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[dEnamed]

There's a black spot in my gaming history which is labelled "do not go there, don't meet your heroes". That would be the games which came out during the transition from 2D to 3D. During the transition, they looked like the future of gaming but from todays point of view, by god they're one big ugly mess.
Everything from before that Era is perfectly fine, 2D Games still look amazing to me, even if they're decades old. Slightly newer 3D Games are fine too. "Yeh, give me texture bugs and flickering, I don't care, give me a resolution of 320x240, I really don't care". But that one spot, which is sadly filled with games like Golden Eye, Blastcorps, Zelda:Oot and others, where it feels like you can count the polygons by hand with super low res textures - I just can't stand them anymore.
As soon as it looks highly stylized or comes without textures, it's okay again. Starfox I can play just fine, Lylat Wars - not so much. Heck, I can even play Elite just fine.

[ducktails]

i think there's two types of things here -- the first are games which are good the first time you play them, and not good the second time. the second are games which, because they are old, they play badly to a modern audience, so that even if you play the old game for the first time you might not like it

And the third type (which Caruso touches upon) are games that are perceived as good when played as a kid, but really weren't. A lot of the games listed here I think (like Goldeneye, FInal Fantasy 7) just weren't good to begin with.

[C.A. Sinner]

Goldeneye was above and beyond the best console shooter at the time and the multiplayer was extremely fun.

Also I don't mind old 3D graphics. Of course just like most people I've gotten used to modern high-res, high poly 3D so the old stuff often looks jarring initially but if the game is good I'll usually just forget the graphics after a while and focus on the other aspects. I just recently experienced this when I replayed Gothic 2 (inspired by the Skyrim thread ). The dated graphics were a problem for about 10 minutes, after that I was too immersed in the game's world, story, mechanics etc. to give a shit.

But yeah I'm not much of a "graphics guy" (I play roguelikes, go figure), so YMMV.

[J. R. Hill]

I think for the most part, game aging has to do with graphics more than anything else, and is mostly a problem with early 3D games.  (Like has been said)  The other types of graphics that age fairly poorly for me are games with prerendered-3D, and games in 3D that use sprites.  (Mostly because they looked great on a CRT, but not so great on a digital monitor)

[_Tommo_]

imo, gameplay-wise, Zelda:OoT and Mario64 and most nintendo games have aged even too well, being still on par of their current counterparts... while anything that tried to be "photorealistic" looks like an ugly jumbled mess.
Usually what tries to be "realistic" ages worst, being left behind of our ingenuity on accepting what is "realistic" and what is not.

So uhm, I can't play any early 3D pc game like HL1, or Doom, Fallout, System Shock, etc... games that were usually more adult in their themes (but not at all HL2, apart from the "you are a box" problem it is still quite neat).

games like Golden Eye, Blastcorps, Zelda:Oot and others, where it feels like you can count the polygons by hand with super low res textures - I just can't stand them anymore.

I feel that one day super-low-res-3D will be the new pixel art
Just wait for those those 10-year-olds to enter their 30's... we're almost there. Minecraft, maybe?

[Rm88~]

No game looks dated enough for me to go "EWWWW, OLD GRAPHICS". Ultra low-res Atari 2600, absurdly low poly early PS1-N64 games, it just doesn't bother me at all.

So it comes down to bad gameplay that I forced myself to like back in the day. When you're a kid and you buy or otherwise get a game that turns out not too awesome, you don't have many options if you have already played all your other games. Two examples:


Street Combat. A really bland SNES fighter that I used to play a lot. It's mediocre in every possible aspect, controls are slow and lacks content and personality.


Deadly Arts was better, with better characters and decent music, but the gameplay was downright broken. Making your character do something you want to do is a challenge itself. Too bad, because it had a pretty cool "create a character" mode that was quite innovative for the time.

[JimmyJ]

I tried replaying Heretic 2 a couple years ago, and couldn't get past the first level. The whole thing seems to have aged badly to me.

[Gimym TILBERT]

At least some old emulated 3D console support texture pack, Playing wii/gc and N64 game with texture pack greatly help

Wait wii/gc isn't that old

[Cow]

Every single arcade beat-em-up. And I guess Wizardry.

[Dragonmaw]

CONTROVERSIAL OPINION AMONG INDIE NERDS: Final Fantasy 7 is great and will always be great.

[DavidCaruso]

I tried Final Fantasy VII for the first time recently and I couldn't force myself to play past the 4 hour mark. In addition to the modern JRPG convention of drawn-out filler battles (okay maybe not entirely modern at all, but it's exacerbated by the larger emphasis on flashiness), the story seemed pretty trashy and bad (plus a lot of distracting spelling/grammar mistakes in the dialogue.)

I feel that one day super-low-res-3D will be the new pixel art
Just wait for those those 10-year-olds to enter their 30's... we're almost there. Minecraft, maybe?

oh god that would be the worst

THIS ISN'T A BAD BLOCKY ASS 3D MODEL...IT'S MY STTTYYYYLEEEEE

[SirNiko]

Oh man. I saw "Treasure" and I must've skipped reading the rest. My bad.

[Gimym TILBERT]

It's already happening, fortunately hyper hi rez normal mapped specular AO texture literally had mask that trend (torchlight and a bunch of other game), and those who do nearest neighborg (blocky pixel) are very good. Even game on old like hardware (ds) are very good visually now (4 warrior of light).





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[Paul Eres]

i used to think ff7 was bad, then i played ff8, ff9, ff10, ff12, and ff13. ff7 isn't as good as ff4-6, but it is the best of the 3d final fantasy games (unless you count fft as a 3d ff game, even though it's sort of 2d-3d hybrid)

i think ff7's main problem (but this is true of most ff games other than ff5) is that it's too easy, and that it doesn't allow much room for customization / personalization. there are still some really good parts to it though; some of the pre-rendered backgrounds are very artistic. and it's historically very important, modern games (even non-japanese modern games) still use techniques of presentation and storytelling created for ff7

consider how well the ending of ff7 works with only a couple of words of text here and there -- most of it is visual storytelling: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4_sw0trdNc -- from 3:40 on is especially good

[Alevice]

I actually enjoyed much more FF9 over FF7. FF7, I beat the frist disc, and wasn't compelled to continue playing; it started with the potential to explore a huge city, and then it quickly moved to loads of nonsensical things, like going to a chinatown and a theme park for non logical reasons. FF9 was more honest and richer in its content I feel.

I'm also quite surprised the negative reception DKC seems o have around here, for I enjoyed and still do the whole level design, which I feel a fair amount of levels were like fucking cake if youfound out the level's rythm. Plus the music was goegous and was suitable to the whole ambience in the levels. They did the prerendered look right. I didnt enjoy DKC2 and 3 as much as the first tho, I think they missed the charm.


As for the actual topic, I am kinda suffering this with Commmandos:BEL nd BtCoD. The first time I played them it felt quite original how I had to subvert going all front to accomplish the mission, but rather being all sneaky like. Nowadays, it just seems that no original mechanic emerges and the formula is quite straightforward - evade LOS, attract with radio, reach goal, mission succesful. There are a few touches here and there, but no mission feels that distinct.


Clay Fighter felt like an hilarous fighter with lots of charm. Nowadays it fels like a mediocre fighter which had a promising premise that failed to deliver.

I kinda suffered the same with HL2. It felt so fucking revolutionary, I was impressed when I had my first fights with Civil Protection, how real the game felt. Nowadays I play it, and I cant enjoy it much. Episode 1 didnt feel that great either, but Ep2 is far more replayable.


First Mortal Kombat Trilogy, once the excitement of violence wears off, the games prove to be completely mediocre fighters. Boring as sin.

Resident Evil is so hard to play nowadays. I heard the REmake fixes some of the annoying issues of the original series, but I never got accss to a gamecube.