Games that didn't age well

You just kept on playing....

All you guys do[the ones who are into "didn't aged-well" issue] is criticize. I bet when you first RE, Tomb Raider, FF7 and all those games of legends, you'll do anything to grab a copy of it ASAP.

Its like Gran Turismo. As a GT Fan, I got excited when the PS console's going to release the GT2, also the time when they're going to release GT3 in PS2. (That's the only reason why I got the PS2) then the GT4 then the GT5 (PS3)

It all started with the basics, and somehow in those years, technology in consoles are not as good today, but the concept of every game that year innovated every single game that is present today.
 
Gonna go out on a limb here and say WCW/NWO No Mercy for the N64. At the time the game was great, and it is still regarded as one of the best, but going back and playing it again I have to say... mediocre at best and it just isn't that fun to play anymore.
 
Wel no game from back then can really age well compared to the new ones lol... Lol i mean comeone the tech today for games just demolish that back then legends shit to the floor so you know.. Theres one thing that old games had and thats it.. it was actually fun timr consuming.. and they wre long.. games today arent long at all and really not to fun in large incriments..

But i dont think avp2 aged well it wa fun bak then but now its like ahh....
 
Tried to play Gauntlet(N64) a week ago or so cause i hadnt played it in like 4-5 years so i thought it would be fun to play it again with a friend of mine..After 10min with playing we almost puked of boredom:p...
 
With the technology changing so fast, it's not really surprising that even classics didn't age well, even so much as to say within like a generation, the games we loved won't even get fiddled with.

Oh well, a game that I now find difficult to enjoy despite old loves has to be... dang, I have no clue, since I'd absolutely still play them if there was a way to simply put my old cartridges or discs in my 360.

I'm now shit at games that used to be easy for me, such as the original Mega Man games, because it's all changed so much and I've forgotten the minor intricacies of play, so I'd say that sure, those are the games that didn't age well for me.
 
the n64 Perfect Dark i feel is superior to the the Perfect Dark on the 360. i wish they would just remake that game for the 360. i mean everything about it, just put on a new coat of high def paint.
 
Myst for the PC. Now that we have more photo realistic graphics makes it look severely outdated, and the gameplay, namely dropping someone somewhere with no clue as to what to do, would be lauded as a bad gameplay design.
 
Hey, I hated Myst back when it was new, so I guess I'm ahead of the curve.
 
Before I give names, I'd like to express a few thoughts:

-If a game has aged well, that might be because what was good about it then still holds today.
-If it has not, it is possibly because it was only relatively good, and its virtues were thus sort of flash-in-the-pan; More people saw The Ten Commandments than John Cassavetes' Shadows in 1958, but Shadows has had the longer lasting influence.
-I will not say a game aged poorly if it was lousy when it first came out. I will say it was always lousy, and though time may further exaggerate its flaws, it has not lost something that it had.
-These judgments are only subjective opinions. Where I state anything objective, it is either conjectural, or noting something that has influenced my opinion in a meaningful way.
-I only use games that I liked a little or a lot when they first came out or I first saw them, because age has in some sense changed my judgment.

In that vein, I offer up the following list of games that I think have aged poorly:

-Final Fantasy IV-IX: Largely due to problems completely beyond possibility of remedy at the time, these six games are lost in what will someday perhaps be known as video gaming's 'silent era' (as critics are excessively fond of comparing games to movies now, I think the terminology inevitable) and appreciating them on their own terms will be mainly for those who were there when they first came along. For the rest, it will be done with an outsider's eye, with attention more to the history of art than the art itself. Playing even isolated snippets of it will be more like watching D.W. Griffith's Intolerance than a contemporary movie. Someday, students will play/see and need scholarly presentation in seeing the influence and growth at work.
-Wolfenstein 3D: Will be remembered as a propaedeutic to Doom and the FPS genre, but its own virtues will go largely unmentioned, I suspect.
-Doom 3: It felt like an expensively rehashed Doom without everything that interests the gamer so easily there. The level design feels as if the designers at id had not noticed or imagined a way the genre might move forward in the 10 years since Doom came along, and had no inkling of the contributions of System Shock, System Shock 2, Half-Life, or any of the other games that took the genre to new places. The interface, which was delightfully slick, is another story. This is not to be misunderstood; Doom 3 is a tech demo for a then state-of-the-art new game engine. I am not saying it is a bad game. I had lots of fun playing it, and would still if I did play through it again today. But it doesn't feel as monumental as it did then, and time will further diminish it.
-Age of Mythology: As a simple matter of visuals, its graphics show age more readily than Age I or II, though I am ill-equipped to define how this is so.
-Soldier of Fortune: Its approach to violence was bold and original, but its visuals lack the impact they had then.
 
I like and agree with the first part of your post, I fear some people when asked what games didn't age well, just simply look at the graphics and nothing else. That is a mistake.

But the second part... didn't most of those games come out within the last 5 years...?
 
The more recent examples I used were meant to illustrate the nature of the 'aging' effect. Age of Mythology is still one of my favorite RTS games, but the increasing visual complexity of 3D rendering causes the game to show its age very quickly and it has not aged well. Doom 3 feels like a very old FPS wrapped in new clothing, so the thing which was or was not good at the time is itself very old, and so it feels dated right off the bat.

Sorry if I was being obscure. I should have made that a note in the first section.
 
As I was reading I kept thinking of games that DID age well-for me at least. Tomba I would still play. And the original Contra I bought on the Wii literally made me start smoking again, but I love it. Something about the unforgiving nature of those games with no auto save, or any save, for that matter, will keep me coming back. (and smoking). And the Castlevania games. Symphony of the Night has aged better than wine in my opinion.
 
What comes off the top of my head is Grabbed by the Ghoulies, I did like the artwork of the game and I loved Rare games, but the game play was hurt really bad by the clunky controls, I don't know how I even beat that game. It was hard to get used to the controls mainly for the fact of the aiming mechanism for guns and swinging weapons, I recall having to press 3 buttons at the same time to shoot, which to me is unacceptable and broken.
 
xxlordskullxx said:
the n64 Perfect Dark i feel is superior to the the Perfect Dark on the 360. i wish they would just remake that game for the 360. i mean everything about it, just put on a new coat of high def paint.

But with Rare cleaning house and "restructuring" that seems even less likely to happen :(
 
Solaris10 said:
Mortal Kombat

I agree completely. The gameplay of it was more than a bit irritating to me when I first started to play it, but now it just feels unplayable; the hold of the original (great as it was at the time, and influential as it's been overall) is gone.

Another couple I'd bring up is the original Doom and Doom II. I loved it, and I still love it (I play the first on the 360 from time to time), but only so much for nostalgic purposes; with the advancements in the genre, it feels so archaic and slow. Maybe it's just that I've played it to death, but it doesn't have that feel that makes it easy to "get into" anymore.
 
DOOM. People used to think that shit was scary. All the Doom games have aged badly due to their simplicity, but whilst Doom and Doom 2 can at least claim their place as influential and revolutionary Doom 3 is pretty much irrelevant to gaming.

Another - and some jaws may drop at this - is Half Life 2. It's just nowhere near as impressive as it used to be. The visuals, physics, and cinematic gameplay that were revolutionary back in 2004 are pretty commonplace now, but what sticks out the most is its linearity. So many first person games today allow the player different solutions to problems and provide him/her with a more open, realistic environment.
 

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