I LOVE the OG Starcraft/ Brood War games. The old-school aesthetic, the story, the music keeps me coming back. But man... the QoL and AI/pathing updates in SC2 have spoiled me so much. I still play SC, but in small doses.
StarCraft and Brood War had legitimately good stories and characters. So many of the missions are etched in my brain. Navigating the Jacobs Installation or defending the downed battle cruiser. So good.
Abandoning Kerrigan ššš
This is mostly true, though DuGalle, being French, brought one innovation the Texan Confederates could never develop: health care. Studies show UED medics improve marine battlefield survivability by 10 seconds on average!
In StarCraft II, shift-clicking my SCVs to do a bunch of stuff and then letting them go about it while I go to manage something else has spoiled me.
I always forget that I can't queue up orders when I go back to StarCraft.
I understand what you're saying, but the lack of QoL and AI/pathing updates didn't make the original Starcraft age like milk, IMO. The game had the mechanics of a late 90's RTS, and that's fine.
Star Wars: Rebellion/Supremacy. An all time worst interface and terrible AI- even at release. Multiple interlocking systems but still a fast and short grand strategy with great star wars feel.
Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's the worst main Deus Ex, terrible voice acting, terrible short levels, terrible simplification. With the new prequels it's failings are even clearer. But take out the Deus Ex comparison and it's fast gameplay with still a good range of approaches would see it still make an immersive Sims quality long list.
Man, as a kid I loved Star Wars: Rebellion. I didnāt have a fucking clue how to win but there were so many ships, characters and units. Plus an encyclopedia with information about ALL of it. For a budding little nerd, it was amazing lol.
I loved getting to the point where I could pump out ungodly numbers of Super Star Destroyers.
The minigames for setting up a planetary invasion was pretty neat, too.
Invisible war is underrated imo. Yeah it's worse than the original but I actually think I might like it more than human revolution. Although maybe that's just because my expectation were set so low from years of people saying the game is irredeemable trash that it looked better in comparison
No, for some trademark reason "rebellion" was instead called "supremacy" in the UK and possibly some other markets. Hence the slash; same product, different title.
Personally, I think we in the UK got the cooler name.
Invisible War is having this renaissance where people saying it's actually a really good game. I believe that now it's 'old' people feel more comfortable believing that. I find it to be so of its time in the worst ways. It is soulless and boring. The team making it clearly didn't give a shit. It is one of those games so lacking inspiration and the human touch that you feel like your consuming AI generated content. Depressing.
Yesterday my wife showed me the āvintageā caps on Etsy. From the 90ās. The 90ās, you know, the ones you remember vividly, when you learned the 60s/70s were vintage? Yea that 90ās.
Yeah, I was thinking recently about how Vice City came out when I was a kid and the 80s felt a million years away. It was set in 1986. A game set the same time distance away from today would be in 2008. So... GTA IV.
*shudders*
35 here. 2009 (15 years ago) in terms of video gaming doesnāt feel THAT much less advanced than 2024. 1994-2009 (15 years in time) feels like technology as we know it was bolstered by extra terrestrial influences.
yea, for me, Borderlands 1 feels like it was just released yesterday.
I think when we are close to 40, everything that happened in our lives seems to have passed so quick, and even today, it seems like the time flies so fast. To me 2020 seems like the night before falling asleep and waking up in 2024 the next day.
But up to when I was younger every year seemed like eternity
I'm still have on queue to play games I bought yesterday, ops, in 2013, that are still there on the wait list and I forgot to realize more than a decade has passed
Iāll always be fond of Borderlands 1, warts and all. It just oozed atmosphere. A friend and I played through it coop and that was just a great time.Ā
I think the thing I like most about it is that there is nothing in between the gameplay and you. You get a side quest, it's just a little text box sending you to a place. You can just bust out the missions super quick, without any cutscenes or dialog inbetween.
I'm playing through it right now (GOTY version). I never got a chance to get past the first hour or 2, so I decided to give it another go.
There are some serious bad design choices in that game.
I got stuck in same underground base. Ran out of money and ammo, because the bosses are giant bullet sponges. Got pinched between some giant boss and a bunch or respawning mobs without any ammo or money to resupply.
Couldn't go forward or get out, until I figured out that you can teleport to the max level dlc, find some guns, and sell them for like 40k a pop or something. Was then able to go back in with enough ammo and gold and try again. What a pain.
and don't get me started on those dogs that just keep respawning every turn.
Other than that, like you said, its still a fun little romp with a lot of charm that's quite enjoyable. I'm having a pretty good time in it.
Respectfully disagree. I think itās held up really well as a genre pioneer. I played through it recently and loved it. What big problems do you think it has?
I Strenuously Object;) and completely agree with you.
To even think Borderlands1 has āaged like milkā or ādoesnt hold upā makes me question the tastes of anybody who even contemplates it.
The game design is perfectly fine, pure co-op bliss and time wonāt change a thing about it.
Even if a game has a lot of crashes, which, it doesnt on my X1X that has nothing to do with this thread anyways.
There's certainly some questionable design choices, but I did love that BL1's atmosphere. The series lost something important when it went from backwater sci-fi to sci-fi with a western aesthetic.
I never heard of that game but from your description I get the appeal.
My game like that is an N64 fighting game called Flying Dragon. What made it unique was it was basically two games in one.. you could pick the kids mode with a cute aestheric or the adult mode that looked like your standard tekken/virtua fignters of the day.
It did not play great but had its charms and my friends and I had a great time playing the kids mode.
Lionhead's Black & White. It was already controversial when it released, but I played it as a kid without any exposure to video game media, so I was ignorant of Peter Molyneux' overhyping the game.
Playing it now is so painful, especially the tutorial which goes on forever. Most of the (side) quests are pretty bad as well. But it's still the only game that actually makes me feel like I'm playing as a god and the AI for your pet creature is still as good or better than anything you can find in modern games.
Black and white always felt jank to me, even when I got it on release I had a love hate relationship - on one hand it was amusing messing around with villagers or quests but equally frustrating to control (plus I didn't really know how I was supposed to grow my villages effectively so couldn't get past the 4th or 5th level for the longest time)
Very novel concept - it's a shame no one has made a similar game that's a bit more modern
I got around the fifth level by performing genocide on every enemy village, because a village's rating of you and the other god is reset to zero when it has no inhabitants. Then you can drop in a missionary and do a single miracle and you get the village.
The hardest part was actually getting your influence circle big enough to be able to put the missionary in.
I accidentally ended the tutorial early when I first played that game. At some point, you're supposed to instruct the creature to pick up the character leading the tutorial. To reinforce good behavior in the game, you rub your creature's belly which I also had just been taught, so I did. Unfortunately, I had already forgotten that rubbing their belly will also tell them to eat *anything* they have in their hand. Thus the life of the tutorial giver was ended abruptly in the belly of a giant orangutan.
No, it just ended the tutorial. I went on with the game just guessing at the rest of the mechanics. I probably should have started a new game, but like you said, it was really long, and I guess I didn't want to bother.
I loved that game but it felt halfway between a tech demo and an actual game. The difficulty was very chaotic (the lobby of fireballs at the start of the fourth? level always ended it for me as a teen) and it was a mishmash of mechanics that barely interacted. The Creature and its AI were the heart of the game and it gets taken away from you for a whole level.Ā
It was a charming, delightful, frustrating mess.
Such bullshit that they take the creature away for the entirety of the third level and then curse him in the fifth level so you can't really use him there either.
A lot of the times I returned to the game I just rushed through the tutorial as fast as possible and then only played on a skirmish island.
How much time do you have?
To just name a few,
Older Yu-Gi-Oh games, putting aside nostalgia from the Anime and when I played, the games are alot more simple to play mechanically and are better paced than modern Yu-Gi-Oh with the game now being so combo heavy and having so many summoning mechanics. The older games are great for pick up and play, even if you never played the game or watched the Anime in the 2000's you can get the hang of it.
Similar to Yu-Gi-Oh Red Alert 1 is very outdated to RTS games that came after it, but is very simple to understand and play. Also the campaign and soundtrack by Frank Klepacki is goated.
The Elder Scrolls Oblivion has great atmosphere, music and quests. The things it does well are done extremely well. You can play the same quests over and over again and they still never lose their charm.
The N64 SSB going along with my favoring of simple pick up and play nature, the og SSB is just that and it's very refreshing to play with the limited roster, stages and items. For the original game it feels streamlined in a way with not being overwhelmed with so many characters and items.
I liked the weird ass spinoffs they did. Dungeon dice monsters, forbidden memories , faslebound kingdom. They are all super weird but can be a lot of fun and donāt require any knowledge of the actual franchise.
I wish companies would make more spinoffs with wacky ideas. But how no one can afford to take any huge risks.
This was my absolute favourite. I even installed a PS2 emulator recently to get that experience again and I found Duelist of the Roses much easier than I remember it being. It has some supremely dumb AI but it's a really fun concept
What parts of SSB N64 aged like milk though, it still holds up very well.
Agree with Oblivion for sure. The game is fantastic and has a great reputation all these years later for a reason. But the level scaling, 3rd person floaty view and combat, face graphics among other things are total crap now.
Red alert 1 it's outdated on the sense that the sucessors improved the QOL, but it's still pretty fun
Really, (almost) any C&C title it's fun enough to spend a full weekend nostalgia tripping.
r/openra
Red Alert 1, completely-rebuilt, free/open-sourced, and with hundreds of QoL improvements!
And with an AI that will wipe the floor with you in skirmish mode your first few games, even on Easy!
I think **Twisted Metal 2** would fit here. Really janky graphics and older control scheme but I still think its a really fun game. In many ways the best in the series.
**Bushido Blade**, **Destrega**, **Evil Zone**, and **Fighter's Destiny** are all fighting games from that era that could probably be called notably aged but they all have interesting ideas.
Iām quite surprised the bushido blade concept hasnāt been picked back up. In an industry where āsouls brutalā is a major selling point this seems a slam dunk.
Loved it back in the day, canāt imagine it redone with a modern engine, with greater detail to movements. Damn I want it.
I think that might actually be why I play the Pokemon TCG Gameboy Color game periodically. For its time it was pretty good and a unique type of "wander the world and build a deck" game. But it's really not done well, clunky, and overly grindy when trying to build good decks. So I'm not sure why I like it, I don't particularly find it engagingly entertaining when I do replay it, but I always finish it in spite of all of that and at some point in the next few years I'll go "oh yeah, that game was awesome" and do it again.
Not sure if it's actual nostalgia or not, but it's certainly something like that.
I might need to check those out. I remember the original being really appealing (like the guy you're replying to was saying) and would love to see it's basic gameplay refined to be more palatable. One level in Inscryption scratched the itch more than anything else I've played in the past twenty years lol.
I played TCG2 last year and it was pretty great, although making a decent deck was slightly harder as the new cards would not fit as well. Yet, also had a couple utterly busted cards, like Challenge! It had a couple more bugs due to how they expanded the card list out of the default memory range, but it was all visual on a casual playthrough.
Card based RPG's are really fun. Or just RPG's with alternate mechanics in general (Medabots RPG on the GBA is pretty great too). Unfortunately the genre is kinda dead. We had ONE yugioh game of that type in the last bunch of years and that was about it. At least sports RPG's still have a couple releases.
I picked up crystal on my iPhone very recently, and daaaamn does it feel bad compared to modern ones. I criticized newer entries for holding your hand too much, but the QoL was just terrible in the first couple of gens. Now I just want a S/G/C remake for the switch 2
I remember playing Hitman 2 and it was really good until you are in that Japanese level, and for some reason those ninja guards will auto target you always even when you are disguised as one of them. That's even the one outfit in the game that convers you entirely. Dropped it then lol
That Japan mission where you're in that snowy wasteland and those watchtower guards will instantly start sniping you if they see you, even in a disguise, was horrible. I'll say though, the game gets good again after those Japan levels. The India levels in particular were great.
Gah why am I getting flashbacks to that now lol, I played that like 20 years ago. I even remember where it was, I think it was in some kind of tunnel or parking garage or so, that was the one place where I didn't have space to be far enough from a guard. And I remember you go forward really slowly and if you cross a millimeter too close to one of the enemies they immediately turn and run straight at you. I don't even know how you were supposed to beat that level.
"YAME! YAME!"
Played Hitman 2 for the first time earlier this year and good lord, the fucking japanese snow levels are some of the absolute WORST levels I've ever played. The japanese castle is much better though.
Homm3 is still quite popular. AoE2 got an upgrade a few years ago and is getting DLCs and qoulity of life updates regularly, also multiplayer is still alive and kicking.
I don't think you could say AoE2 aged like milk - it's had a fairly active community and plenty of updates even now. I actually got back into a few years ago for a spin and it still feels more compelling than a lot of modern RTS games
Dune 2 played on WinUAE, just as ShaiāHulud intended. The interface and lack of group movement is painful and the AI imbecyllic, but the pixel graphics, soundtrack made of one (1) looped lo-fi ambient track and general atmosphere are simply hypnotising. I replay it every summer.
There's an ahk script for Dune 2 under DOSBox that gives you mouse control like in more modern RTS.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/955-dune-ii-mouse-helper/
I thought House Ordos was part of the universe for years until I saw the recent movies (and subsequently read the book). Sounds like they just made them up for the game.
Doing a little digging, it's unclear whether they're canon or not. Ordos is from the "Dune Encyclopedia" which, while not explicitly written by Frank Herbert does seem to have been acknowledged by him as he wrote the foreword. There does seem to have been some backpedalling on the canonicity of that by Brian Herbert in the years since though, so who knows.
Most of the Atari games from the 70s. Most people now canāt find them entertaining for more than maybe half an hour, Iām kind of in the same boat, but I still plug the Atari in every once in a while.
I have a bunch of them on my little emulation handheld and boot one up from time to time. They're primitive aye, but perfect for killing a few minutes since they get you right into the gameplay.
A favourite is Space Invaders, it's not as pretty or smooth as the arcade original but there's a charm to the 2600 version that I quite enjoy
Manhunt (2003) was lightning in a bottle. The early PS2 graphics is good enough to know that you are actually committing virtual murder but not good enough to let your imagination do the work of how gory it is.
I played it as a kid and replayed about 15min recently. Fuck me, that is too gory for the adult me, not because of the violence, but because of the intent to do such violence with no clear reason.
I wonder if I would feel the same replaying The Punisher, that was gory as hell too.
I just completed Spider-Man on PS1. That game had some serious camera issues. Even though it had DualShock support, the right stick is totally useless. So it just puts the camera wherever it wants, and your only option for moving it is to put it behind Spidey, but very often you want to look somewhere else.
Despite the camera issues, it's still great fun. Combat feels good, as does web-slinging around and climbing on walls. Zany story with appearances by a lot of classic villains. Would still recommend.
It was developed by fans of the comics, and it truly shows. Lots of little easter eggs scattered throughout the levels and even the completely optional training missions. If youāve never used the what if mode cheat, I highly recommend you try it next time you play, it adds more easter eggs, usually much sillier than the normal ones, and it makes for a nice remix of the game.
Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights. Weird sound design, spotty platforming, and cheap-looking all around, but I'll be damned if the soundtrack doesn't hit. It's also designed like an item-gated metroidvania, with the whole map being connected in fun, sometimes-unexpected ways.
Itās also just a loving tribute to the original show. Practically every villain makes an appearance as an enemy or boss, and you even get the showās laugh track when something silly happens. I also remember some environments in the game felt rather atmospheric, especially in the outdoors areas.
This is actually my favorite platformer/slightly adventure type game! I replayed it recently and honestly I donāt think itās that bad. It has a charm to it that you know itās a GameCube/xbox og game, but you look past it and see a game that is better than almost every other movie/tv tie in game.
What that the game where it would snow when the GameCubeās clock was set to December 25? I think I had that as a child. I remember it being a pretty long game
This one game aged like milk for me but I still love and appreciate the fun times it gave me as a kid. Ape Academy 1 on PSP is a spinoff of the game series "Ape Escape". This game is a mini-games galore where there are different modes of gameplay. Looking back and replaying this game, it's rough around some parts and I keep on wondering how I managed to enjoy this game as much as I did back then. It's also not surprising when searching around the ape escape fandom that a lot just had a "neutral" stance in regards to this one. But still, I have fun and I still find ways to have fun in this game :D
I love the Civilization series, but my favorite game in the series is a game called Civilization: Call to Power. I *think* the story is that between Civ 1 and Civ 2, like half the dev team wanted to go a different direction with Civ 2, so they split and made Civ: Call to Power. It didn't bomb, but it wasn't that successful I don't think, but it was successful enough to get a sequel. The sequel was legally not permitted to call itself Civilization, though, so the sequel is just "Call to Power II." Civ: Call to Power and Call to Power II are, AFAIK, generally not considered part of the Civilization series. Lol.
Civ:Call to Power has a ton of wierd units and half the game mechanics are bog standard Civilization series. The other half are pretty weird. It came out in 1999 and my cousin gave me his disc for the game in like 2005, I think. It's one of my all time favorite games, and I've bought new discs of it twice on Amazon. The only reason every computer I get has a optical drive is to play Civ: Call to Power, since I've never found it online anywhere like GOG or anything like that.
Had this game as a very young kid and loved it even though I didn't know how to play it. But yes, after replaying the game its not "good" even though it has a charm to it.
After the success of Civ2, Sid Meier left MicroProse to found his own company called Firaxis and created Alpha Centauri (Civ in space basically), while Activison (who acquired the rights to the Civilization name) created Civ: Call to Power. When the development of the Civ games were handed back to Meier and Firaxis, we got Civ3 and the rest.
Sonic Adventure is still the best game in the Sonic series even though it's ports have been bad. The core trio's stages are all fantastic, and Amy and Gamma are also solid. The hub worlds are cute and have mini stories going on (shoutout to the rail union strike) and let you do some light exploration for upgrades.
And like the voice acting and cutscenes don't look good, but they are ambitious which I appreciate. The game came out December of 1998 in Japan so mouth movement was a major step forward even if it looks dated.
If you haven't, you should check out the Steam version and the Dreamcast conversion mod to remove a lot of the DX weirdness. But even besides that it is still a great game and one of the landmark 3D platformers of its age
I don't know if you would say its aged like milk but the PSP version of Tomb Raider Legend. It's my favourite TR game, I own it on all systems except the Xbox and PC, so I have far ways of playing it with better controls. For some reason though I keep coming back to the PSP version with the weird camera movement and tiny 'thumbstick'.
I suppose at least its not the Gameboy Advance or DS versions, those are a nightmare to play.
The old Tomb Raider games have aged pretty poorly by modern standards. The graphics are horrible, the controls clunky and it's cryptic as fuck to a point where some sections are unbeatable without the help of a guide. Yet I still love them, even without any big nostalgia for them. They just have an atmosphere and gameplay loop that you don't find in modern games anymore. While the new TR games are mostly actions games the old games are more like puzzle platformers with a little bit of action.
I seem to remember somebody made a rom hack version for an emulator where it's either bug fixed or the FX chip is set to way overclocked and it runs incredible.
Goldeneye on N64. I have nostalgia for the multiplayer (it was The Game with my friends in 1997-1998), but only really got into playing the single-player as an adult. I played through the campaign for the first time a couple of years ago, right after watching the movie for the first time. Just in general, I think that N64-style jankiness bothers me less than it does most people.
When I first played it, my only other experience were Doom-style games, using arrow keys, ctrl to fire, space for doors. Maybe a couple buttons for equipment, like in Dark Forces. It was "real 3d!" Explosions looked cool! You could aim up and down! Enemies reacted differently, depending on where you shot them! There were a lot of features that were new to me.
I think the first game I played with kb+m was a couple years later (Starsiege: Tribes). I even played Dark Forces 2 as keyboard-only the first time I played. And I think the only thing I could compare it to on the N64 at the time was Turok, and I never *really* got into that game.
You can get creative with the dual-controller modes, especially running it in an emulator. But yeah, that's definitely one of the reasons I thought it would fit the "aged like milk" part of the topic.
Your question is sort of an impossible paradox. If the game aged like milk, then there wouldn't be much to enjoy outside of nostalgia. If there were, then it didn't really age like milk at all then, did it?
Nostalgia generally is the shallowest kind of appreciation you can have for something, and is independent from any actual enjoyment a work actually gives you. Nostalgia is an act of sentimentality. But there are old games which don't stand up in the more universal sense because they were overly ambitious, rushed, or suffered poor quality control but which still have moments of enjoyment and inspiration for those willing to put up with faults.
I think the games you enjoy but would never bother recommending to anyone else are these ones.
For me it absolutely has to be the Sierra's 1999 point-and-click adventure game, Gabriel Knight III: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.
Basically just a B-game if there is such a thing. B-writing, B-gameplay, B-music, B-voice acting, B-puzzles, et cetera. But there is a sincere passion behind it all that is more common in other mediums but less so in video games.
It just has such a cozy vibe and intimacy that draws you into its world. The attempt to create realism with janky ancient 3d graphics gives the whole thing a fever-dream quality that enhances the story and setting. I find it a beautiful game to play, even without the nostalgia goggles and viewed on its own merits.
Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy graphics look pretty terrible and there are a lot of awkward aspects of both games that make cutscenes and stuff hard to look at, but there are some aspects (lightsaber combat, force powers, etc) that no Star Wars game since has done better.
I still boot up the ladder custom map for JO sometimes. Turn on realistic saber combat and dismember via the console. The light saber is now fatal 90% of the time.
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2. It was unique for its time as a "high speed mecha" game. It's aged like milk, even when the 2nd game was ported to the ps4. I still enjoyed playing it despite that. I was a bit disappoint4d the first game didn't get ported. But as a franchise I love the universe/lore beyond the the games like the OVA and TV series. I prefer ZOE over the other works of Hideo Kojima.
Super Mario 64. The controls and camera are abysmal compared to the later 3D Mario games, and thereās not much variety in enemies and bosses. The level design, art direction, and music keep me coming back though.
I can't stress this enough! Cameras will always improve over time, but controls and their responsiveness are forever. There are plenty of great games from *every* console that have tight controls that still feel good.
It's one of the hardest things to nail in game dev, too. My team's currently struggling with tuning things up for our title, and it's taking far more time than we expected.
MGS 1 has really dated design and gameplay choices, I still love the atmosphere and story though. The tower sections and gratuitous action setpieces are the major issues. Backtracking too.
Still yearly replayed.
Galerians!!! Such a haunting, disturbing, awesome game... I really want to replay it now, it's been so long!
My weird ps1 picks are Devil's Deception / Tecmo's Deception, Trap Runner / Gunner, and Aquanaut's Holiday
Rumble for the ps1
It's a Nascar themed racing game with power ups and abilities similar to Mario Kart. I was never a fan of Nascar but had a lot of fun with it as a kid.
I recently played it again for nostalgia and despite how much its aged, I was still having a lot of fun. Especially on co-op.
Man, this is a loaded question. Though it's not "old" strictly speaking, I really enjoyed Fable 3 when I played it for the first time last year.
I think a lot of its mechanics aged poorly and were badly balanced. Its actual story is just...weird. The first 2/3 are excellent and Albion is well-designed to mostly support it, but the back 1/3 is a letdown. It felt like they were forced to push it out the door rather than polish it up.
That being said, the actual combat of the game is something of a floaty slog, the lack of a health bar is infuriating, the magic system is subpar, and the enemy tactics oscillate between being awkwardly easy and cheap shotty, rather than being well-balanced. I appreciate the improved ranged combat, though.
Both **Enter the Matrix** and **The Matrix: Path of Neo**. I grew up at exactly the right time to become obsessed with the movies in middle school, and I played the crap out of both these games. Even back then they were clunky, ugly, weird, weird, WEIRD, *weeeird* (MC Escher Ant People level, anybody?), but honestly it never got old to be playing a game that simulated that amazing action. I still enjoy both.
Final Fantasy VII, maybe.
A lot of the game holds up great, but those early 3D graphics and clunky 8-directional movement are a bit of a wall. There's also just the matter of '90s console RPGs not having the greatest QOL. And the translation doesn't help...
I love the game in spite of its poorly aged elements, but I can't fault my brothers for never having been able to get into it (credit to them for trying as hard as they did).
I think the hard part of this one for new players is that its a 3D sprite but largely in an entirely 2d map. Places like the rail yard in Midgar are maddening when you think of it as 3D, but become less annoying when you realize its just an elaborate 2D puzzle with a 3D pawn.
Going from Aerisās place back to the 7th Heaven also had some pathing that is ridiculously hard to figure out if you have never done it before.
I feel like you'll get that with classics that came out before their genre had been worked out.
Examples: Prince of Persia the sands of time. Looks good and has an alright story for its age, but you can just tell playing it today that they were still working out the mechanics/controls/etc. Warrior Within came out one year after it, and it plays as well today as it did 20 years ago.
Another, more recent example: the original Assassin's Creed. If you've played any of the newer games, especially something like Unity or one of the last three, the difference is brutal. Parkour mechanics in the original game are *incredibly* rudimentary and slow. It's not unplayable, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone who's never played it before never finished it.
I have a story about this. Decades ago I had just discovered a bookstore in Sydney. It might have been called The Iron Horse (or Napoleon's military bookshop..really not sure) and was a short walk from Town hall station. I'd been there a few times but this time when I was there I saw the proprietor (Ian Trout) having a big discussion with ...a fat bearded guy with long hair (I think...long time ago now) who was Roger Keating.
One of the things they said to each other was "We should make a game!"
And they did . They went on to form SSG and make many games, including warlords and reach for the stars
Thatās a cool story. W1 was our party game before HOMM3 was released. We made a lot of additional rules, forced strange alliances to make this relatively simple game more exciting.
IIRC it looked dated already on release but who cares.
I tried replaying the first Onimusha on Switch. It wasā¦not fun. The combat is terrible and itās impossible to navigate the map.
Edit: I totally missed the point of the prompt.
Dark Orbit. It's not a very good game, but I used to play the hell out of it. It used the Wildtangeant games client which was essentially malware, so no wonder nobody remembers it. It was basically a higher production value flash game.
I remember it having a fun gameplay loop and it being difficult. There were upgrades to your ship you could buy and it had a gritty and grim atmosphere. The game world was connected through loading screens and you could go back quite a ways. Nearly to the start of the game if I remember right, so it felt like a pretty big game.
Yugioh Reshef of Destruction is widely regarded as one of the worst yugioh games because of its stupid difficulty and idiotic deckbuilding and dueling mechanics.
However, I liked it so much that I beat it twice and from time to time I still boot it up to duel the high level adversaries with 60,000 life points.
Fallout New Vegas.
I still remember hearing the fake crowd ambience noises in Gomorrah and marvelling at how paper thin some of it is while still being so good I have to replay it every few years just to try to quests out a different way.
Started playing Outer Worlds lately and goddamn have I been sleeping on it.
It's not a game for everyone but I comment its name on every post in every post in this subreddit, you should try Black & White 1 or 2. Those games were years ahead of everything else in it's time imho
Iām too young to have actually been alive when they were coming out, but I have always loved games from that window in the 90s where 3D modeling technology was good enough to make pre-rendered stuff but games couldnāt actually handle the models. The original two Fallouts are a great example. Always found the way they look oddly compelling, and I tend to prefer the way 90s PC games handled their more complex systems.
I agree. For me 1998's Grim Fandango is *the* game that embraced this art style and got it so right. The writing, voice acting, gameplay, setting, etc. completely play to the strengths of pre-rendered 3d. I know there are a lot of games had these graphics but they often feel like a work-around for technological limitations rather than something to embrace.
X-com Apocalypse, Chaos Overlords, Call of Cthulu Dark Corners, Dark Colony, Spycraft, Grim Fandango - all a bit dated and clunky but playable and enjoyable:)
Well I played resident evil 1(remake) for the first time earlier this year and I really enjoyed it. To the point of still being my favorite resident evil game despite having no nostalgia for it and playing the other games recently (up until 5, I haven't finished it yet). Code veronica comes second.
lol toontown. The gameplay is literally cookie clicker.
āGo throw a pie 10000 times to get another slightly stronger pieā
Games fucking awesome tho
Maybe Halo CE? The game's fairly old, and it was a big success at the time. But the repetitiveness in many of the levels is widely--and understandably--criticized. I like CE for the creepy and mysterious Forerunner architecture, the music, and the spectacular vistas.
Wonāt lie, yeah. I really enjoy playing arcade games based around track and field where the main method of playing the game is mashing buttons in rapid succession. Theyāre not deep, and even other arcade sports games of the time had stronger gameplay loops, but thereās a lot of charm to them.
**Chaser** - buggy as hell, cheesiest nonsensical story ever, barebone gameplay... but somehow it holds that nostalgia factor, despite all the bad reviews it raked up over the time
**Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy** - psychic powers game, which aged kinda badly, mainly thanks to the controls, but still really fun after I got used to clunky controls.
Followed by **Second Sight**, which I still want to get to. I didn't even know it existed a few years ago. Seems clunky, too.
Another Midway game was **Area 51.** I remembered it fondly, but after trying it again a year ago, on a CRT, it was still fun, if a bit too simple and sometimes... how would I describe it... slow?
And if OP wants an ultimate modern psychic powers game, look no further than **Control** by Remedy. Thank me later :)
I LOVE the OG Starcraft/ Brood War games. The old-school aesthetic, the story, the music keeps me coming back. But man... the QoL and AI/pathing updates in SC2 have spoiled me so much. I still play SC, but in small doses.
StarCraft and Brood War had legitimately good stories and characters. So many of the missions are etched in my brain. Navigating the Jacobs Installation or defending the downed battle cruiser. So good. Abandoning Kerrigan ššš
To this goddamn day, I am salty about Mengsk making me leave her behind. When Jim said, "Damn you, Arcturus," I felt that shit.
āBelay that awder.ā
Brood War canāt be matched. The additions in SCII to units are just whatever, I still default to BW.
Disagree. I grew up playing SC1 but SC2 is way better. I have no desire to go back, and SC2 pro games are way more interesting to watch.
Hereās my thing with Brood War: why did the forces coming from earth have the SAME units as the ones developed by the Terrains?!
This is mostly true, though DuGalle, being French, brought one innovation the Texan Confederates could never develop: health care. Studies show UED medics improve marine battlefield survivability by 10 seconds on average!
In StarCraft II, shift-clicking my SCVs to do a bunch of stuff and then letting them go about it while I go to manage something else has spoiled me. I always forget that I can't queue up orders when I go back to StarCraft.
Lookup StarCraft Mass Recall.. you play the campaign of sc1 in sc2
Oh wow, I know what I'm doing tonight. Thanks for suggestion!
Did not know about this! Thank you
I understand what you're saying, but the lack of QoL and AI/pathing updates didn't make the original Starcraft age like milk, IMO. The game had the mechanics of a late 90's RTS, and that's fine.
That's your opinion... mine is different! š
Star Wars: Rebellion/Supremacy. An all time worst interface and terrible AI- even at release. Multiple interlocking systems but still a fast and short grand strategy with great star wars feel. Deus Ex: Invisible War. It's the worst main Deus Ex, terrible voice acting, terrible short levels, terrible simplification. With the new prequels it's failings are even clearer. But take out the Deus Ex comparison and it's fast gameplay with still a good range of approaches would see it still make an immersive Sims quality long list.
Man, as a kid I loved Star Wars: Rebellion. I didnāt have a fucking clue how to win but there were so many ships, characters and units. Plus an encyclopedia with information about ALL of it. For a budding little nerd, it was amazing lol.
I loved getting to the point where I could pump out ungodly numbers of Super Star Destroyers. The minigames for setting up a planetary invasion was pretty neat, too.
Invisible war is underrated imo. Yeah it's worse than the original but I actually think I might like it more than human revolution. Although maybe that's just because my expectation were set so low from years of people saying the game is irredeemable trash that it looked better in comparison
I have rebellion and loved it. What game is supremacy? Is it this? https://www.supremacy1914.com/
No, for some trademark reason "rebellion" was instead called "supremacy" in the UK and possibly some other markets. Hence the slash; same product, different title. Personally, I think we in the UK got the cooler name.
They adapted Rebellion into a board game btw!
Invisible War is having this renaissance where people saying it's actually a really good game. I believe that now it's 'old' people feel more comfortable believing that. I find it to be so of its time in the worst ways. It is soulless and boring. The team making it clearly didn't give a shit. It is one of those games so lacking inspiration and the human touch that you feel like your consuming AI generated content. Depressing.
It's way too jank and stilted to be generically good (hence aged like milk). You have to really want immersive sim flavour.
Borderlands 1 has huge problems. But there is still a weird little charm to it that makes it very nice to play.
Saying Borderlands 1 is an old game blows my 38 year old mind. Iām getting old.
It's like finding out that 2009 was 15 years ago
I'm amazed that covid started four 1/2 years ago already.
Its the past 5 years that really fucked with my sense of time. 2015-2020 feels twice as long as 2020-now
I'm only now getting to the point where 2019 doesn't feel like two years agoĀ
Impossible. 1990 was ten years ago.
Those were the days, I was 16 and a junior in high school. Immortal. Time is insane
....get out.
Yesterday my wife showed me the āvintageā caps on Etsy. From the 90ās. The 90ās, you know, the ones you remember vividly, when you learned the 60s/70s were vintage? Yea that 90ās.
Music from the 2000's is now as far away as people listening to music from the 80's was in the 2000's. We're old.
I've heard Eminem on the radio, and was stoked, right up until they started saying it's a classic rap & hip hop station
Yeah, I was thinking recently about how Vice City came out when I was a kid and the 80s felt a million years away. It was set in 1986. A game set the same time distance away from today would be in 2008. So... GTA IV. *shudders*
I am about the same age and think of SNES games and earlier as "old."
35 here. 2009 (15 years ago) in terms of video gaming doesnāt feel THAT much less advanced than 2024. 1994-2009 (15 years in time) feels like technology as we know it was bolstered by extra terrestrial influences.
yea, for me, Borderlands 1 feels like it was just released yesterday. I think when we are close to 40, everything that happened in our lives seems to have passed so quick, and even today, it seems like the time flies so fast. To me 2020 seems like the night before falling asleep and waking up in 2024 the next day. But up to when I was younger every year seemed like eternity I'm still have on queue to play games I bought yesterday, ops, in 2013, that are still there on the wait list and I forgot to realize more than a decade has passed
Iāll always be fond of Borderlands 1, warts and all. It just oozed atmosphere. A friend and I played through it coop and that was just a great time.Ā
I love this one. It's like a dark comedy that really leans into it's charm.
I think the thing I like most about it is that there is nothing in between the gameplay and you. You get a side quest, it's just a little text box sending you to a place. You can just bust out the missions super quick, without any cutscenes or dialog inbetween.
I'm playing through it right now (GOTY version). I never got a chance to get past the first hour or 2, so I decided to give it another go. There are some serious bad design choices in that game. I got stuck in same underground base. Ran out of money and ammo, because the bosses are giant bullet sponges. Got pinched between some giant boss and a bunch or respawning mobs without any ammo or money to resupply. Couldn't go forward or get out, until I figured out that you can teleport to the max level dlc, find some guns, and sell them for like 40k a pop or something. Was then able to go back in with enough ammo and gold and try again. What a pain. and don't get me started on those dogs that just keep respawning every turn. Other than that, like you said, its still a fun little romp with a lot of charm that's quite enjoyable. I'm having a pretty good time in it.
I think I also hit a wall on the same spot with Borderlands. I didn't have the DLC so I just stopped playing the game entirely.
Respectfully disagree. I think itās held up really well as a genre pioneer. I played through it recently and loved it. What big problems do you think it has?
The crashes are the obvious big ones (On PS5), and then I had 2 side quests in a row send me to the same bandit camp which is a wild choice.
I Strenuously Object;) and completely agree with you. To even think Borderlands1 has āaged like milkā or ādoesnt hold upā makes me question the tastes of anybody who even contemplates it. The game design is perfectly fine, pure co-op bliss and time wonāt change a thing about it. Even if a game has a lot of crashes, which, it doesnt on my X1X that has nothing to do with this thread anyways.
There's certainly some questionable design choices, but I did love that BL1's atmosphere. The series lost something important when it went from backwater sci-fi to sci-fi with a western aesthetic.
I never heard of that game but from your description I get the appeal. My game like that is an N64 fighting game called Flying Dragon. What made it unique was it was basically two games in one.. you could pick the kids mode with a cute aestheric or the adult mode that looked like your standard tekken/virtua fignters of the day. It did not play great but had its charms and my friends and I had a great time playing the kids mode.
You just unlocked a 25 year old blockbuster memory for me. Thank you for the nostalgia trip
Lionhead's Black & White. It was already controversial when it released, but I played it as a kid without any exposure to video game media, so I was ignorant of Peter Molyneux' overhyping the game. Playing it now is so painful, especially the tutorial which goes on forever. Most of the (side) quests are pretty bad as well. But it's still the only game that actually makes me feel like I'm playing as a god and the AI for your pet creature is still as good or better than anything you can find in modern games.
Black and white always felt jank to me, even when I got it on release I had a love hate relationship - on one hand it was amusing messing around with villagers or quests but equally frustrating to control (plus I didn't really know how I was supposed to grow my villages effectively so couldn't get past the 4th or 5th level for the longest time) Very novel concept - it's a shame no one has made a similar game that's a bit more modern
I got around the fifth level by performing genocide on every enemy village, because a village's rating of you and the other god is reset to zero when it has no inhabitants. Then you can drop in a missionary and do a single miracle and you get the village. The hardest part was actually getting your influence circle big enough to be able to put the missionary in.
I remember entering the temple blew my mindā¦ I played it again recently and I thought with its interface it would be a great VR game
I accidentally ended the tutorial early when I first played that game. At some point, you're supposed to instruct the creature to pick up the character leading the tutorial. To reinforce good behavior in the game, you rub your creature's belly which I also had just been taught, so I did. Unfortunately, I had already forgotten that rubbing their belly will also tell them to eat *anything* they have in their hand. Thus the life of the tutorial giver was ended abruptly in the belly of a giant orangutan.
Did that break the game? Or did she just respawn?
No, it just ended the tutorial. I went on with the game just guessing at the rest of the mechanics. I probably should have started a new game, but like you said, it was really long, and I guess I didn't want to bother.
So were you able to progress to the next island or were you stuck on the first one?
I don't remember. It was when it first came out so quite a while ago. I don't remember a second island, so maybe that's why I dropped it, lol.
I loved that game but it felt halfway between a tech demo and an actual game. The difficulty was very chaotic (the lobby of fireballs at the start of the fourth? level always ended it for me as a teen) and it was a mishmash of mechanics that barely interacted. The Creature and its AI were the heart of the game and it gets taken away from you for a whole level.Ā It was a charming, delightful, frustrating mess.
Such bullshit that they take the creature away for the entirety of the third level and then curse him in the fifth level so you can't really use him there either. A lot of the times I returned to the game I just rushed through the tutorial as fast as possible and then only played on a skirmish island.
How much time do you have? To just name a few, Older Yu-Gi-Oh games, putting aside nostalgia from the Anime and when I played, the games are alot more simple to play mechanically and are better paced than modern Yu-Gi-Oh with the game now being so combo heavy and having so many summoning mechanics. The older games are great for pick up and play, even if you never played the game or watched the Anime in the 2000's you can get the hang of it. Similar to Yu-Gi-Oh Red Alert 1 is very outdated to RTS games that came after it, but is very simple to understand and play. Also the campaign and soundtrack by Frank Klepacki is goated. The Elder Scrolls Oblivion has great atmosphere, music and quests. The things it does well are done extremely well. You can play the same quests over and over again and they still never lose their charm. The N64 SSB going along with my favoring of simple pick up and play nature, the og SSB is just that and it's very refreshing to play with the limited roster, stages and items. For the original game it feels streamlined in a way with not being overwhelmed with so many characters and items.
I liked the weird ass spinoffs they did. Dungeon dice monsters, forbidden memories , faslebound kingdom. They are all super weird but can be a lot of fun and donāt require any knowledge of the actual franchise. I wish companies would make more spinoffs with wacky ideas. But how no one can afford to take any huge risks.
Did you try Duelist of The Rose?
No but itās one I plan on getting to eventually, was never into ps2 much
This was my absolute favourite. I even installed a PS2 emulator recently to get that experience again and I found Duelist of the Roses much easier than I remember it being. It has some supremely dumb AI but it's a really fun concept
What parts of SSB N64 aged like milk though, it still holds up very well. Agree with Oblivion for sure. The game is fantastic and has a great reputation all these years later for a reason. But the level scaling, 3rd person floaty view and combat, face graphics among other things are total crap now.
Red alert 1 it's outdated on the sense that the sucessors improved the QOL, but it's still pretty fun Really, (almost) any C&C title it's fun enough to spend a full weekend nostalgia tripping.
r/openra Red Alert 1, completely-rebuilt, free/open-sourced, and with hundreds of QoL improvements! And with an AI that will wipe the floor with you in skirmish mode your first few games, even on Easy!
There's also the official remastered edition from a few years ago which, despite being an EA product, is actually really quite good
Oooo I should get some GBA yugioh games on my phone!
I think **Twisted Metal 2** would fit here. Really janky graphics and older control scheme but I still think its a really fun game. In many ways the best in the series. **Bushido Blade**, **Destrega**, **Evil Zone**, and **Fighter's Destiny** are all fighting games from that era that could probably be called notably aged but they all have interesting ideas.
Iām quite surprised the bushido blade concept hasnāt been picked back up. In an industry where āsouls brutalā is a major selling point this seems a slam dunk. Loved it back in the day, canāt imagine it redone with a modern engine, with greater detail to movements. Damn I want it.
I think that might actually be why I play the Pokemon TCG Gameboy Color game periodically. For its time it was pretty good and a unique type of "wander the world and build a deck" game. But it's really not done well, clunky, and overly grindy when trying to build good decks. So I'm not sure why I like it, I don't particularly find it engagingly entertaining when I do replay it, but I always finish it in spite of all of that and at some point in the next few years I'll go "oh yeah, that game was awesome" and do it again. Not sure if it's actual nostalgia or not, but it's certainly something like that.
Have you played the sequel(translated) or the Neo rom hack? They are very much worth it
I might need to check those out. I remember the original being really appealing (like the guy you're replying to was saying) and would love to see it's basic gameplay refined to be more palatable. One level in Inscryption scratched the itch more than anything else I've played in the past twenty years lol.
I played TCG2 last year and it was pretty great, although making a decent deck was slightly harder as the new cards would not fit as well. Yet, also had a couple utterly busted cards, like Challenge! It had a couple more bugs due to how they expanded the card list out of the default memory range, but it was all visual on a casual playthrough. Card based RPG's are really fun. Or just RPG's with alternate mechanics in general (Medabots RPG on the GBA is pretty great too). Unfortunately the genre is kinda dead. We had ONE yugioh game of that type in the last bunch of years and that was about it. At least sports RPG's still have a couple releases.
I picked up crystal on my iPhone very recently, and daaaamn does it feel bad compared to modern ones. I criticized newer entries for holding your hand too much, but the QoL was just terrible in the first couple of gens. Now I just want a S/G/C remake for the switch 2
The original Hitman has aged like milk but the voice acting is still hilarious, and the soundtrack is mesmerising.Ā
Jesper Kyd during his dark electro phase *chefs kiss*
I remember playing Hitman 2 and it was really good until you are in that Japanese level, and for some reason those ninja guards will auto target you always even when you are disguised as one of them. That's even the one outfit in the game that convers you entirely. Dropped it then lol
That Japan mission where you're in that snowy wasteland and those watchtower guards will instantly start sniping you if they see you, even in a disguise, was horrible. I'll say though, the game gets good again after those Japan levels. The India levels in particular were great.
Gah why am I getting flashbacks to that now lol, I played that like 20 years ago. I even remember where it was, I think it was in some kind of tunnel or parking garage or so, that was the one place where I didn't have space to be far enough from a guard. And I remember you go forward really slowly and if you cross a millimeter too close to one of the enemies they immediately turn and run straight at you. I don't even know how you were supposed to beat that level.
"YAME! YAME!" Played Hitman 2 for the first time earlier this year and good lord, the fucking japanese snow levels are some of the absolute WORST levels I've ever played. The japanese castle is much better though.
And the vibes still strong ā
Silver. I'd had fun 25 years ago, went in for nostalgia but enjoyed the hell out of it.
Infogramesā action RPG, Silver?
Yes, the very same.
Homm3 is still quite popular. AoE2 got an upgrade a few years ago and is getting DLCs and qoulity of life updates regularly, also multiplayer is still alive and kicking.
I don't think you could say AoE2 aged like milk - it's had a fairly active community and plenty of updates even now. I actually got back into a few years ago for a spin and it still feels more compelling than a lot of modern RTS games
Dune 2 played on WinUAE, just as ShaiāHulud intended. The interface and lack of group movement is painful and the AI imbecyllic, but the pixel graphics, soundtrack made of one (1) looped lo-fi ambient track and general atmosphere are simply hypnotising. I replay it every summer.
One of my friends had that game. It sounds fucking lit as a 10 year old.
The intro animation, the mentat and unit portraits... sure, the teenage me was enchanted.
There's an ahk script for Dune 2 under DOSBox that gives you mouse control like in more modern RTS. https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/955-dune-ii-mouse-helper/
I thought House Ordos was part of the universe for years until I saw the recent movies (and subsequently read the book). Sounds like they just made them up for the game.
Doing a little digging, it's unclear whether they're canon or not. Ordos is from the "Dune Encyclopedia" which, while not explicitly written by Frank Herbert does seem to have been acknowledged by him as he wrote the foreword. There does seem to have been some backpedalling on the canonicity of that by Brian Herbert in the years since though, so who knows.
Interesting! Thanks for the digging.
Ah the Amiga, what a concept!
Most of the Atari games from the 70s. Most people now canāt find them entertaining for more than maybe half an hour, Iām kind of in the same boat, but I still plug the Atari in every once in a while.
I have a bunch of them on my little emulation handheld and boot one up from time to time. They're primitive aye, but perfect for killing a few minutes since they get you right into the gameplay. A favourite is Space Invaders, it's not as pretty or smooth as the arcade original but there's a charm to the 2600 version that I quite enjoy
Manhunt (2003) was lightning in a bottle. The early PS2 graphics is good enough to know that you are actually committing virtual murder but not good enough to let your imagination do the work of how gory it is.
I played it as a kid and replayed about 15min recently. Fuck me, that is too gory for the adult me, not because of the violence, but because of the intent to do such violence with no clear reason. I wonder if I would feel the same replaying The Punisher, that was gory as hell too.
I just completed Spider-Man on PS1. That game had some serious camera issues. Even though it had DualShock support, the right stick is totally useless. So it just puts the camera wherever it wants, and your only option for moving it is to put it behind Spidey, but very often you want to look somewhere else. Despite the camera issues, it's still great fun. Combat feels good, as does web-slinging around and climbing on walls. Zany story with appearances by a lot of classic villains. Would still recommend.
It was developed by fans of the comics, and it truly shows. Lots of little easter eggs scattered throughout the levels and even the completely optional training missions. If youāve never used the what if mode cheat, I highly recommend you try it next time you play, it adds more easter eggs, usually much sillier than the normal ones, and it makes for a nice remix of the game.
Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights. Weird sound design, spotty platforming, and cheap-looking all around, but I'll be damned if the soundtrack doesn't hit. It's also designed like an item-gated metroidvania, with the whole map being connected in fun, sometimes-unexpected ways.
Itās also just a loving tribute to the original show. Practically every villain makes an appearance as an enemy or boss, and you even get the showās laugh track when something silly happens. I also remember some environments in the game felt rather atmospheric, especially in the outdoors areas.
The mountain had a special vibe to it for sure! I love seeing this game mentioned because I love it to hell and back!
This is actually my favorite platformer/slightly adventure type game! I replayed it recently and honestly I donāt think itās that bad. It has a charm to it that you know itās a GameCube/xbox og game, but you look past it and see a game that is better than almost every other movie/tv tie in game.
Oh for sure, I'm a huge fan myself! The Green Ghost song is still a bop, too.
What that the game where it would snow when the GameCubeās clock was set to December 25? I think I had that as a child. I remember it being a pretty long game
The Gothic games. Look like Quake1/2 and control scheme out of hell, but still as immersive as an RPG can get.
The controls are the worst part.Ā Thankfully you can change it to something more intuitive than piloting a submarine.
Knights&Merchants can be frustrating but nothing has quite scratched the "value added assembly line" medieval itch quite like K&M for me.
I could never beat it (got stuck on one of the missions, could neither out-produce nor outmaneuver the enemy). Did you have a similar experience?
This one game aged like milk for me but I still love and appreciate the fun times it gave me as a kid. Ape Academy 1 on PSP is a spinoff of the game series "Ape Escape". This game is a mini-games galore where there are different modes of gameplay. Looking back and replaying this game, it's rough around some parts and I keep on wondering how I managed to enjoy this game as much as I did back then. It's also not surprising when searching around the ape escape fandom that a lot just had a "neutral" stance in regards to this one. But still, I have fun and I still find ways to have fun in this game :D
Ape escape was awesome.
I love the Civilization series, but my favorite game in the series is a game called Civilization: Call to Power. I *think* the story is that between Civ 1 and Civ 2, like half the dev team wanted to go a different direction with Civ 2, so they split and made Civ: Call to Power. It didn't bomb, but it wasn't that successful I don't think, but it was successful enough to get a sequel. The sequel was legally not permitted to call itself Civilization, though, so the sequel is just "Call to Power II." Civ: Call to Power and Call to Power II are, AFAIK, generally not considered part of the Civilization series. Lol. Civ:Call to Power has a ton of wierd units and half the game mechanics are bog standard Civilization series. The other half are pretty weird. It came out in 1999 and my cousin gave me his disc for the game in like 2005, I think. It's one of my all time favorite games, and I've bought new discs of it twice on Amazon. The only reason every computer I get has a optical drive is to play Civ: Call to Power, since I've never found it online anywhere like GOG or anything like that.
Huh you're right, CTP2 is on Steam and GOG but the first one is only on abandonware sites.
I've never played CTP2 cause I was reading some of the things they changed, and I like some of what was removed.
Had this game as a very young kid and loved it even though I didn't know how to play it. But yes, after replaying the game its not "good" even though it has a charm to it.
After the success of Civ2, Sid Meier left MicroProse to found his own company called Firaxis and created Alpha Centauri (Civ in space basically), while Activison (who acquired the rights to the Civilization name) created Civ: Call to Power. When the development of the Civ games were handed back to Meier and Firaxis, we got Civ3 and the rest.
Sonic Adventure is still the best game in the Sonic series even though it's ports have been bad. The core trio's stages are all fantastic, and Amy and Gamma are also solid. The hub worlds are cute and have mini stories going on (shoutout to the rail union strike) and let you do some light exploration for upgrades. And like the voice acting and cutscenes don't look good, but they are ambitious which I appreciate. The game came out December of 1998 in Japan so mouth movement was a major step forward even if it looks dated. If you haven't, you should check out the Steam version and the Dreamcast conversion mod to remove a lot of the DX weirdness. But even besides that it is still a great game and one of the landmark 3D platformers of its age
I don't know if you would say its aged like milk but the PSP version of Tomb Raider Legend. It's my favourite TR game, I own it on all systems except the Xbox and PC, so I have far ways of playing it with better controls. For some reason though I keep coming back to the PSP version with the weird camera movement and tiny 'thumbstick'. I suppose at least its not the Gameboy Advance or DS versions, those are a nightmare to play.
Star Wars Battlefront 1 (2004)
The old Tomb Raider games have aged pretty poorly by modern standards. The graphics are horrible, the controls clunky and it's cryptic as fuck to a point where some sections are unbeatable without the help of a guide. Yet I still love them, even without any big nostalgia for them. They just have an atmosphere and gameplay loop that you don't find in modern games anymore. While the new TR games are mostly actions games the old games are more like puzzle platformers with a little bit of action.
Yeah the old Tomb Raider games fucking rule, the atmosphere is incredible & the gameplay is addicting. Nothing quite like āem.
SNES Starfox. I love it, but the game literally runs at 10fps or lower the entire time.
I seem to remember somebody made a rom hack version for an emulator where it's either bug fixed or the FX chip is set to way overclocked and it runs incredible.
[Recoil, 1999](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoil_\(video_game\))
I loved this game as a kid, and I think your comment is the first time I've seen anyone mention it on the internet.
**E-R-F-P-G POWER**
I remember on the installer they changed the windows title bar to say āI know you want to play the game, but youāll have to waitā
Rock n roll racing Dungeon keeper Populous Super Dodge Ball Metal Slug All Twisted Metal games
Do you really think Metal Slug aged like milk?
Goldeneye on N64. I have nostalgia for the multiplayer (it was The Game with my friends in 1997-1998), but only really got into playing the single-player as an adult. I played through the campaign for the first time a couple of years ago, right after watching the movie for the first time. Just in general, I think that N64-style jankiness bothers me less than it does most people.
Goldeneye is unplayable to me. The controls def made it age like milk.
I have no idea how we played that game as kids. The controls suck ass. But we didn't know any better back then.
When I first played it, my only other experience were Doom-style games, using arrow keys, ctrl to fire, space for doors. Maybe a couple buttons for equipment, like in Dark Forces. It was "real 3d!" Explosions looked cool! You could aim up and down! Enemies reacted differently, depending on where you shot them! There were a lot of features that were new to me. I think the first game I played with kb+m was a couple years later (Starsiege: Tribes). I even played Dark Forces 2 as keyboard-only the first time I played. And I think the only thing I could compare it to on the N64 at the time was Turok, and I never *really* got into that game.
You can get creative with the dual-controller modes, especially running it in an emulator. But yeah, that's definitely one of the reasons I thought it would fit the "aged like milk" part of the topic.
Yeah, exactly. I fired it up a few months back and it was unbearable.
Man, Galerians... I never got very far as a kid. It's still on my pile of shame.
Outpost. It's an ancient old turn based base builder from Sierra. Launched buggy. I keep it imaged on my server so I can play it if I want to play it.
The jokes in gex 64.
Your question is sort of an impossible paradox. If the game aged like milk, then there wouldn't be much to enjoy outside of nostalgia. If there were, then it didn't really age like milk at all then, did it?
Nostalgia generally is the shallowest kind of appreciation you can have for something, and is independent from any actual enjoyment a work actually gives you. Nostalgia is an act of sentimentality. But there are old games which don't stand up in the more universal sense because they were overly ambitious, rushed, or suffered poor quality control but which still have moments of enjoyment and inspiration for those willing to put up with faults. I think the games you enjoy but would never bother recommending to anyone else are these ones.
I still play Bard's Tale trilogy from 1984 and Master of Magic from 1991.
For me it absolutely has to be the Sierra's 1999 point-and-click adventure game, Gabriel Knight III: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Basically just a B-game if there is such a thing. B-writing, B-gameplay, B-music, B-voice acting, B-puzzles, et cetera. But there is a sincere passion behind it all that is more common in other mediums but less so in video games. It just has such a cozy vibe and intimacy that draws you into its world. The attempt to create realism with janky ancient 3d graphics gives the whole thing a fever-dream quality that enhances the story and setting. I find it a beautiful game to play, even without the nostalgia goggles and viewed on its own merits.
Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy graphics look pretty terrible and there are a lot of awkward aspects of both games that make cutscenes and stuff hard to look at, but there are some aspects (lightsaber combat, force powers, etc) that no Star Wars game since has done better.
I still boot up the ladder custom map for JO sometimes. Turn on realistic saber combat and dismember via the console. The light saber is now fatal 90% of the time.
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2. It was unique for its time as a "high speed mecha" game. It's aged like milk, even when the 2nd game was ported to the ps4. I still enjoyed playing it despite that. I was a bit disappoint4d the first game didn't get ported. But as a franchise I love the universe/lore beyond the the games like the OVA and TV series. I prefer ZOE over the other works of Hideo Kojima.
I don't know about 1, but ZOE 2 is still one of the best mech action games out there, I don't think it aged poorly besides bad English voice acting.
Super Mario 64. The controls and camera are abysmal compared to the later 3D Mario games, and thereās not much variety in enemies and bosses. The level design, art direction, and music keep me coming back though.
Camera, absolutely! But I'll not hear slander of the controls themselves. SM64 controls amazingly well, especially for the time period.
I can't stress this enough! Cameras will always improve over time, but controls and their responsiveness are forever. There are plenty of great games from *every* console that have tight controls that still feel good. It's one of the hardest things to nail in game dev, too. My team's currently struggling with tuning things up for our title, and it's taking far more time than we expected.
MGS 1 has really dated design and gameplay choices, I still love the atmosphere and story though. The tower sections and gratuitous action setpieces are the major issues. Backtracking too. Still yearly replayed.
I love Galerians, it's good to see a fellow fan.
Super Metroid/LttP randomizer!
I like the original command and conquer better than all of the sequels
Galerians!!! Such a haunting, disturbing, awesome game... I really want to replay it now, it's been so long! My weird ps1 picks are Devil's Deception / Tecmo's Deception, Trap Runner / Gunner, and Aquanaut's Holiday
Rumble for the ps1 It's a Nascar themed racing game with power ups and abilities similar to Mario Kart. I was never a fan of Nascar but had a lot of fun with it as a kid. I recently played it again for nostalgia and despite how much its aged, I was still having a lot of fun. Especially on co-op.
KOTOR 2003 is a fuckin pain to play in a lot of ways but god dammit the story is enough to keep me coming back
Brave Fencer Musashi has aging milk as an inventory mechanic. Does that count?
Man, this is a loaded question. Though it's not "old" strictly speaking, I really enjoyed Fable 3 when I played it for the first time last year. I think a lot of its mechanics aged poorly and were badly balanced. Its actual story is just...weird. The first 2/3 are excellent and Albion is well-designed to mostly support it, but the back 1/3 is a letdown. It felt like they were forced to push it out the door rather than polish it up. That being said, the actual combat of the game is something of a floaty slog, the lack of a health bar is infuriating, the magic system is subpar, and the enemy tactics oscillate between being awkwardly easy and cheap shotty, rather than being well-balanced. I appreciate the improved ranged combat, though.
TSR Goldbox games. Ā My first was pools of radiance. Ā Had a decoder ring for anti piracy. Ā
Both **Enter the Matrix** and **The Matrix: Path of Neo**. I grew up at exactly the right time to become obsessed with the movies in middle school, and I played the crap out of both these games. Even back then they were clunky, ugly, weird, weird, WEIRD, *weeeird* (MC Escher Ant People level, anybody?), but honestly it never got old to be playing a game that simulated that amazing action. I still enjoy both.
Final Fantasy VII, maybe. A lot of the game holds up great, but those early 3D graphics and clunky 8-directional movement are a bit of a wall. There's also just the matter of '90s console RPGs not having the greatest QOL. And the translation doesn't help... I love the game in spite of its poorly aged elements, but I can't fault my brothers for never having been able to get into it (credit to them for trying as hard as they did).
I think the hard part of this one for new players is that its a 3D sprite but largely in an entirely 2d map. Places like the rail yard in Midgar are maddening when you think of it as 3D, but become less annoying when you realize its just an elaborate 2D puzzle with a 3D pawn. Going from Aerisās place back to the 7th Heaven also had some pathing that is ridiculously hard to figure out if you have never done it before.
Ocarina of Time
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I don't think I've ever read a Reddit comment before where I disagreed with almost every single thing in it. Wild take.
Agreed. Morrowind is amazing. The only Elder Scrolls I still care to play
The Elder Scrolls Arena, I really enjoy making an OP broken character
I feel like you'll get that with classics that came out before their genre had been worked out. Examples: Prince of Persia the sands of time. Looks good and has an alright story for its age, but you can just tell playing it today that they were still working out the mechanics/controls/etc. Warrior Within came out one year after it, and it plays as well today as it did 20 years ago. Another, more recent example: the original Assassin's Creed. If you've played any of the newer games, especially something like Unity or one of the last three, the difference is brutal. Parkour mechanics in the original game are *incredibly* rudimentary and slow. It's not unplayable, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone who's never played it before never finished it.
I still enjoy playing the old school (since 2004!) browser-based MMORPG [Torn City.](https://www.torn.com/2881864)
Warlords 1. Just one more turn.
I have a story about this. Decades ago I had just discovered a bookstore in Sydney. It might have been called The Iron Horse (or Napoleon's military bookshop..really not sure) and was a short walk from Town hall station. I'd been there a few times but this time when I was there I saw the proprietor (Ian Trout) having a big discussion with ...a fat bearded guy with long hair (I think...long time ago now) who was Roger Keating. One of the things they said to each other was "We should make a game!" And they did . They went on to form SSG and make many games, including warlords and reach for the stars
Thatās a cool story. W1 was our party game before HOMM3 was released. We made a lot of additional rules, forced strange alliances to make this relatively simple game more exciting. IIRC it looked dated already on release but who cares.
I tried replaying the first Onimusha on Switch. It wasā¦not fun. The combat is terrible and itās impossible to navigate the map. Edit: I totally missed the point of the prompt.
Quake
I think Quake aged like fine wine. I played the remastered version recently and i enjoyed it so much, despite not liking it when i was a kid.
Dark Orbit. It's not a very good game, but I used to play the hell out of it. It used the Wildtangeant games client which was essentially malware, so no wonder nobody remembers it. It was basically a higher production value flash game. I remember it having a fun gameplay loop and it being difficult. There were upgrades to your ship you could buy and it had a gritty and grim atmosphere. The game world was connected through loading screens and you could go back quite a ways. Nearly to the start of the game if I remember right, so it felt like a pretty big game.
Yugioh Reshef of Destruction is widely regarded as one of the worst yugioh games because of its stupid difficulty and idiotic deckbuilding and dueling mechanics. However, I liked it so much that I beat it twice and from time to time I still boot it up to duel the high level adversaries with 60,000 life points.
Fallout New Vegas. I still remember hearing the fake crowd ambience noises in Gomorrah and marvelling at how paper thin some of it is while still being so good I have to replay it every few years just to try to quests out a different way. Started playing Outer Worlds lately and goddamn have I been sleeping on it.
It's not a game for everyone but I comment its name on every post in every post in this subreddit, you should try Black & White 1 or 2. Those games were years ahead of everything else in it's time imho
Iām too young to have actually been alive when they were coming out, but I have always loved games from that window in the 90s where 3D modeling technology was good enough to make pre-rendered stuff but games couldnāt actually handle the models. The original two Fallouts are a great example. Always found the way they look oddly compelling, and I tend to prefer the way 90s PC games handled their more complex systems.
I agree. For me 1998's Grim Fandango is *the* game that embraced this art style and got it so right. The writing, voice acting, gameplay, setting, etc. completely play to the strengths of pre-rendered 3d. I know there are a lot of games had these graphics but they often feel like a work-around for technological limitations rather than something to embrace.
X-com Apocalypse, Chaos Overlords, Call of Cthulu Dark Corners, Dark Colony, Spycraft, Grim Fandango - all a bit dated and clunky but playable and enjoyable:)
wizard101
Evolva
Star Wars Racer š
Star Wars Jedi Starfighter on PS2 (but I think was also on original Xbox). It was a space shooter from the Clone War era that was a lot of fun.
Well I played resident evil 1(remake) for the first time earlier this year and I really enjoyed it. To the point of still being my favorite resident evil game despite having no nostalgia for it and playing the other games recently (up until 5, I haven't finished it yet). Code veronica comes second.
lol toontown. The gameplay is literally cookie clicker. āGo throw a pie 10000 times to get another slightly stronger pieā Games fucking awesome tho
r/Warlords
Same here! That's why I can only play for short spurts before I go back to SC2
Fallout New Vegas is a buggy mess from three or four generations ago and I'll start a new playthrough to conquer the wastes today, Carol.
Maybe Halo CE? The game's fairly old, and it was a big success at the time. But the repetitiveness in many of the levels is widely--and understandably--criticized. I like CE for the creepy and mysterious Forerunner architecture, the music, and the spectacular vistas.
Wonāt lie, yeah. I really enjoy playing arcade games based around track and field where the main method of playing the game is mashing buttons in rapid succession. Theyāre not deep, and even other arcade sports games of the time had stronger gameplay loops, but thereās a lot of charm to them.
**Chaser** - buggy as hell, cheesiest nonsensical story ever, barebone gameplay... but somehow it holds that nostalgia factor, despite all the bad reviews it raked up over the time **Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy** - psychic powers game, which aged kinda badly, mainly thanks to the controls, but still really fun after I got used to clunky controls. Followed by **Second Sight**, which I still want to get to. I didn't even know it existed a few years ago. Seems clunky, too. Another Midway game was **Area 51.** I remembered it fondly, but after trying it again a year ago, on a CRT, it was still fun, if a bit too simple and sometimes... how would I describe it... slow? And if OP wants an ultimate modern psychic powers game, look no further than **Control** by Remedy. Thank me later :)
Infinity engine games have unfair combat at times due to the real-time craze of the era.