off the game speeds up, so if you want a high framerate you need to put vsync on, which halves your framerate when you cannot max it.

The best official Quake executable for modern systems is WinQuake, which looks like Dos Quake but gives you a nice smooth framerate at 1280x1024. Source ports like FitzQuake are better still though.

 

[Trunkage]

Daggerfall is still one of my favourite games (way better than Morrowind in my opinion) but it looks like trash

 

[Rangaman]

Being revolutionary doesn't make something good, even in its time.

Actually it has to make it good, otherwise the "revolutionary" aspects would be forgotten.