agreed. I can name many games that I really like, that haven't aged well. The main point is, has something in a game been done better by another game. If Goldeneye controlled well, all FPS would still control like that, there's a reason they don't.
The reason is GoldenEye was designed for a strange controller that was never replicated again... It's kind of a product of its time. That doesn't change the fact the game still holds up.
You guys are utterly hopeless. You should just stick to PS4 and Xbone games.
Goldeneye is perhaps my favorite game of all-time but even I admit that it hasn't aged well. It's not just blocky graphics, but FPS is played on dual sticks now and a single stick FPS is a huge step backward. It doesn't mean it is unplayable or not fun, it just means the genre has improved so much that it feels clunky by comparison.
Start a mission, go to options, pick controller option Solitaire 1.2, move your hands to the D-pad and Analog Stick. You now have the controller equivalent of the classic PC keyboard and mouse, virtually the same thing as dual analog sticks.
GoldenEye N64 has not aged poorly. People are just shallow.
I still love Goldeneye 007 and play it regularly. I was already a PC FPS player with Doom and Quake and had fully transitioned to mouse look controls. I had already familiarized myself with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on N64 and always adapted my controls to 1.2 Solitaire to be most similar. There is no reason to use the D-pad though then they arranged the C-buttons for that and you still have access to A & B buttons. The C-buttons were always intended as a secondary set of digital directional inputs.
Originally posted by: TDIRunner
I think one thing people seem to forget is that sometimes a certain aspect of the game might not age well. For example, the original Tomb Raider is still one of my favorite games off all time. The game play, level design, story line and overall experience still hold up very well today. However, the graphics can sometimes be pretty difficult to look at. I think it would be fair to say the graphics haven't aged well despite the fact that the game is still amazing. If I was going to pick an aspect of SOTC that hasn't aged well, I would pick the camera. In the time that it was released, it did everything that one would expect it to, but by today's standards it can be a little cumbersome. But that doesn't mean the game itself hasn't aged well.
Funny, because The Last Guardian is only days old and the camera is incredibly frustrating. It much worse than SotC, and I can't say that other modern games in general are any better than SotC when it comes to camera controls. It's one of those things that hit a wall a long time ago and simply are what they are from game to game depending on what the developer wants to to. For example, The Last Guardian often wants you to see what the creature is doing or looking at and will not let you position the camera where you want. Often it will not let you look in a direction that puts the camera between a wall and the player and there is no 1st person "look" mode. These were frustrating game design decisions and not indicative of an older or more crude era of game development, especially considering that it's only a few days old.
The idea that SotC hasn't aged well is ludicrous. If you don't like it now then you wouldn't have liked it back in the day. (The HD version is also one of the few PS3 games that supports 3D on 3D televisions, way worth trying out if you can).
I started watching the video review of Last Guardian but I couldn't stand listening to that guy talk, so I don't know what all he said. Is it possible he was referring to Last Guardian as a poorly aged incarnation of Shadow of the Colossus? That would make a lot more sense to me.
It does not appear to be a new or singularly inspired game to me, the way Ico and SotC each were. .. I always thought the concept seemed like a cheap mash up of the previous games, like a pastiche of the Team Ico universe. .. Honestly, following this protracted saga over the years and reading the interviews, Ueda seems like a pretty shallow guy to me.
But that's exactly it, if an element of a game (or movie or phone) has not been improved upon, then it's still the best in its tiny category. For a game to "age well" or "not age well" there has to be newer games to compare with. And if those comparisons manage to do something fundamentally better than a predecessor, then boom, the first game didn't age well. It didn't future-proof itself well enough. Old "smart" phones all got smacked down when Apple came out with its swipe controls for touch screens. It's fundamentally faster and easier than clicking on buttons to scroll. And now those old phones are a pain to use.
Very basic example: Tetris for Game Boy. Has it aged well? The "graphics" in newer Tetris games light look a little fancier, but no self-respecting Tetris game is going to use anything but square blocks to make up the pieces. In this way, blocks have aged very well, since they're still the best in their sub-sub-category. Overall gameplay? It plays fine, but it's a little hard to go back to GB Tetris after playing a newer Tetris that allows fast-dropping. For some, that's a deal breaker. They'd say that GB Tetris didn't age well, because there exists a fundamental improvement that isn't present in GB Tetris.
Any game that tries to look like "real life" is begging to age poorly. Goldeneye was fine when it came out. It looked like Pierce Brosnan and it was toward the front of the realism movement. Now it's laughably ugly, but only because we've seen better. If all video game development ceased at the release of Goldeneye, we'd still be ok with how it looks and controls.
As I mentioned in my own topic on this issue, I mostly don't understand the age well concept at all...it's the same game now as it was then right? Still, even during the 5th gen (late 90s) when I was on vacation in Florida with the baseball team (I was student manager) and they had both a PS1 and N64 and I thought the PS1 baseball game looked all jaggedy and weird compared to the N64 baseball game. But I figured that was only because PS1 was 32 bit and N64 was 64 bit and thus N64 could do twice as good graphics and such right?
When its all you know its different. Controls and graphics improve. When you get used to modern day things and try to play the old you see all the flaws and poor controls and visuals more. This mainly sticks out like a sore thumb with 3d polygon era. I think you are intentionally playing dumb to this argument. Of course its the same game, but your perspective is changed. The games are generally still playable, they just arent as good because youve played better and know better. They can still be fun, but by not aging well they are meaning they arent as good as they remember. At the time you didnt know better. They were new. Its really not that hard a concept to understand.
yup. Remember how awesome flip phones were? "Holy shit it has a camera now!" Would you use one today, knowing there are smartphones? Why not? It's still the same phone that was awesome back then
I never understood why people felt that way about flip phones with built-in cameras. They were awful.
I had a Samsung VGA1000, Motorola RAZR V3, and some higher-end Samsung phone.
Photos sucked. Storage sucked. Getting the pictures onto a PC required ridiculous bloatware. The software was terrible and unintuitive. Even if you went through the trouble to get pictures to your computer, they still looked like ass.
I never understood why people felt that way about flip phones with built-in cameras. They were awful.
I had a Samsung VGA1000, Motorola RAZR V3, and some higher-end Samsung phone.
Photos sucked. Storage sucked. Getting the pictures onto a PC required ridiculous bloatware. The software was terrible and unintuitive. Even if you went through the trouble to get pictures to your computer, they still looked like ass.
It was novel that they could take photos in the first place. You didn't have to lug a camera around, or if you saw something like a crime or car crash, you could take the photo right there. But you're right, they sucked. They had to start somewhere, though.
Music on phones sucked at first, too. Very limited storage, you had to buy special headphones, loading was a pain, etc., but the novelty of not having to tote around an iPod was appealing to some.
I think we can agree that they did get better on both parts.
Let's just all say that there's no real right or wrong answer since it's all subjective anyway.
If you feel whether or not that an older retro game (whether you've played it in the past or not) holds up to this day in age, then that's all that matters.
"Didn't age well" just means you didn't understand why the game was bad at the time you were playing it.
Thia is exactly what I think reading through this thread. Most of the games that people say haven't aged well were terrible in the first place. MK was NEVER a good game. It sucked then and it sucks now. Was it popular? Yes, but so are a ton of shitty games these days, just like before.
agreed. I can name many games that I really like, that haven't aged well. The main point is, has something in a game been done better by another game. If Goldeneye controlled well, all FPS would still control like that, there's a reason they don't.
The reason is GoldenEye was designed for a strange controller that was never replicated again...
To be fair, Cranky Kong did say that he couldn't figure out which way to hold it, that there's too many buttons, and that whobbly stick thing felt like it was broken!
Maybe those early flip phone cameras is a lot like the DS camera that I still use (mainly because I have no choice at the moment), it was only meant to be a side dish, not the main course, and it was built accordingly.
I have problems using the term "dated" too. Makes little sense to me.
The only thing I could imagine being "dated" is graphics. Some of the first 3D CGi graphics might look worse than you remember it, Starfox is often brought up... but I don't know... its still somewhat subjective. I still love the graphics from Alone In The Dark and Ecstatica, because I love the games. I can easily understand some younger people today thinking it looks horrible though, or even "dated". But it was good for its time.
Nobody says the graphic of SMB1 looks dated, because the 8-bit graphics has become kind of retro-cool. You can make a game today that looks like an 8-bit game and its welcomed. Look at Minecraft, Shovel Knight and so on. But SMB1 was made like that due to limitations just like premature CGI stuff.
Finally got the time to watch the video in the original post. I was expecting him to harp on how SOTC didn't age well.
All he said was "haven't aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Finally got the time to watch the video in the original post. I was expecting him to harp on how SOTC didn't age well.
All he said was "having aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Jump to 2:20. What he said in reference to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus was that "they are excellent although they haven't aged perfectly well." He says this while suggesting that you might want to go back and play them, so he is attempting to set expectations.
He's not attacking the games, but he is picking one of the last games in the world I would ever use as an example of not aging particularly well. It's one of the best examples of a game that was ahead of its time, doing things none of its contemporaries were doing at the time. It's the total opposite of the way I would describe it, hence, my confusion about his use of phrase.
Finally got the time to watch the video in the original post. I was expecting him to harp on how SOTC didn't age well.
All he said was "having aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Jump to 2:20. What he said in reference to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus was that "they are excellent although they haven't aged perfectly well." He says this while suggesting that you might want to go back and play them, so he is attempting to set expectations.
Yeah, thats the line I heard and referenced in my post (though I see a typo in my reference now). Wasn't trying to say he didn't say anthing like you suggested.
Was more saying it like I was suprised after reading this whole thread that the topic was based on someone saying the aged well, just not perfectly well.
"Didn't age well" just means you didn't understand why the game was bad at the time you were playing it.
Thia is exactly what I think reading through this thread. Most of the games that people say haven't aged well were terrible in the first place. MK was NEVER a good game. It sucked then and it sucks now. Was it popular? Yes, but so are a ton of shitty games these days, just like before.
Wow wow wow Woooooooooooww. MK... Really. Perhaps the graphics were amazing at the time but have become dated. But the fight mechanics and idealology of the specials (fatalities), still hold up very well. Infact many modern fighters have still have super/ultra/mega power moves and finishers.
Wow wow wow Woooooooooooww. MK... Really. Perhaps the graphics were amazing at the time but have become dated. But the fight mechanics and idealology of the specials (fatalities), still hold up very well. Infact many modern fighters have still have super/ultra/mega power moves and finishers.
Oh, would you look at that, ANOTHER conflicting opinion on what game qualifies as having aged poorly!
Who said that idiom was suppose to be a method of classification? Of course individuals will use it to express their opinion, cause all it represents is the evaluation of a gap in the reception of a video game at a moment to another moment many years later. Like with everything else in life, opinions won't match 100 %, it doesn't equal that it means jack shit as a figure of speech. You're really fighting windmills about this, lol.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
But it isn't a threat to the history of video games at all, and the expression is used for other things, hence why the windmills reference.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I actually agree with your second statement, but it still doesn't mean that saying a game 'has aged well or not' has no meaning for explaining a personal impression.
And the greatest entertainment media of all time is cinema
Cinema... I was a film student. I had to watch many old movies in a room full of 20-year-olds. There were many laughs at what I felt were not intentionally funny scenes. Particularly early surrealist stuff, and Rock Hudson features. Is the fault with the audience, or the work itself? I was not among the laughing, but it seemed like the majority was, so I'm not sure.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
I don't get why people are so defensive about this topic.
It's pretty simple. "Game hasn't aged well" = "Appears dated". "Appears dated" = Either has clunky controls, subpar graphics, or other technical limitations that have been rendered obsolete by more modern technology. Each person's opinion of whether or not a game has aged well may differ, but the term "age well" is commonly understood.
There's a reason we don't all play text adventures from the 70's anymore. It you tried to play them then you'd realize they haven't "aged well" when you compare them to games with graphics.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
I agree with you even though I like GE. The only reasons I might not find it as enjoyable today is like what you said about 10 Yard Fight; I simply didn't understand the game's limitations and exploits when I was younger - That, and the the fact I've beat the game to a pulp.
About MK and other games, while some things have 'held up', I still remember being bored of the game pretty quick and finding it very slow paced back in the day. Hell, all I did was play 'test your might' most of the time, which is still hilarious to this day in my opinon. I dunno, once the novelty of the fatalities wore off, the game didn't have much to offer. MK II on the other hand...
Anyway, at this point people are basically just arguing in circles about their opinions of games (subjective) and how we remember them (also subjective).
I was never a fan of the Mortal Kombat series. I wasn't a fan of fighting games in general. When my friends were into Street Fighter II, I just didn't understand the appeal. At least the music and artwork is more appealing to me than MK. My friends were never very good at these games. They just liked to beat each other up. I think this even goes back a bit further, to things like Double Dragon. Yes, I *loved* some beat-em-up brawler games, like TMNT II (NES) and TMNT IV (SNES), but DD never really did it for me. I never really tried Final Fight or Streets of Rage because I just assumed (probably incorrectly) they were more like Double Dragon than TMNT II.
Then I got an XBAND video game modem. Then I got Killer Instinct. Then I got *really* good at Killer Instinct. Now I can almost enjoy Street Fighter II, but it still feels incomplete without a proper combo system (KI2/Gold perfected that, IMO). The Mortal Kombat series still feels like an imitation of a proper fighting game. I remember reading an old magazine article where one of the creators (Ed Boon or John Tobias) kinda confirmed this. He said they got the idea when they saw how popular Street Fighter II was.
Though I still didn't really *like* MKII, I have always preferred it over the others. Fatalities and backgrounds were interesting. Characters were more interesting than the first. The combo system in MK3 wasn't a "system" at all (just memorize random sequences for different characters). Lame. I vaguely recall seeing some goodness in MK4, but even my friends quickly forgot about that one.
So anyway, I can't say MK games didn't age well because they really didn't have any appeal to me back then either.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
But it isn't a threat to the history of video games at all, and the expression is used for other things, hence why the windmills reference.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I actually agree with your second statement, but it still doesn't mean that saying a game 'has aged well or not' has no meaning for explaining a personal impression.
Doesn't get the "aged well" idiom, doesn't get "fighting windmills." I'm convinced Guntz is related to Drax the Destroyer.
"His people are completely literal. Metaphors are going to go over his head."
"Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it."
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
Exactly.
There are many, many games that we viewed through a different lens as kids than we do as adults, to where, whether you played the game as a kid, or not, your opinion of it TODAY differs from what it was, or would have been, "back then".
Examples:
1) things that are purely a "time suck" -- i.e. grinding in RPGs clashing with how (I suspect most) adults value their free time
2) things that requires longer periods of uninterrupted play -- i.e. the lack of saving or passwords clashing with how (I suspect most) adults have enough other commitments that our gaming sessions are a lot more compact than they used to be
3) certain graphic styles that are glaringly "dated" -- i.e. pretty much any low-poly-count 3D, where we accepted it then because it was the only option for that type of thing, but now "we know better"
4) control styles that are glaringly dated -- i.e. cameras (either player controlled or automated) on PS1 and N64 games, where developers now have MUCH better techniques than they had at that time
All of those things contribute to a game "not aging well", where yes, it is not a literally accurate description, but that is the nature of pretty much ANY idiom.
But it is a term that is instantly understood to subjectively mean that a game, for whatever reason, has lost its charm versus how it was initially perceived.
We've established that Guntz hates idioms, pretty much every time this topic bubbles up.
We've also established that he takes great offense at the rest of us thinking that Star Fox or Goldeneye are clunky and ugly. (and he believes that we are shallow for thinking such a thing)
But this particular idiom (a thing "not aging well") is here to stay.
It applies to games. It applies to movies and TV shows. It likely applies to books and poetry, depending on your perspective (there are definitely writing styles that are so different from today that they can be cumbersome enough to distract from the ability to either understand or appreciate what is being said by the author).
Cinema... I was a film student. I had to watch many old movies in a room full of 20-year-olds. There were many laughs at what I felt were not intentionally funny scenes. Particularly early surrealist stuff, and Rock Hudson features. Is the fault with the audience, or the work itself? I was not among the laughing, but it seemed like the majority was, so I'm not sure.
There are all kinds of movies that speak to a very specific type of audience in a very specific point in history.
Take the movie out of that time and show it to a modern audience and things that used to be shocking or scandalous are now completely ridiculous, because we are different people than those the film was made for in the first place.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
I agree with you even though I like GE. The only reasons I might not find it as enjoyable today is like what you said about 10 Yard Fight; I simply didn't understand the game's limitations and exploits when I was younger - That, and the the fact I've beat the game to a pulp.
About MK and other games, while some things have 'held up', I still remember being bored of the game pretty quick and finding it very slow paced back in the day. Hell, all I did was play 'test your might' most of the time, which is still hilarious to this day in my opinon. I dunno, once the novelty of the fatalities wore off, the game didn't have much to offer. MK II on the other hand...
Anyway, at this point people are basically just arguing in circles about their opinions of games (subjective) and how we remember them (also subjective).
I never liked Golden Eye, still dont.
There is a difference between games that are dated and just being bad.
Take the movie out of that time and show it to a modern audience and things that used to be shocking or scandalous are now completely ridiculous, because we are different people than those the film was made for in the first place.
Happens with theatre, too. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Veronica's Room were exceedingly shocking for their day (60s and 70s), but time has blunted their impact considerably.
Comments
Originally posted by: BertBerryCrunch
agreed. I can name many games that I really like, that haven't aged well. The main point is, has something in a game been done better by another game. If Goldeneye controlled well, all FPS would still control like that, there's a reason they don't.
The reason is GoldenEye was designed for a strange controller that was never replicated again... It's kind of a product of its time. That doesn't change the fact the game still holds up.
You guys are utterly hopeless. You should just stick to PS4 and Xbone games.
Goldeneye is perhaps my favorite game of all-time but even I admit that it hasn't aged well. It's not just blocky graphics, but FPS is played on dual sticks now and a single stick FPS is a huge step backward. It doesn't mean it is unplayable or not fun, it just means the genre has improved so much that it feels clunky by comparison.
Start a mission, go to options, pick controller option Solitaire 1.2, move your hands to the D-pad and Analog Stick. You now have the controller equivalent of the classic PC keyboard and mouse, virtually the same thing as dual analog sticks.
GoldenEye N64 has not aged poorly. People are just shallow.
I still love Goldeneye 007 and play it regularly. I was already a PC FPS player with Doom and Quake and had fully transitioned to mouse look controls. I had already familiarized myself with Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on N64 and always adapted my controls to 1.2 Solitaire to be most similar. There is no reason to use the D-pad though then they arranged the C-buttons for that and you still have access to A & B buttons. The C-buttons were always intended as a secondary set of digital directional inputs.
I think one thing people seem to forget is that sometimes a certain aspect of the game might not age well. For example, the original Tomb Raider is still one of my favorite games off all time. The game play, level design, story line and overall experience still hold up very well today. However, the graphics can sometimes be pretty difficult to look at. I think it would be fair to say the graphics haven't aged well despite the fact that the game is still amazing. If I was going to pick an aspect of SOTC that hasn't aged well, I would pick the camera. In the time that it was released, it did everything that one would expect it to, but by today's standards it can be a little cumbersome. But that doesn't mean the game itself hasn't aged well.
Funny, because The Last Guardian is only days old and the camera is incredibly frustrating. It much worse than SotC, and I can't say that other modern games in general are any better than SotC when it comes to camera controls. It's one of those things that hit a wall a long time ago and simply are what they are from game to game depending on what the developer wants to to. For example, The Last Guardian often wants you to see what the creature is doing or looking at and will not let you position the camera where you want. Often it will not let you look in a direction that puts the camera between a wall and the player and there is no 1st person "look" mode. These were frustrating game design decisions and not indicative of an older or more crude era of game development, especially considering that it's only a few days old.
I started watching the video review of Last Guardian but I couldn't stand listening to that guy talk, so I don't know what all he said. Is it possible he was referring to Last Guardian as a poorly aged incarnation of Shadow of the Colossus? That would make a lot more sense to me.
It does not appear to be a new or singularly inspired game to me, the way Ico and SotC each were. .. I always thought the concept seemed like a cheap mash up of the previous games, like a pastiche of the Team Ico universe. .. Honestly, following this protracted saga over the years and reading the interviews, Ueda seems like a pretty shallow guy to me.
Very basic example: Tetris for Game Boy. Has it aged well? The "graphics" in newer Tetris games light look a little fancier, but no self-respecting Tetris game is going to use anything but square blocks to make up the pieces. In this way, blocks have aged very well, since they're still the best in their sub-sub-category. Overall gameplay? It plays fine, but it's a little hard to go back to GB Tetris after playing a newer Tetris that allows fast-dropping. For some, that's a deal breaker. They'd say that GB Tetris didn't age well, because there exists a fundamental improvement that isn't present in GB Tetris.
Any game that tries to look like "real life" is begging to age poorly. Goldeneye was fine when it came out. It looked like Pierce Brosnan and it was toward the front of the realism movement. Now it's laughably ugly, but only because we've seen better. If all video game development ceased at the release of Goldeneye, we'd still be ok with how it looks and controls.
As I mentioned in my own topic on this issue, I mostly don't understand the age well concept at all...it's the same game now as it was then right? Still, even during the 5th gen (late 90s) when I was on vacation in Florida with the baseball team (I was student manager) and they had both a PS1 and N64 and I thought the PS1 baseball game looked all jaggedy and weird compared to the N64 baseball game. But I figured that was only because PS1 was 32 bit and N64 was 64 bit and thus N64 could do twice as good graphics and such right?
When its all you know its different. Controls and graphics improve. When you get used to modern day things and try to play the old you see all the flaws and poor controls and visuals more. This mainly sticks out like a sore thumb with 3d polygon era. I think you are intentionally playing dumb to this argument. Of course its the same game, but your perspective is changed. The games are generally still playable, they just arent as good because youve played better and know better. They can still be fun, but by not aging well they are meaning they arent as good as they remember. At the time you didnt know better. They were new. Its really not that hard a concept to understand.
yup. Remember how awesome flip phones were? "Holy shit it has a camera now!" Would you use one today, knowing there are smartphones? Why not? It's still the same phone that was awesome back then
I never understood why people felt that way about flip phones with built-in cameras. They were awful.
I had a Samsung VGA1000, Motorola RAZR V3, and some higher-end Samsung phone.
Photos sucked. Storage sucked. Getting the pictures onto a PC required ridiculous bloatware. The software was terrible and unintuitive. Even if you went through the trouble to get pictures to your computer, they still looked like ass.
I never understood why people felt that way about flip phones with built-in cameras. They were awful.
I had a Samsung VGA1000, Motorola RAZR V3, and some higher-end Samsung phone.
Photos sucked. Storage sucked. Getting the pictures onto a PC required ridiculous bloatware. The software was terrible and unintuitive. Even if you went through the trouble to get pictures to your computer, they still looked like ass.
It was novel that they could take photos in the first place. You didn't have to lug a camera around, or if you saw something like a crime or car crash, you could take the photo right there. But you're right, they sucked. They had to start somewhere, though.
Music on phones sucked at first, too. Very limited storage, you had to buy special headphones, loading was a pain, etc., but the novelty of not having to tote around an iPod was appealing to some.
I think we can agree that they did get better on both parts.
If you feel whether or not that an older retro game (whether you've played it in the past or not) holds up to this day in age, then that's all that matters.
Originally posted by: pegboy
"Didn't age well" just means you didn't understand why the game was bad at the time you were playing it.
Thia is exactly what I think reading through this thread. Most of the games that people say haven't aged well were terrible in the first place. MK was NEVER a good game. It sucked then and it sucks now. Was it popular? Yes, but so are a ton of shitty games these days, just like before.
agreed. I can name many games that I really like, that haven't aged well. The main point is, has something in a game been done better by another game. If Goldeneye controlled well, all FPS would still control like that, there's a reason they don't.
The reason is GoldenEye was designed for a strange controller that was never replicated again...
To be fair, Cranky Kong did say that he couldn't figure out which way to hold it, that there's too many buttons, and that whobbly stick thing felt like it was broken!
The only thing I could imagine being "dated" is graphics. Some of the first 3D CGi graphics might look worse than you remember it, Starfox is often brought up... but I don't know... its still somewhat subjective. I still love the graphics from Alone In The Dark and Ecstatica, because I love the games. I can easily understand some younger people today thinking it looks horrible though, or even "dated". But it was good for its time.
Nobody says the graphic of SMB1 looks dated, because the 8-bit graphics has become kind of retro-cool. You can make a game today that looks like an 8-bit game and its welcomed. Look at Minecraft, Shovel Knight and so on. But SMB1 was made like that due to limitations just like premature CGI stuff.
All he said was "haven't aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Finally got the time to watch the video in the original post. I was expecting him to harp on how SOTC didn't age well.
All he said was "having aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Jump to 2:20. What he said in reference to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus was that "they are excellent although they haven't aged perfectly well." He says this while suggesting that you might want to go back and play them, so he is attempting to set expectations.
He's not attacking the games, but he is picking one of the last games in the world I would ever use as an example of not aging particularly well. It's one of the best examples of a game that was ahead of its time, doing things none of its contemporaries were doing at the time. It's the total opposite of the way I would describe it, hence, my confusion about his use of phrase.
Finally got the time to watch the video in the original post. I was expecting him to harp on how SOTC didn't age well.
All he said was "having aged perfectly well". Then said how it feeling like a last gen game wasn't a bad thing. Which is something I agree with.
Watching the video all but convinced me why i'll pick up and play through this game probably sometime after i'm done traveling for the holidays. All the stuff I loved about ps2/ps3 gen games is here. Its a single player game that truly looks like a solo experience but its bogged down by crazy amount of menus and tons of min-maxing skill trees.
Jump to 2:20. What he said in reference to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus was that "they are excellent although they haven't aged perfectly well." He says this while suggesting that you might want to go back and play them, so he is attempting to set expectations.
Yeah, thats the line I heard and referenced in my post (though I see a typo in my reference now). Wasn't trying to say he didn't say anthing like you suggested.
Was more saying it like I was suprised after reading this whole thread that the topic was based on someone saying the aged well, just not perfectly well.
"Didn't age well" just means you didn't understand why the game was bad at the time you were playing it.
Thia is exactly what I think reading through this thread. Most of the games that people say haven't aged well were terrible in the first place. MK was NEVER a good game. It sucked then and it sucks now. Was it popular? Yes, but so are a ton of shitty games these days, just like before.
Wow wow wow Woooooooooooww. MK... Really. Perhaps the graphics were amazing at the time but have become dated. But the fight mechanics and idealology of the specials (fatalities), still hold up very well. Infact many modern fighters have still have super/ultra/mega power moves and finishers.
Originally posted by: ne$_pimp
Wow wow wow Woooooooooooww. MK... Really. Perhaps the graphics were amazing at the time but have become dated. But the fight mechanics and idealology of the specials (fatalities), still hold up very well. Infact many modern fighters have still have super/ultra/mega power moves and finishers.
Oh, would you look at that, ANOTHER conflicting opinion on what game qualifies as having aged poorly!
Video games aging well/poorly is a crock of shit.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
Originally posted by: Guntz
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
But it isn't a threat to the history of video games at all, and the expression is used for other things, hence why the windmills reference.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I actually agree with your second statement, but it still doesn't mean that saying a game 'has aged well or not' has no meaning for explaining a personal impression.
And the greatest entertainment media of all time is cinema
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
It's pretty simple. "Game hasn't aged well" = "Appears dated". "Appears dated" = Either has clunky controls, subpar graphics, or other technical limitations that have been rendered obsolete by more modern technology. Each person's opinion of whether or not a game has aged well may differ, but the term "age well" is commonly understood.
There's a reason we don't all play text adventures from the 70's anymore. It you tried to play them then you'd realize they haven't "aged well" when you compare them to games with graphics.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
I agree with you even though I like GE. The only reasons I might not find it as enjoyable today is like what you said about 10 Yard Fight; I simply didn't understand the game's limitations and exploits when I was younger - That, and the the fact I've beat the game to a pulp.
About MK and other games, while some things have 'held up', I still remember being bored of the game pretty quick and finding it very slow paced back in the day. Hell, all I did was play 'test your might' most of the time, which is still hilarious to this day in my opinon. I dunno, once the novelty of the fatalities wore off, the game didn't have much to offer. MK II on the other hand...
Anyway, at this point people are basically just arguing in circles about their opinions of games (subjective) and how we remember them (also subjective).
Then I got an XBAND video game modem. Then I got Killer Instinct. Then I got *really* good at Killer Instinct. Now I can almost enjoy Street Fighter II, but it still feels incomplete without a proper combo system (KI2/Gold perfected that, IMO). The Mortal Kombat series still feels like an imitation of a proper fighting game. I remember reading an old magazine article where one of the creators (Ed Boon or John Tobias) kinda confirmed this. He said they got the idea when they saw how popular Street Fighter II was.
Though I still didn't really *like* MKII, I have always preferred it over the others. Fatalities and backgrounds were interesting. Characters were more interesting than the first. The combo system in MK3 wasn't a "system" at all (just memorize random sequences for different characters). Lame. I vaguely recall seeing some goodness in MK4, but even my friends quickly forgot about that one.
So anyway, I can't say MK games didn't age well because they really didn't have any appeal to me back then either.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
But it isn't a threat to the history of video games at all, and the expression is used for other things, hence why the windmills reference.
I think what I'm trying to say is that I actually agree with your second statement, but it still doesn't mean that saying a game 'has aged well or not' has no meaning for explaining a personal impression.
Doesn't get the "aged well" idiom, doesn't get "fighting windmills." I'm convinced Guntz is related to Drax the Destroyer.
"His people are completely literal. Metaphors are going to go over his head."
"Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it."
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
Exactly.
There are many, many games that we viewed through a different lens as kids than we do as adults, to where, whether you played the game as a kid, or not, your opinion of it TODAY differs from what it was, or would have been, "back then".
Examples:
1) things that are purely a "time suck" -- i.e. grinding in RPGs clashing with how (I suspect most) adults value their free time
2) things that requires longer periods of uninterrupted play -- i.e. the lack of saving or passwords clashing with how (I suspect most) adults have enough other commitments that our gaming sessions are a lot more compact than they used to be
3) certain graphic styles that are glaringly "dated" -- i.e. pretty much any low-poly-count 3D, where we accepted it then because it was the only option for that type of thing, but now "we know better"
4) control styles that are glaringly dated -- i.e. cameras (either player controlled or automated) on PS1 and N64 games, where developers now have MUCH better techniques than they had at that time
All of those things contribute to a game "not aging well", where yes, it is not a literally accurate description, but that is the nature of pretty much ANY idiom.
But it is a term that is instantly understood to subjectively mean that a game, for whatever reason, has lost its charm versus how it was initially perceived.
We've established that Guntz hates idioms, pretty much every time this topic bubbles up.
We've also established that he takes great offense at the rest of us thinking that Star Fox or Goldeneye are clunky and ugly. (and he believes that we are shallow for thinking such a thing)
But this particular idiom (a thing "not aging well") is here to stay.
It applies to games. It applies to movies and TV shows. It likely applies to books and poetry, depending on your perspective (there are definitely writing styles that are so different from today that they can be cumbersome enough to distract from the ability to either understand or appreciate what is being said by the author).
Cinema... I was a film student. I had to watch many old movies in a room full of 20-year-olds. There were many laughs at what I felt were not intentionally funny scenes. Particularly early surrealist stuff, and Rock Hudson features. Is the fault with the audience, or the work itself? I was not among the laughing, but it seemed like the majority was, so I'm not sure.
There are all kinds of movies that speak to a very specific type of audience in a very specific point in history.
Take the movie out of that time and show it to a modern audience and things that used to be shocking or scandalous are now completely ridiculous, because we are different people than those the film was made for in the first place.
If it means defending the history of the greatest entertainment medium of all time, I will fight those windmills.
Time is little more than a human construct, video games are either good or bad forever, time does not change that.
I agree with you, but people's views of them DO change over time. As a very young kid I thought 10-yard Fight was awesome, but that's only because I didn't know any better.
I personally think Goldeneye 64 is boring, even on release it didn't really do anything for me. I had already played the PC FPS staples like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D, etc to death by the time it came out and it was nothing special to me at all. A mediocre game that was very popular for a console crowd that was new to the genre and didn't know any better. Same shit with Halo a generation later. Some people just aren't willing to take off the rose colored glasses and be objective though.
I agree with you even though I like GE. The only reasons I might not find it as enjoyable today is like what you said about 10 Yard Fight; I simply didn't understand the game's limitations and exploits when I was younger - That, and the the fact I've beat the game to a pulp.
About MK and other games, while some things have 'held up', I still remember being bored of the game pretty quick and finding it very slow paced back in the day. Hell, all I did was play 'test your might' most of the time, which is still hilarious to this day in my opinon. I dunno, once the novelty of the fatalities wore off, the game didn't have much to offer. MK II on the other hand...
Anyway, at this point people are basically just arguing in circles about their opinions of games (subjective) and how we remember them (also subjective).
I never liked Golden Eye, still dont.
There is a difference between games that are dated and just being bad.
Take the movie out of that time and show it to a modern audience and things that used to be shocking or scandalous are now completely ridiculous, because we are different people than those the film was made for in the first place.
Happens with theatre, too. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Veronica's Room were exceedingly shocking for their day (60s and 70s), but time has blunted their impact considerably.