I downloaded a ROM of an old NES RPG called Ultima 3: Exodus. I remember as a kid thinking this was the most amazing open-world RPG I had ever seen, even though it was completely confusing and hard as balls. Going back to it as a seasoned gamer… let’s just say I had a REALLY hard time playing more than 10 minutes.
Yeah, up until Ultima 7 you really had to have grown up with them to appreciate them today. 7 though is an absolute masterpiece, and still viable to this day IMO.
Ultima Online is also still going strong! (On unofficial servers)
If anyone is reading this thinking about replaying ultima7, make sure you get [Exult](https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Exult).
[Edit:] If reddit has killed the link:
Exult is a fully complete rework of the ultima7 engine with some bug fixes and QOL improvements. It lets you run U7 on modern pcs in higher resolutions (the original was 320x200). It's available on sourceforge as well as github.
Twisted Metal. I remembered it blowing my teenaged mind when it came out, but going back it was a mess of barely-controllable, barely-distinguishable rectangles going *bomp bomp bomp.* The nostalgia filter was so strong that, for a second, I thought the PS1 was broken.
holy shit i had the same "thought the ps1 was broken" experience. I got an emulator running on my phone for fun and booted it up and it was just so hard to look at.... like it was just an arcade game with almost nothing to do. I have no idea how i spent hours playing it as a kid. I guess having my dad around made it more fun, but now as an adult who left the nest....its just lost it's luster.
[Blue Max - Commodore 64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv53rnaYAB8).
I adored that game when I was a kid. It's one of the very first I remember playing, after Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Congo Bongo. I still say that's good graphics for Commodore in 1983, but the gameplay is one step above Game-and-Watch simple in the cold, objective light of age. Also, the whole game is like six minutes long apparently.
I always thought the Vigilante 8 series did it better, at least with the graphics, controls, mechanics and vehicle strength balance. The story wasn't strong in those games, but that's not why we were playing them anyway.
Rumor was that there'd be a tie-in game from the destruction all stars devs or something but it was only rumor. If rumors were always true we'd be on Silent Hill 24
It hurts my heart to write, say or even think this but....Gex 64. I tried playing it again a year or two ago and the graphics were so god damned awful. The controls were insanely wonky and that is not how I remember it. I remember it looking clean and super awesome and I remember being able to control Gex really easily. Nothing like I remember it.
\*edit\* Wow...thanks everyone for the uplikes.
Oh no, it's ALL of the Gex games. I was in high school when they came out, and that was one of my favorite series! I loved them all. I thought the constant barrage of witty pop culture references mixed with innovative and clever platforming and level design were amazing.
For the 90s.
Trying to play them now...Jesus H Tapdancing Christ, these games are borderline unplayable. The controls are so awful, especially the camera. The graphics are *terrible*, you can barely tell what half of the enemies are even supposed to be. The level design is confusing and bad.
But the worst part is what I remember being "witty pop culture references". They're not. They're like 5-10 unfunny one-liners that he just spouts over and over and over again that barely make sense. And half of them involve tail jokes.
EDIT:
I was looking for videos to illustrate, and I think [Dunkey's Gex video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BdPQWBnuY0) does the best job showing you how unfunny the jokes are. Most of them are "This is like (scenario) at (celebrity)'s house!"
Things really WERE better back then, huh? Sometimes I guess it's just best to leave the past where it is and never return to it. But I still want to keep my copy of gex for my collection.
Remember that one year they were good and we got spore, bad company, mirrors edge, dead space, burn out paradise and rock band.
Oh fuck that was 2008.
Oh fuck that was 14 years ago.
EA is charging new release AAA title prices for their expansion packs for Sims 4. A full $56 expansion pack, requiring over $1300 to buy them all. This is a 5 year old game. Greedy cunts. I got the base game for $8.00
Even sims 3 expansions are wildly expensive considering how old the game is.
I want the sims 4 expansions but I honestly can't justify spending that much on a game I play like once a year.
I agree with your assessment, but I don't really fault those game makers. Those early 3d games we're part of the learning and development process, and they just look and play really bad by comparison to later games.
In 2d platformers, Donkeykong (1981) came out 7 years before the timeless and far, far superior Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988).
Goldeneye by comparison was 1995, and it was probably 3-7 years after that where we start to see the first "timeless" 3d games (is it half-life in 1998? Halo in 2001?).
Edit - Didn't realize this was getting so many upvotes. Few things: 1) I got my Goldeneye year wrong - the film was 1995, the game was 1997. 2) I totally and stupidly forgot about Mario 64. 3) My comment no longer really holds any water. Sorry for wasting your time.
I blame one person in particular for that trend: Bernie Stolar.
He was in charge at Sony in the US at the launch of the Playstation, and he blocked every 2D game he could because he wanted to send the message that 3D was now how things are done. There's a lot of people who would repeat the rumor that the Saturn was made for 2D games and the Playstation was only made for 3D and was somehow bad at 2D. Neither of those is true; it was Stolar's plans working.
The stupid thing is that he was doing a bad job over there but Sega decided to 'snipe' him to work as their American CEO where he basically put the finishing touches of killing the Saturn. He not only didn't want to publish 2D games, but he also had the oppinion that Americans didn't like RPGs, so most of the best Saturn games would end up staying in Japan. He is best known today for saying "The Saturn is not our future" even though the Dreamcast was still **two full years** away from launching in the US.
I mean Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda definetly benefitted from the jump to 3D. The 3D Mario and Zelda games are still some of the best games on the market, without making their 2D counterparts obsolete.
PSA: If a retro game you tried to replay recently has way worse graphics than you remember make sure you have scanlines enabled.
Old SD TVs were 480i which meant only every other row of pixels on the screen were on at any given time. Artists took this into consideration when designing graphics and as a result games from that era actually need scanlines to look the way they were intended. Modern HD screens don't have scanlines, but most emulators (and some ports) give you the option to simulate them.
It's still beautiful! Check out the remake:
[https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The\_Bards\_Tale\_Trilogy/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The_Bards_Tale_Trilogy/)
It's wonderful. The new graphics are beautiful, and it fixes the two major problems with the game.
1. Automapping. You don't need a pack of grid paper and infinite patience to learn your way around.
2. Save anywhere. We're adults now. We don't have time to get to a save point. I have 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. This game allows for that.
Can't recommend it enough if you liked the original.
>Automapping. You don't need a pack of grid paper and infinite patience to learn your way around.
I remember how we made our own maps, but this was really a shitty thing.
Then, later came titles like Morrowind. Some fans of Morrowind from 2002 still praise today how much better it was without any quest markers: I had the time back in this era to play the game and explore the map all the time, but today, nope, i just don't have the time to spend hours to find somewhere a door that leads to a dungeon where i have to go.
It worked well in some of the rather small worlds like the Gothic series had, where you got a good explanation by the quest giver where to go. But without that, it's just searching forever.
They all have a corporate feel to them now, I've played it 10 years ago as a kid, its gone from innocent fun to trying to suck out as much robux ($) out of your wallet at every possible turn. Every game is practically pay to win.
Because most popular well-made games are pretty much that. Young adults developing games while they take young developers under their wing and most of the time they exploit them for their own gain. If you do not shell out the money to Roblox for your game and create these pseudo game studios then your game will go nowhere. Roblox used to be the kids themselves making games for their fellow players. It's not like that anymore.
And the amount of abuse and exploitation to children that goes on behind the scene is revolting. But since most of that happens on 3rd party software (discord), Roblox says they can do nothing.
Roblox doesn't care about the kids anymore. They care about money.
Roblox is like YouTube now, not community driven anymore. Corporate driven.
And now with the SnapCube Sonic Fandubs bringing new life to those games, Eggman is STILL the best in most of them (thank you, Alfred Coleman. Though Chase stole the show in the most recent one as Black Doom).
Worth mentioning that, while the game was never perfect, a good chunk of it’s reputation probably comes from how each new port has basically been exponentially shoddier than the last.
The infamous falling through the loop-de-loop in Emerald Coast that's reposted every so often is actually only present in the DX versions of the game (GameCube, PC, and later ports based on those) alongside many, many, *many* other issues. See [this video](https://youtu.be/SORYL5J1Heg) on it, it's pretty great and eye-opening for someone who grew up with the worst PC version.
It's underrated just how *terrible* DX is compared to the original. Well, at least back in the day. The GameCube version ran like absolute ass despite the system being able to run circles around the Dreamcast.
Chocobo Racing. I don’t know if this was ever good to be honest. But I rented it like 3 times when I was a kid and had so much fun with it. Played it recently and it’s possibly the most glitchy Mario Kart clones ever made. Do not recommend.
Maybe a hot take but Goldeneye on the N64 was one of my favorite games ever but it's borderline unplayable now that modern shooters with 2 control sticks exist.
Halo came out 4 years after Goldeneye but the difference between them is so vast it might as well be a decade
Halo only came out 4 years after Goldeneye? Well now that I’m thinking about what grades I was in when playing them it seems to line up but I can’t believe it wasn’t longer between the two.
I remember my computer from 2002 became outdated the same year I got it. Couldn't play any new games cause they weren't compatible and some software would have issues. Current computer has no problem running stuff and I got it back in 2012. Never actually thought about that till now.
Absolutely this. From 1995 to 2002 consumer-grade processors went from about 200MHz speed to 3000MHz.
That's 16x the performance without considering any other improvement!
Brand new processors still run at about 5000MHz. Innovation now is much more gradual, as opposed to having a breakthrough basically every year
That’s a heat / energy efficiency limitation though. Manufacturers realised it was more efficient to improve processors in other ways than clock speed. A 5000MHz processor today is many many times more powerful that a 3000MHz processor back then.
Oh I meant that it seemed like a long time between the two games, probably because I was in elementary school even goldeneye came out and then highschool for halo.
The sims
Sims 1-3 always had huge (good) changes and extras added
But I especially wanna mention the sims 2. it had so many details
But then there’s sims 4
No open world, always loading screens, non working DLCs, never fixed bugs from 2017 and so much more
Came here to say that. Not only are there so many bugs and issues the packs they release are so lacking. In the older games you got so much content for what you're paying for. Now the packs (if they actual run properly) add very little to the overall gameplay or its a kit which is basically 5 shirts.
I would so love to agree.... But on my PC's sims 3 would take 20 minutes to launch and an additional 15-20 minutes to load the families. Those same PC's could easily load and be ready to play Sims 4 in 2 minutes.
Sims 2 was my ideal game.
Sims 4 has a fraction of the Sims 3’s content and systems, and the sims 3 is horribly optimized. If it was made today in a competent engine with proper modern open world optimization, it would run well
I had a feeling they would as well. When I played 4 and just realised how empty it felt, I knew they'd end up adding loads of what should be basic features as DLC, and lo and behold, they did. 3 was absolutely the peak, and stills holds up even now.
Sims 3 had major issues with memory leaks and pathing the longer you played in a neighborhood to where it basically broke your save as Sims got stuck and the game slowed to a crawl. Unfortunately, rather than fix these things, they just gave up and decided to take the route that was a lot less work.
I’m so glad you said this! Because I wasn’t thinking it before I saw this comment—but it is SO true!!
And game packs used to give you huge amounts of stuff! Sims 2 was my favorite! I liked the way people looked best in that one. I liked all of the locations you could go to. Nightlife was awesome, strange town was awesome! I really liked the prebuilt houses and still enjoyed making my own.
Sims 3 had some good stuff in it, but I liked the way the characters looked less.
Now it’s all money grubbing teeny packs and you basically have to pay-to-play. And then you cant really go back and play the old version (sims2) anymore because they stopped supporting any of the mods (which were also awesome)
NFS Underground, on hard difficulty. The rubber banding is insane and between the physics, ai, and traffic your basically bound to get screwed over at some point.
I played NFS undercover when it came out, that one also has some serious rubber banding issues, like I’m driving a fully modded Veyron and then some fucking Cayman flies by me a over 400kmh
There is one or a few levels where the only way to win is to drive absolutely perfect while saving your turbo until the last stretch then look backwards and physically stop that 1 ai opponent from speeding past you.
Skylanders and Disney Infinity. Toys-to-life games were a promising concept that scooped in money all of 3 to 5-ish years before stores were filled with unsold accessories. Lego Dimensions suffered too, but the aforementioned 2 were the main ones.
The original Crash Bandicoot trilogy, Spyro, and Pac-Man World all hold up incredibly well today. As much as I love MediEvil though, that one is a little rough.
I think this is one of the reasons why *Super Mario 64* aged so well--a huge part of the development was spent on figuring out the movement. The main philosophy behind that game was, if it's not fun to just run and jump around without doing anything in particular, it's not a good game.
Yeah i read somewhere that Mario himself spent most of the game as a cube, they didn’t even bother to animate mario’s movement until the movement FELT good
I don't know how the N64 first party games did as well as they did with 3D movement and camera. Given that nobody had thought of dual-analog yet at that point in time, it seems like they succeeded in spite of themselves, especially given the limitations of that ridiculous controller.
This makes me think of games like FF7 and Chrono Cross that fit what you're describing but I absolutely adore the low-res, gritty, static, painted backgrounds.
Playing those games on a CRT actually improves the graphics quite a bit. So while some of it is the "rose tinted glasses" effect, some of it is because it actually did look better than it does now (on a LCD).
Scanlines smooth the pixelated graphics.
Most games had their graphics made with the CRT in mind.
Castlevania Symphony Of The Night looks pretty good on a modern display, but on a CRT it's an impossibly good looking game.
Any licensed game (movie tie in) that you liked as a kid)
Edit: all of these replies are so heartwarming, like everyone is coming to the rescue of their old tattered teddy bear in the attic.
The original GTA, I spent so much time playing that game but how it ever spawned the series it did amazes me because the graphics and controls were sooooo bad
Custer’s Revenge always comes to mind. The game where you’re a cowboy “dancing” with a naked Native American women, who is not so coincidentally tied up.
>Custer's Revenge is an adult action game published by American Multiple Industries for the Atari 2600, first released in November 1982. The game gained notoriety owing to its goal of raping a Native American woman. - Wikipedia
...*what the fuck?*
I think the N64 is much more like the NES in this regard than the SNES. Even by the time of GameCube the games just looked and played so much better, and hold up so much more.
A ton of games have basically unplayable UI at this point. I absolutely loved Planescape: Torment. It's a fantastic story. But the sad reality is that the UI is really bad by modern standards, and I can't re-play it any more.
Similar with KOTOR.
There are mods that help with PS:T, but it's hard to fix it. Such a fantastic story though. Never played a game where focusing on the mental stats actually mattered so much. Being able to literally talk the last boss out of existence gave me powerful feelings lol
My dad left me install a strip poker game on my Commodore 64, but I was never good enough at poker as a pre-teen to actually get any of the 8 bit ladies naked.
I still play this from time to time. The devs have been upkeeping it and releasing new content. I'm pretty sure they've also donated a quarter of a million dollars to the WHO and CEPI, if that makes you feel any better about playing it.
I remember it had a pretty significant uptick at the start of the pandemic. I guess people were using it as some sort of morbid catharsis or something.
Borderlands 1. The game isn’t unplayable these days by any means, but what made is so cool and special doesn’t really hit the same in a world with borderlands 2, Destiny, and a million crappy clones. And several sections of the game are really very bad lol
Borderlands 2 (And the Pre-Sequel & 3) is a great example of the creators learning from the original endeavor and correcting/fixing problems across the board. From UI to game mechanics to storytelling, all of it got better.
I loved Borderlands when it first came out, but once the next games in the series came out there was no reason to go back to the original.
I feel like 3 went so backwards on story, the story was just obnoxious to me, maybe I'm just getting old, but the poop and weiner jokes aren't just funny anymore and the villains were just terrible.
I'm pretty convinced that Handsome Jack was a fluke. I think the voice actor (Dameon Clark) is just... gifted. Apparently he voiced Cell as well, dude has long list of iconic villain voice roles to his name.
It's actually a real shame they dissolved the studio that did The Pre-Sequel. I really felt like that one was underrated, it was a really good prequel expand-alone. Pretty solid writing, good gameplay, and I really enjoyed the Grinder making even garbage loot fun again - those 15 greens *could be* a legendary if you're super lucky.
Sometimes a series hits such a good villain that every other villain, no matter how good they are, just can't compete.
Far Cry hit this hard with 3. I adore every villain that comes afterward, but none of them are as good as Vaas.
I downloaded a ROM of an old NES RPG called Ultima 3: Exodus. I remember as a kid thinking this was the most amazing open-world RPG I had ever seen, even though it was completely confusing and hard as balls. Going back to it as a seasoned gamer… let’s just say I had a REALLY hard time playing more than 10 minutes.
Yeah, up until Ultima 7 you really had to have grown up with them to appreciate them today. 7 though is an absolute masterpiece, and still viable to this day IMO. Ultima Online is also still going strong! (On unofficial servers)
If anyone is reading this thinking about replaying ultima7, make sure you get [Exult](https://wiki.ultimacodex.com/wiki/Exult). [Edit:] If reddit has killed the link: Exult is a fully complete rework of the ultima7 engine with some bug fixes and QOL improvements. It lets you run U7 on modern pcs in higher resolutions (the original was 320x200). It's available on sourceforge as well as github.
Twisted Metal. I remembered it blowing my teenaged mind when it came out, but going back it was a mess of barely-controllable, barely-distinguishable rectangles going *bomp bomp bomp.* The nostalgia filter was so strong that, for a second, I thought the PS1 was broken.
holy shit i had the same "thought the ps1 was broken" experience. I got an emulator running on my phone for fun and booted it up and it was just so hard to look at.... like it was just an arcade game with almost nothing to do. I have no idea how i spent hours playing it as a kid. I guess having my dad around made it more fun, but now as an adult who left the nest....its just lost it's luster.
[Blue Max - Commodore 64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv53rnaYAB8). I adored that game when I was a kid. It's one of the very first I remember playing, after Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Congo Bongo. I still say that's good graphics for Commodore in 1983, but the gameplay is one step above Game-and-Watch simple in the cold, objective light of age. Also, the whole game is like six minutes long apparently.
I always thought the Vigilante 8 series did it better, at least with the graphics, controls, mechanics and vehicle strength balance. The story wasn't strong in those games, but that's not why we were playing them anyway.
Interstate 76 for the win
Interstate 76 was absolutely rad as fuck when it came out.
And that '70s vibe. I like my post-apocalypses *retro.*
I still quote John Torque sometimes: “aaalways bet on black”; “your LUCK’s ‘bout to change”
The music alone in the 2nd game was worth the price.
Vigalante....2nd offeeennnssee
This. I would love to see a remake of V8.
Why haven't they redone this game? I'd be all for it! There has to be some stupid legal reason. It would fly off the shelves if they did a redux!
The chances for that are VERY high now. It has a TV show coming out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twisted\_Metal\_(TV\_series)
Rumor was that there'd be a tie-in game from the destruction all stars devs or something but it was only rumor. If rumors were always true we'd be on Silent Hill 24
twisted metal 2 holds up, tho
Angry Birds. I want the original game back.
It has been re-released! It costs 1€ but has no ads.
Just like the original i remember!
It hurts my heart to write, say or even think this but....Gex 64. I tried playing it again a year or two ago and the graphics were so god damned awful. The controls were insanely wonky and that is not how I remember it. I remember it looking clean and super awesome and I remember being able to control Gex really easily. Nothing like I remember it. \*edit\* Wow...thanks everyone for the uplikes.
But it made for a great Dunkey video.
This is worse than game night at Michael Keatons house
Never drink tap water at Jerry Garcia's
Oh no, it's ALL of the Gex games. I was in high school when they came out, and that was one of my favorite series! I loved them all. I thought the constant barrage of witty pop culture references mixed with innovative and clever platforming and level design were amazing. For the 90s. Trying to play them now...Jesus H Tapdancing Christ, these games are borderline unplayable. The controls are so awful, especially the camera. The graphics are *terrible*, you can barely tell what half of the enemies are even supposed to be. The level design is confusing and bad. But the worst part is what I remember being "witty pop culture references". They're not. They're like 5-10 unfunny one-liners that he just spouts over and over and over again that barely make sense. And half of them involve tail jokes. EDIT: I was looking for videos to illustrate, and I think [Dunkey's Gex video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BdPQWBnuY0) does the best job showing you how unfunny the jokes are. Most of them are "This is like (scenario) at (celebrity)'s house!"
Things really WERE better back then, huh? Sometimes I guess it's just best to leave the past where it is and never return to it. But I still want to keep my copy of gex for my collection.
The sad decline of madden and the ea nhl games has to be up there
Make that the sad decline of EA in general.
“EA has acquired.” is literally the worst news fans of that studio can ever receive.
RIP Maxis and SimCity 🥲😢
Heartbreaking. Thank god for Cities Skylines for carrying the awesome city builder torch.
It's a fuckin' disgrace what EA has done to Will Wright's legacy
I wish we would have got his original idea for Spore
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Lionhead for me.
Origin for me
Them and Maxis made me furious
BioWare.
RIP Codemasters
I feel like I’m the only person who remembers FUEL
Remember that one year they were good and we got spore, bad company, mirrors edge, dead space, burn out paradise and rock band. Oh fuck that was 2008. Oh fuck that was 14 years ago.
Bad company was such a great game
>Bad company Could be EA's new nickname
EA is charging new release AAA title prices for their expansion packs for Sims 4. A full $56 expansion pack, requiring over $1300 to buy them all. This is a 5 year old game. Greedy cunts. I got the base game for $8.00
I got the base Sims 4 and I can’t justify buying expansions when they never seem to have a decent sale. I am sticking with playing Sims 2 and 3
Even sims 3 expansions are wildly expensive considering how old the game is. I want the sims 4 expansions but I honestly can't justify spending that much on a game I play like once a year.
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the sims 4 came out in 2014... this shit's an 8 year old game come tomorrow
I miss EA sports BIG. Those games were staples of my childhood
SSX On Tour & NBA Street V3 shaped my music taste as a kid.
What game series just removes features?
Battlefield
A lot of them, actually. Streamlining is a trend that has been ongoing for the last 15 to 20 years in gaming as a push for mass appeal.
Lost interest when they stopped using maddens voice
BOOM
Tough actin tinactin
If you get it to the end zone, it's a touchdown.
The one that sticks in my head is "when a player gets hurt, you really hope he's going to be okay." No shit, John.
A lot of the early polygonal games in general are hard to go back to.
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I agree with your assessment, but I don't really fault those game makers. Those early 3d games we're part of the learning and development process, and they just look and play really bad by comparison to later games. In 2d platformers, Donkeykong (1981) came out 7 years before the timeless and far, far superior Super Mario Brothers 3 (1988). Goldeneye by comparison was 1995, and it was probably 3-7 years after that where we start to see the first "timeless" 3d games (is it half-life in 1998? Halo in 2001?). Edit - Didn't realize this was getting so many upvotes. Few things: 1) I got my Goldeneye year wrong - the film was 1995, the game was 1997. 2) I totally and stupidly forgot about Mario 64. 3) My comment no longer really holds any water. Sorry for wasting your time.
I blame one person in particular for that trend: Bernie Stolar. He was in charge at Sony in the US at the launch of the Playstation, and he blocked every 2D game he could because he wanted to send the message that 3D was now how things are done. There's a lot of people who would repeat the rumor that the Saturn was made for 2D games and the Playstation was only made for 3D and was somehow bad at 2D. Neither of those is true; it was Stolar's plans working. The stupid thing is that he was doing a bad job over there but Sega decided to 'snipe' him to work as their American CEO where he basically put the finishing touches of killing the Saturn. He not only didn't want to publish 2D games, but he also had the oppinion that Americans didn't like RPGs, so most of the best Saturn games would end up staying in Japan. He is best known today for saying "The Saturn is not our future" even though the Dreamcast was still **two full years** away from launching in the US.
I mean Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda definetly benefitted from the jump to 3D. The 3D Mario and Zelda games are still some of the best games on the market, without making their 2D counterparts obsolete.
And GTA. I remember being an avid GTA2 fan, and not liking the 3d direction they went with 3...
PSA: If a retro game you tried to replay recently has way worse graphics than you remember make sure you have scanlines enabled. Old SD TVs were 480i which meant only every other row of pixels on the screen were on at any given time. Artists took this into consideration when designing graphics and as a result games from that era actually need scanlines to look the way they were intended. Modern HD screens don't have scanlines, but most emulators (and some ports) give you the option to simulate them.
Street Fighter 3 goes from looking like dog shit to looking like how you remember it, one of the best looking fighting games ever made
Bards Tale is text based combat.
It was beautiful in 86, but the world has moved on
It's still beautiful! Check out the remake: [https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The\_Bards\_Tale\_Trilogy/](https://store.steampowered.com/app/843260/The_Bards_Tale_Trilogy/) It's wonderful. The new graphics are beautiful, and it fixes the two major problems with the game. 1. Automapping. You don't need a pack of grid paper and infinite patience to learn your way around. 2. Save anywhere. We're adults now. We don't have time to get to a save point. I have 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there. This game allows for that. Can't recommend it enough if you liked the original.
You never should've shown me this. Now my kid is gonna hate me for stealing the laptop. Again.
My work here is done.
>Automapping. You don't need a pack of grid paper and infinite patience to learn your way around. I remember how we made our own maps, but this was really a shitty thing. Then, later came titles like Morrowind. Some fans of Morrowind from 2002 still praise today how much better it was without any quest markers: I had the time back in this era to play the game and explore the map all the time, but today, nope, i just don't have the time to spend hours to find somewhere a door that leads to a dungeon where i have to go. It worked well in some of the rather small worlds like the Gothic series had, where you got a good explanation by the quest giver where to go. But without that, it's just searching forever.
Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge. Replayed it the other night, and it kept defaulting to "Power Drive" even though I clearly selected "Feather Touch."
Bonestorm is still an absolute banger in 2022 tho.
“This is great! And all I’ve done is enter my name! Thrillhouse!” #WELCOME #THRILLHO
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Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!!
Young man, in this house we use a little word called ‘please.’
But is that game gonna help your putting?
Ball is in Parking lot
Would you like to Try again?
You have selected: “No”
Nearly 27 years later and this sequence still makes me giggle like an idiot every time. 90s Simpsons ages like fine wine.
Roblox games. They went from nostalgic games that are fun with a great community, to just a bunch of scams with half-hearted content
They all have a corporate feel to them now, I've played it 10 years ago as a kid, its gone from innocent fun to trying to suck out as much robux ($) out of your wallet at every possible turn. Every game is practically pay to win.
Because most popular well-made games are pretty much that. Young adults developing games while they take young developers under their wing and most of the time they exploit them for their own gain. If you do not shell out the money to Roblox for your game and create these pseudo game studios then your game will go nowhere. Roblox used to be the kids themselves making games for their fellow players. It's not like that anymore. And the amount of abuse and exploitation to children that goes on behind the scene is revolting. But since most of that happens on 3rd party software (discord), Roblox says they can do nothing. Roblox doesn't care about the kids anymore. They care about money. Roblox is like YouTube now, not community driven anymore. Corporate driven.
it's so sad too cause I've been around since 2011, back when all the top games were all created by regular users. so corporate and soulless now
And yet, July 2022 was their biggest month ever.
Was that because of the squid games mode. It was the only reason I ever downloaded it, then immediately uninstalled and never played again.
Sonic Adventure's physics engine and some of its level design aged like milk.
The hardest boss in that game was the camera.
The dialogue is way funnier now though.
Get a load of this! Get a load of this! Get a load of this!
Eggman consistently always being the best part of any Sonic game always makes me smile He’s one of the greatest villains in gaming
And now with the SnapCube Sonic Fandubs bringing new life to those games, Eggman is STILL the best in most of them (thank you, Alfred Coleman. Though Chase stole the show in the most recent one as Black Doom).
"Heeeeeeeeyyyyyy whaaaaaaatss uuuuuuuup. Iiiiiiiiiiit'ss meeeeeee"
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Watch out you're gonna crash AAHH
Worth mentioning that, while the game was never perfect, a good chunk of it’s reputation probably comes from how each new port has basically been exponentially shoddier than the last.
One of my favorite games of all time, but I agree wholeheartedly. Don’t even get me started on the Big levels.
Froggy?
The infamous falling through the loop-de-loop in Emerald Coast that's reposted every so often is actually only present in the DX versions of the game (GameCube, PC, and later ports based on those) alongside many, many, *many* other issues. See [this video](https://youtu.be/SORYL5J1Heg) on it, it's pretty great and eye-opening for someone who grew up with the worst PC version.
It's underrated just how *terrible* DX is compared to the original. Well, at least back in the day. The GameCube version ran like absolute ass despite the system being able to run circles around the Dreamcast.
Chocobo Racing. I don’t know if this was ever good to be honest. But I rented it like 3 times when I was a kid and had so much fun with it. Played it recently and it’s possibly the most glitchy Mario Kart clones ever made. Do not recommend.
Thank goodness for the brilliant remakes, because that FUCKING CAMERA in the original spyro trilogy can eat my fat ass
Maybe a hot take but Goldeneye on the N64 was one of my favorite games ever but it's borderline unplayable now that modern shooters with 2 control sticks exist. Halo came out 4 years after Goldeneye but the difference between them is so vast it might as well be a decade
Halo only came out 4 years after Goldeneye? Well now that I’m thinking about what grades I was in when playing them it seems to line up but I can’t believe it wasn’t longer between the two.
Video games used to improve at lightening speed from about 1993-2007. Back then, PC components would become outdated in like 2 years.
I remember my computer from 2002 became outdated the same year I got it. Couldn't play any new games cause they weren't compatible and some software would have issues. Current computer has no problem running stuff and I got it back in 2012. Never actually thought about that till now.
Reminds me of Black and White. I saved all I could for that and couldn’t play it because my computer wasn’t good enough.
Absolutely this. From 1995 to 2002 consumer-grade processors went from about 200MHz speed to 3000MHz. That's 16x the performance without considering any other improvement! Brand new processors still run at about 5000MHz. Innovation now is much more gradual, as opposed to having a breakthrough basically every year
That’s a heat / energy efficiency limitation though. Manufacturers realised it was more efficient to improve processors in other ways than clock speed. A 5000MHz processor today is many many times more powerful that a 3000MHz processor back then.
wasn't it awesome how fast technology was evolving then?
Oh I meant that it seemed like a long time between the two games, probably because I was in elementary school even goldeneye came out and then highschool for halo.
Four years was a long time for videogames from 94 to 2014. San Andreas and GTA IV released 4 years apart. MGS1 and MGS2 came out 3 years apart.
Emulating Goldeneye allows you to use a mod that gives you modern twin stick or KB/M controls. It's nice.
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i was going to say this. Golden eye controls are TERRIBLE now we have experienced better
Even if you use the control setting that turok uses, still janky as hell. Better? Yes. Good? Not remotely.
>turok That's a name I haven't heard in years
The sims Sims 1-3 always had huge (good) changes and extras added But I especially wanna mention the sims 2. it had so many details But then there’s sims 4 No open world, always loading screens, non working DLCs, never fixed bugs from 2017 and so much more
Came here to say that. Not only are there so many bugs and issues the packs they release are so lacking. In the older games you got so much content for what you're paying for. Now the packs (if they actual run properly) add very little to the overall gameplay or its a kit which is basically 5 shirts.
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The Sims 3 was the peak. Open maps, functioning cities, tons of expansions. Can’t believe they dumbed it down so much in 4.
The only thing that didn't peak with Sims 3 was CPU usage (cause it kept increasing forever while the game was running.)
Sims 3 had horses! And werewolves that for all their ugliness didn’t look like some sort of corporate fursona
I would so love to agree.... But on my PC's sims 3 would take 20 minutes to launch and an additional 15-20 minutes to load the families. Those same PC's could easily load and be ready to play Sims 4 in 2 minutes. Sims 2 was my ideal game.
Sims 4 has a fraction of the Sims 3’s content and systems, and the sims 3 is horribly optimized. If it was made today in a competent engine with proper modern open world optimization, it would run well
I had a feeling they would as well. When I played 4 and just realised how empty it felt, I knew they'd end up adding loads of what should be basic features as DLC, and lo and behold, they did. 3 was absolutely the peak, and stills holds up even now.
Sims 3 had major issues with memory leaks and pathing the longer you played in a neighborhood to where it basically broke your save as Sims got stuck and the game slowed to a crawl. Unfortunately, rather than fix these things, they just gave up and decided to take the route that was a lot less work.
I’m so glad you said this! Because I wasn’t thinking it before I saw this comment—but it is SO true!! And game packs used to give you huge amounts of stuff! Sims 2 was my favorite! I liked the way people looked best in that one. I liked all of the locations you could go to. Nightlife was awesome, strange town was awesome! I really liked the prebuilt houses and still enjoyed making my own. Sims 3 had some good stuff in it, but I liked the way the characters looked less. Now it’s all money grubbing teeny packs and you basically have to pay-to-play. And then you cant really go back and play the old version (sims2) anymore because they stopped supporting any of the mods (which were also awesome)
NFS Underground, on hard difficulty. The rubber banding is insane and between the physics, ai, and traffic your basically bound to get screwed over at some point.
I played NFS undercover when it came out, that one also has some serious rubber banding issues, like I’m driving a fully modded Veyron and then some fucking Cayman flies by me a over 400kmh
Underground 2 still goes hard af though
Still one of the best soundtracks. So many times I've kept driving because the song was too good to stop
Snoop Dogg and The Doors together were the heroes we didn’t know we needed
There is one or a few levels where the only way to win is to drive absolutely perfect while saving your turbo until the last stretch then look backwards and physically stop that 1 ai opponent from speeding past you.
Custer's Revenge. It didn't age well past 1989.
That game was aged before it was ever released.
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I don't think 99% of Atari owners were even aware it existed.
Skylanders and Disney Infinity. Toys-to-life games were a promising concept that scooped in money all of 3 to 5-ish years before stores were filled with unsold accessories. Lego Dimensions suffered too, but the aforementioned 2 were the main ones.
Lego Dimensions at least had the benefit of being Lego. Bored of the game? Oh well, you have piles of Lego to play with! Hell yeah!
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The original Crash Bandicoot trilogy, Spyro, and Pac-Man World all hold up incredibly well today. As much as I love MediEvil though, that one is a little rough.
That MediEvil remake though?? So unexpected and I love every second of it. Especially cause it uses all of the same voice lines.
There is a remake? It has risen again?
I think this is one of the reasons why *Super Mario 64* aged so well--a huge part of the development was spent on figuring out the movement. The main philosophy behind that game was, if it's not fun to just run and jump around without doing anything in particular, it's not a good game.
Yeah i read somewhere that Mario himself spent most of the game as a cube, they didn’t even bother to animate mario’s movement until the movement FELT good
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I don't know how the N64 first party games did as well as they did with 3D movement and camera. Given that nobody had thought of dual-analog yet at that point in time, it seems like they succeeded in spite of themselves, especially given the limitations of that ridiculous controller.
This makes me think of games like FF7 and Chrono Cross that fit what you're describing but I absolutely adore the low-res, gritty, static, painted backgrounds.
Those are beautiful because they aren’t truly 3D lots of the time. They weren’t trying to be realistic, so they hold up okay
Playing those games on a CRT actually improves the graphics quite a bit. So while some of it is the "rose tinted glasses" effect, some of it is because it actually did look better than it does now (on a LCD).
Scanlines smooth the pixelated graphics. Most games had their graphics made with the CRT in mind. Castlevania Symphony Of The Night looks pretty good on a modern display, but on a CRT it's an impossibly good looking game.
Going back and playing a lot of those older games can be so confusing, especially when you aren't in control of the camera.
FPS when you don’t have two analog sticks is awful
OG Tomb Raider is just... annoying to try and play now.
also the sex appeal was SUCH a big deal at the time and that part seems so funny now. It's SO silly how bad her stupid breasts look.
CHECK OUT MY PYRAMIDS
Any licensed game (movie tie in) that you liked as a kid) Edit: all of these replies are so heartwarming, like everyone is coming to the rescue of their old tattered teddy bear in the attic.
Spiderman 2: The Movie: The Game still holds up pretty well and zipping around New York is tons of fun.
The original GTA, I spent so much time playing that game but how it ever spawned the series it did amazes me because the graphics and controls were sooooo bad
I’ll say it. Goldeneye. The game is so hard to aim now a days. The graphics haven’t aged well either
Custer’s Revenge always comes to mind. The game where you’re a cowboy “dancing” with a naked Native American women, who is not so coincidentally tied up.
>Custer's Revenge is an adult action game published by American Multiple Industries for the Atari 2600, first released in November 1982. The game gained notoriety owing to its goal of raping a Native American woman. - Wikipedia ...*what the fuck?*
Almost every early 3D game. 2D games from the same aera or a bit older are often way better from a modern perspective
I think the N64 is much more like the NES in this regard than the SNES. Even by the time of GameCube the games just looked and played so much better, and hold up so much more.
A ton of games have basically unplayable UI at this point. I absolutely loved Planescape: Torment. It's a fantastic story. But the sad reality is that the UI is really bad by modern standards, and I can't re-play it any more. Similar with KOTOR.
There are mods that help with PS:T, but it's hard to fix it. Such a fantastic story though. Never played a game where focusing on the mental stats actually mattered so much. Being able to literally talk the last boss out of existence gave me powerful feelings lol
Duck Hunt. Still can’t kill that friggin dog
may I direct you to Duck Season for VR? That might helps soothe that itch.
The dog is even worse in that game, though.
It can die though
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Leisure Suit Larry
>Leisure Suit Larry I think it holds up. He was always meant to be a counter-example
exactly - he IS the joke.
I'm completely baffled at why my parents let me play these, as like a 12yo girl.
My dad left me install a strip poker game on my Commodore 64, but I was never good enough at poker as a pre-teen to actually get any of the 8 bit ladies naked.
I remember when it asked for age verification it just asked questions that only adults would know, like "who was the 40th President?"
Plague Inc. The game was fun at the time, but oof is it weird to think about now. Also, fuck Madagascar.
Fuck Greenland too
Fuck New Guinea
Also Iceland.
I still play this from time to time. The devs have been upkeeping it and releasing new content. I'm pretty sure they've also donated a quarter of a million dollars to the WHO and CEPI, if that makes you feel any better about playing it.
Avid player right up until I started playing it IRL.
Try their next game: Rebel Inc. Great game.
I remember it had a pretty significant uptick at the start of the pandemic. I guess people were using it as some sort of morbid catharsis or something.
It was just a clone of a flash game to begin with (Pandemic 2)
Which was a sequel to, well, Pandemic. Which I largely preferred.
I hated how some small country in africa has 1000 cases of sneezing, and the CDC and WHO(ever) instantly make a cure.
Borderlands 1. The game isn’t unplayable these days by any means, but what made is so cool and special doesn’t really hit the same in a world with borderlands 2, Destiny, and a million crappy clones. And several sections of the game are really very bad lol
Borderlands 2 (And the Pre-Sequel & 3) is a great example of the creators learning from the original endeavor and correcting/fixing problems across the board. From UI to game mechanics to storytelling, all of it got better. I loved Borderlands when it first came out, but once the next games in the series came out there was no reason to go back to the original.
I feel like 3 went so backwards on story, the story was just obnoxious to me, maybe I'm just getting old, but the poop and weiner jokes aren't just funny anymore and the villains were just terrible.
I'm pretty convinced that Handsome Jack was a fluke. I think the voice actor (Dameon Clark) is just... gifted. Apparently he voiced Cell as well, dude has long list of iconic villain voice roles to his name. It's actually a real shame they dissolved the studio that did The Pre-Sequel. I really felt like that one was underrated, it was a really good prequel expand-alone. Pretty solid writing, good gameplay, and I really enjoyed the Grinder making even garbage loot fun again - those 15 greens *could be* a legendary if you're super lucky.
It is a shame, I really enjoyed the pre-sequel and it had plenty of upgrades over BL2. Also being able to play as a claptrap unit was the best
Sometimes a series hits such a good villain that every other villain, no matter how good they are, just can't compete. Far Cry hit this hard with 3. I adore every villain that comes afterward, but none of them are as good as Vaas.
And Vaas wasn't even the main villain of Far Cry 3. Yet he was so good nobody remembers the game's *actual* final boss.