Hmmm, this could be a good thread.
Lately - for better or worse - I have had an extreme desire to visit some of the older games I have never experienced before my nostalgia glasses get too heavy and fall right off my face like a VirtualBoy without a stand. Suffice it to say, 2014 left me feeling cold at least, and snowed in a condemned tenement at worst. I've seen what I perceive as astonishingly overrated quite a few times, at this point. So-called "classics" that most of my friends played when they were kids, but don't seem to have really played in recent years or simply forgive them for what they accomplished at the time. When the word "classic" passes your lips, you shouldn't have to follow it with an asterisk saying "at the time."
Allow me to clarify with the following examples.
LEGEND OF DRAGOON:
Perhaps it's my fault for not properly experiencing this game on a tube television at properly Playstation resolution. I don't care. It's 2014. There are genuinely good remasters of games that have helped us preserve what will be lost one day, but god forbid you tell the seething legions of the Peoples' Anti-Remaster Party of Absurdistan. They had to play the game when it was shit and so do you. In this particular case, it manifests as a glaring gameplay issue realized by - believe it or not - the graphics.
"Look at this wimp over here," you might say, "blaming the game for sucking at it." Legend of Dragoon shares a mechanic with Paper Mario, in that your attacks and moves have certain actions required for you to perform and execute increased damage. The player feedback necessary to pull off this maneuver is usually squares that spiral around the screen and require you to press X at the proper time to continue the attack's chain in order to do extra damage. Sometimes there's a counter-attack. Regardless, this visual feedback presents massive ghosting issues on modern video, which makes it extremely difficult to time this properly. I know this is Legend of Dragoon's problem because you can still pick up the original Paper Mario - from the same generation of consoles - and not face this issue with its clean, stylized-but-efficient UI. If I'm going to be able to enjoy Legend of Dragoon, I'm sorry Sony Defense Force, it's time for a remaster.
I might have been able to truck through this issue and mastered it, but to be completely honest, I wasn't gripped by any other part of the gameplay, and the story - while a breath of fresh air compared to some modern JRPGs - was not endearing itself to me. It's not a timeless classic, otherwise I'd be able to pick it up and enjoy it these days. I know this because I've been playing Parasite Eve and I'm astonished by how aggressively risk-taking it was compared to a lot of JRPGs I've played. Sure, it wasn't much of one, but that's exactly why I liked it. There are games that do things differently than Legend of Dragoon, and games that do what it does better. I see no reason to bother here unless you just want more JRPGs. It's assembled well if you can seek an obsolete TV and system to play it on. PSN has it for sale, but I don't know if it was upscaled. If it was, the ghosting will likely be present.
CHRONO TRIGGER:
Oh, now it's just obvious I'm trolling, isn't it? Another classic JRPG? I must be biased, me and my love for Final Fantasy 9, my positive acknowledgment of Final Fantasy 10, my burning passion for Parasite Eve's accomplishments, and my obsession with the Persona games. No, truth be told, I grew up with JRPGs - but not very many. Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Suikoden, Grandia, Skies of Arcadia, and indeed, the earlier Persona games and Final Fantasy 6, were among JRPGs I did not play when I was younger, and still haven't played. I picked up Chrono Trigger over at a friend's house and played it for about five hours. Perhaps I'm missing something by judging this game quite early, but I found it to be a perfectly average - perhaps even above-average - JRPG that successfully pulled off the tactical depth of a JRPG and provided an interesting story without doing much else. Perhaps just accomplishing what it set out to do is exactly what makes this game so beloved, but I saw missed opportunities. Character positioning, for example, seemed to be - like in Final Fantasy X-2 - purely for show save for a few enemy attacks that might have exploited it. You don't get to move around, yet the enemy can saunter about and change their positioning? I'd like to be able to use that, too. It was the natural next step for JRPGs, I feel, and Chrono Trigger missed it.
That's not really why I dislike this game, though. I dislike it because, well, frankly... it's not THAT good. Have you ever picked up a game that was new at the time and played it and thought it was satisfying, but had no strong urge to go pick it back up again? That's what Chrono Trigger is. It's basically a Suda 51 game in that you don't really need to look back at it after playing it. Okay, so there's multiple endings, but I never liked that idea in video games, like, ever. Multiple endings are so rarely satisfying, as I just think to myself "what about those other endings I haven't gotten to enjoy? Maybe I should start up a new game and play those." I'm not pleased, because I know I haven't actually completed the game. It's one of those experimental innovations in video gaming that I've always thought needs to die. This so rarely works. One of the appeals of a lot of western RPGs is playing the game differently a second time, which is the notorious cause of that so-called excuse: "I haven't finished the game yet, but I have made five different characters already." While this certainly presents its own challenges, providing multiple approaches in a game is the sort of depth that makes you want to genuinely revisit it. Many games fail to do it well. People are fans of the Elder Scrolls games exactly because they can do this. This, however, is the reason I can sometimes accept multiple endings. You had a completely different character with a completely different skill-set and (if you're properly roleplaying
) a different moral compass. A JRPG like Persona is capable of this as well. But the standard for video games is to have one minor choice in a game or a god-awful binary moral choice system that restricts your gameplay because you want to pursue the most climactic of endings or the mode of gameplay that fits you, the player, best. I'm not going to pretend I know what Chrono Trigger does, but after seeing the status quo from both old and new games providing such lazy incentives for multiple playthroughs, and the fact that Chrono Trigger appears to be a fairly linear JRPG, trust that I won't hold my breath until I know for sure. There are a lot of video games to play, and I just can't give that time to many JRPGs that don't grip me fast.
SONIC CD:
Take my opinion for what it's worth, because I'm not entirely certain I'm the target audience for Genesis platformers. I enjoyed Freedom Planet, but that's an indie game from last year that was inspired by the Sonic games. I grew up with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, but upon reflection, I think nostalgia is really the only reason I could truly say I "enjoyed" them. I certainly didn't like the levels without Sonic (the absolutely lowest part of either of the Adventure games were the Big the Cat levels, followed by Rouge's Mad Space from SA2). So I figured, "The 2D Sonic games probably got it right." I kind of liked Sonic Generations as a guilty pleasure, but I honestly think it was still too much of a mess to even be called a "step in the right direction" for Sonic. It was more like accidental... not quite "genius" but more like a village idiot that could provide you with some harmless fun.
Sonic CD does not live up to its praise. It's an extremely short game, which ironically manages to be its best characteristic, as anything that isn't a boss battle in that game is incredibly BORING, and coming from someone who actually has ADD, playing a Sonic game should not be boring. Have you ever encountered someone that says that Sonic games are all about "speed" and not the "platforming"? Sonic CD is the perfect linchpin in your rebuttal. Levels zoom by so fast that I barely have a chance to appreciate the platforming bits. As I speed through levels, pressing jump and somehow making the next leap of faith I had to make at high-speed, I get the impression that maybe it's similar to a rhythm game, except what's a rhythm game where I don't know the rhythm? There's so little actual platforming, so very little substance that makes games like Super Mario World such breakout hits. This game's cheap attempts to have multi-world gameplay only serve to pad out an experience that I could barely care to enjoy to begin with. It feels like it wasn't made to be enjoyed in a single playthrough, but to be beaten after acquiring arbitrary bonus collectibles in the form of Time Stones. These multiple worlds actually make the game far longer, at a total of 70 levels according to Sonic Wikia's entry on the game. But I don't even want to explore the slightly-different levels. I think the only thing that could earn less of my interest than a boring level is a boring level that's been reskinned and called a "new level." This game might have seemed amazing in its day, but next to the massive libraries that have been built up since Sonic CD's debut - including platformers that all but crush it deftly - I see little reason to keep bringing up Sonic CD when mentioning the "best Sonic game." For all I know, that could just mean the shiniest of turds.
THE ELDER SCROLLS III: MORROWIND:
This is a very weird one. The first Elder Scrolls game I ever played was Oblivion, but the first one I ever played extensively was actually Skyrim. I don't want to criticize the actual game so much as I want to criticize the fanbase that has made newer games virtually impossible to enjoy simply because it doesn't measure up to their nostalgic wonder. I wish Morrowind were a game I would have grown up with, as I knew it existed at the time and frankly, I think I would have enjoyed it thoroughly. I have a friend who I almost want to stop talking to about video games entirely bnecause I'm sick of his opinions on how amazing Morrowind is, even if I think Skyrim is a badly streamlined game compared to Oblivion, which I have glimpsed. I would like to have a rebuttal, or perhaps even better, I would like to enjoy Morrowind for all its depth and complexity. The problem? Bethesda never seemed to get any better with QA.
I don't merely say this because the game has a lot of glitches. Actually, the only glitch I've encountered is one that prevents me from playing. After about 15 minutes of playing, the audio bugs out and infinitely loops a split second, only for the game to crash when I attempt to transition maps. I've diagnosed this issue with the help of Google to possibly my Xonar DG sound card. Understandably, the game doesn't play nicely with modern hardware, but that's my point.
Games go obsolete. Like it or not, there are some things we enjoy now that are going to look pitiful when we're older, and there may even be games in the future that blow our minds compared to years like 2014 that merely promised and failed to. We'll be complaining about tank-like controls to our grave from games like Resident Evil. This is why remasters, why post-launch support, are pivotal to a game's survival. I hold no ill will against Morrowind and for all I know, it could be fantastic. Signs point to it likely being enjoyable for me. Unfortunately, we have to come to grips with the fact that technology needs to be updated in order to remain relevant, and video games are technology. Silent Hill 2's fog is a good example, as it was made possible with the Playstation 2's technology, but the translation over to modern systems was less than compatible, resulting in the malfunction of one of the most important aspects of the atsmopheric horror game. This could have been made possible with new technology, and regardless of where you stand on the Silent Hill HD Collection debacle which I don't wish to get dragged into, Silent Hill 2 suffered on modern systems. But do you want to preserve that game and make it playable so that we can demonstrate to others why horror in video games has been going through an awkward phase? Do you want people that never experienced it to enjoy it again? This is the beauty of post-launch support, even so many years after its launch, whether it be something as innocuous as being sold on PSN/XBL or even getting a complete remastering.
Older games sometimes used technological limitations to their advantage, so I understand that translating to new hardware would be something of a challenge, but I am for the preservation of actual classics in video gaming. Morrowind is the only example of one of these games that I couldn't get "in to" because it's less than friendly with present-day technology, even if it's just a sound card. People had an even worse issue with Grim Fandango and Dungeon Keeper, as I understand it. Now they're made available to new generations to enjoy through remastering and simply selling on a digital storefront like GOG. Holding a game hostage to outdated systems is probably the worst disservice you could possibly do to a game you love, especially as you try to suggest that anything new can't hold a candle to it, and Morrowind stands as that example. Skyrim may have a lot of game-breaking glitches, but at least Bethesda and their customers can find solutions for that game that can be fixed. Googling "Morrowind crash fixes" isn't going to yield nearly as many results. Likewise, games I can still enjoy despite appearing horribly outdated like Deus Ex are in need of SOME level of modernization.
Again, I don't hate Morrowind, nor do I even dislike it at all. I have no opinion; it just keeps crashing. When I do get it working, I'll probably enjoy it, but I feel this aside was important when discussing new players playing old games. It's a relevant discussion that needs to take place among retro gaming circles, especially when people still see "HD Remaster" as a cash-in. Maybe if you're Konami, it is.
You may now PM me to tell me that I need to git gud at old video games.
