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Old games you feel have aged poorly?

Silentstorm

Silentstorm

Location
Portugal
Well, in a world where retro gaming, emulators, indie games inspired by old games and stores like GOG are a thing, it's clear that games of the past haven't been forgotten, with many people still saying that old games were better or putting some old games as their favorite games ever.

Yet, just because a game was popular or a cult classic back then, doesn't necessarily mean it's still good nowadays, either that, or it just isn't acessible or fun for a younger audience anymore due to improvements in controls and interfaces since the old days.

So i thought it would be an interesting topic to talk about those old games that just aren't what they used to be and why.

For my part, i think that the older CRPG games like the first Ultima games just aren't that fun to play, they tend to have annoying interfaces and controls compared to games nowadays, to a point where they tend to take all the fun out of the games to anyone who didn't grow up playing those games.
 
People were willing to throw money just so that the first System shock gameplay is updated
 
RTS games from the early to mid-90s aren't worth playing even for the Nostalgia Value, I'm talking about things like Dune, Command & Conquer or Warcraft I, hell, even Warcraft II feels more like a chore than something genuinelly enjoyable to play. Unlike Starcraft which still holds up pretty well.
 
Chumbeque said:
RTS games from the early to mid-90s aren't worth playing even for the Nostalgia Value, I'm talking about things like Dune, Command & Conquer or Warcraft I, hell, even Warcraft II feels more like a chore than something genuinelly enjoyable to play. Unlike Starcraft which still holds up pretty well.
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I could never really get into the older Command and Conquer games (everything pre-RA2, really) for a bunch of reasons (interface issues, largely). Tiberian Dawn is also essentially just the singleplayer campaign + the bonus missions, unless you can find another person who is willing to play with you.

I don't have any sentimental attachment to the older games, so compared to the polish of the later entries in the genre the original games just feel very rough edged. Never mind that a lot of the core RTS gameplay has not aged well generally. Rather more recently I got AoE II HD for various reasons, but I ended up not liking it much.
 
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Silentstorm said:
For my part, i think that the older CRPG games like the first Ultima games just aren't that fun to play, they tend to have annoying interfaces and controls compared to games nowadays, to a point where they tend to take all the fun out of the games to anyone who didn't grow up playing those games.
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I tried playing Planescape Torment once (from GOG). I got out of the starting dungeon area into the city itself, wandered around a bit, and then decided that I simply did not enjoy any part of the game, but the biggest offender was the control scheme. Everything was nested in submenus that required way too many clicks to perform a given action (best would be one click, but PST took up to three at times), combat was unintuitive and tedious, and dialogue seemed like they were more interested in building walls of text than actually conveying any sort of message or information.

Then the game crashed (because it's an old game running on a newer system), and I haven't touched it since.

From what I can tell, this is common to that era of CRPGs. I have no idea why.
 
Adloquium said:
I tried playing Planescape Torment once (from GOG). I got out of the starting dungeon area into the city itself, wandered around a bit, and then decided that I simply did not enjoy any part of the game, but the biggest offender was the control scheme. Everything was nested in submenus that required way too many clicks to perform a given action (best would be one click, but PST took up to three at times), combat was unintuitive and tedious, and dialogue seemed like they were more interested in building walls of text than actually conveying any sort of message or information.

Then the game crashed (because it's an old game running on a newer system), and I haven't touched it since.

From what I can tell, this is common to that era of CRPGs. I have no idea why.
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Yeah, it's... pretty dire. Came here to post this about PST basically lol.

Another one would be Spore, which, while I love it to death is just kind of a limp disappointing mess.
 
Adloquium said:
I tried playing Planescape Torment once (from GOG). I got out of the starting dungeon area into the city itself, wandered around a bit, and then decided that I simply did not enjoy any part of the game, but the biggest offender was the control scheme. Everything was nested in submenus that required way too many clicks to perform a given action (best would be one click, but PST took up to three at times), combat was unintuitive and tedious, and dialogue seemed like they were more interested in building walls of text than actually conveying any sort of message or information.
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Heh at least Planescape allows you build charisma ot the point you almost never need to fight....except if you want Nordom....oh well at least he's useful

Heh I think planescape aged better than most because of that, the rest using that model I don't enjoy even though I love RPG
 
"Golden Eye" on the n64 does not really hold up anymore. It proved that you could do an fps on consoles, and it should be remembered for that but holy shit the controls.
 
Oblivion.

Just, the entirety of it outside of a few moments in the main quest and a few of the notable guild sidequests.
 
Zoo tycoon and similar business simulation in earlier years. Everything is soooooo slow, just how did my childhood stand the slowness?
 
Ford Prefect said:
Is it that the games have aged, or that we have ...?
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Both maybe?

The games have aged because game design has moved on in terms of controls and interfaces making for much simpler and streamlined experiences, making games more accesible and faster overall, hell, you don't see text parsers being a thing those days, and things like subtitles and the ability to rebind keys are common nowadays which is awesome really.

And as we grow, we get more critical of the media we consume, and we have standards set by good games to compare many games with, and we can't help but think "Huh, if this was made nowadays, there would be more options in the menu and the UI would make more sense!".

And tastes have also changed, look at retro inspired games or indie games inspired by old games, they do harken back to the old days, but they still tend to modernize the games and change things to be more acessible to gamers in general.

For example, Pac-Man?

Namco did Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ precisely to make the old maze game fun for a younger audience by inserting things like time limits and really damn fast gameplay, as in, the ghosts seem to be having an audition for the role of Sonic, all because kids or gamers nowadays wouldn't find the original Pac-Man game as fun.

Or look at Bloodstained: Curse Of The Moon, a game that is pretty much inspired by Castlevania 3, only there are many modes to unlock and the game is a lot more forgiving with the difficulty not being as cheap because game design has moved from the NES days.

And those are just some examples, even the retro games aren't 100% copies of old games and have elements of modern game design in them for a reason.
 
How about 70's and early 80's arcade games?

Many of them haven't aged that well, seriously, they are a bit too simple and slow paced for the most part, you play the Space Invaders or Pong games nowadays and you likely won't be that impressed.

Sure those arcade games were very influential in terms of design and helped make games become popular, after all, games like Pong, Space Invaders, Frogger and Pac-Man were HUGE back in the day.

But nowadays?

Nowadays they are slow, don't look that good and you can get games that look and sound better on your smartphone, with many twitch based games like the endless runner genre in them, i just don't see people who don't have a ton of nostalgia for them having that much fun with them for more than a few minutes before picking something else to play.

Again, this isn't all games of that era, something like Robotron 2084 can still be fun...but even then, there are better alternatives nowadays, like Geometry Wars or other twin-stick shooters.

But it's true that if an old arcade game comes back nowadays, it will be with a remake or reimagining that changes things significantly to make it fun to a modern audience.
 
Silentstorm said:
And as we grow, we get more critical of the media we consume, and we have standards set by good games to compare many games with, and we can't help but think "Huh, if this was made nowadays, there would be more options in the menu and the UI would make more sense!".
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To be fair, the old games had to make do with only a quarter of the screen space to fit their UI in.
 
Pidl said:
To be fair, the old games had to make do with only a quarter of the screen space to fit their UI in.
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Okay, granted, but there are still old games that managed to have a good UI and controls, though i feel like those were mostly console and arcade games for some reason.

Maybe because they were more simple and had less keys to worry about developers were forced to adapt the UI's and controls for that?

Not saying that all arcade and console games had perfect UI's and controls, because that would be a big lie, but still, i generally feel like i can play an old console game and have more fun with it than an old computer game.
crhoades said:
"Golden Eye" on the n64 does not really hold up anymore. It proved that you could do an fps on consoles, and it should be remembered for that but holy shit the controls.
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That being said, i feel like the 32 Bit era console games had some problems regarding UI and controls as well, mostly when it comes to 3D games, developers were still adapting to 3D gaming after all, which means that things like cameras and controls for 3D games weren't always perfect, even if it improved as the years went on.

And speaking of controls, the original Resident Evil games, holy shit, those tank controls suck!
 
Silentstorm said:
Okay, granted, but there are still old games that managed to have a good UI and controls, though i feel like those were mostly console and arcade games for some reason.

Maybe because they were more simple and had less keys to worry about developers were forced to adapt the UI's and controls for that?
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I don't know how true this is, but I have heard some random forum speculation about how a lot of older Western CRPG UIs seem to have this deathly fear of making their UIs too "colourful" or "kiddified", by which it turns out to mean "simple".

I mean, taking the aforementioned Planescape Torment, it was released in December 1999. Compare it to, say, Final Fantasy 8, released in February 1999. Heck, compare it to System Shock 2, released in August 1999.

There might be something about CRPGs of that era and how they prefer to make their UIs so incredibly obtuse and unfriendly, compared to just about every other genre (except possibly adventure games of the Sierra and Lucasarts oeuvre, which are usually even worse).
 
I'm going to second Goldeneye 007. When it came out, it was revolutionary for a number of a reaons:

  • It was a highly successful FPS on a console. Prior to that, FPS games were almost exclusively limited to the PC.
  • It featured locational damage, with individual animations depending on where you shot someone. Shoot someone in the head and he'd die instantly. Shoot him in the leg or arm and he'd clutch his limbs in pain. Shoot him in the ass and he'd do a little hop. No one had seen anything like that before.
  • It was one of the first FPS games (perhaps *the* first) to include a sniper rifle - being able to zoom in and shoot someone from halfway across the map was just awesome.
  • It had limited stealth mechanics - silenced weapons wouldn't alert the guards, while unsilenced ones would have them all coming after you.
  • There were objectives to complete in each map - planting bugs, rescuing hostages, recovering evidence, and so on - and it was actually possible to fail missions. Most FPS games up to that point had no other objective but to kill everything that stood in your way.
  • The 4-player multiplayer was incredibly fun.
To anyone who grew up playing more modern console shooters like Halo or Call of Duty, however, Goldeneye 007 is just a game with terrible controls, character models that look like origami, and an utterly appalling framerate.

(To give you an idea of how badly the game's graphics have aged, here's a shot of the game running in an emulator at the N64's native resolution, with a scanline filter to approximate how it would have looked on a television at the time):

 
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The Victorian said:
  • It was one of the first FPS games (perhaps *the* first) to include a sniper rifle - being able to zoom in and shoot someone from halfway across the map was just awesome.
  • There were objectives to complete in each map - planting bugs, rescuing hostages, recovering evidence, and so on - and it was actually possible to fail missions. Most FPS games up to that point had no other objective but to kill everything that stood in your way.
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TFS predated it by two years and had both objectives (that intertwined with the story) and a sniper rifle of sorts (the LASER rifle had a screen which displayed a closer-up image of where you're aiming, although due to pixel blow-up the benefit wasn't as good as a high-res screen would provide; still made long-range shots slightly more convenient). Dark Forces had objectives all the way in 1995. (DF2 has a full-fledged sniper rifle, but post-dates Goldeneye by a month.)

So I don't think those two are all that unique and maybe not so revolutionary on a concept level either.
 
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People complain about how games have become standardized pointing to things like the endless WoW clones with identical user interfaces and core gameplay loops, but that's because developing good UI and core gameplay loops is hard. I am reminded of Angry Videogame Nerd and how if you look at the crappy games its usually UI (controls are unintuitive or unresponsive, important commands are difficult to find or trigger in unclear contexts, character movement is floaty or slippery, pathfinding is broken) or core gameplay loop (no continues, hit point sponge enemies, some or all enemies insta-kill or stunlock you or conversely are broken non-threats, game is too short or too long or too repetitive and bland). Outside of shovelware, developers have increasingly learned to stick to tried and true formulas to avoid this.

Rook said:
Another one would be Spore, which, while I love it to death is just kind of a limp disappointing mess.
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That was true the day it came out. It had a decentish sandbox space fuckery simulator (according to some, I had no interest in it) all the previous periods were basically minigames with lots of customization and little game. I've grown accustomed to Big Idea games like Black and White or Empire Earth which promise deep complex simulations or going through all the ages falling flat. There's a reason most stick to just one period or context.

The Victorian said:
I'm going to second Goldeneye 007. When it came out, it was revolutionary for a number of a reasons:
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It was also meaty. Lots of guns, lots of multiplayer maps, lots of missions, the way in which higher difficulties added objectives and significantly changed the scale of the missions, etc etc.
 
firefossil said:
That was true the day it came out. It had a decentish sandbox space fuckery simulator (according to some, I had no interest in it) all the previous periods were basically minigames with lots of customization and little game. I've grown accustomed to Big Idea games like Black and White or Empire Earth which promise deep complex simulations or going through all the ages falling flat. There's a reason most stick to just one period or context.
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Civilization is the exception that proves the rule of course.

Tho after all these years I'm still impressed at how smoothly rise of nations worked as a game given that it tried to do the same as Empire Earth but the solution to not make it fall flat was to make it more complex.
 
Kotor. Not even from a gameplay (although the gameplay could use an update) or story perspective. Just from an entirely graphical perspective that game has aged rather poorly.
I meant the very next rpg they did was dragon age origins and thats aged remarkably well.
Kotor for me is from a very narrow time were 3d games were just in between that almost classic retro look and the more modern graphics style which tends to age fairly well.
 
For me too it are the old school rpgs that come to my mind when it comes to this, though I partly that is certainly down to me simply no longer having the "patience" to deal with the finicky stuff those games require. SO maybe it is less the games that have aged poorly and more myself ;)

Fluffy said:
Kotor. Not even from a gameplay (although the gameplay could use an update) or story perspective. Just from an entirely graphical perspective that game has aged rather poorly.
I meant the very next rpg they did was dragon age origins and thats aged remarkably well.
Kotor for me is from a very narrow time were 3d games were just in between that almost classic retro look and the more modern graphics style which tends to age fairly well.
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Huh, for me at least the graphical issue tends to "disappear" after the second or so hour and are quite tolerable after that. Admittedly it has been some time since I last played KotR but I replayed the Gothic series a few months back and that one graphics are worse across the board and were enough to scuttle my first two "attempts" at replaying it but at the end I barely noticed them...
 
Chumbeque said:
Civilization is the exception that proves the rule of course.
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I have mixed feelings about Civilization. On the one hand its shown a willingness to improve and make real changes:
*Alternate victory conditions and their development over time.
*I approved of the shift to hex maps and removal of unit stacks, it makes combat more tactical.
*I love that the maps get colored in by your civilizations and culture can help push it out.
*The District system as well as Wonders taking up hexes were great ideas that make cities more specialized and distinct rather than interchangeable.
*Workers and Traders as they are now are a big improvement with regards to adding improvements and roads.

On the other hand I feel that core issues remain:
*The game is painfully slow even at the highest speeds, which in turn seriously limits combat and multiplayer. The endgame is abrupt in structure, with you losing with little or no warning.
*The AI is dumb as a box of hammers and a fickle schizophrenic loon, which is a problem when multiplayer is largely untenable.
*Wide strategies involve building tons of identical cities and doing the same stuff over and over, especially on the larger maps. Tall strategies are rarely workable despite being historical reality at times.
*Workers and Traders are still repetitive busywork that should've been subsumed into the city UI entirely rather than being field units.
 
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