Going back to older games is kind of a fickle thing. So Gamespot UK's @dannyodwyer started a new video series Random Encounter and I suggested Giants: Citizen Kabuto, a game released back in 2000 to almost universal acclaim. So clearly a great idea from me for good times. Not so much. As it turns out that game in 2013 is significantly less awesome and makes us wonder what we were thinking back in those days.
Part of this is just because some games age better than others, for various reasons. Deathmatch games like Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament haven't really progressed since then and in many ways have disappeared from modern games and the FPS is just something that's very different. Those two games are still fantastic. But it's hard for me to say how good those games would be if I hadn't played them back when they were released.
I think the older games that don't resemble modern games have to a certain extent aged better simply because they lack that direct comparison. Space sims like Freelancer there haven't been the same advancements and developments that have happened to other genres. Back to Giants, third person action games have changed over the years. The ways in which that game falls flat on it's face are in many ways, just part of the times that it was in. Just from how the game moves and feels, the kind of terrible/incredible race stereotypes, the fact that the game is kind of trying to be a third person action game, but also a strategy game and also have this racing game in it as well. Also having it all happen in this really big open areas for you to traverse. It was incredibly ambitious back in 2000 and it was certainly pushing the boundaries of what was being done, but none of that makes for a game that will play well thirteen years later.
So what does make a game age well, I mean being a good game to start with clearly helps but also clearly isn't a definitive indicator. Going back to a game like GTA 3 for instance, great in it's time, but the open world crime action game has progressed so far in the interim years that you see the flaws and problems in that game a lot more because well developers spent a great deal of time fixing them. I genres that have otherwise died off don't have the same points of comparison to modern games which definitely helps but if someone that had never played TIE Fighter before went back to it today, would they have any fun?
A lot of this has been pretty speculative so far but there have been somethings that have been kind of figured out. Early polygonal games like PS1 era, just look bad now. Technically impressive in their day, but now they just look terrible. The catchy 8 bit music of old can still be really impressive. Strong catchy melodies have served those tracks incredibly well. Animation, particularly polygonal animation have come a long way, doubling animation frame speed as it turns out is a terrible idea. In short most games don't age well. Some do, but at the same time, it'll always be hard to say if you're enjoying those older games because of those fond memories or because the game still holds up as a good game in 2013.
To cap this off I'll list a few more game suggestions for Random Encounter. Because clearly I'm not done ruining people's memories of old games.
Alpha Centauri
Oni
XIII
Ground Control
Dungeon Keeper
Stronhold
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines
Theme Hospital
Homeworld
Red Alert
Freelancer
MechWarrior
TIE Fighter
Morrowind
Theme Hospital is definitely one of those games has aged really well. It's a classic. I agree that going back to older GTAs is difficult: I booted up GTA Vice City and apart from the soundtrack, I wasn't that keen on playing it. But something like Sim City 2000 I feel always will have appeal.
Morrowind was a great game and many people, including myself, would still argue it is a great game. It was my favorite sotry of the elder scrolls games as well as favorite location out of all the games. With that said, I went back and attempted to play it and just could not stand the graphics. We are just simply spoiled now with the graphics we have. I wish they would redo Morrowind with the Skyrim Engine.
"Animation, particularly polygonal animation have come a long way, doubling animation frame speed as it turns out is a terrible idea."
I don't understand, care to elaborate? And isn't more animation good as long as the animations can be interrupted by the player?
@Shadowdanc3r That was specific to Giants, where instead of animating a sprint, they doubled the speed of the walk animation so it looks super dumb. Also coincidentally something that the developers of DayZ found out while modding the original ARMA 2 animations.
Ha! That must've looked like a Benny Hill sketch. :) I thought by "doubling animation frame speed" you meant increasing the fps or adding unique animations, oops. Thanks for the context, I never played Giants so I didn't know they did that.
Titles that imho aged very well:
Thief 1 and 2;
Fallout 1 and 2 (if you survive the graphics they are still masterpieces);
Syndicate (1993), too bad AI was buggy (don't dare to play this in full screen);
Vampire Bloodlines **I really don't understand how can someone say it didn't age well, I played it last year. The only problems it has are bug related;
Led Storm (full screen is strictly forbidden);
GTA 1 and 2... and somehow their predecessor, APB even if this one litteraly kills your eyes;
Doom 1 and 2;
Planescape Torment;
Baldur's Gate 1 and 2;
Castlevania Simphony of the Night (the older ones make my eyes bleed too much);
Arena and Daggerfall are 10 times better than Morrowind and 100 times better than Skyrim, too bad eye bleeding is a big issue;
Paper Mario and The Thousand-Year Door;
Eternal Darkness (the graphics is still decent).
The list should be way longer, but it's already long enough imho.
I've replayed all of them at least once (except for Arena and Daggerfall that hit too violently my eyes) and I've found them still very enjoyable.
How enjoyable a game is imho mostly depends on what you expect from a game.
If you want an interactive movie, full of cool gimmicks, then no old game will ever age well; if instead you look for an immersive story, then old games can still teach a thing or two to modern ones.
Finally, if you are looking for a single player challenge, then old games really shine... either them or some new "old school" game like Spelunky or They Bleed Pixels.
@angubaranar123 I went back and played Bloodlines fairly recently and still really enjoyed it. I still don't think that has aged well because I feel that if a new person went to that game the general jank of the melee which lacks impact and gunplay which is just kind of okay. Which is why as people that have played those games that older games back when they were new, our views on if they've aged well or not may not be entirely valid. A true test of a game's age would be someone new coming to the game and finding it to be a good game.
@lim_ak About Bloodlines lacking combat-wise... not that more recent games always require good combat mechanics to get great scores (like GTA 4).
Bloodlines advantages are story and multiple ways to advance in the game. It's like playing Vampires pen and paper and trust me, combat there sucks even more.
About the last part, actually I did try that, with different games and had mixed results.
I made a friend of mine try Eternal Darkness (he never saw it before) and after finishing it he said it was one of the best games he ever played and asked why there isn't a sequel. Another friend tried Bloodlines (never played it before) and said it's a cool game.
Then I made another friend (he never played anything but FIFA and PES and just recently "discovered" other games thanks to Skyrim) try them both and he said something like "they suck, gimme something with cool graphics".
I also tried to make a 10 years old boy play Eternal Darkness and he answered "don't you have Assassin's Creed III? I saw it on TV".
About these 4 people, I made them all try Spelunky (imho it's a masterpiece and it has been elected best platform 2012 here), the results were 1 and 2 "BEST GAME EVER", 3 and 4 "did I just die? What is this s**t?"
For what I could see from these tests (it was more like people asking me "show me some games") the answer depends on what "gaming environment" you grew up with.
Since the answers were so different, I'm just happy I let 2 friends of mine know 2 games that imho are timeless.
As I recall Giants was rather repetitive and had rather dull shooting for a TPS, so it wasn't entirely your nostalgia that makes it seem so bad now. What kept most of us (or atleast me) playing Giants was the humour it had, the same applies to the game's spiritual sequel in Armed And Dangerous.
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing but I disagree that the likes of GTA 3, XIII or Oni to mention only a few games you listed have aged poorly because they all have such distinctive styles that nothing has been able to recapture their feel as of late.
@loopy_101 That list wasn't games that I think have aged poorly but games that they should play on Random Encounter, I actually think XIII will be just as good as it was when it was new, which is to say a kind of alright game. I think mechanically GTA3 will probably fall down on its face. So yeah some of that list I think probably will play completely fine, they were just suggestions for the show.
Nostalgia is a dangerous thing and just as it's never a good thing to meet our heroes, it's often a mistake to revisit an old game.
It seems like this is part of the reason why so many gamers are spoiled now. If games hadn't advanced as far as they have now and were still being made like they were from ps1 era and before would you still have fun, I'd say that I would. Yes, the games today are fantastic but I don't think it's fair at all to hold games from the past to the standard of today. I mean damn, look at the tank controls and stupid aiming from Resident Evil 1, but how great was it to so many people when it was the new thing. I enjoy many many different types of games in fact, one of my favorite games was the SEGA Genesis collection, I actually wish they would do games like that way more. I never had the chance to play Beyond Oasis but I was amazed even now to how great that game was and glad I had the chance to play it.
As you say, some games hold up, some don't. I recently bought the original Spyro trilogy from PSN - the first game I ever played on PS1 - and I was nervous. Turns out they are still awesome. I think nostalgia has a lot to do with that though. I also recently tried to play the first Soul Reaver (another favourite of mine from that era), and the story is still great, but man the controls are just terrible!
I would definitely think twice before replaying cherished old school games. And as others have said, generally speaking the 8-bit and 16-bit games seem far less affected by the passage of time. I still crank up Sonic and Pac-man every now and then, and still have a blast with them.
I found out to my regret , that the best way to preserve your good memories of really old games is never to play them again. Otherwise you just end up comparing them to modern games and wondering how you ever though such crappy graphics were so awesome.
@Imperiusmax That's been quite interesting with some modern sequels like Starcraft 2. It in many ways tricks you into thinking that was what your memory was of that original game because of the way that game looked. But yeah in general, oh PS1 era polygons, how terrible you look.
@lim_ak @Imperiusmax Good point. I was especially disappointed when I replayed the Syphon Filter series which was a series I had really enjoyed as a lil kid.
A good game is always a good game, that doesn't change. We change, but values don't. Also a weak game isn't more playable if it happens to come from the current generation. If someone plays a lot of games, and plays games for all of his life, I think he can surely adapt and find the way to enjoy an older masterpiece. It isn't always easy, but one must try a little, and not just quit right away. In certain cases it might take some time, but at the end it is worth it.
@Rheinmetal I certainly don't agree that a good game is always a good game, it will always remain a good game for it's time but that's all you can really say with certainty. Giants was considered to be one of the great games of it's time, but games as a whole have moved on since then. We've gotten better at making them, refined mechanics in a way that was non-obvious at the time. You can go back and appreciate an older game for what it did, but it doesn't make it any better a game, playing it in the modern day.
If someone doesn't know how to play an old game, or has a different idea for a good game in their mind, and different-newer perceptions as a gamer have nothing to do with whether the game is great, or not. I think that the greatness of a game, a book, a film, or a work of art in general is always judged in the context of its time and its value should not be revised with modern criteria. It has its place in history, and it's up to us if we are interested to enjoy this product, or not.
Also I disagree that "we 've become better in making games." On the contrary, in my opinion games' quality deteriorate with a steady pace. We 've only become better in computer programming. I think that the creative talent of its makers and the best use of the tools they have at their disposal determine the quality of a game, and not the effectiveness of the tools.
That's what this Random Encounter thing is? Man, wish I'd known sooner. I must be missing out on something great!
Some games do age well, gameplay wise, but the graphics certainly don't. I'd say old school 8-bit graphics are better then some of they early attempts at realistic graphics. Like, playing Morrowind without graphics mods makes my eyes bleed.
1 Like I think you have to respect a game for its originality, the feelings it evokes, and any ideas it may have brought to the table - as minor or as major as those are.
Fact of the matter is, you're going to notice the differences. People grow, games don't. But hopefully, like a good story or song, the memorable games really will retain a lot of their awesomeness.
@Ovirew That's something I thought about, memory is a bit of a funny thing because it skews our perception in such a weird way. I have a huge fondness for Bloodlines but I really like it but I fully expect that if someone went back to it now they would call me a crazy person. That doesn't diminish my own feelings on the game, but it does perhaps make my opinion on "is the game any good or not" somewhat less useful.
@lim_ak @Ovirew VtM:B is still damn awesome even to this day. Maybe once another round of consoles are out it will start to look dated, but at the moment on a PC with the community patch it looks better than average console games, so the glorious gameplay, epic RPG components (multiple races, multiple ways to finish quests, multiple viable skill builds, multiple ways to interact with the world to progress), amazing story, top notch atmosphere etc. are still intact.
The thing that makes a game overcome its own age is basically what was the main focus of the game and how did that evolved.
Action games usually are focused on audiovisual quality and fluid gameplay so they wont age good at all, since that is the feature that by far has advanced the most in the industry, and action is the most popular feature that sells.
But games that have mainly intelectual, sentimental or original value are much more likely to continue to be great even when compared to newer games, and in a lot of cases old games beat the crap out of new games.
I play old games ALL the time, even more than newer games, and after making endless comparisons, my opinion is that most old RPGs (the focus being in story, characters, complexity) are vastly superior to most modern RPGs, Survival Horror games are also vastly superior to new ones but more because the genre is almost dead today, stealth games were also a lot better because they had a clear identity instead of being just action games with some stealth like most games today, RTS games started to die slowly and while the newer ones arent worse, the lack of variety and evolution makes most old RTSs still excellent and fun.
So my point is, if a game ages well doesnt appear to depend that much on the game itself, but on how much the genre or type of game evolves with time, unfortunately the industry simply stalled or became worse in a lot of things, so in those points, old games are still the best ones.
@yeah_28 Some stories in games have aged pretty well. Survival Horror has definitely changed and a lot of companies have done real good jobs of messing it up, but there are still some really good horror games being made. Something like the original Red Alert has aged significantly worse than it's sequel. But I definitely agree that it depends a lot on how game genres have changed over the years.
I still play quite a lot of the games you've listed. The game I'd most like to see played is the first Carmageddon.
1 Like @zanelli Let's hope that Carmageddon:Reincarnation is everything the original was :) Man I loved that game so much...
@zanelli In the chat we were rattling off games left and right. They have absolutely no shortage of suggestions.
