Games That Have Aged Well (For You)

[Ihateregistering1]

Earth 2160: Pretty much no one played this game when it was out, and the voice acting is still awful, but this RTS game had so many strategic options and such a wide variety of ways to play that it makes StarCraft seem downright anemic by comparison. Custom built units, deep tech trees, day and night cycles, hacking, radar-jamming, and 4 factions that all play wildly differently.

Quake 4: I still have a blast with this game, especially now that there's a mod that the bodies don't instantly disappear. Well designed environments, a truly vile enemy, fun weapons that upgrade as the game goes along. This is just a quick and fun old-school shooter game.

 

[regalphantom]

Most SNES games: For what they are, they have lasted surprisingly well.

Banjo Kazooie 1 & 2

Donkey Kong 64

 

[The White Hunter]

Super Castlevania IV is immaculate and time cannot wear on it's brilliance.

I can still play Pokemon Gold & Silver quite happily, though Red & Blue are frustrating excercises.

The original trilogy of Sonic games are still brilliant and only get better as you progress through them.

Chu Chu Rocket is still fudging amazeballs.

Many others.

 

[small]

b17 the mighty 8th.
its finally popping up on sites like gog.com and steam thank goodness, it was one of the last of the old school flight sims which had that good in between of realism and difficulty, where people could pick them up and play and didnt need a freaking pilots license like you do now days with sims.

on the ground the graphics show their age but when you are flying, it still looks incredible, bringing home a crippled b-17 back to base, half the crew dead or injured, holes in the wing and tail big enough to climb through (literally) is still an incredibly tense moment not to mention the bombing run itself, seeing those puffs of flak in front of you and knowing there's not a damn thing you can do apart from fly through it and hope no one is killed and you arent to damaged to make it home

 

[rgrekejin]

Soul Calibur II - Best game in the series, still. Best guest characters, best visual design, best level design... this game was just phenomenal.

Resident Evil 4 - Some people may not like the direction the series has taken since, but RE4 is *still* the best action/horror game ever made. Also, can we get that inventory system back? That inventory system was cool.

Mechwarrior 4 - Sure, the graphics are a little dated (not terrible like 2 and 3, though), but this game still gives me the best sense of piloting a real giant robot of any game that wasn't Steel Battalion.

Gundam Side Story: Rise from the Ashes - Only Gundam game I've ever played that didn't suck. Literally the only complaint I had about it was that it was too damn short.

Fable: The lost Chapters - Say what you want, but in my eyes, the original Fable was a masterpiece, and the Lost Chapters only made it better. Sure, every Fable game since then has systematically been taking out the stuff I like from the previous one and replacing it with stupid Stephen Fry characters and general meanspiritedness, but the original is still fun, and still plays pretty well, too. Curiously, Fable Anniversary, which was more or less just a graphical upgrade, somehow managed to ruin the magic, through a toxic combination of microtransaction DLC, uneven texture upgrades, and game-breaking bugs.

 

[Zydrate]

Oddly, Fable 1 held up for a long time for me.

(Gamespot, as per watermark)

It's only just started to feel outdated within the last couple of years are so, largely due to the RPG mechanics feeling a bit dated. The rest is fine. The environments are gorgeous. It also has a good gold-earned to gear-earned ratio. I can just barely afford an Obsidian Greatsword before the Arena, and sometimes I need to go collect rent for a few cycles before I can even manage that.

Compare to other games wherein once you have a few hours played, you can restart the game, find all the right things, and be sitting on a stockpile to make the earlygame hilarious.
The AC series is bad with drowning you in money with nothing to do. Fallout 3/NV is a little better with it but by the time you're level 15, you're rich beyond measure.

Another one is Morrowind, and not just because of the mods.

I may have a vague sense of bias. Morrowind was the first game that opened up the door to a massive load of personal creativity. My writing and imagination improved tenfold with this game at my disposal. Morrowind was the herald of a personal golden age of personal discovery.
I must have had a thousand hours on it before I ever managed to get it on PC. It's almost all I played for ~3 years back when I was still in school. Partly because it was all I COULD play, but it's still great.

I want an HD remake of Morrowind, like they did with Fable Anniversary. There's a Skyrim mod coming out to do something to that effect but I'd prefer something more official for stability reasons. I can't even get Skyrim to run more than 10 minutes anymore. And that's after reinstalling.

 

[FoolKiller]

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, and it's sequel, Heroes. Of all the original Xbox games, these games I still keep in my collection of pop 'n plays. Those two games had such a perfect balance of Dynasty Warriors style commander action, real-time strategy combat, and RPG-lite troop development, no single game to date has taken over their spot in my heart. It really hurt my soul when Circle of Flame came out for the 360 and it was just a giant pile of crap, with NONE of what made those games so great.

Oh well, Kingdom Under Fire 2 is gonna hit beta soon. Let's roll the dice once more, yeah?

Won't matter.... still not Phantagram making it. It's Blueside or Blueshift or whatever company that made Circle of Flame. Such a waste of good lore on such a boring game.

 

[Lieju]

I genuinely think Super Mario Bros 3 has aged well. As well as the 2-D Mario platformers on the SNES I imagine, although I skipped that generation so I have less experience with those.

Sprites and 2D platforming just still works.

 

[Alhazred]

Playing SNES games on the Wii almost makes me wish I'd started gaming in that era. I'll always think of the trio of Super Mario World, A Link to the Past and Super Metroid as the holy trinity of Nintendo games.

And let's not forget about that other pillar of gaming, Square; the SNES is when they really started to pick up steam: three of the best Final Fantasy games, Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and of course my favourite game of all time... Chrono Trigger!

Still, while it's true that those games have aged marvellously well, I bet my jaw would still drop at the sight of the likes of Ocarina of Time or Final Fantasy 7; so many polygons!

 

[nathan-dts]

Space Invaders and Tetris are probably the oldest examples of games that hold up to this day. Another stand out to me is Super Mario World. Given that I didn't grow up in that era it's still perfectly enjoyable were as the NES Mario games are just plain bad for me.

 

[Silence]

Super Metroid. I played it the first time in 2011 I think. It's one of my favourite games since then.

Most other games age at least graphically, Super Metroids graphics are still good today.

 

[Akjosch]

Most were already mentioned: Alpha Centauri, MechWarrior 4, Morrowind, Duke Nukem 3D. When you look at the sequels (official or spiritual) and all they do is make you re-play the original? Yeah. They're that good.

I'd toss in two more:

Nethack. Still easily the best of its kind. With the depth of its gameplay, who the hell needs graphics?

UFO: Enemy Unknown ("X-COM: UFO Defense" in North America). See the comment above about the sequels.

 

[Hectix777]

Let's see:

The Harvest Moon series (except for the ones where your crops apparently expire)

Suikoden

Digimon from the Playstation

The Sonic GBA games

Pokemon of course

Knights of the Old Republic

Spiderman 2 playstation

Dynasty Warriors

and Final Fantasy 7 and 9

 

[TheArcaneThinker]

Rome total war .
The game is a underrrsted masterpiece . Imo its the best game ever made and still runs like butter on even low end pcs . The game is graphically dated which makes most people look away but when your fighting a war , it doesnt even matter as thousands of soldiers are fighting with each other . The game is great to this day and is the best rts made to this day .

 

[FPLOON]

Well, the multiplayer in both Banjo-Tooie and Conker's Bad Fur Day for me, since I played those for the first time ever...

Other than that, there's Game & Watch Gallery 4, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Super Mario Strikers, Rez, Sonic Adventure (Both 1 and 2), Metroid Prime and Tales of Symphonia for the GameCube...

Honorable mention to Nicktoons Unite! for still holding up being the (video game) sequel to The Jimmy/Timmy Power Hour as well as a [pretty unbalanced] co-op game...