What’s a good game that didn’t age well in your opinion?

[Nidoking's icon Nidoking Nidoking]

Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

 

[UnDubious]

Unlike many, I like early 3D a lot visually. Those games often have bad cameras, and controls can be finicky, but I don't find it that hard to put up with typically, and those problems were already problems then, so to me they have not aged poorly. The only times a sequel can really make its prequel obsolete is when it's practically the same but unambiguously better, which is not really that common outside of certain genres (VS fighters are often that way, as are sports games of course).

 

[TruxtonTatsujin]

I've never liked the idea of games aging poorly, seems like a very flawed concept. You can just say you didn't like it, you don't have to treat it like it's an expired bag of milk
I also disagree with the overgeneralization that most early 3D games fall into this category. Sure there where some developers that struggled with the jump to 3D but those games weren't considered good at the time either and I definitely wouldn't say they where the majority. Jumping Flash! is one of the oldest 3D platformers I know of and I think it still plays and looks great.

I think people just see things that are perceived as unconventional to modern games and rather than just adapt they just give up and say "old game bad because old"

 

[Hahahavana]

I think the games that have probably aged the worst are the early DOS RPGs like Might and Magic, Ultima, and Wizardry, the early installments thereof at least. They had the misfortune of coming out before the CRPG genre was established and refined, and while they are an indispensable part of RPG history they also predate (and inspired) a lot of the later advancements and quality of life improvement.

Great games, but borderline unplayable unless you're willing to deeply invest in them.

 

[sk4di]

Bioshock 1

 

[CritDex]

A bunch of PS1 games, especially jrpgs.

 

[rugal]

a good game is always a good game
i do not not compare a old game with a new one


morrowind to the original xbox
reason it never did get the expansions the pc version did

 

[Dawg19]

I'd say the original Persona 3 for PS2. The story is incredibly deep and the characters feel so down-to-Earth. The gameplay aged like milk though, indirect commands with poor AI, mixed with lackluster dungeon design (imo), leads to a generally unfun game. But its a shame because the story is one of the best I've ever seen. All of this is why I was so happy when Reload came out!

Persona 3 Reload Makoto Yuki GIF - Persona 3 reload Persona Makoto yuki - Discover & Share GIFs

Click to view the GIF

tenor.com

 

[snackcannon]

Syphon Filter lol When I was a kid the game seemed so cool. Playing it as an adult? What a sluggish piece of work

 

[Tonberry]

But Makoto Persona 3's correct options (that is, the ones that give music notes) tend to be him manipulating the other party, with the incorrect ones typically being him just trying to end the conversation. Emperor stands out the most, as you just encourage Hidetoshi to be overzealous until something happens for him to reconsider. While you *can* play them certain ways that don't conform to that, they do have aspects that show through their dialogue options and in interactions you have no control over.

Ah okay. Thanks for the reply.

It’s true that they have a slight prebuilt personality, but I’m not sure I agree that the P3 hero feels manipulative like that, but that’s a good thing with blank-ish slate protagonists at the end of the day I think, that we can apply our own ideas of how they are through our choices.

I always chalked the note-giving answers in P3 to come from Hashino being socially inept and treating S-Links in 3 more like a minigame you have to ”win” rather than later entries that encourage roleplaying more, so you always just tell the other person what they want to hear most of the time, which gets boring. Or a case of ”it was new so they were still testing the waters”.

Interesting take though, I’ve never really heard anyone say that before. Then again, I’m kind of new to these games.

 

[Graves Ruinwalker]

Same here, I think.
I don't like using the term "aged" for games because it feels weird to me. I wouldn't compare a game from 1987 with a game from 2017 in terms of fidelity and technical progress because it feels unfair both ways. "Old", sure, that's objective, but not "aged".
If the game is fun, it's fun, and if I end up changing my mind on a game I used to like/dislike, the reason is usually on me just not having fun with it anymore for whatever reason.

I don't mind other people using the term though, I just don't jive with it personally.

I completly agree with your statement .

Many older games still hold up extremly well but need some time to get used to it because the game-design isnt only directed by its more limited controllers but even with focus on the design how it plays for its genre and its strengths . Maybe it needs only some refinement and thats it .

Tank controls were never a bad game design but it wasnt suited for all genres to fit and many games are bad because the tank controls cant keep up with more reactionary gameplay that are fast-paced and are bound to precision except like the third person camera of Godhand or megaman legends or first-person-shooters like Doom .

Even the focus how the games should be played determines the design of it . For example Dungeon-crawlers and CRPGs :

Going more simulative : story isnt much needed , hunger mechanic , different illnesses and poison status-effects , body-part-damage-system with different nerfs , Weight- and item-limits , open-world/area and so on .

Going more story-focused : Simplified RPG-combat and traversal through areas , defined characters , story determines the outcomes of the situation and not the decisions the players make , very linear , leveling up is pretty fast , alot of scripts and scenes and so on .

Older game designs arent outdated but different .
There are glaring flaws too but thats more on the compromises what this game was focused in its design overall and what decisions brought those flaws into it instead being old and moldy .

Im playing Metal Max Returns lately and many gripes i had from old JRPGs werent the problem in this ge and i have a blast with it .
The high encounter rate is this time a welcoming thing because the prices in this game are high , there is not really a story to progress and leveling up improves your efficiency in combat which makes them shorter combined with different weapon combos cuts more time out and exploration is the most important part of this game .

Thats why i dont believe this outdated-idea overall . Either the game is good or bad overall .

 

[Benjamillion]

I used to like Mario Kart 64 a lot when playing years ago. But I dunno man, when you're turning it feels like you're sliding on ice. Personally I like later entries as I felt like I was more in control

 

[GuyZero32k4]

Virtua Cop 1 and 2.

 

[PhrawzT]

Most of the early 3d games

I find that the visuals are acceptable as a relic of the times, but the controls on a lot of early 3D games are awful.

 

[Varyag]

I find that the visuals are acceptable as a relic of the times, but the controls on a lot of early 3D games are awful.

Yeah, this. Outdated graphics have a charm of their own, the art made with the limitations of their time. What is sometimes really hard to go back to, is games with outdated control schemes, or "clunky" lack of responsiveness that modern games have. Or too many menus, having to go back and forth inconveniently for routine actions.
Good games are still good, but many times later games in the genre took what made them good and worked on top of that.

 

[ThatOneLum ThatOneLum]

Assassin's Creed.

Trying to go back to the first game feels super limiting after playing almost any of the others. I don't think that makes it a bad game, it was just early enough in the system(s)' life cycle that it was not the best optimised and feels really clunkly compared with almost any other entry.

 

[Pearly]

I used to like Mario Kart 64 a lot when playing years ago. But I dunno man, when you're turning it feels like you're sliding on ice. Personally I like later entries as I felt like I was more in control

I loved Mario kart 64 when I played it as a kid, so much, was one of my favourite games to play and I played it again recently and it's a very simple game. Mario kart was really one of those series that each game is objectively much better or at least more expanded than the last in the case of mario kart on the wii just being a retooled double dash. Mario Kart 8 is the best mario kart in every way.

The following takes on classics might shock some, but I am seemingly immune to the concept of nostalgia when it comes to something I can enjoy in the present, in this very moment as opposed to just remembering something, If I enjoyed something years ago and play it now, if it's really dated in too many ways, I admit it's not as good as it was at the time or the game was always mechanically sound and has "aged well". I should add that I played all these games on release, bar xenogears.

For me a game that aged badly would be Final Fantasy 7, everything about the game when it came out was spectacular, except for the dialogue not being great(had no idea about the rushed translation at the time) and the character models outside of battle looked weird to me, even at the time, likely a compromise based on what was likely an early N64 build if the character models of 8 and 9, parasite eve and even xenogears are anything to go by, FF7's character models look so strange compared to literally everything square did at the time on every game afterwards for the PlayStation, conjecture on my part of course but if the FMV's were removed and the audio was formatted differently, it would work as an early N64 game. It genuinely looks like it was built for the N64 and it's well known that it was in development for the N64 and they abandoned it because Nintendo went with cartridges instead of discs, square needed more than the amount of space that was on a N64 cart. This is my theory for why the FF7 character models aged like milk.

I played FF7 on it's release, I rented it, I bought it later when it was released as a budget title, after finishing 8. I replayed 8 and 10 throughout the years but never 7, played through 7 twice and didn't touch it for a while. Like everyone else I was hyped when cloud showed up in kingdom hearts, and I remembered the music, characters and story pretty well. I started to remember it looking a certain way, "How I remember it looking".

Advent children was about to release so I thought I'd play through it again. I was horrified. I loved advent children and dirge of Cerberus as it was more of 7, but as I remember it looking. There's many that hate the new 7 games, but I adore them as it's what I wanted from it, but with extras and a pseudo sequel at the same time. I took my sweet time playing remake, got 50 hours out of it and relished every second.

I took a break from rebirth after 90 hours as I'm half way through, and needed to focus on studying for university exams, however, I am old school day 1 fan of Final Fantasy 7 and the new games are objectively better in every single conceivable way. It's like comparing Mario kart 8 to Mario kart 64. I think FF7 is a prime example of a game that was great at the time but aged poorly in all the mechanical ways, not the music, story, area design , character design etc. Is a decent game, but it's not the masterpiece that those blinded by nostalgia claim it is, as it's aged badly in a few ways.

I really can't understand why anyone born way past it's original release, sitting down and playing it now or in the last year for the first time, and claiming with a straight face, that remake and rebirth are objectively worse games that the original. It's ironically what the team would have done at the time if they had the resources available. It's why so much effort was put into advent children visually and they wouldn't touch remaking 7 until it could look as good as advent children, of course, remake and rebirth look better than advent children did.

Resident Evil 4 is also very stiff mechanically, bought that game day one, played it several hundred times throughout the years, the remake is a massive improvement on it. Leon feels like he's running between two rails when he's moving, instead of the buttery smooth movement of the remake. RE4 OG is important though, it changed action games forever.

Old games require adjusting to dated technology, this isn't really an issue from the 16 bit era onwards for 2d games, as they all aged great for the most part. But the early ps2 era and earlier, many of those games made choices due to technological limits at the time that made the game "dated".

I am currently playing through xenogears, I played xenosaga 2 many moons ago and we did not get the first or third part, we didn't xenogears either in Europe so I'm playing Takahashi's games in order of release. It's amazing but clearly made by a team at squaresoft around the same time as FF7, it reminds of FF7 in subtle ways I can't quite describe. Though many things about it aged better than FF7 for the most part. Bad camera is my main complaint and slow text crawl, otherwise it's pretty great. I am not counting the shortcomings of the game essentially running out of budget and time as it wasn't a massive budget title as anything to do with when it came out.

The original resident evil 1 also really didn't age that well, tank controls were a bad idea. The dialogue is atrocious too. 2 aged well, though in all honesty those fixed camera angle tank control games require adjustment to enjoy. I often thought I want to play through RE2 again and I'm just thinking "oh yeah...the controls D:" and stop playing. Nintendo focus on how fun it is to move a character around as the starting point for making games, and I agree, movement should be fun before anything else.

Mario 64 didn't age too well graphically, but the gameplay is just as good as when it came out, still great, even if the levels aren't as well designed as every other game that came after. Nintendo's logic of movement should be fun worked out.

 

[Jediuser]

The first Virtua Fighter. I played it a lot back in the Saturn days. But now? Umm no.

Yeah, I feel 90s fighting games in general don't hold up. I found Killer Instinct Gold virtually unplayable.

 

[Antilocal123]

All of them cuz video games can't be good, duh! /j

 

[Jeff]

Tony Hawk Pro Skater on PS1. Played it last night and while the gameplay feels smooth with great presentation, the frame rate and graphics on the other hand look choppy. 3D games in the late 90s never aged that great to be honest but they still have grewt gameplay.

 

[Kuro2427]

Call me a Zoomer, but having grown up in the PS2 times, but for me it's the PSX era Resident Evil games. I don't mind tank controls at all usually, I've replayed the original Silent Hill trilogy more times than I can count, but there's just something about the pre rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles that just messes with my depth perception or whatever and I just can't navigate them very well

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

IMHO, a good game is a good game regardless of its age. If a game has "aged badly", that means it was always bad.

I don't understand the whole "if a game is good then it's good forever" and "if it has aged then it was never good to begin with" argument.

This isn't the subject of the topic but this can be an interesting debate because they seem to be a contradiction against the other.

I mean there were movies that weren't well received back then but gained a cult following and some movies that were acclaimed had some flaws being pointed out so why video games cannot have the same effect? It's clear that a silent and/or black and white movie will ultimately look aged because of the advancements and how CGIs that may have been groundbreaking could look ugly today. Same with music that had genres that clearly fits their respective epochs.

Even if a good game is acclaimed it cannot be really "untouchable" and you are allowed to point out stuff you don't like about it without having people saying "but back then it was a perfect game".

I'm pretty tolerant on older games, even the early 3D (low poly can have some charm) but I gotta say that pre-Famicom video games are rough for me. There's a reason why the Krash happened and why it's easier to pick up a NES controller over an Atari 2600 one.

Sonic Adventure, and it's a very good early 3d game, just, outside of 3 character campaigns (Sonic, Knuckles and E-102), others exist to pad out time... heavily... while reusing stages/bosses and whatnot...
To be fair, most early 3d Sonic games didn't age that good, I remember Sonic Heroes suffering from the same issues

There might be those that aged badly due to some awful mechanics or just overstaying their welcome

Somehow I still think that SA2 worsened the other two gameplay mechanics that aren't Sonic's and that even Shadow's levels that wasn't Sky Rail felt rushed because of the dev of the game not having Shadow nor Tails playable in mind.

Reusing stages is fine if there's a different gameplay but I do agree that Tails is 75% of Sonic's campaign so doing it back-to-back after Sonic felt a bit jarring (especially with Chaos 4 and Sky Chase 1&2).

The cutscenes may have aged the worse but then again they're not mandatory to see in DX.

 

[iamthemilkman]

Bioshock 1

I just replayed this portably on the Switch and it still holds up. Few games have the immersion that Bioshock does. While I know many people preferred combat in 2, 1 still feels good to play. I enjoyed replaying Bioshock more than playing most modern games for the first time. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

 

[Ikagura Ikagura]

I just replayed this portably on the Switch and it still holds up. Few games have the immersion that Bioshock does. While I know many people preferred combat in 2, 1 still feels good to play. I enjoyed replaying Bioshock more than playing most modern games for the first time. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

I genuinely think that Infinite will age less well because of how it felt more like your average modern FPS with only two weapons at a time and how the convoluted multiversal plot made it too headscratching for its own good to the point it feels more like faux-deep than making a real point like Andrew Ryan's Rapture.

I'd rather see the consequences of an anarchistic society when they have unmonitored access to genetic modifications and drug abuse over an ultra religious society having intolerance over minorities with the twist being that Comstock is you from another reality.

 

[NotGodlike]

I genuinely think that Infinite will age less well because of how it felt more like your average modern FPS with only two weapons at a time and how the convoluted multiversal plot made it too headscratching for its own good to the point it feels more like faux-deep than making a real point like Andrew Ryan's Rapture.

Man, and I wish this prototype footage of Infinite was a real game. It would have aged like a fine wine (probably)