Games that haven't aged well

[Kenogu Labz]

I know I'm in the minority on that game, sorry it just didn't connect with me. I was constantly getting bored with the dialogue in some parts. Psychonauts is just not my game, sorry..

Then you've never had to confront the Milkman Conspiracy.

Remember those old Windows games? Skifree? Chips Challenge? Yeah. Used to play those for hours. Now...

[Gollgagh]

I know I'm in the minority on that game, sorry it just didn't connect with me. I was constantly getting bored with the dialogue in some parts. Psychonauts is just not my game, sorry..

me too

...maybe I should stop making these posts

[Toadofsky]

Then you've never had to confront the Milkman Conspiracy.

Remember those old Windows games? Skifree? Chips Challenge? Yeah. Used to play those for hours. Now...

That's the part I wanted to get too, but I was forced to get a cobweb duster and a bunch of arrowheads, which I didn't have, I promptly gave up after that...

[Arrow]

Metroid - Slightly better physics, but it's far too easy to get WTFPWNed due to no protection after getting hit, unlike Mario or Sonic games. And once you die, you get down to a mere 30 health. So, either you find an energy tank, or you farm one of those pipes that keeps making bugs. And the second option takes foreeeeever. And, obviously, no save-rooms or map screens.

I find this helps a lot with that, minus the save room issue.

[SirChadlyOC]

I can't play any PS1 game anymore due to the horrendous load times (and bad graphics), especially FF7. I would love for these old Square games to be remade on Nintendo DS (or PSP, if I had to) like Perfect Dark on XBOX LIVE Arcade.

For those who haven't played it, the remake has updated graphics, but the same sounds and music. The gameplay is the same. Oh, and it does have online support, but I'm not expecting that for my future Xenogears/FF7/everythingelse remake.

[Gollgagh]

I can't play any PS1 game anymore due to the horrendous load times

I have never, and probably will never, understand how people are getting these "horrendous" load times specifically in the PS1 era

PS2/Xbox/'cube and current gen load times are just as "bad"

[SirChadlyOC]

PS2/Xbox/'cube and current gen load times are just as "bad"

Well, GameCube isn't bad, but then again, I haven't played much PS2 or XBOX, so I guess I'm just showing my naivete.

[Schwaltzvald]

I have never, and probably will never, understand how people are getting these "horrendous" load times specifically in the PS1 era

PS2/Xbox/'cube and current gen load times are just as "bad"

Maybe they tried playing the older PS1 re-releases of the Final Fantasy games as well as Chronotrigger on their PS1/2s.

Good six to seven second delay after every battle, maybe 3 or 4 seconds before the battle starts...

[Gollgagh]

Well, GameCube isn't bad, but then again, I haven't played much PS2 or XBOX, so I guess I'm just showing my naivete.

have you tried dragon age?

shit takes like 4 minutes to load

also notice my use of quotation marks

Maybe they tried playing the older PS1 re-releases of the Final Fantasy games as well as Chronotrigger on their PS1/2s.

Good six to seven second delay after every battle, maybe 3 or 4 seconds before the battle starts...

perhaps I should confess that I own Chronicles and that when I played Chrono Trigger, I honestly didn't notice the delay

I'm certainly not going back and trying to play it again (especially since I'm not quite sure where the discs are)

[SirChadlyOC]

have you tried dragon age?

Not yet, but when an xbox360 game takes too long, I download it to my harddrive. If it still takes too long after that (DDR3), I usually just end up not playing it very often.

[Coyote-Trickster]

some games don't age well, yes

others go beyond that and become a legendary black plague that haunts you to this day.

such as.. http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=kPubA8kH_6A&feature=related

[Maco70]

I find this helps a lot with that, minus the save room issue.

such as.. http://www.youtube.com/watch#!v=kPubA8kH_6A&feature=related

Yikes...

It sometimes baffles me how things like this were actually released.

[JCvgluvr]

I find this helps a lot with that, minus the save room issue.

[Triad Orion]

I still enjoy the Mega Man Legends games...

This. The games may not have aged very gracefully, but they're still fun.

[Mirby]

I'm honestly surprised at how many people still like Legends...

[Ravich]

Games that have not aged well:

FFIX. The battle system is pretty horribly designed to begin with, but it's so clunky and slow that it's WAY worse in retrospect. It should have just been turn based because the ATB sure as hell isnt doing any good with 10 second animations for regular attacks. Even then, it wouldnt have made the length of battles any more bearable. I love FFIX, but poor choices were made regarding the battle system

On the other hand, I personally feel like FFVII has aged very well for a PSX game. The field sprites are very awkward (but perhaps endearing?), and the MIDI isnt as good as VIII or IX, but I think it plays quite smoothly. The battle system graphics dont look all grainy like VIII and IX do these days, and the battle system itself plays very smoothly. The animations transitions from one to the next relatively seemlessly, and there is minimal ridiculousness when it comes to animation length for spells and whatnot. The translation is of course flawed, but I've seen far worse. It makes certain lines read a bit awkwardly, but at least the characters still retain speech mannerisms that define them. There are games where the translation may not have blatant grammatical errors, but every single line that is uttered sounds incredibly awkward (Legend of Dragoon and Shadow Hearts come to mind).

I would say that Ocarina of Time also did not age well. I played through a healthy portion of the game a couple of months ago, and while I enjoyed myself, and I could DEFINITELY see why it was such a huge deal at the time it was released, I dont think the game can hold water today. I'm sure that in 1998, the open green fields of Hyrule were like nothing anybody had ever seen before. Today, however, it does not present the player with the same overwhelming sense of wonder. There are also plenty of instances where it is not clear at all where you have to go next or what you have to do, and that was okay back in the 90s. That's how video games worked. If you got stuck, you explored and wandered and became even more attached to the game before you stumbled upon your next goal. That's just not how it works anymore. There's also the lack of fluid camera control which just wasnt available with controllers from that console generation.

FFX also aged poorly IMO. Like a lot of early PS2 games, it spent a lot of time saying "OOOOOH look how pretty 3D graphics are this generation!" without much thought as to why we are zoomed in on someone's face. Maybe that's just a SE thing though, since FFXIII did a lot of the same thing. Hell, maybe it's a Japanese thing, since MGS4 was even worse in that regard. Anyway, back to FFX. More importantly, the voice acting is a complete and utter joke. If it retains playthrough value for future generations, it will be because it is funny.

I also agree with the sentiment that it is usually factors other than graphics that date a game for me. Pixels the size of my thumb nail dont stop me from having an incredible experience playing games like MGS1. MGS1's gameplay is perfectly effective (bells and whistles from the sequels arent that great IMO), and the voice acting is probably the best in the series because the actors arent fitting their lines to some animator trying and failing to make a CG character model look realistic.

I also feel like Vagrant Story aged well. Sure, the graphics are definitely outdated, but cinematic aspects of cutscenes are better than 90% of what we see in current gen games. Also, spectacularly mediocre voice acting did not ruin the whole thing. I dont think Sakimoto hurt the equation either.

As for my feelings on current gen games that wont have aged well.... I would say it applies to any game that relies on a "cinematic" approach to storytelling but doesnt really pull it off particularly well (MGS4), and of course any game that relies on graphics to be impressive but lacks substance (FFXIII). Video games are at a pretty pivotal point in time though. Standard gameplay formulas are cleary becoming outdated, and we're only just beginning to have a grasp on making 3D graphics look relatively realistic at a practical level of effort put in. We'll see where this goes. Ultimately I think that games which succeed in creating an atmosphere and an immersive gaming experience are the ones that will still be playable in years to come.

[Toadofsky]

As for my feelings on current gen games that wont have aged well.... I would say it applies to any game that relies on a "cinematic" approach to storytelling but doesnt really pull it off particularly well (MGS4), and of course any game that relies on graphics to be impressive but lacks substance (FFXIII). Video games are at a pretty pivotal point in time though. Standard gameplay formulas are cleary becoming outdated, and we're only just beginning to have a grasp on making 3D graphics look relatively realistic at a practical level of effort put in. We'll see where this goes. Ultimately I think that games which succeed in creating an atmosphere and an immersive gaming experience are the ones that will still be playable in years to come.

I'd like to believe that last sentence could happen. But until a bunch of the game designers quit thinking they're "artists" or directors of an "experience", I don't see much hope in a lot of the games today. I'm to the point where I'm only interested in a game if it has a lot of REPLAY value, a game that can be picked up months after I have played it.

If it doesn't have an "arcade structure", chances are, it's only gonna be a rental for me. But hey, since game companies are getting so greedy in trying to kill of rentals AND used games, I probably won't be doing much future generations of gaming at all.

[Mirby]

FFIX. The battle system is pretty horribly designed to begin with, but it's so clunky and slow that it's WAY worse in retrospect. It should have just been turn based because the ATB sure as hell isnt doing any good with 10 second animations for regular attacks. Even then, it wouldnt have made the length of battles any more bearable. I love FFIX, but poor choices were made regarding the battle system

You do realize that the slow, clunky features you're complaining about is purely because of loading the actual animations off the disc and nothing else, right? It's not like Square designed it that way on purpose; that's just how it worked out in the end.

[Deep Thought]

clearly you are not familiar with bleck

What clued you off?

[Kinslayer]

Well, obviously nothing from Atari era has genuinely aged well, however, we still seek them out in Arcades and what not because they're fun to play for however long we want to play them...NES hasn't really aged well in general, the Castlevania series, Metroid, Zelda, and even the original Super Mario Bros. have since been overtaken even by re-releases of the same game (SMB All-Stars ver./Metroid: Zero Mission.) Zelda II was also the epitome of fail, it's easy to see plainly by the fact that you can find it for under $10 at a used game shop most times, while honestly at the time the graphics were much better, the game itself just sucks, however, titles like SMB 2 and 3 still hold a special place in the hearts of gamers(Even if SMB 2 was lame, you have to admit you like something in it.) Most games from the Super NES/Genesis Era have aged well to this day, including titles like, The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and the Donkey Kong Country series. However, games like Super Mario Kart(which definitely hasn't aged well at all) are still fun to play if rather hard to look at. On Genesis, the first game that comes to mind that hasn't aged well is Sonic the Hedgehog. The lack of a lot of features that made 2, 3, and S&K so good, the lack of "roller-coaster" stages, and the abysmally slow speed of the game have made it possibly the worst of the older sonic titles other than Spinball. As far as portable gaming goes, most games from the Gameboy era haven't aged well at all, with the exception of the Zelda titles... Link's Awakening, and the Oracles are still great games and are quite nice graphically considering the system, but games like Pokemon(I would know, I'm playing thru Blue right now) Metroid II: Return of Samus, and the Super Mario Land titles are just so hard to look at that they're hard to play. Not to mention the gameboy was notorious for having the most difficult games, or the fucking easiest games for the playing, an issue which is a moot point come the release of the GBA...as is typical, Metroid has games that are terrific in replay value, and Fusion/Zero Mission were not only great graphically for 2D era, but are quite fun to play.

Moving on to 3D...I have to agree with what was said earlier about OoT/Majora's Mask, they truly have aged badly GRAPHICALLY, but they are still terrific games to play, hell, even Mario 64 aged badly graphically. The Playstation probably had the worst aging titles that I can think of. The most impressive series I've seen on that system sadly enough is Megaman Legends and Crash Bandicoot, which haven't aged well, but are still a blast to play. Games like Suikoden, Wild ARMs, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Chrono Cross, and Alundra, are all a chore to play because they're clunky, have bad rendering, are a bit offsetting to look at, or have horrible load times...

Another game that has aged badly...Dance Dance Revolution...it still has it's Arcade value, but as far as rhythm games go, I've played better on Steam.

[Brycepops]

Zelda II was also the epitome of fail, it's easy to see plainly by the fact that you can find it for under $10 at a used game shop most times, while honestly at the time the graphics were much better, the game itself just sucks

How DARE you. Don't make me come over there.

[Mirby]

I enjoyed it. Not as much as other games, granted, but I still had fun with it. The music is awesome, and the difficulty may be a bit high, but once you get past that, it can still be fun. In fact, I'm currently ready to go to the Great Palace; which is the final dungeon.

[Arcana]

Games like Suikoden, Wild ARMs, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Chrono Cross, and Alundra, are all a chore to play because they're clunky, have bad rendering, are a bit offsetting to look at, or have horrible load times...

I would argue that, most RPGs age poorly unless they have a particularly legendary battle system, or an immensely complex story that has many subtleties in writing and plot direction.

About the only RPGs I can think of that I would still play and really enjoy for the battle system alone is Final Fantasy Tactics, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, and possibly Tactics Ogre.

Almost no RPG would gain 'instant classic' points based solely on the storyline. While a lot of the games have stories that are "good the first time through", many of them simply do not have the writing or the acting to back them up.

Someone brought up art direction as something that makes a game transcend time. I believe that this is true but only second to the story and the battle system. For instance, Kartia is a still-unknown game that I love to death because its writing is extremely solid (seriously, it has pretty much zero translation errors in an era of games wrought with translation difficulty), but also because its art direction really backs up its storytelling. The battle system kind of sucked, though. But I don't know if I could play it a second or third time without getting bored, since I know what the story is like already.

I think something that is key here is the effect of playing a game versus replaying a game. There are many games that I can recommend playing without replaying, and in fact I would say the vast majority of single-player games are best played once, and then never again.

[Tex]

Zelda II was also the epitome of fail, it's easy to see plainly by the fact that you can find it for under $10 at a used game shop most times

It sucks because it's cheap? What the hell is that?

Most games from the Super NES/Genesis Era have aged well to this day, including titles like, The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, and the Donkey Kong Country series.

There are no Genesis games in this post. You're obviously Nintendo biased.

[Arcana]

It sucks because it's cheap? What the hell is that?

More like "it's cheap because it sucks"? Try finding a North American cart of Earthbound or Secret of Mana for $10. (BTW if you do, mail it to me and send me a bill).