What games can you not get into because they feel too outdated?
Are there games that you tried but just couldn't get into because they feel outdated? Games that, in theory, you would enjoy, but don't because the controls, graphics, writing, or mechanics just don't feel good anymore. Games that, compared to today, just don't hold up to your standards.
I recently tried playing Heroes of Might and Magic III, and I realized that a lot of the invisible language used through game design from that era, I do not understand. There are many things that the game didn't explain, and I assume they were just understood by players. Not only that, but I imagine there was a lot of crossover between video games and board games back then, so maybe that language was used as well. I ended up downloading a manual and putting it on my second screen and I get it and played it, but it just wasn't for me.
I also dropped Mirror's Edge, but this time it was because of the graphics. It looks and feels great, but the graphics give me a headache. There is way too much bloom, and for some reason, there are some parts that look like the imaginary lens has been covered in Vaseline. This didn't bother me before, but my eyes are not used to it anymore.
There are also games like the first two Tony Hawk Pro Skater games that I can't fully get into because they're missing mechanics from the later games. The levels and controls feel great, but they don't feel complete without those mechanics. It keeps me from enjoying the games as much as the others.
Please share yours!
Yeah absolutely. I think with a lot of these older games that are considered to be the GOATs of their respective genres you'll run into the same problem: They were so good, that the mechanics/ideas become the minimum requirement for all games thereafter. So, if you played the game on day 1, it was an innovative masterpiece the likes of which you'd never seen before. If you play it 10-15 years later after having played modern games in the same genre, it feels like the same old shit except without the 10-15 years of improvements.
For me personally, the game I'll get crucified for not enjoying is Half Life 2. I played through the entire game. It was ok. I was pretty bored for most of it though. Shooters aren't generally my thing for one, but even that aside the game was very milquetoast to me. I did a lot of reading up on the history of HL2 afterwards because I was astonished that I didn't enjoy such a legendary game and I think I came to the conclusion that some new mechanics such as the cover system and story-driven nature of HL2 were what made it such a hit in 2004. But 15 years later those mechanics weren't new and exciting to me and the story is decent but a far cry from amazing.
The other game that stands out to me is Assassin's Creed 1. I couldn't make it more than a few hours into that game. Just so boring and repetitive, the combat was boring, the collectables were boring, most mechanics didn't actually seem to matter...I just hated the game lol. I do think it's another example of later entries in the series/other games doing the same thing but better so going back to the OG just felt like a slog. But I really hated AC1 hahaha.
A big part of HL2 was also the physics. No game did that before to the same extent, so it was novel and cool. The gravity gun was super unique and all the physics puzzles were new and cool.
I tried replaying it a few years back and had the same experience as you. Every physics puzzle felt boring and just stopped the flow of the game. The gravity gun is still fairly unique, but it has lost a lot of its charm. It's just not the same experience as it was around the time it released.
I liked that gravity gun was op but you need to find things to throw before you can use it
Half-Life 2 has suffered the fate of Seinfeld - the work was so monumental in its field that it revolutionized everything coming after it. Many of those iterations accomplished certain things better. Going back you think: what's the big deal? Basically every game has physics, ragdoll enemies, novel gimmick weapons, and an action-packed cinematic feel.
Reminds of me of when I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and was confused because I had heard great things about the soundtrack, but it was just a bunch of songs I had heard before.
About halfway through the movie I realized that it was an original soundtrack and it was so influential that it became a cliche. 2001: A Space Odyssey was a cliche, not because it followed a saturated trend, but because it itself was copied by everyone else.
AC1's concept and maybe even story has held up, but you're right that the later entries feel miles better.
Exactly this. The same applies to many of the Great Films or the Great Games. They were amazing for their ground-breaking and their trend setting.
But now, decades later, everyone learned from it and improved on their work. We take the new things for granted, so the originals looks boring and dated.
Ezio or bust.
AC1 is the foundation of basically every ubisoft game since, but I can totally see how it's unplayable if you didn't play it first.
AC1 had those same criticisms back then too. I played it back then and hate finished it and wasn't going to check out the rest of the series but then the ending reveal hooked me. And AC2 addressed lot of the complaints.
Half Life 2 was mostly noted for the extreme technical advancements. Take a look at what a gaming pc looked like when it came out. It shouldn't have been allowed to be so advanced.
Half Life 1 was the one with the gameplay advancements. I played both on release, and both times felt like I've just entered another multi-verse.
Far Cry 1 managed that, too.
None of them hold up today. They are still as great as they were back then, but the feeling is all gone. I've recently finished all of them again, just to check.
For half life, try playing it in VR. completely new experience
I second this!
Do you mean Alyx? I actually do own that, but haven't got around playing it yet.
Oh no the original half life 2. There is a VR mod for it that gives 6DOF with motion controls
Def agree on half-life 2. I even played HL1 before to prep, and weirdly enough enjoyed that more than I enjoyed HL2. Guess it's hard to understand the hype when you weren't there when it came out.
Recently had this with PS1 Tomb Raider.
I can see the skeleton of an amazing game. For 1996 and no reference its absolutely amazing achievement. But the controls suck, gameplay is stiff and I hated climbing that damn waterfall and the combat was terrible.
I appreciate what's there but I'd need to cheat, or use save states to play any further than the second cut scene.
When Witcher 3 was winning all those awards, I wanted to give the original game a go.
Don't. I imagine it's nothing like Witcher 3. It aged terribly poorly.
I bought a bundle with all the 3 witcher games and tried both 1 and 2. I could jot even get through the tutorial in 1 and could jot beat the first boss of 2. Each game controls completely differently from one another.
That Kayran fight is one of the most unfortunate things about Witcher 2. It's far too difficult a fight for a first boss, and almost all of that chapter is a drag to boot. The game is so much better after that point.
My favorite moment in that game is a serious case of understatement in dialogue prompt. You have an option to help one of two diametrically opposed people and if you choose "Help person A" you draw your sword on person B. If you choose "Help person B" you immediately throat punch person A.
Similar to how "push dijkstra aside" leads to Geralt breaking his ankle in a really violent matter.
I really liked Witcher 2 though. It's a good game.
Yea, I don't know. I disagree with the others. They're definitely not modern games, but I think they're both still quite good games individually.
Yeah, Witcher 2 felt like something completely new when I started it up right after finishing the first game.
I imagine going from 2 to 3 will feel the same.
Not so much to be honest. The 3rd one is just way more open world and the combat is so much smoother and more responsive.
I remember playing the first game and getting stuck on the tutorial because I was mashing the left click button trying to swing my sword only to have Geralt hip thrust at the enemies.
But once you figure out how to swing the sword, the game's actually pretty fun. One thing I particularly liked is that there's an investigative storyline where you actually have to go and investigate and figure out the answer with the clues provided, and you can fail. I went into it thinking it would be like most modern games where you only get obviously correct or incorrect dialog options and angered everyone in the process.
It did have some positive traits, but the gameplay just didn't do it for me at all.
I did make it through the whole game, so I feel like I can hold that opinion, haha
People didn't like its mechanics even back when it launched. Personally, it's still somehow my favorite even tho objectively it's less fun to play and less polished than the other two. Something about its story and the atmosphere makes it more unique and genuine.
It does have a great story!
The typical advice for people looking to get into the Witcher games is to watch a cutscene compilation of the first game, then start with the second. Don’t bother with too many side quests in the second; Just make it through the story so you know the broad strokes and major decisions. Then take that save to the Witcher 3, and just play that one from now on.
Because going backwards is so incredibly difficult; Each game adds a ton of quality of life improvements, so going back to older games feels horribly sluggish and clunky.
Yeah, I actually enjoyed the plot. But the gameplay kept getting in the way of that...lol
Yeah, I don't know how unpopular the opinion is, but the original Witcher didn't strike me as a particularly good game. It was a... fine... I guess game, but with mature elements and tone that other games in the genre lacked. I slogged through it in preparation of playing Witcher 3.
Pokémon, actually. Just a month ago I wanted to play Soul Silver. But man, it is tedious. There's so much slow dialog, long animations, and little inconveniences everywhere (even in the menus). And I feel like you also have to grind to progress, which I absolutely hate in games (but maybe I also just didn't play well enough, whatever). So yeah, quite disappointed with it since I remember the 3DS games being quite fun.
I think this is a greater problem with games that are technically aimed at children. There is so little respect for your time generally, but I think it's especially egregious when it comes to menus, dialog, and animations. Additionally, there are many things that are in sequence (with large unneeded gaps between) that could happen more or less simultaneously.
Conspiratorially, I think this is to pad play time, and for kids the animations and what not are jingling keys that keep then occupied enough they don't care or notice.
I was just thinking this exact same thing... but about Red Dead Redemption 2. I had to stop playing it because it had no respect for my time.
I'm used to driving to places to start a mission like in all the other GTA games, but in RDR2, it would be about 10 minutes of riding a horse before the real mission started.
The animations take way too long sometimes, and cutscenes and a lot of dialogue are unnecessary and feel like padding. Those 1-2 second animations add up when it's a 50+hr game
I really enjoyed those tbh. One of my favourite things to do in RDR2 is just riding around and enjoying the scenery, or chilling in Saint-Denis at night time. Gaming time is chill time. There's no rush to finish a story.
Yeah, I was going to say the same. RDR2 is one of those weird games where I’m okay with wasting time. Because the entire game is so fucking scenic that I can just wander around doing whatever catches my eye. The mission pacing in the beginning of the game could benefit from some tweaking, (the snowy sections are just so slow,) but the rest of the game feels like a nice scenic drive; Even if you have an eventual destination, you’re just enjoying the journey.
I was very disappointed that one of the animations they didn't bother with was shaving and hair cuts. I wanted to see that.
The new games are still the same way.
Quit holding my fucking hand and let me play the damn game already.
“This is a Pokémon and this is how you battle..”
Motherfucker, I’ve been playing these games since I was 7.
It took me so long to keep sticking with Sword and I just couldn’t. I just wanted to hop into the world and catch some Pokémon, battle, and discover the world.
I haven't played since ORAS, but I think they'll always have those tutorials cause they're targeted at kids. Like I was playing the original at 10 and now my kids starting to get into Pokémon at 6.
I feel like they should allow an "adult" version though. Like no hand holding and harder.
It's wild how little the most financially successful franchise of all time has innovated.
Oh yeah most definitely. Not even just for kids, but I’m sure there are adults who are just getting into the games too and need a tutorial.
I just am sick of forced tutorials where you can’t skip them and they want you to know the story and no way to skip all the dialogue that most seasoned players already know. It seems like every Pokémon game does this and is one of the worst offenders of this.
By all means, do continue to make tutorials and incorporate the story elements, but make them skippable if the player so desires.
I've always wanted there to be an option when you start a new Pokemon game that just lets you say "I've played Pokemon before let me get into it", it really is a pain in the ass as an adult.
Ironically another draw y for emulators over the two thing. Just speed up the boring bits 8x
The games really need an option to just turn off tutorials. I imagine it's a little bit trickier than that because they need to be designed in a way a small child won't accidentally turn it on without realizing. But there must be a way to do it.
Civilization has settings buried in the menu like
New to Civilization (default)
New to Civilization VI
New to Civilization [Expansion 1]
New to Civilization [Expansion 2]
Disabled
Something like these options could go a long way -
New to Pokémon (all tutorials)
New to Pokémon on [Console] (tutorials specific to controls on that console)
New to Pokémon [Generation] (tutorials specific to new mechanics in that generation)
Disabled (no tutorials)
Pokemon is better with game shark style cheats. It's way more fun to have the option to get 100x more xp, and force Pokemon to appear rather than grind a 1% appearance rate. Pokémon even made TMs reusable eventually, but you need cheats for that in the early games.
Or just a speedup button! Red and Blue are some of my favorite games ever, but I haven’t played them without a speedup button in like 20 years.
Hm I'll think about it. Seems like this is really the way to go. I was playing on a modded DSi though, so I will probably have to switch to an emulator to use these kinds of cheats. Still, sounds like a good idea.
Check out the myriad of rom hacks out there. So many of them improve on the original games in virtually any way you can think of.
pokeharbor.com
This is the way. I stopped playing the originals after X/Y, but some ROM hacks and fan games are so much fun.
I was thinking about that. Thank you for the suggestion and also the link :)
You can change options to remove animations and speed up dialogue.
Also, switch from "Shift" to "Set".
Shift is little kids' mode. Set is normal mode. Too bad it's set to easy by default
Although the original commenter's mileage may vary considering they complained about too much grinding, so I don't think their issue is with the game being too easy.
Fair point, but this forces the player to get better! Haha
I always thought about the differences of these 2 modes, but never tried it out. What exactly does it change?
You know how in default when you are in a battle and knock out an opponent's pokemon, it tells you what they're going to put out next and asks you if you'd like to switch pokemon? That's 'switch' mode, in 'set' mode you aren't asked that and have to use a turn to switch pokemon if you're at a type disadvantage, meaning they get a turn of damage or set up. Really makes you think about strategy a lot more, and is integral to challenge runs like nuzlockes.
Oh I see, thank you.
In "set" mode, the game doesn't ask you if you want to switch every time an opposing trainer sends out a new pokemon.
Alright, thanks for the info.
Trust me, first things I do in Pokémon games. Didn't help.
Baldur's Gate 3 was good, but I can't play 1 or 2. They definitely don't feel the same.
For newer games, I can actually play the older Zelda games, but I can't stand the latest games. Not a big fan of the gameplay with weapons breaking and how much they pushed the open world thing. I very much prefer smaller maps with more story.
Oh! I tried playing Neverwinter Nights recently and... I bounced. I want to try again soon because people really love that game (and its modding scene!), and I love D&D (having only played 5e, however), but it's not appealing to me as much as I wish it did.
I played the crap out of Neverwinter Nights back in the day, but I picked up the remastered or whatever version on steam and just can't handle the controls anymore. Hooray for BG3 to scratch the same itch with improved controls!
I really enjoyed the original Neverwinter Nights, went back and played it relatively-recently (despite the fact that the main storyline, pre-DLC, is pretty bland).
But I tried playing the newer Neverwinter Nights 2 and it just did not draw me in at all.
Still haven't tried BG3.
BG3 is the best version of DnD on a computer in my opinion. Great characters including enemies, so much flavor, and it moves right along with tooltips galore to let you know aht is going on. While there is a lot of gratuitous romance available, you can easily turn everyone down if it isn't your jam. You can do pretty much anything and "screwing up" just tends to lead to more options!
I love talking to the goblins! Make friends before wiping them out!
Being DnD there is a lot of fiddly bits and the devs love exploding barrels, but to be honest they kind of add to the charm.
For what it's worth, the story to the main campaign of NWN2 is pretty tropey and bland. However, you should give Mask of the Betrayer a shot if you don't mind main campaign spoilers and think story could keep you invested over gameplay. I never finished it, but the story was quite fresh and unique. It's wildly well reviewed, to the point that while you have to deal with the Epic level rules, its still worth playing a bit just for the weirdness involved.
What's so different about the first two Baldur's Gate games? I was thinking about getting the first one on my phone
I tried playing Icewind Dale on my phone after enjoying Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 on my PC. Don't bother. The touch UI just cannot keep up in any remotely tactical situation, at least not for my tactics-heavy wizard playstyle with milking every turn as much as I could.
There is a lot to read. And it is probably not appreciatable on a phone. (Tablet may be fine) They are a totally different ruleset and while it is 2d and all the story is definitely deep. Many hours...
Specifically AD&D 2nd Edition. Back in the days of THAC0. To give an idea of how different it is from 3e and later editions, classes were restricted by race, there were two different ways to be multiclass (one for humans, one for everyone else and they work very differently), and lower AC is better - instead of rolling d20+attack bonus and comparing it to target AC you roll d20 - target AC and compare it to the attackers THAC0, which is the number they need to roll To Hit AC 0. AC could be negative as well, meaning that THAC0 wasn't necessarily the highest number you might have to roll to hit. Thief skills use percentile rolls. Saving throws were weird, both in mechanics and categories.
So, for example, a second level fighter might have a THAC0 of 19 and +2 to hit from his high strength, and the thug he's fighting might have an AC of 8 from his leather armor. So he has to roll 19-8=11 to hit, and would get a +2 on that roll, and so needs a 9 on the die.
To add to what everyone else is saying, the combat isn't the same in that it's not turn based like you're thinking. Fights involve everyone getting into a fracas at once and swinging, the game expecting the player to regularly pause to give specific commands. Also, in BG1 you start at level one which feels reeeeeally weak so fights will be quite difficult until you're about level 3-4.
That said, I had a lot of fun with the game after I got used to it. Writing is the main star of the show and it's quite good.
Knights of the old republic 1 and 2. First my old PC couldn't run it and my new one it just feels too jank and ugly. I love star wars games and am sad if the remake stays dead.
KOTOR is jank, but I would say it's entirely due to the controls. It acts like point-and-click even on controllers, where you have to use the D-pad to select the element and interact with it using the face buttons.
Also, the semi-pseudo-turn-based combat system doesn't really totally hold up, I wish there was a way of smoothing it out.
There are higher resolution texture projects for both KOTOR 1 and 2, I think KOTOR 2 has it available natively with the Steam Workshop.
Personally I love that era of graphics tbh. I bought Valheim on the Steam sale just for the jank graphics lol
Funnily enough I've played KoTOR so much that I can still go back and play those, and aside from the camera control it's totally comfy for me.
I feel the same way. I wanted to love them, but I just don't. They feel tedious to me.
Probably going to get some hate for these.
FFVII. The pc port was ass, controls were a pain on keyboard and there wasn't great controller support. The graphics were really tough to ignore, and the combat felt like fighting the control scheme more than anything. I've played and liked many other titles in the series, but I couldn't manage this one by the time I got to it. The experience was also so bad I have no interest in the remake/remaster.
Morrowind. Played it a ton on Xbox, but I can't get back into it on pc anymore. Even with mods to alleviate the graphics and draw distance, the game is so dated. Building a character can be very punishing in the early game, and easily break able in the late game. Many weapon skills are garbage because they lack enough support in items. Movement speed was tied to a skill, jumping is significantly faster, but also a skill. The leveling process is arcane and not adequately explained in game. The journal is awful, so you better remember what quests you are doing. Item storage was a pain because crates had weight limits, and merchants had pitiful amounts of gold to sell items.
I get that. FF VII is probably my favourite game. But, I grew up with it. I think that plays a huge roll. If I discovered it for the first time now, I'd probably feel the same way you do.
Don't skip the remake, though. I hate that there's differences from the original, but I view it as a retelling from a different perspective regarding the story. The gameplay kicks ass. I'd recommend it to anyone who likes the style of game.
I'm actually playing FF7 for the first time on a handheld emulator. I've previously tried to play FF4 and FF6 (several times) but couldn't really get too far in before giving up. I'm nearly 8 hours into FF7 now and, while it's definitely a bit dated in terms of controls (and obviously graphics), I'm having a much better time with it and as it stands, can see finishing it if it keeps going like it is. I just made it to the open world.
It's a classic for a reason. But I can absolutely see why someone would have a hard time playing it.
Have you tried Tifa's Bootleg? There are mods that can drastically improve the graphics
Modded FF7 on PC ruined PS1 FF7 for me. Wonderful stuff. 7th Heaven is such a joy.
I played through it for the first time a few years ago, using the open-source OpenMW engine. It definitely isn't graphically-competitive with modern games, but I was still able to enjoy it.
Here's a current image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQUYr7JhNXg
I feel like a lot of people enjoyed the game because they could break it in the late game.
Yeah, though I don't think that any Elder Scrolls or Fallout game has really had a truly balanced skill tree, though.
Yeah, I have to say that automated quest tracking and note-taking is definitely something that I like about modern RPGs. Sometimes it starts to feel too much like "go to waypoint, do thing, repeat", but I remember manually mapping dungeons with teleporters on graph paper in the D&D Gold Box games, and it was just arduous.
I started a new play through of Morrowind after lasting playing it in the 2000s. I used OpenMW on my Steam Deck, it plays really well.
It was really refreshing how more immersive it is as you have to read the journal and use the map to figure out where to go for quests. I really enjoy not having a quest marker guiding you.
Starfield
Damn! Burn
Came here to say this. That's and old game with lipstick. Poorly applied lipstick.
Personally, the earlier Witcher games. Great story, but it's trapped in an old RPG missing all kinds of modern features and mechanics.
When the first Witcher came out, Yahtzee's review was spot on. It's a good game, it's got a lot of depth, but a lot of the mechanics are arcane and just not fun.
Witcher 2 made big strides in this department, finally culminating in Witcher 3 - I am in a similar boat in terms of having serious issues trying to play the first two Witcher games.
I really enjoyed the branching paths in Witcher 2. They were two different games depending on what you chose with the different characters and areas you'd go through.
Oh man I hated the combat system in the first Witcher so much they I ended up doing it completely. I even looked to see if there were any mods that overhauled the combat but unfortunately never found any.
I think I used a mod to one hit kill everything and increased my movement speed to get though the story which I did enjoy.
The UI in the Witcher 2 is awful
I tried playing the original Deus Ex for the first time a couple of years ago and I sadly had to put it down before I escaped the tutorial. Early 3D graphics have not aged well, the controls were not very intuitive, and it just seemed like it wasn't worth the effort. I then played and enjoyed Human Revolution though; I know, I'm an absolute peasant.
Give it a try again with GMDX. It's a mod that modernizes Deus Ex mechanically and visually without losing the original vision like what "New Vision / Revision," does
Ooh interesting, how easy is it to set up mods for DX? Reckon it'll work on a Steam Deck?
I didn't do it on the Deck but on Linux, so steps should be something like:
Thanks for the tip, I started a few weeks ago and barely made any progress. Maybe this will help.
One thing that's really interesting is once you get to the headquarters after the first level, the floors and things are super shiny and have actual reflections. Most modern games use screen space reflections now (although raytracing is fixing this), so things not on screen can't be reflected. Deus Ex, and many games of the time, have better reflections than modern games. The graphics do look dated generally, but it's funny how technology advancement can cause some things to be worse
Yeah most older 3D games I've tried I just can't control that well.
A couple years ago I tried playing the original Tomb Raider and geez was that difficult to control. It really makes me appreciate how good the Mario 64 controls were
I can get past ugly early 3D, but bad controls are not something that I can stand. I didn't like Tomb Raider back when it was new for that reason.
Similarly, I want to play Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, but the tank controls are just painful.
Agreed. Can't stand the outdated controls. Play Human Revolution instead.
I never did really beat morrowind or even finish any of the factions questlines, i was too young at the time to care about that i just did the infinite intelligence potion exploit to create an unbeatable god character slinging 50ft radius fireballs from level 1.
A part of me really wants to revisit it and and least complete the main quest, but damn does it feel dated.
Yeah, it was in a weird sort of Uncanny Valley for gameplay. It was a 3D game with real-time combat, but was still relying on the old school tabletop RPG mechanics that the series was built on. So when you attack, the game does some math to figure out if you actually hit. But that causes some cognitive dissonance because I just saw my character’s attack connect and yet it was labeled as a miss because the invisible d20 rolled too low.
Rolling for an attack is fine in a turn based game, or a 2D game where sprites are just bouncing around. But when I saw my sword phase through the enemy without hurting them, it made it hard to continue playing.
The game also requires a lot more focus and time than I have these days. As an adult, I typically only have a few hours a week to play. And that’s intermittent, while constantly getting pulled away for other things. And in a game like Morrowind, things like the quest notes just aren’t conducive to my lifestyle. No quest marker, because the game gives me a note with vague directions? That’s fine if I’m a kid who can spend 5+ hours wandering around looking for the right boulder to take a left at. But if I’m getting pulled away and distracted constantly, I won’t even be able to remember what the note said when I come back to my computer.
I dont mind the no quest marker, as you can re-read your quest journal to get the directions again. The problem was that the quest journal was unsorted so if you happen to advance in multiple quests at a time or put off a quest and come back to it, then good luck paging through to find the relevant info.
Tribunal added the ability to see specific quest entries iirc
As someone who didn't even know it existed until like 2 years ago. It feels incredibly dated. I have 2 friends who love it and beg me to play with them with the multi-player mod but I just can't get into it. Controls feel clunky, combat is janky and graphics are meh. I understand it probably has great systems and writing and for the time it was great but it just doesn't hold up unless you have prior history with it. I'm not even hating on it, I understand it's probably a great game. I also played Mario 64 and ocarina of time way after their release (grew up a poor kid in a tiny rural town with no internet and 1 TV that had like 3 channels) and both felt pretty decent and like they held up while also being older than morrowind.
I actually really enjoyed replaying it recently after many many years. Other than the dialog, what bugs you about it?
By the way, the engine replacement is really good.
I'm so glad I went back and finished it recently. The MQ story is really good. I put on a mod to make magicka regenerate like in later games and played a straight mage, eventually crafting rings to be able to jump around town super fast and another to cross the continent.
What put me off of the game initially was that it had a nasty bug where the game would immediately crash and close to desktop after about 15 to 30 mins of play. So if you didn't regularly save, you'd lose progress.
This happened to me on multiple OSes (Windows 98, XP, 7 & 8.1), across different copies of the game and after trying various community patches to fix the problem to no avail
Bought the GOTY edition with the Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions on Steam when it was heavily discounted and it works just fine.
Unfortunately this is one of those many instances where a game is released absolutely fucking broken and you have to buy the expansion to fix it. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 is another such game where the base game has a game breaking bug can randomly plummet the stats of all your rides.
Halo, even the remaster. The world's feel empty and vehicles make me long for the Mako
I've since been told it's just one of those "you had to be there" things. Was really hard to admit the hype cycle sometimes has value
Solo, absolutely agree. Coop over the internet, probably not worth it.
Hear me out, though...
A couple weeks ago an old highschool buddy and I ordered a pizza, and then played Halo coop on a bigscreen for 3 hours. It was the best night I've had in a while.
Halo and Halo 2 are all about the in-person coop experience.
I used to say at the time that Halo 1 was by far the most amazing shooter... on consoles.
The characters are slow and sluggish, the maps are mostly empty, the vehicles are cool but just as sluggish, the weapon selection is pretty lacking even compared to games a decade older.
But for consoles, it was amazing, because all they had were shooters made for PC, and that didn't work at all for controllers, at least not for casual players. Halo was basically the first shooter seriously created to be played with a controller and still offer depth. It also launched basically completely unopposed.
It releases in the same year as Red Faction, Tribes 2, HalfLife blueshift, Ghost Recon and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Quake 3 Team Arena and Counterstrike came out the year before. The PC market was drowning in amazing FPS games. But on console, nah, it was just Halo.
Personally I kinda like that feeling of an empty world sometimes. One of my favorite places in any game is the mall in GTA Vice City.
I can't explain why though lol
Halo 1 requires nostalgia now to really get through. 2 and 3 were vast improvements.
Disagree.
I would have to say the dual wielding introduced in Halo 2 in addition to streamlining of the controls made the sequels way better.
Halo 1 is a great game on its own but all the subsequent improvements made the later iterations just so much more playable.
Probably controversial but half life 2 for me. I got it very cheap on a sale after years of hearing how good it was. Just couldn't get into it. Even worse, every time I felt nauseated after a couple of minutes.
I guess this is just an example of a "you had to be there" scenarios. I was there as a gamer at the time but had no funds to play all the games. I skipped on HL 2 and can't get into it 20 years later.
Motion blur. My friend couldn't play HL2 or Portal until I suggested he turn it off - he was getting crazy motion sickness and headaches after just a few minutes before that
Motion blur: taking a performance hit to make your games look like fuzzy ass.
Lens flare is up next.
Can we bump "let's make it look like shit on purpose" chromatic aberration above that?
Putting in a lot of effort to make games look like the protagonist has camera lenses for eyes.
Real life doesn't have motion blur, or chromatic aberration, or lens flares. Real life does have depth of field, but it moves with my eyes, not my right hand on the mouse.
Putting in a lot of effort to make games look like the protagonist has astigmatism.
I'm almost certain this is why so much blurring and flare was pushed as "realism" a couple generations ago. The devs and artists needed their eyes checked.
As someone that already has to deal with a somewhat blurry perception, I don't want any more of that, ever.
I've heard it was to mimic films, which has actual lens flares. But I like this alternate "game devs had eye problems" narrative!
Real life absolutely has motion blur and flares. You're just used to it
IS THAT WHAT IT WAS???
Dude I get SO SICK playing HL2. I played it with a puke bucket next to me so I could finish the game.
Nothing has fucked me up before or since as badly as HL2 did for motion sickness.
Could have been lol
Motion blur is disgusting in video games. It didn't make me sick but I turned it off because....why would I want everything to look like musg
If you want to give it a go again, turn up the field of view and turn down head-bobbing if that's an option (which I'm sure it is with the console at least). These are the things that give people motion sickness in FPSs usually.
Yeah maybe, thanks for the tip.
However, I do feel that, being the groundbreaking tech of that era from which all post games practically were derived, I won't have the same "iconic" experience today as I would have had back then. I feel like I just have to live with the fact that I missed it.
That's okay though. Maybe some games today will be the predecessors and iconic titles of times to come ;).
I posted on another comment about how HL2 just doesn't stand up anymore because it was a game that's at least 50% interesting because of the physics gimmicks, which we've seen thousands of times now, so I totally agree.
The more recent games iconic games that I don't think have been surpassed yet are Dark Souls and Factorio. They've both spawned whole new genres, but I still think they're the best examples of their genres.
Dark Souls combat has been done better since, but the total package I think is still better in that one. The world they created is nearly perfect, and no successor has even really attempted to recreate the experience of traveling through it.
Factorio copycats never try to do better than Factorio, just different. Satisfactory is cool, but being 3D significantly limits the factory building aspect, though it adds architecture design which is cool.
I'm sure there are others that I haven't thought of or we don't recognize yet.
I completely agree with Dark Souls! That was also the title I had in mind which did groundbreaking work and paved the way for so many games since.
Haven't played Factorio so maybe that's one I missed again lol.
I can relate
That era of PC gaming has a weird camera that takes a while for me to get used to. Not sure I can pinpoint what is different about it though
Thief.
But I HAVE to try again! I want to write my bachelors about game design of stealth games and not analyzing Thief would be a crime against humanity
I guess it's the graphics and the weird keyboard combo? Because otherwise I don't really see what's the issue. It was so influential and good when it came out that you can get into actual arguments if any successor games are actually better than the original series (disregard the remake).
It's basically still top tier stealth game, but the keyboard interface is weird as fuck initially. But you get used to it within hours, if you want to.
The graphics might be insurmountable for many people.
I let civvie11 play it and I lived thru him vicariously
Morrowind was always this for me. I started the series with Oblivion and Skyrim. Those have their own issues, but at least you hit things when you hit them, and their leveling systems won't actually screw you over if you don't Excel it correctly.
SMB 1 and 2. The SMB1 engine was revolutionary, but I hate the controls. SMB2, the Western one, just never felt like Mario, even back then. I also mostly started on SMB3 which had much better platforming and controls and was actually a Mario game, so that's probably why.
I consider myself, more or less, a "Zelda fan", at least from LttP to about half of Wind Waker. I will never play the first two NES games, though. Aside from 2 being "pretty much not zelda", 1 is so full of arbitrary wonk, "Guide dammit", and "Nintendo hard" that I don't feel like it even for historical purposes.
Zelda II is dope. You're missing out.
Forreal though? The side scrolling one?
If you say it's worth it I'll plow through it.
Might be partially due to nostalgia, but I think it's good. It's just different.
Lttp was the first game I remember ever picking out completely on my own. I have grown up with this game over the decades and I truly feel it's one of the best games of all time, and like a top 5ish for me easily. Maybe higher depending how nostalgic I'm feeling that day.
The rest of them until twilight princess get regular playthroughs, and I thoroughly enjoy them every time I dig in.
Botw was great. Totk too!
I have never once felt an urge to play the very first Zelda that lasted longer than 30 minutes or so.
For me it was Ocarina of Time. Ugly, and very clumsy. And I play tons of retro games. Early 3D stuff can be rough.
Did you try Ship of Harkinian? It has a lot of improvements that make it easier to play nowadays.
https://www.shipofharkinian.com/
Oh thank you. I'll check it out. I always wanted to get into the Zelda franchise and I love the lore of Ocarina/Majoras Mask
There are specific things about OoT that irritate me, but I can generally still get some enjoyment.
Morrowind.
Great characters, setting, dialog, and lore, but clunky af, even compared to Oblivion
I really want to like it too. My first Elder Scrolls game was Oblivion which I loved and then of course Skyrim happened (multiple times).
I even tried going back to Oblivion, which I'll still play a bit out of nostalgia, but if I picked it up today I don't know if I would like it.
Yeah oblivion ruined games for me i played skyrim after but just couldnt get into it as much but then going back to oblivion feels bad especially since pc didnt get controller support I cant just sit on the couch and play and if im going to sit at my desk i feel i need to get through new game backlog since desk time is a commodity now for me
You'll get used to it
That's such a shame, it was the first RPG I ever played and I absolutely loved it.
Yeah I get that there are many that feel that way. And I love RPGs, though my first was probably Diablo, which I played the hell out of. I just wasn't even aware of Elder Scrolls until Oblivion so it wasn't until later that I tried to go back and play it and it's just tough.
Unpopular opinion for sure, but Vampire: The Masquerade. I've started so many playthroughs over the years but just cannot fall into it like other RPGs on account of its dated mechanics and graphics.
I assume you're talking about VTM Bloodlines, the video game RPG? If you're not playing with the fan patch, you need to. The game was never totally finished and was rushed out the door by their publisher, so it'd got a lot of jank and missing content. It's probably a hard game to love, but if you get into it then it does so much better than a lot of other games.
I played with the fan patch but still didn't get very far. It feels very weird to play an RPG in an early version of the Source engine. Would be neat to see the game get a Source 2 port with upgraded graphics and modernized mechanics.
Bloodlines 2 is coming out sometime. It was in development hell for a while, but it's a new team working on it now and they released something about it recently. It may actually come out eventually.
Good to know. I thought it was canceled years ago. Thanks.
Yes, Bloodlines, should've clarified. I've never looked into the patch but I've heard of it.
The funny thing is how much I love Fallout New Vegas, a game that gets thrown around a lot in the same discussions. Currently have several hundred hours of playtime on FNV across like five consoles and PC, but I've never been able to get into VTMB the same way.
The patch is so important I'm pretty sure it's bundled into the GoG version of the game. It's essentially required at this point.
I'll second that the fan patch for VtM:B is pretty much essential for enjoying it. FNV had its bugs, but it was at least polished into a solid experience before release. VtM:B...wasn't, unfortunately, but the patch gets it there.
Even so, I'd rather play a forward-port of Fallout: New Vegas to a newer engine with updated graphics, but I doubt that it'll happen. Retexturing might be doable with AI upscaling or something like that, but I can't think of an inexpensive way to remodel everything. If they're going to do the kind of asset work that I suspect would be required, they'd probably be better-off just doing Fallout 5.
There's the Tale of Two Wastelands mod that put Fallout 3's content into Fallout: New Vegas, but it could just use the content directly, as the two were pretty contemporaneous.
Starfield's engine runs vastly more smoothly for me than even Fallout 76's, does a better job of streaming content into memory.
Also, I liked Fallout: New Vegas -- one could change the world in many interesting and interacting ways, it had great DLC, I liked the New Old West setting, finding unique items felt really neat. But it had a number of warts, a number related to the engine, and I feel that sometimes people look at it with the gilding of nostalgia:
The game tended to load and save more-and-more slowly over the course of a game. Maybe with a present-day PC on solid-state storage, it'd be okay, but it got absolutely horrendous, especially on consoles.
It also, in my experience, tended to get less-stable over the course of a game.
Falling through terrain was an issue.
Enemy AI was pretty bad. I mean, it was par for the course for the time, but Starfield's human enemies have gotten more-interesting behavior.
It wasn't uncommon that I'd manage to break one quest or another on a given playthrough.
Some people really like the "skill point" system in Fallout: New Vegas and earlier, and dislike the shift to just doing perks in Fallout 4, to the point that there have been mods to forward-port the skill system forward. I don't. One thing I liked about the Fallout series was that the SPECIAL points were significant enough that you could feel each point make a difference; this was a shift from the Dungeons & Dragons convention, where a single stat point often didn't make much change. The skill points, however, broke with that, and a given level up didn't make a really noticeable change.
The perks weren't really balanced; some are clearly better than others. This isn't to specifically criticize Fallout: New Vegas: that's been true for the whole series. But it's not on par with, say, a traditional roguelike, where there's a very long, iterative development cycle where there are tweaks and rebalancing.
Some of the compromises that had to be made to get performance reasonable are really visible, like the walls around New Vegas, or the limited number of characters running around.
The view distance and weapon ranges were limited to the point that it was always kind of noticeable.
There was a lot of polygons clipping through each other. Not the end of the world, but it did impact immersion for me.
It feels like trying to play a really old Half-Life 2 mod that was never updated after the initial release. Which makes sense since it was the first Source engine game to be produced by a 3rd party. Also doesn't help that they tried to make an RPG in an engine designed for FPS.
FONV and Skyrim. Even with mods, FONV looks like microwaved dog shit. Im mot even a huge graphics nut but at a point it becomes too distracting and FONV goes far beyond that. Skyrim's sluggish movements keep me completely disengaged, although the graphics don't throw me off quite as much, it feels so outdated that the immersion is ruined right from the very start.
What's sluggish-movement about Skyrim? You mean the character movements, or something else?
The high-running-speed in Skyrim compared to even some modern AAA's has always been an upside to me.
The horse speed on the other hand is awful. There's a mod called "faster horses" though that addresses it.
Yeah, I can agree with that. Horse speed is pretty lackluster. I think part of that is valid, and part of that is how fast the character normally moves (since they move a lot faster than a real human would)
Character movement. All the animations, running, walking, and turning in 3rd person are about the worst they could be. 1st person isn't much better but at least you can't see anything but the arms. My take is that the animations just didn't match the quality of everything else.
It's like taking a beautiful road trip all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway from the Redwoods to sunny SoCal but doing to in a old ass rustbucket with no power steering, the breaks are shot and making that noise and it always smells like gas inside but the windows won't roll down. What's outside the window is pretty great tho.
Luckily, there are plenty of mods to help with that whilst keeping the experience authentic.
Wish more games supported modders to this extent.
I'd love to give Skyrim another go with my PC as I've only ever played it on console. I have FONV on PC with all the best rated popular quality of life mods and it's still horrendously ugly. I've seen others mod skyrim and it looks beautiful.
Have you tried FO3? It came before NV and might draw you in more because the locations in it are far more iconic. I like it a bit better in some ways as well.
Fallout 1&2. I love isometric top down rpgs and have played every title since fallout 3 to completion. Something about the clunkiness leaves me with a lot to be desired. I didn't pay more than $4 for both titles on a steam sale so I'm not mad they're in my library, I just wish I could break through the barrier and experience the beginnings of that world.
I’m the opposite and grew up with 1&2. I spent a ton of time modding 3 and then just got bored. I bought NV but have never even launched it and I don’t think I’ve even bothered looking at 4. I’d love for an HD remake of 1&2
For what it's worth I personally find fallout 3 soulsucking. It's got interesting stuff throughout but it feels randomly scattered into a disjointed and confusing world.
New Vegas is a lot better at making the area feel like a cohesive environment. You understand petty easily why people are where they are and move along the routes they do. We're practically a cult so I'll spare you further recommendation.
Yeah, I love the idea of fallout 1 & 2 and remember watching a friend play it when it was new, but I tried to get into it as an adult and just can't..
Same boat as you practicality
At this stage, I am loath to go back to any game where the UI takes up half the screen. RTS games especially just used so much screen real estate back in the day, that couldn't be scaled or hidden to get any back. Like playing your game through a letterbox surrounded by stickers.
I hate playing StarCraft because the UI is gigantic and you can't zoom out far enough on the map. I've got massive, high-res monitors, but the game treats me like it's still 640x480.
And really, more strategy/sim games need to support multi-monitor setups. Supreme Commander spoiled me, and more games should follow their example.
Start craft specifically, but I believe most RTS games in general, limited the visible map area to make sure all players in a multiplayer games were on equall footing. They didn't want people with larger monitors or more powerful computers to have an advantage by being able to see more terrain and units than those with lower resolutions. Lack of zoom is usually down to network optimization where bandwidth was significantly limited in the dial-up days.
On multiplayer - fine. I played single-player and it was annoying as hell.
Sup Com FA was a pretty elegant UI, yeah. Very unobtrusive but combined with the split screens, multi screens and all the hotkeys it was so versatile. Probably a bitch to create though and not used by most players at the time.
Quite a few, but more recently:
Neverwinter Nights. Even the Enhanced Edition.
Diablo.
Other older RPGs just start off too slow, but that isn't necessarily age related, but by design.
Morrowind, but only because I've lost where I was up to in my saved game from 3-4 years ago, not so much because of the mechanics; they didn't bother me too much.
Diablo II holds up to me, and they did a wonderful job with the remaster!
If I was offered a million dollars if I could continue where I left off in Morrowind (major, minor, side, or goals)... Yeah, I'll be in tomorrow, boss.
Diablo in its vanilla form is rough, there's an amazing mod which sort of upgrades it to d2 style called bezzelbub. I recommend trying it with that if you cash jam D2 but my D1
A lot of the UI/UX and game mechanics from HOMM3 were taken from Sid Meier's games, like Colonization and Civilization. When you say you didn't understand stuff in HOMM3, I want to ask if you've played CIV6 or CIV5 or other modern games in that same genre? If not, you're going to be confused by them regardless of whether you're starting with CIV1 or HOMM3 or CIV6.
Anything with consoles as the primary focus. You know the games, the ones where the controls suck if you don't use a controller..like witcher, and all those dark souls copy/paste clones. Cameras are too jank
My two are Morrowind, where I loved the quest design and lack of handholding, but the random hit chance and BS difficulty distribution were just... too much to handle.
And also, KOTOR, which I expected to love as a huge Star Wars fan, but the "stand around while dice are rolled" combat was just... exceptionally boring and tedious.
My issue with Morrowind is the level up system where you gotta metagame it to get +5s for 3 stats per level if you want to be most efficient. And you gotta max endurance ASAP to gain the maximum potential health by end game. I simply can not handle it. It sucks the fun right out of the game for me.
Maybe relax on the "you gotta max this stat" and it may be more fun for you.
Lol, who is this comment for?
Me: I don't like the level up system of an ancient RPG because I invariably feel drawn to minmax based on the design. It just sucks the fun out of the game for me every time I try.
You: Maybe relax and pretend not to have that issue.
Back up, he's a hero.
Final Fantasy Tactics. I always hear its praise and apparently the story is really great, but... I just can't stand it. Despite being a massive fan of its sequel on the GBA.
I've had multiple story battles end before I even got a turn it, just because the NPC I was supposed to protect walked straight into his death. And that's kinda true for every NPC, in a game with permadeath and NPC companions for a big chunk of the inital hours. Sometimes you just gotta repeat a mission several times for a single chance to actually play and win.
You want to recruit monster? Great! Now they multiply like rabbits and your whole squad will forever be clogged with monsters.
Outside of NPC suicide, a lot of the battles are stomps. Either you know how to abuse the jobs and become a literal god or you kind of suffer, since once again permadeath. Oh, but even if you struggle through, you just get the most overpowered unit for free, making the last part mostly trivial anyways.
There a literal softlocks if you save right after a mission with a mandatory follow-up without being able to handle it. Your save will just throw you into a battle you cannot win.
It just feels like a game made before proper playtesting was a thing.
I haven't played it, but it's interesting that it's too difficult.
A lot of the games I go back to from the NES era are often too difficult for me. I find a lot of them to be unfair and I wonder if the difficulty something that was brought over from the arcade games form right before it
Either that or padding to make the game longer. If that's the case, I prefer side mission padding because at least that's usually optional lol
For the early NES era, it's literally this - game devs were mostly coming from the arcade sector, and depending on the company the design mentality of trying to get them to spend more quarters died more slowly for some than others. It calms down a bit for later NES titles, especially ones that weren't in common genres for arcade games.
There's also the fact that a $40 game in 1988 would be over $100 in 2024 money.
Imagine buying a game (for you or your kid) only to beat it in an hour, and there's nothing else to do with the game.
Skilled gamers did rentals because they made sense when games couldn't be nearly as big as they are today.
Definitely one of those that needs a new release. The underlying system that continued into the Advance games is still one of the best sandboxes for fans of Final Fantasy jobs. Just not being able to undo moves feels ancient today. A lot of the rest of the jank was just how Matsuno did games, though. He's one of those that thinks players should grind a bit, even on Twitter recently defending a notoriously difficult recruitment quest in Tactics Ogre Reborn.
Unfortunately, despite the otherwise reliable Nvidia leak, it's sounded like a remaster for this one isn't coming any time soon.
Actually I'm curious about Tactics Ogre Reborn, did you play it? I initially wanted to get it but my recent experience with FFT stopped me from doing so. Would you recommend it despite my gripes?
I believe there still is permadeath, but I read somewhere that units only actually die if you let them fall in 3 missions or something like that. That would be fine, if they don't spam rescue missions and NPC companions.
I have played Tactics Ogre Reborn, yes. I think it depends on what you're looking for. The story is one of Matsuno's better ones, and the way to navigate its branches is still to this day not a device that's been used much in gaming. Parts of the gameplay are still dated, and the equipment system is on the obtuse side.
On your specific gripes, yes, the permadeath works on a "heart" system, so it's not one-and-done. That's kind of necessary too, since there are some instant death situations (mostly in the game's side areas). The good news is that everyone is qualified to use resurrection items, so the limitation for that will be money, especially early on. The game's battles--especially the story battles--have fewer rounds than FFT does. There is a generous rewind system that helps, too. Between those two factors, for the most part, it's going to be less of an issue of permadeath and more whether you can actually clear the battle.
Unfortunately, Tactics Ogre has long been notorious for NPC AI issues. It seems somewhat improved in this version but it can still certainly be a problem. Here it's not going to impede your story progress (unlike a couple of fights in FFT where it's Game Over if a guest goes down after you picked the wrong dialogue option to start the fight), but it will close the opportunity for recruitment temporarily. Rewind helps again here.
Amusingly, the game specifically warns you about softlocks, so as long as you're not accidentally deleting saves it won't be an issue. It's possible you might find yourself deep in a long dungeon and can't handle the last floors, and in that case you'll have to go back to an outside save.
Overall, I would rate the difficulty higher than Final Fantasy Tactics. As you found, FFT gets to a point where player knowledge equates to a massive power increase. Player knowledge plays a role in TOR, but not really to that degree. A solid grasp of the tactics is required, and the game does offer a far smoother difficulty curve. It's really only a certain early sidequest involving some undead that has a difficulty spike, and that's mostly because players may not realize it's a battle they can come back to later.
Loved the GBA version. Solid game, simple but effective; would recommend to anyone.
Have fond memories of FFT but in hindsight I kept playing mostly because I was a kid and thought grinding was normal. The plot is also cool but the original translation was shit and I couldn't figure out what was going on half the time.
Also the soft locks. Sometimes it's better not to save when the game gives you the chance...
Plus most of the named characters took center stage and your team was mostly irrelevant once you got Orlandu.
Life
Not to be confused with John Conway’s the game of life. That one is fine, a classic.
I dunno man, Conway's Game of Life has a quite boring endgame, I must say.
Yes, but absolutely no grind.
Pretty much all of the iconic games from my early teens. (I was a teen in the late 80s and 90s). The games that I grew up with, that I fell in love with, are unplayable now.
Dragonstrike, a flight sim where you fly a dragon in the D&D Dragonlance world was mind blowing when I first played it. Now, it's so bad that replaying it spoiled my memory of the original experience!
Yeah I get that. Sometimes I wish I didn't revisit games and instead kept the nostalgia glasses on haha
Exactly! I'm much more inclined to not revisit things these days. The original Fallout games fall in this category for me
Damn, that game sounds amazing as a concept though. I've been really looking for something that's a decent dragon-based game which doesn't involve the dragons being relentlessly shat on by the story/all being dead or super rare.
How bad are we talking, exactly..?
It's a flight combat sim. You're on the back of a dragon instead of in a cockpit. You can either blast enemies with your breath, or get close and rake them with your claws. I was on PC at the time, and this runs on DOS, so don't expect any marvel of technology.
Like a scientifically accurate dragon MMO?
I'm listening. What've you got?
It's a meme. A glorious one.
There are a couple of dragon flight games out there, but the ones I've played take too many pages from flight sims, and not enough from riding horses. You can't get a horse to try to jump the Grand Canyon, but in the sims I played, the dragons would let you fly them into a mountainside.
Someday, though.
I feel like after BotW and TotK, older 3D Zelda games seem clunky yet easy. I can't get used to the cameras in OoT and MM it feels so stiff as opposed to an old game like Kingdom Hearts where the first game aged well and the controls are still good.
If you play OoT with the PC port then you can have full camera control with the second stick.
Interestingly I think the 2D Zeldas aged less than the early 3D ones. ALttP is pretty good to this day.
Super Mario 64, while i started with the nes i never really fully played the 64 title
I played it on stream some time ago but eventually stopped cause mario just felt so weighty and clunky to control. I tried 3 different controllers just in case it could have just been me, but unfortunately, i just didnt jive with it.
I tried to replay GoldenEye on switch and just couldn't. The control scheme is just too dated and I can't get past it.
Goldeneye just isn't a very good game. It was one of the best fps games on the N64 so if all you've got is an N64 you're going to think it's amazing. But other games have done much better what it tried to do so today it feels clunky and bad. Contrast to something like Doom which still holds up today because that style of gameplay hasn't been massively improved on.
Coming to it from Crash Bandicoot, there was just something off about how Mario 64 controlled.
This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I'd bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There's definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.
Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I'd paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money's worth.
Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels 'modern' enough that I don't usually have this problem.
That's interesting. I either refund them if I struggle a little too much on tutorials, or just leave it in the backlog for later (aka most likely never).
I should try doing that more though because they're classics for a reason and maybe there's still fun I can get out of them.
That's interesting, I kinda get the wanting to get your moneys worth out of it. I am a little surprised that even though I only played Fallout 1 and 2 a few years ago for the first time (not old enough to have played them at release) I really liked both of them. I thought the story was really solid. Much simpler than F3 or New Vegas, but still very good.
There are still games that require a lot of reading documentation to be playable. Come to think of it, some of my favorite games are like that, like Dwarf Fortress or the like.
Yes that's true! I find that games like that have their own sort of niche, in which players usually know quite a lot about the game (from watching others play it online) before jumping in. And there's an expectation that they'll refer to the wiki regularly. These kind of games can't have a tutorial that covers everything, because there's way too much to cover.
Persona 1 and 2. As a Persona fan I see some people saying how great they are, and the story does seem interesting, but I can't deal with that map movement, battle system and endless random battles.
Really, any RPG with random battles is a little harder to get into compared to overworld monsters you can avoid or target at your own pace.
Even as a kid growing up with that stuff I hated the random battles.
Same. I used to play some fantasy RPG with random battles. Me, being like 9, realized that you can escape, and if you fail you can try again. Well, I started skipping all battles, and somehow ended up in a boss fight that was level like 25, and I was about 12. I didn't have any earlier save, and I couldn't go back.
It was some game about going on a pilgrimage.
Sounds like Final Fantasy X, but it really depends on how old you are. It has a Flee skill which allows you to instantly escape nearly any battle. Lots of new/young players abused it because they thought “hey, less battling.” But then they were horribly underpowered for the bosses.
And yes, it features a pilgrimage as a main plot point.
If you’re interested, the PC remaster has some nice added features. You can up the speed to 4x, enable auto-attacks, enable a “boost” mode that gives you a full heal every turn, etc… And if you install the Untitled Project X mod, you can enable exp gains for characters on your bench, so you don’t even need to swap out characters for them to receive exp. It takes a relatively grindy game, and turns it into one where you don’t need to grind at all. Giving exp to benched members means you spend less time on each battle, and you don’t end up with any characters who are underpowered because you never use them.
I remember I struggled with my first play through because I rarely used Wakka or Rikku. And those are two out of three characters who can fight underwater. Near the end of the game, there’s an underwater boss fight that was basically a brick wall for me. All because those two characters weren’t leveled up enough.
Good tip, but it was definitely mot FFX. I remember starting in a village, on a sort of peninsula, being sent out on a pilgrimage for whatever reason, going north. It was definitely not 3D graphics.
EDIT: After a lot of searching, it was probably "Legend of Heroes 2: Prophecy if the Moonlight Witch", but I am not too sure. It's the closest I could match from my memory. It is almost 20 years ago lol.
EDIT2: It is definitely it.
Lord of the rings online looks terrible but I’ve always wanted to explore.
I played that game all of ten hours. Three of which involved a rando I met guiding me through his route to acquiring a horse early. Got to parade that shit to all my friends when we played next. 10/10 wouldn't play again.
The first 30ish hours are amazing to see the world and visit the Shire and Bree but then it becomes total ass unless you love MMOs
I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic right now. The only thing that makes the graphics tolerable is playing on my switch. The screen is small enough to minimize the bad graphics and jank. But if I was playing it on a TV or computer screen I wouldn't be able to continue. It hasn't aged well at all.
Well, if you do want to play on pc, KOTOR is an amazing game, and if you can't get past the old graphics, there are upscaling mods https://www.nexusmods.com/kotor/mods/1302?tab=files
I hate the texts I that game. They're either too small to see from a normal distance or you can mod them bigger and then they don't fit in the ui
I tried to play fallout 3 and new vegas after falling in love with fallout 4 but I just could not stomach it. The games looked ugly and controlled strangely. I had more fun and enjoyment playing the original fallout from the 90s.
The aiming on guns in those Fallout games always felt odd, even on my first playthroughs when the game first came out and it makes gameplay a chore sometimes, relying more on VATS than actually aiming like you would a FPS.
Even by comparison of using bow and arrow in Oblivion which came out a year or two before Fallout 3, it’s just…off.
Man are those a good ride on PC though. A handful of mods and the graphics are solid enough. Unofficial fixes and other key mods for QOL update many mechanics and make the game more playable. Nowadays modding has largely evolved so folders and sub-folders are properly constructed with Mod Organizer 2 doing a lot of the footwork for you.
Did you play on PC? Aside from the graphics I thought it handled pretty much like any typical fps game, so the gameplay didn't feel aged to me. But then again I used so many mods in my play through that I don't really know what the vanilla game is like.
I was on pc yes
It bothers me how fucking monumental of an achievement Xenogears could have been, how incredible it still is, and how unbearably painful it is to try and play today.
It's still one of the most wild sci-fi stories I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing, [and I read a LOT], but even at the time it was a really clunky combat system and the controls can be absolutely maddening.
I feel the same way about the modern games in the series. The combat feels like an MMO in the worst way, but the stories are interesting enough that I keep on trying to play them.
Suikoden III really should have used voice acting. I think it came out at the beginning of the voice acting era, but chose to make the player read everything. It's a fantastic game otherwise, but that makes replays unappealing.
On the contrary, not being able to turn off voice acting can be a deal-breaker for me! Haha
You'll have to sail the high seas since it requires THUG2 which isn't for sale anymore but THUGPRO is a mod that will let you play classic Tony hawk levels with all the mechanics from later games.
The first witcher. The story seems really interesting and it has some great rpg elements but the combat is just so boring that I ended up startin witcher 3 without knowing the lore
I don't think it actually matters for the Witcher series. They don't tend to dwell too much on the events of the previous game.
I assumed that Yen was something from the Witcher 2 (that I skipped), but I don't think she's in that at all. If anything it relies more on the books for the backstory of each game.
Witcher 1 is a very odd game, gameplay-wise, that makes more sense when you realise it was initially some top down D&D game. It's just presented as a regular 3rd person game that we now expect to play somewhat differently, rather than the odd "click the mouse at the right moment" system they went with. It's worth it just for the story. Just turn down the difficulty as it's really not worth struggling with, although for me the hardest boss in the game was a dog near the start.
Yeah I kinda realized the same thing. I might not know everything but witcher 3 with no extra information has been great and I havent felt like I don't know enough to enjoy the lore
I was always a console gamer in my childhood so I missed the boat on a lot of the most iconic PC games.
I feel like I might catch some heat for this one, but recently I tried Half Life 1 and I just couldn't get into it. The game just feels so...lifeless. I got about 10 chapters in, which is like 60% or so of the way through, and every moment just feels like I'm playing House of the Dead in the arcade, walking down a hallway and shooting jumpscare enemies. I think the lack of any semblance of story or motivation for what I'm doing is especially egregious to me.
We're you playing Black Mesa, the fan remake, or the original? Black Mesa is the way to go now, although the original did get a patch recently.
I was playing through the patched version of the original. I picked up the entire Valve bundle for a few bucks on sale about a year or back.
As someone who is an outsider to the series, I was under the impression that Black Mesa was a unique game set in the same universe?
Black Mesa is a fan remake of HL1. It's basically a ground-up complete remake. And as such, it revamps a ton of outdated mechanics, improves a lot of weird maps, and of course, improves the graphics and sound design. Actually, what I'm really impressed by is how they're able to change so many things but still keep the core "vibe" of the game.
I was in the same boat as you, I really bounced off HL1 when I tried it. But Black Mesa is great. If you liked HL2, you'll definitely like Black Mesa
I was planning on doing a playthrough of HL2 after the first, so I haven't actually played it yet. The first has kind of left a sour taste in my mouth though and as far as I can tell the second isn't a huge change in terms of the issues I felt the first had. If they did a good enough job with Black Mesa to fix the hallway simulator vibes of the first I may definitely have to give it a shot.
I don't mind the dated mechanics and graphics as much. I do mind the lack of player agency and objectives or direction. A lot of similar shooters of this period really survived on the atmosphere they created and I just don't feel that in this game. It just makes it hard to overcome the "why am I playing this, I'm very bored" feelings.
The vibes is exactly why HL1 was successful, but I agree it doesn't really hold up compared to modern games. I think Black Mesa brings it close to the same level of modern games, while still being HL1. It's still a lot of hallways (especially early on), as that's the setting of the game. BM just makes them look better and adds more detail the original couldn't have. It also adds physics, so it feels more alive.
HL2 was one of the first games with physics, and as such used physics as a gimmick too frequently in my opinion. It doesn't hold up as well as Black Mesa makes HL1 hold up. HL1 is just a shooter with an interesting story, and importantly never takes control away for cutscenes or anything, which was new for the genre. There's no gimmicks, just a good game.
At this point I'm definitely going to finish the game, so we'll see if my opinions change at the end of it all. If I'm still struggling to get into it I'll definitely give Black Mesa a shot so I appreciate the suggestion and clarification.
I guess my expectations were way out of whack because I'd heard nothing but praise of the game for 20 years.
The best way to describe Black Mesa is Half-Life 1 with HL2 graphics.
Personally I'd wait for the inevitable RTX Remix mod of BM before giving the game another chance. I don't know if you've seen the HL2 RTX mod, but it looks as good as a modern game to my eyes.
If that's truly what the game is about I don't know that it's for me then. Outdated graphics aren't actually a big issue for me and with the updated patch on the base game they really are not bad at all.
Most of my issues come from game direction and design. I can only run straight down a hallway with no idea why for so long before it just starts to feel tedious. If the Black Mesa map redesigns helps to give more area traversal options I would definitely think again though.
I don't think that I'd go back and play Half Life 1, but it introduced a lot of things that were, for the time, unusual for the genre, like an actual story (if you don't like HL1, earlier FPSes were absymal), aircraft and vehicles, interesting weapons.
Someone above -- talking about Half Life 2 -- mentioned that there are games that are significant not so much because they stand up well today, but because they introduced improvements to a genre that became widespread.
Yeah, I think ultimately my expectations got the best of me for this one. I'd heard nothing but praise of the game for so long and wasn't looking at the game through the lens of the development limitations of it's time period. I'll still probably finish the game, but I am a bit disappointed and probably won't play the second.
Mario 64. it's so frustrating.
That game did not age well. I predict a remake in the future
I'd love to play one
These days, for me the absolute minimum is full controller support due to the wife acceptance factor. She loved Dragon Age Inquisition so we tried to play Origins a couple years ago, and even though I'd cloned the displays, me sitting behind her at my computer instead of next to her on the couch was a deal breaker.
There are other plusses in terms of WAF, full voice narration and a good story being chief among them. There's a reason the only soulslike I've ever really played is Fallen Order. 😆
For me playing alone (which I almost never do anymore), one example I can think of is trying to go back to Dark Age of Camelot after playing WoW for a while. That was...painful.
I'm curious how your wife might enjoy the Xbox 360 version of Dragon Age Origins. It's a shame they didn't patch the PC version so that you could use that interface.
Thanks to the modding community we were able to play Mass Effect as if it were running on console many years before the Legendary Edition was available.
In general I can play any game regardless of age, unless the controls are complete garbage and cannot be changed. Luckily on PC a ton of games can be modded for the better, but not always and it's always down to controls feeling too off that I'll drop something I'm otherwise interested in.
Reading the comments here hurts my soul, everyone hates all my favorite games. 🤣
I bounced right off Super Metroid because of the controls. Mind you I first picked up the game in 2016. It's a game that wants more than a SNES pad, really overusing the shoulder buttons. I didn't grow up with that one, and I just can't get a feel for it.
The movement tech in that game puts most modern metroidvanias to shame. Some of the tricks you can pull off are nuts!
Yes, I'm aware. Watching someone skilled in the game is just amazing. I think I'd be pretty adept at it if I'd started at 8 years old, but trying to start out with it in my 30's I just bounced right off.
It's a great game, fantastic visuals, music is fantastic...I don't like to play it.
fair. if you're interested in giving it another shot, there's actually a ROM hack that brings the much tighter controls from the GBA Metroid games into it: https://www.romhacking.net/reviews/5293/
Otherwise just playing a GBA title like zero mission, which is a remake of the first game, I can highly recommend
What mechanics is the new THPS1+2 remake missing besides being able to get off your board and walk around? Or do you just mean mechanics from other skate games like Skate or Session aren't in it?
I don't think they're talking about the remake
Yeah I think you're right... I'm an idiot. 😵💫
Not sure about 2, but even decades ago, I found it hard to go back to the original without manuals.
Watch Dogs 2. It was going cheap on steam, but it feels so outdated, the most generic game-themed game with all the game elements you've seen before.
Bro what the fuck? There are so many mechanics in WD2 and so much whacky shit you can do, the story is also somewhat good
By your definition GTA is a garbage game
Emperor: Battle for Dune was a solid Westwood RTS but it only allowed for one-button controls, rather than the two-button system that arrived with Age of Empires 2 which dominated all RTS games since.
Also from AoE2 the idle peasant button.
Do you mean Dune II? Emperor was the 2001 reboot. Two button RTS controls were around since at least as early as Warcraft: Orcs and Humans in 1994.
Yep. Starcraft came out in 1998 and had two-button controls, but Westwood's Dune II rebalancing in Emperor did not. Two Button controls were there in Generals in 2003 (which was my staple at the time). I didn't play Tiberian Sun.
I got the PS1 anniversary edition which had Metal Gear Solid on it, and I don't get how that game was ever as popular as it was. The handling is super janky, and the graphics is so dark that you basically cannot discern the environment and the enemy unless you stay still and watch for moving pixels.
Jank was the style at the time.
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shin megami tensei III nocturne. the lack of useful information in combat compared to what's available in other smt/persona games i have played is frustrating (strange journey, smtv, p4, pq, p5)!
Going from Persona to the mainline SMT games is rough. Persona is basically a much easier version of SMT, but is also much more popular. So lots of Persona players enjoyed the game, wanted more, and looked into SMT. But then they’re dismayed to find out how goddamned difficult the main games can be.
Nocturne fans are a lot like Morrowind fans; They hate the modern gameplay mechanics and yearn for the “good ol days” when JRPGs were hard as nails and hid even the basic mechanics from you. But you can also become overpowered as hell you play the game the “right” way. And for Nocturne fans, being good at the difficult game is a point of pride.
If you can accept the fact that they’re grindfests that are built like old school JRPGs, then you’ll probably have a decent time. But they can absolutely be obtuse and brutal if you’re just expecting more Persona.
If you’re looking for something in between, try Persona 3. It’s getting remade soon so I can’t speak on that, but the PlayStation version (P3 FES) is fantastic. It takes longer than other Persona games to get started, (seriously, the story takes several hours to get off the ground,) but it’s a lot like the later Persona games, while only being marginally more difficult.
If you hate the lack of party controls, (you can only issue general commands to party members in FES) then maybe you’ll want to check out P3 Portable instead. It adds direct commands (and the option of a female main character) to the game. It has a slightly different UI, (the daytime gameplay is more like an interactive comic,) which turned a lot of players away. But the story remains the same (with a few exceptions if you pick the FeMC) and the addition of direct commands is a great modernization.
I torture myself cause I always start series from the beginning. Megami tensei 1 and 2 were an absolute slog, shim megami tensei isn't much better. Really all these early ones I just need to have gamefaqs up on my phone the whole time cause I'll have no idea where I'm going. Shin megami tenseis not AS bad. I generally can find where I'm going, but if I take any sort of break to play another game I come back lost.
i get the feeling you didn't really read what i wrote. but i will assume you were speaking generally and enthusiastically.
I read it. You specifically didn’t list Persona 3 while simultaneously saying you wanted more SMT games to check out.
Zork I guess. Or IDK.
I heard good things about some of the earlier Star Wars games like Knights of the Old Republic and others... maybe Jedi Academy?
Struggled to get into them due to overall clunkiness and outdated menu stuff.
If someone could recommend a remake on Switch or Steam maybe with decent controller support? I might be convinced to give them another try...
Betrayal at Krondor. What an amazing game, I love it, but if you imagine what the graphics would be like if it were made today, I think it's hard to recommend anyone play it.
I don't really understand what it is about HMMIII you don't get. It is a relatively simple game concept, and the fundamentals has remained largely unchanged from iteration to iteration. I personally prefer III over most of the later ones exactly because of its simplicity (and none of those ugly 3D graphics).
For me what mostly antiquates a game is if it was primarily based on graphics which have been outdated, otherwise I don't really have a problem even with much older games. But then again I also grew up playing games in the 80s, so I have been used to those my entire life. Some of the games which fascinated me on account of the complexity, like the early Ultima games (at least I and II), doesn't exactly stand revisits, because they were very barebones compared to the later games in the franchise. Ultima V still holds up beautifully, simply because it is so complex behind those primitive graphics.
I started getting used to Ultima V, then i left it for a few days and had no idea what I was doing when I tried getting back into it! Maybe I should try one of the easier ones, maybe VI or VII?
HMM III was the first game I played in the turn based strategy genre. I had never played anything similar really, but I wanted to get into the genre and I decided to start with one a lot of people consider a classic.
My gaming knowledge started with the PS1 era playing games like crash bandicoot, THPS, and others like that. I didn't get into PC gaming until around 2016 and now games I play are Death Stranding, DOOM 2016, Skyrim, BOTW, CSGO etc.
I've tried a wide variety of games besides those, and I truly didn't know what the game was asking from me until I looked it up. Maybe the game gave me enough and I just didn't connect the dots in my head. I'm not sure, but all I know is my experience which I struggled with
All I'm saying is that I've never met anyone who didn't understand a game like DOOM or the classic Marios. There's clearly a difference in language that isn't as common in modern/more mainstream games. Not saying HMM III wasn't mainstream during it's time, but I've never heard anyone of my generation who has played it or heard of it
It's a strategy, it requires planning and thinking. Comparing to FPS is crazy. Pick up gun and shoot.
HoMM3 is quite simple. Get towns and upgrade them. Make monsters. Kill. Most stuff you can learn and figure out as you play. It was the first game of that type I played. I'm not great at it, but that's more because it's hard to master, but you can still play a reasonable game.
It's worth persisting as its one of the best games made and people still play it decades later.
From way back, first onimusha game I played was onimusha 3: demon siege, loved it so I wanted to play the other games in the series, 1 big issue, the 3rd game used analog sticks to move, the original 2 didn't, and I could not get over that fact, onimusha dawn of dreams (the 4th game) was great... maybe because it was modern enough to use the analog sticks to move.
I'm a big Guild Wars 2 fan, though I don't play that much anymore. Often in the game, Guild Wars 1 references, and stories told by players of how great it was, made me want to try it.
It still fully works, and can be played. But for me, it was a no-go. I could live with the graphics, and the environments were fine. Good music and sounds.
The interface killed it for me. Dozens of windows, shortcuts, clunky ways of doing things, the inventory. I couldn't take it anymore after a few hours.
It's not about disliking old interfaces. I basically live on the Linux-shell, and I still play xcom: ufo-defense. But the gw1 one is all over the place, like it hasn't been planned but just happened by random people dropping into the studio and adding some stuff for the fun of it.
Come to think about it, it isn't even about old games. I couldn't play Xenonauts for the same reason. I suppose I just don't enjoy clunky interfaces...
Gta 5. Story progression is just awful. You play a mission, it ends and you're forced to do open world activities instead of continuing the story. Then just when you're getting into the groove in the open world you get a call to do a story mission and it turns out to be shooting imaginary aliens. The missions are too linear and short. Gunplay is weak. Also the characters feel like they were written for 10 year olds who think swear words are funny.
I'm hoping rdr2 is better
The Elder Scrolls Online. Bought it, played 2 hours max.
If you're talking about Elder Scrolls Online, then I had the same experience. It's too repetitive and not satisfying enough
Woops yes ESO indeed.