How much of an old game's flaws are you willing to excuse?

[95tan - TheBestOS -]

When I'm playing an old game, I find myself repeating the phrase "ah, it's an old game. It'll have some kinks," from time to time. A glitchy texture, an annoying section, an unclear objection. One or two and you can shrug it off.
Whether you can excuse it for being old is person-to-person. But even for those of you who CAN, there does have to be a limit.

What's yours?

 

[Guinea]

Even new games have some kinks and unclear objectives but I get ya. If Google is required more than a few times to figure out where to go or what to do because details are too obscure then I'll probably just move on to the next one.

 

[Felipe]

I can go with any old game as long as the bugs, difficulty and gameplay arent much of a problem. I stopped playing Fallout 1 due to the bugs and the official patch not fixing the most serious ones till i found the unofficial patch and i played it again till the end.

 

[Zerpina]

It's like Castlevania 2 on the NES...

It was plagued with bugs, the awful load times between day and night, you know the "What a horrible night to have a curse" and such. And the problem that plagues most 2D Castlevanias to this day the being sucked toward a pit if hit... of course, a bad translation like Simon's Quest had didn't help.

I kind of overlook stuff like the hitback thing, as that's just part of it. But the janky day-night thing was awful. If the game is fully riddled with bullshit like that, I can't deal with it, honestly.

Again, the pit thing I can deal with, just how it was designed to be hard as nails.
Mind you, fans have fixed most of the bugs with that game. As they are on a lot of older titles.

A better question is... if they remove all the jank, are they still the same games?

 

[PSVitaForever]

I'm not sure if you mean "old-game-like-flaws" in new games, or "old-games-flaws" in old games that we're not used anymore to because of QoL improvements.

In "Shadow Hearts" (played it on emu some month ago), I was glad about playing it with a guide because I'm spoiled by minimaps on the corner of the screen (or a map I can always bring up). I was also glad for savestates because in later battles I screwed quite a lot with the ring.

I'm not used anymore to random battles: I think "Bravely Default" (the first title on 3ds) did it great, you can put them off to explore and then on again when you need to grind. A modern game should follow that example if they want to put random battle in it and for some reason they don't want enemies onscreen.

Also: I like saving whenever I want. Sometimes you need to do something else and if you have to turn down your console and you're far from a savepoint AND you've been grinding for a bit or won a difficult battle... it's sad.

 

[Advil Lavs]

I guess it's a case by case basis. If it's something small I have to do a lot of times, it would get annoying but if the rest of the game is great, I'll excuse it. If it's a difficulty spike, if I can't overcome it in that or the next play session, I might just drop the game.

 

[bjork]

I'm curious what constitutes an 'old game.' I'm basically as old as the 2600 so I've seen and endured a lot. The only unforgivables to me are if a game crashes a lot, or if it's impossible to finish in its released form. Something like DOS TMNT with the jump you can't make, or Jet Set Willy having to be reissued due to a bug with arrows in one room. But other than that, I can take a lot.
The main things I have low patience for are damage sponge enemies in any kind of game, or poor map designs/item placements in metroidvanias. But those are both newer era design choices.

 

[Evaccaneer Doom]

Am I having fun? If so I’ll excuse all of its flaws.

 

[TheMinuMaster]

The first two hours of any N64 game always have me thinking, ‘this cursed old camera…’ But the funny thing is, by the end I’m always like, ‘what a masterpiece, not a single flaw.’

 

[.xxxevious]

Am I having fun? If so I’ll excuse all of its flaws.

Same, it's all about how much fun I'm having so it's really case by case. If anything, I almost find it more charming when an older game has some minor flaws, even lag when there's a big explosion or something.

When we were kids lag was a sign that the game was getting so crazy our consoles could barely handle it! Now I feel it points more towards poor optimization? If that makes sense.

I usually pull up guides for unclear objectives, but if I'm having too much trouble even with that I just drop it. I need to be having more fun than I am frustrated with my incompetence

 

[Dr.Kisaragi Dr.Kisaragi]

Well I grew up on old games never played modern games (PS4 and above) I have a high torelance.

 

[χKai]

Game can be straight-up bad and as long as it's NES or Famicom, I'll probably like it anyway.

It's when gaming and techbology have come to a point where issues haven't been a problem in most games for a long time, and a developer decides to make one with all the easily fixable problems of that era, that I truly become offended.

One example is Super Chinese World, these games would have been great if they didn't lag atrociously. In an age where most lag problems in games were a thing of the past, it's sad they took such potential and flushed it down with the rest of the poop.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

Almost anything as long as it's not cryptic BS designed to make you stuck forever... Never had any tolerance for that.

 

[Elwiwi]

Everytime I go into an old game I prepare myself mentally for all the bullshit the game is going to throw at me and not be too bothered for it ( shitty controls , unfair difficulty... You know the drill)

 

[Janunba88]

Bad RNG and unnecessary difficulty spikes are two things I can no longer tolerate in games, whether old or not. My time is limited; I'm no longer a child with hours and hours free for games. And trying to be "git gud" each year is even less likely because I'll prioritize something more important in my life over being good at a stage or fight in a game.

 

[Luxfin]

For me, when I play a game with some flaws. I take it by a case by case basis. If I am genuinely interested than I can at least try to learn around those flaws despite how inconvenient it is. If it something that bogs down that game, read: Lunar: Dragon Song, than I stop playing.

 

[trickybus]

Anything that's intentionally unintuitive, cryptic or mean-spirited can GTFO.

My favorite example of this is in Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within. There's an early part of the game where you're expected to check a suit of armor at a specific time in the game in order to activate it as an enemy that will then chase you. There are several good reasons why this armor would never be activated, the most common being that the armor does nothing any other time you interact with it. There's also nothing in the game that hints at the appropriate time to interact: you just fucking guess.

If you don't activate the armor, there's a cutscene that plays at a much later point in the game where that same armor crashes through a skylight and lands on your character, killing her. If you reload and avoid the trigger, you'll notice that you cannot progress past this room because a door that should be open is locked.

Yes, if you don't trigger an obscure enemy encounter early in the game, you get soft-locked. No, you cannot go back and fix it. You start a new game because fuck you.

 

[χKai]

Anything that's intentionally unintuitive, cryptic or mean-spirited can GTFO.

 

[Soupmancer]

Genuinely, the moment a game makes me sit there and grind out something for a prolonged period of time is the moment I'll fall off. Grinding demi atmas for Final Fantasy XIV? I'm leaving. Last Bible expects me to go out of my way to grind an additional 30 minutes to an hour to step foot in a dungeon? No thanks. Digimon World refuses to give me a certain tech after defeating so many enemies? Goodbye. Like playing through Final Fantasy 1 I never had to furiously grind in that or many older RPGs the way people say they had to. I can handle cryptic. In the age of the internet it's kind of charming, actually. But grinding??? You're killing the game's pacing.

 

[raiden_dj]

old games rock
modern games tho, that's where i have to set a limit

 

[Turbo Kid]

None. Great games are great games regardless of what time period they came out in. If a game sucks, it just sucks. It has nothing to do with being an "old game". Some of the best games I have played are old games that still hold up.

 

[BigTony]

Main thing I find hard to readjust to is frame rates I tried to play the first gungrave game and it was unplayably slow in my opinion. Its varies from game to game but generally the faster the game the more unplayable it is at low frame rates.

 

[extermist]

That's a good question, I guess it's the overall fun factor.
But this is arbitrary for game to game.

-> The level design is boring or bland, collision issues with geometry.
+ But the game isn't too long.
+ But the character is hot or cool looking.
+ But there's hidden or unexplained mechanics that I'm free to explore.
++ Something in the physics or system is very exploitable and I want to see how far I get away with breaking it.
++ I want to see how far I can break the game with cheats.

I am 100% content with what the game has to offer if it hits any of these.
The biggest issue I have with new or old games is if the controls are not intuitive for me, in that regard I'm not too forgiving.

 

[Stingy Perry Stingy Perry]

There are games with a few flaws that it made part of its charm and identity. What once perceived as a flaw became one of the things distinguishable from its contemporaries.

I’m making one exception though and that’s all the games that has the LJN logo on it.