Games that haven't aged well....

[JemothSkarii]

Most games I've played recently have aged pretty well: Crash Team Racing is still as fun as hell (and I'm still awesome at it), The first 6 Final Fantasy's are still great to play with their stories, 7/8/9 still have good battle scenes and good cutscenes (which only counts for 8 and 9)

however, a game for me which hasn't aged well is MediEvil; I used to love that game, and now it's really kinda clunky and annoying to move around in.
Same with the Abe's Odyssey/Exoddus games, the frustration of not being able to pull a lever in time is just godlike.

 

[DustyDrB]

Not a whole lot on the N64 has aged very well either. Goldeneye is fun, sure, but as an FPS its pretty crappy. Super Mario 64 is another good example, it just looks and plays terribly.

Excuse me, my favorite platformer ever would like to have a word with you.

Spoiler: Why no love?

Spoiler: Because this exists. =P

Banjo-Kazooie is great, for sure, and I still play it from time to time today. But it falls short of DK64 in many areas. It went overboard with collectibles, and the bosses were pretty underwhelming when put up against DK64's [5jIh_szguNM]

But I do still love Banjo-Kazooie (I have all three games in the series...even Nuts and Bolts)

 

[GiantRaven]

Banjo-Kazooie is great, for sure, and I still play it from time to time today. But it falls short of DK64 in many areas. It went overboard with collectibles, and the bosses were pretty underwhelming when put up against DK64's [5jIh_szguNM]

But I do still love Banjo-Kazooie (I have all three games in the series...even Nuts and Bolts)

I think Tooie made up for the lack of good bosses in the first game.

I definitely had a lot of fun playing all three though. Good times. =D

 

[Shameless]

Mario 64, didn't age well sadly, so do Duke Nukem 3D

 

[Sebenko]

"Phantasmagoria 2"

Stylised graphics always seem to slow down the aging process. Look at any game from the 90s that aimed for realism.

Metal Fatigue, managed to get it working on my xp ...and I still love it

Custom giant robots beating the crap out of each other. Hell yes.

Also: Fucking captchas, they're damned unreadable. Took me three fucking attempts.

 

[irani_che]

Nintendo

the whole god-damn company
the only things older and staler or childishly immature than their last three years of sequel crapping out are the ppl they are trying to market the DS and Wii to

 

[Geekosaurus]

Crazy Taxi. Oh dear.

 

[GiantRaven]

Duke Nukem 3D

I remember loving that as a child but when I bought it off GOG recently I couldn't stand it. I think it was the lack of mouse aiming/an easy way to look up.

Nintendo

the whole god-damn company
the only things older and staler or childishly immature than their last three years of sequel crapping out are the ppl they are trying to market the DS and Wii to

Yeah! Curse those people getting into videogaming who don't like the same things as you!

 

[mayney93]

Sonic, and metroid games 'nuff said

 

[Jekken6]

Deus Ex, especially in the graphics department.

 

[vxicepickxv]

I find it amazing that people are confusing Franchises with individual games. The old Sonic games aged quite well for two reasons. First, stylized sprite based graphics tend to age slower than current edge style games, and second, the gameplay is actually better. Yes, Sonic is better in 2d than 3d. I said it.

Final Fantasy VII did not age well. Look at slightly older games, like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, the stylized graphics helped them last longer in terms of quality, especially compared to first generation Polygon graphics.

 

[Willem]

Okay, so is it worth the $10 or so on PSN, or should I skip straight to MGS2?

Easily worth it. The story is top notch and the only bad thing about the gameplay is that MGS2 improves on it a huge amount.

The story is painfully awful (just like every other MGS game) and MGS2 has some of the worst controls in videogame history. You had to press almost every button on the controller to shoot from cover. Executing basic actions was like doing a fucking code.

Deus Ex, especially in the graphics department.

Deus Ex is the greatest game ever made. What the fuck is wrong with you?

 

[x0ny]

Ridge Racer, the market now demands driving sims.

 

[irani_che]

Duke Nukem 3D

I remember loving that as a child but when I bought it off GOG recently I couldn't stand it. I think it was the lack of mouse aiming/an easy way to look up.

Nintendo

the whole god-damn company
the only things older and staler or childishly immature than their last three years of sequel crapping out are the ppl they are trying to market the DS and Wii to

Yeah! Curse those people getting into videogaming who don't like the same things as you!

i dont mind gamers who have incompatibly different tastes to me

but when you have a handheld console whose spokesperson is Jonathan Ross, (if your not british you might not know who this guy is, dont worry about it) you clearly have lost your way in the industry.

other than game specifically made for the new hardware (be it innovative advances with the wii and ds or just gimmicks) what has nintendo actually made recently that is new??

 

[tahrey]

Pretty much anything that was samey old BS.

Games with a bit of a "spark", some effort put into the way they look, play, are plotted etc, continue to be quite playable and transcend the era in which they were made and the hardware they used, and can even have a certain charm if the poor graphics and sound are used in a stylistic manner. Hence how I can still happily play stuff like Stunt Car Racer, F19, Civilisation, Monkey Island, Sonic 1, Lemmings...

Those which didn't and were just churned out as yet-another-version-of-X tweaked to fit inside certain HW limitations come off worse. Endless, usually quite ugly and unresponsive bloody platformers or puzzle games... ugh. Too many to try naming them.

Though also, on the whole, pre-true-3D driving and flying games tend to suck. The jerky, unrealistic 2.5D visuals just kill the whole affair. Any F1 game before the groundbreaking Geoff Crammond one, for example, or bike game which used a similar visual conceit. Flight games really suffered badly - have you SEEN the attempt at putting F15 Strike Eagle on the NES?
A few came off OK, but then they satisfied the rule given above e.g. the Rally game on the GameGear 4-in-1 cart is easily the most charming and fun 2.5D race title, just edging out Buggy Boy and Lotus Turbo; it craps all over any pre-Sega Rally "serious" title of the sort; various Space Harrier type flying games are about as realistic as a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man with a celebrity's face stuck on, but they make it fun (and Desert Strike cheated by using a heli and isometric view). The rest just die a horrible horrible death of advanced ageing.

If I wasn't so tired and flu'd up I'd be tempted to roll thru my emulator cart/disk list and come up with some real howlers. But for now, all I can think of is Transbot on the Master System and Transformers on the NES. Christ. Terrible examples of the cheap cash-in platformer/scrolling shooter genre which did nothing to hide or work with the limited hardware.

 

[tahrey]

Ridge Racer, the market now demands driving sims.

Conveniently ignoring Burnout and its ilk...

Besides, the completely bizarre handling in Ridge Racer never really did it for me, the way you had to drift to about 120 degrees from straight-ahead to make it round corners was just bizarre (particularly alongside their attempt to make an arcade version with a 4- (6?) speed manual gearshifter and clutch pedal). RR4 on the playstation was probably the best, and I wish I still had a copy around to fire up and see how well THAT's aged. It was a very pretty game and far more playable than the ones that had gone before, without taking itself at all seriously or going all Sim-style. Just removed the worse excesses of cartoon handling.

BTW I think whatever takes the prize will be whatever's the polar opposite of Galaga. There's a pub on the welsh coast with an original sit-down cocktail cabinet version still working, and it must easily swallow its own worth in coins each year. Hardware is simplistic even for early 80s vintage but it's a fun game with brightly coloured (yet not garish) graphics and silly SFX that make such thing irrelevant.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

i would say the controls for any ps1 or n64 3d game. mostly such as shooters and whatnot, good god i used to be amazing at them..but MAN they are so freaking bad now (me and the game trying to get along) so i avoid those like the plague.

 

[Lynxan]

As I see it, in graphics it often comes down to what it is trying to represent. I think the reason that the looks of a game like Metal Gear Solid is that it is trying to represent real people. This had gotten better over the years with the more powerful systems, there's no way around that. I think that as you get away from this the more that you get away from being a real human or animal. Take for example I was playing Sheep Raider for the PS1 and while there is a blockyness to them, it wasn't as bad to try and look at it since it was abstract to start with.

When it comes to game play, it's the small improvements that start to add up. Especially the first games of a type of game. I believe the best example would be to go all the way back to the early days for Space Invaders, a big hit in it's day but after Galaxian came in with game play that for most was a huge improvement over it.

Quite simply, it's the improvements over time that make what was not as good.

 

[smudgey]

Goldeneye.

Yeah, i said it. I used to fucking love that game, but when i went back to it years later, it just didn't hold up well at all. Sure, multiplayer is still alright, but single player is severely crippled by some absolutely brain dead AI. They wouldn't fire at you if you were standing behind a railing, and if you ran up to their face, they'd shoot straight past you. Perfect Dark sorted that out, and held up much better for it.