Games aging well and badly

What games from 1996, 1997 or 1998 are still not just highly playable today but also feel just as good for you to play as they did at release?

What games from the same 3 year period now play like total ass and require significant modding to become playable (if at all)?

If I'm honest with myself, there are no games I can think of for the former question.

open it, faggot.
why would you keep a gallon of milk for years just to take a picture of it?
Bet you'll get superpowers if you drink it.

Aged well: Quake. It's still just as tight as it was on release.
Aged badly: Goldeneye. Lord, I had no idea how those controls were acceptable even in 1997. The entire game feels awkward.

For me pretty much nothing from the N64, mostly because of the awful controller.
But Crash, Final Fantasy 8, MGS, Crash Team Racing, and most famous stuff for PS1 holds up pretty much perfectly nowadays.

Future Cop LAPD is fun

Fuck all of that. I want to talk about the milk.

whats habenning to the milk user? Is is going to explode like this screencap?

Thinks don't ferment unless they've been exposed to the air, to the bacteria chilling in the air.

Hence why you don't see bottles of applejuice popping off when you go to the store, and it's not because they change the outdated stock either.

Half Life is still one game that is super fun to play…

Blood aged extremely well, provided you change the controls to full keyboard and mouse. I have now idea why they though aiming with a keyboard was a good idea, even despite the autoaim.

I guess, it's only Populous 3 for me.

Fallout 2, Civ2 and GTA are all playable, but not as impressive. BG1 is also playable, but needs a face-lift.

A lot of 1997 games are still fun as fuck to play today.

Thief aged pretty well. A little tricky to get running for some but it still feels solid and original (mostly because no one else has made a good stealth game).

A lot of N64 games aged badly. Only a few exceptions like Star Fox 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Road Rash 64, etc.. But even well-liked games at the time like SSB didn't take the years well: they usually run like shit or have horrible bugs.

For a lot of PC games it's just that they control like shit and need patches/mods to fix it.

Quake is still just as good nowadays as it was way back in 96.

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aging is the dumbest word to use. It's a personal issue why you can't get into some games due to using older standards.

MediEvil. Also RE2.

Age of Mythology is still really good. AoE II is a good candidate too given how many people still play it every day but I've never actually played it myself.

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See


There are several reasons you are incorrect.

Then you're too young to post on this board.
1996:
1997:
1998:
All games that were fun back then and are still fun to play today.

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A friend broke out his N64 a few months ago and we all thought we would have so much fun playing it. While we did, it was only we had fun laughing at how badly the game played and how impossible it was to kill each other.

I'd say anything from "experimental" eras aged poorly, mainly entering ps1 and ps2 eras where devs were fucking around with new console tech, and early 3d-camera movement games had issues figuring out how to handle it before some one invented twinsticks.

Not quite an aging thing but lots of ps1/n64 era games were accidentally eerie as shit because distance fog was used a lot and you'd be in cities with like 2 people in it tops or similar jarring effects

Battlezone '98 has aged very well when it's patched for modern systems. I've never seen a game quite like battlezone.

Spyro the Dragon

I remember my dad playing that game a lot when I was 5(?), so I bet it feels just as good today as it does 2 decades ago.
The game does not run at all unless it's patched. Thank Microsoft after the shit the pulled in Windows Vista and hereafter.

I tried playing it a few years ago.
I never played the game while growing up, so I found it absolutely unbearable. I couldn't stand playing past the first level.

This industry needs to be destroyed.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

I think HL aged pretty well compared to HL2, aside from stupid AI there's nothing wrong with the gameplay

In no particular order:

Super Mario RPG, Duke Nukem 3D, Pilotwings 64, Starcraft, Kirby Super Star, Final Fantasy 7, Star Fox 64, Megaman Legends, Crash 2, Colony Wars, Grandia, Quake 2, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, Banjo-Kazooie, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Marvel vs. Capcom 1, Sonic Adventure, Spyro the Dragon.


Mario 64. I don't give a shit, you can fight me, Mario 64 sucked my ass and aged like milk

HL1 AI is better than HL2's
it's actually pretty impressive in some parts, even the cockroaches have feeding and fear AI

That's not saying much, and it's only better when it's specifically scripted for the situation. When the scripting is ever broken or is not scripted at all (zombies are incredibly stupid and not intentionally either, they just turn in random directions while fighting me allowing for an easy crowbar kill). HL2 AI is easier to fight but technically more advanced than HL1 AI.

think before you post, retard

Stop making excuses for the shitty AI you valvecuck

For all that cinematic dickfondling one would expect to have something done with FUKKEN LIGHTS other then occasional "single spotlight" and a projected texture one in a billion rooms.

user, are you a zombie?

Counter Strike 1.6

The mid to late 90s and early 00s were the Golden Age of gaming. So many unique game concepts that have been left to rot by the modern industry as they churn out mountains of forgettable trash.

As for games that have aged badly I'd say all the Tomb Raider games until you get to Legends, Anniversary and Underworld (nuLara can go fuck herself). The graphics are ugly, not that that would be a major drawback, but when one of the selling points is the female protagonist you want her tits to look a little more round, the controls are clunky, the combat is shit and the farther along you get into the original run of the games the shittier and buggier they get.

1999 is the minimum year of birth to not be underageb& here.
do you feel old yet?

kill yourself faggot

I think the problem with HL2's AI lies in the map design and the way the game plays. The Combine soldiers would be better if they packed a little more punch and were more aggressive, and if the vehicles weren't such huge bullet sponges. I wish more FPS developers took a few notes from FEAR and everything it did right.

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Wrong, Quake feels incredibly unfinished and lackluster now that we have other games of the same genre. It just feels like the variety of weapons is very small compared to other shooters that came out later on and the levels start feeling incredibly dull after a while. Don't get me wrong, Quake is incredibly fun but after a while you start hearing a nagging voice in your mind that tells you "Wait… that's it?" and then you get bored of playing it.

On the other hand, DOOM has aged incredibly well and anyone who says otherwise is a faggot.

I like Brutal Doom.

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Read the OP a little more.

Fucking kek. Game is fucking balls.

No, what would happen if he kept it for more?

Games don't age

Is this good?

After 20 years it's actually closer to 0 and 0.999.

who doesn't?

I'm not sure but Starcraft's sprites possibly look less dated than low-polygon 3D-models that WC3 had, IIRC Blizzard didn't even bother making completely new sprites for the (((Remaster)))

You bring shame to our country with that awful ignorant non-argument that stems from pure stupidity coupled with Casero. You should be ashamed

Ageing has been used like that for a while in things like movies.
If you're gonna complain, complain about "literally".

Speaking of which you old faggots, this game was released for PC the day I was born, and it also happens to be one of my all-time favorites. I would say it's aged incredibly well.

nice bait

Spyro aged just fine, still one of the best adventure platformers in existence and the controls are very easy to get into. graphics might be shit though since >psx

webm related

I'll answer without regards for the the time restrictions with implication that you are talking pc, so in no particular order
Though hexen's game and level designs are awful and carmageddon was always a slog to go through at later stages.

Sure, I'm using xp for those and not spyware update 10 seconds until restart or anal droned 7, but there is no point trying to make old games run en masse on newer systems, because that's what virtual machines are for. If the game is a classic usually there is a neatly packaged form(gog, modded user's repacks) of it that consists of everything you need to make it run flawlessly if not better than the original.

That's when you use a resolution patch.

Dual-booting or emulated or what? I'm looking for ways to run XP for gaming without performance loss nor meddling with my current system.

Just running xp, as on a separate machine. But you can try multi-booting, though you'd probably want earlier systems for that, since xp isn't perfectly fit either for running natively late dos games. It's not even complicated if you have separate hard drives(at least for xp living with 7 I believe) and if you don't there might be a lil confusion with profile data.

I might be biased but I think F:NV and VTM:B aged fairly well. Also, a lot of RTS games aged pretty well, so long as they implemented fairly recent QOL changes to their menu navigations and such.

Oh…
Boot loader might potentially be fucked during install in both cases, which is kinda what I'm trying to avoid.
I read once that you can boot directly from a virtual hard disk file or something without touching your machine at all but I can't remember any details… Thanks anyway, user.

C&C Tiberium Dawn and C&C Red Alert are 2 games I occasionally can play and still enjoy. Its kind of unfair though because they are golden age RTS games while the majority of the newer RTS games in the last 10 years for the most part have been complete shit.

-humor and artstyle relied so heavily on 90sisms that you can barely tell what's going on on screen.
-In game tutorial assumes you read the backstory included in the instruction booklet and constantly references it
-experimental gameplay stages that feel broken and pointless now
-limited continues + slow paced awkward platforming.
-THREE loading screens before you reach the first level, and tons of opening credits.

It's like a time capsule for every way a game can age badly in the PSX era

No I have an even more interesting thing to talk about now.
Why the fuck do people consistantly confuse the word Think and Thing?
It's such an odd occurrence

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You probably could split a single hardrive in two and make it boot several systems without much confusion, but, as far as I know, that would mean formatting it first. I don't really know much about boot problems, but to my knowledge multi-boot was never complicated, you just pop an os installation disk and it offers to create an other os if it detects an already installed one. Well, there are details like linux file system and other ones that I don't know about, but it shouldn't cause much trouble since those popular userend problems were probably solved many many times and thus were recorded on the internet.

hey
follow me

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I think Gex, Gex 3 and Episode 1 Racer aged excellently.

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Close Combat games aged fairly well. Too bad AI is shit though and it ultimately feels like the newer games are completely inferior in comparison to older ones.

But you can't play Ultima Online today as it was back then.

Starcraft still looks absolutely beautiful 20 years after the fact

After you get this running in an optimized setting and download a few files that bypass the whole "this program was intended to run on an older version of windows" BS, it actually runs really well, and even the cutscenes still work.

The AI wasn't ever updated for the later game's larger maps. That's why Close Combat 3 was the peak. Of course there are mods that increase the number of enemy soldiers to a ridiculous amount, but that's hardly an enhancement.

Vielen dank, kameraden

If it weren't for the lego people, I'd argue that the game had aged well. But when Cloud is falling from the second Mako reactor, I simply laughed at how dumb it looked, especially in comparison to the pretty great background. The gameplay is still timeless, because you can't fuck up turnbased, but the character models are just too jarring against the backdrops.

Are you fucking serious?

Anyway,

I know Legend of Zelda ALTTP came out in 1991 but it still plays beautifully.
That's all I can remember off the top of my head for right now.

It's just a typo.

The game is pretty fun but what didn't age well is needing to swap discs if you want to go back to previous areas of the game. A minor gripe at best though.

Games do not "age". If you say that a game has aged poorly, all that you are really saying is that you lacked the insight or perspective to know a game was bad on release.

Games don't age.

Starcraft is an interesting case however. It shows how a creator can come back 14 years later and release a patch that cripples their own game so that it can no longer be played multiplayer on the systems it was designed for and advertised as supporting. Very interest case indeed, I hope Blizzard burns in hell.

Was a 6/10 on release. Too goddamn easy and too much unskippable exposition between gameplay chunks.

wait

American McGee's Alice aged very well. I don't know what you're talking about.

Yeah, I played FF7 in spurts back when it was still kind of new-ish (early 2000s). A month ago I tried giving it a serious playthrough, and holy fuck has it not held up. The mini games that pop up at random intervals during the story were my main gripe. And for such a more "realistic" take on FF, you have the really retarded lapses in continuity, like having to sneak into Shinra, yet you can casually still talk to employees on certain floors, like they're oblivious to the all the fighting you do on the first floor and that the facility is supposed to be on red alert.

Conversely, pic related has held up pretty well.

Don't think I didn't see that shit nibba

Rebellion actually made a Redux of the game if you're interested in it.

Starfox 64 has aged pretty well, especially considering how badly its predecessor has.

Interesting viewpoint.

I dont think i could say any games have aged badly, i'm just worse at them.

Okay.

Time to piss some people off.

I say that it held up pretty well because it was never good. FF4 is a terrible game, and it never impressed me. The first 3 games are considerably superior.

FF4 is way too linear and gives you no real choice as far as your team/skills go (and it changes constantly because of muh deep plot, so Cecil is always overpowered while everyone else is always useless). It was the first Final Fantasy that severely limited its own gameplay because it tried too hard not to be a game. It was the first bad Final Fantasy. VII is a better game, but it's still really bland. It's pretty fun the first time, but not exactly something that I could play twice. I tried to, in 2016, but it just bored the shit out of me.

FF5 and Tactics will always be the best games in the series. Getting rid of the job system was a massive mistake, especially considering that they got it right even in the first game (despite its simplicity and lack of refinement). That really made FF4 inferior to its predecessors, as a game.

FF2, as weird as its gameplay was, pulled what FF4 was going for much better. And it was much more fun.

He's not wrong, but at the same time, he's wrong. For the most part, games are definted by their gameplay. Good gameplay will never age, no matter what, and that's where he's coming from. Good gameplay will never feel outdated. On the other hand, graphical aesthetics can really fuck with you. Compare the original Mario Bros and Super Mario World. If you had someone play both side by side, they would likely claim that the original Mario Bros feels "Kinda old, but still fun." Super Mario World on the other hand wouldn't have aged a day to them.

In FF7's case, I don't think the minigames or anything take you out of the experience, but it's the graphic that really do it. Because you have these beautifully drawn matte paintings in the background and then fucking lego people walking over them. It makes you question everything going on, and in a narrative based game, that's a death sentence.

I'd argue that good gameplay can age when it's superseded by other games. The original Gran Turismo, for instance, was certainly impressive for it's day, but newer racing titles blow every aspect of the original out of the water.

But that's because the original Gran Turismo made a fatal mistake:Attempting realism. Not that it wasn't admirable, but if you're attempting realism, then the next game will always one-up you, because it simply had more resources to dedicate to faking real life. Which always ends in the end. Like I mentioned in an earlier post, JRPGs will almost never be considered as "aging badly," because they're mostly turnbased games. And turn based games are near IMPOSSIBLE to age, outside of graphics. No one will ever thing of a "better" way to do turnbased combat. There's no better controls to figure out or anything like that.

The problem is FFVII is not the graphics. The problem is that it's too damn easy (thus wasting all of its mechanical depth even on challenge runs) and it has an enormous amount of unskippable non-gameplay exposition that severely cuts into replayability.

It's got its moments.

Shining force is really fun and doesn't look or feel half bad for how old it is.

I'll go back even further than 1996. Doom 1&2 are still amazing games today. 20+ years of mods and .wads even moreso. It's one of the few games that ages like wine.

stop lying

90 percent of PS1 games are unplayable trash now. The transition era from 2D to 3D was experimental enough as it was, but the PS1 in particular was hit pretty fucking hard do to the consoles lack of proper z-buffering, while acceptable back then, is just plain ugly now with its really sad attempt at 3D resulting in wobbly textures and at worst poorely compressed JPEG backgrounds below 3D models.

But it also produced generally more games. Also you are exaggerating, since there were more than 10% 2D good games and some 3D games being great despite their graphics being affected. Prove to that is how ps2 started a trend for downgrading great ps1 games just to make quick dough, it wouldn't be possible if ps1 games were quickly aging trash in the first place.
Also, why not bring up psp to nes tiers of resolution?

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Nigger Rydia, Kain, Edge, and Palom+Parom are way more powerful than he is. His white magic is absolutely worthless compared to Rosa by the end, outside of being used as a glorified map in the overworld. You clearly didn't beat it.
Nope, not with those shitty mini games and gimmicky shit like jumping on cables with unresponsive controls.
If your first time was in 1997, sure.
No argument about that. 5 a best.
Explain your Kawazu tier autism to come to that conclusion.

The remaster does have new sprites and portraits though.
But yeah, the old Starcraft does look less dated than Warcraft III.

Games dont age. Good games are always good games, and bad games have always been unplayable

For example, SMT1 has some good points in it but it's a pain to play, it was hard to navigte back then and it is now

That's literally my fucking birthyear, holy shit.
I've been here since /burgersandfries/ and /krotchy/ were on the top 25

I'm cautiously optimistic about the remake, but Microsoft limiting it to Windows 10 is just a dick move. Top tear list otherwise.

Kirby 64's great. Even looks good still.

Pretty sure someone will hack it eventually to work on earlier versions. Most regular windows users don't even use 10, let alone gamers.
flood detected

Crystal Shards was boring slowpoke garbage on release and it still sucks now.

Is there any way to play Goldeneye with mouselook?

Egoraptor get out.

A stuck clock can be right twice a day. The only reason Crystal Shards gets a pass is because Dream Land 3 already ruined the series before it.

why does anyone actually take Egoraptor's opinions on vidya seriously when he's proven he can't play or analyze vidya well at all?

Aging badly?

Goldeneye 64

Aging well?

SOTN

LEMONS!

Pic related was released in 2008, but in all honesty it has aged worse than some of the early 3D stuff mentioned ITT.

RPGs with a distinctive art style and good stories/characters.

Suikoden and Xenogears are still just as awesome as always. Baldurs Gate is a good WRPG example.

Too many games focus on graphics and not substance.

Vidya has degenerated to a point where games from 1996 - 1998 are now even better today than they were at the time. They've aged in reverse. Modern games are so poorly made and creatively void that pretty much anything considered good in the late-90's is like a flawless masterpiece by comparison. As the industry sinks further and further into cancer, games of the past seem better and better.

Vagrant Story still feels fresh. There are others too, which i don't remember right now.

Did Jizzus cum this year? I didn't end up going back and checking myself, but I heard that he might be slowing down or quitting the year before anyway.

Blood, that was overshadowed by "full 3D grafix games hype" trend, has aged incredibly well
Although gotta use Dosbox to play it