Posted March 05, 2015
So a recent thread about Half-Life got me thinking. It's one of my favourite games ever, probably my favourite FPS, and yet I remember that when I played it again mid 2000s (wanted to beat it on highest difficulty), I had problems adjusting to it, and had some motion sickness during the pipe-jumping part of the tutorial. It was just a matter of getting used to, I could play normally in 2-3 hours without any problems, yet I was surprised how quickly I got "spoiled" by newer games.
So this thread is about games that aged extremely well. Ones which even a young, non-oldtimer player can enjoy without feeling any big inconveniences due to the game's age.
This is regardless of how well the game was received at the time it came out. As an example, I got both Warcraft 2 and Red Alert at the time they came out. Back then, Warcraft was my clear favourite, yet if I were to play it now, I'd say Red Alert aged way better. Warcraft 2 is missing two main things, which now are taken for granted: production queueing and group assignment to #s. Again their absence something you'll probalby get used to after a few levels, but people used to modern RTSs will feel the lack of these 2 features at the beginning.
Obviously turn based games, and especially strategies are at an advantage here, because they don't depend so heavily on graphics.
Try and include only games that are 12 years or older, say 2003 or earlier. Anything newer I'd say hasn't had the time yet to become aged. Though if you can think of notable borderline cases go ahead and mention them.
Also, no external help from fan based-mods. e.g. Baldur's Gate is much more playable with the fan-made widescreen mod, but originally it used the earliest version of Infinity Explorer Engine which only supported 640x480 resolution (Planetscape Torment had the same limitaion; later games from the engine could be played at higher ones). Assume the games are just as they appeared originally.
In addition to that, do not take into account how difficult it is to install the game on modern operating systems, whether it needs Dosbox or other emulators. That's a different issue. For the purpose of this excercise assume that the game runs fine on moders OSs, or that you have a machine with an old OS to run it from. Anything else is fair game and can be used to deduct points from ageing well. Lack of autosave or save in general, no keyboard shortcuts, inabiliy to reassign keys (maybe arrows to WASD for example), low resolution, poor graphics/sounds, lack of storyline for games which are expected to have a good one nowdays. Basically any inconvenience that might make you say "Boy, I'm sure used to doing X in modern games. Wish that feature was here."
I'll start:
<span class="bold">Heroes of Might and Magic 3</span> (1999). 16 years old yet plays extremely well even for youngest of players. To a lesser degree this is true for HoMM2 (1996). HoMM1 on the other hand aged very poorly. I had trouble playing it even early 2000s (played it after I finished HoMM3).
<span class="bold">Settlers 2</span> (1996). I can still play it for hours and at 1024x768 it looks pretty decent.
So this thread is about games that aged extremely well. Ones which even a young, non-oldtimer player can enjoy without feeling any big inconveniences due to the game's age.
This is regardless of how well the game was received at the time it came out. As an example, I got both Warcraft 2 and Red Alert at the time they came out. Back then, Warcraft was my clear favourite, yet if I were to play it now, I'd say Red Alert aged way better. Warcraft 2 is missing two main things, which now are taken for granted: production queueing and group assignment to #s. Again their absence something you'll probalby get used to after a few levels, but people used to modern RTSs will feel the lack of these 2 features at the beginning.
Obviously turn based games, and especially strategies are at an advantage here, because they don't depend so heavily on graphics.
Try and include only games that are 12 years or older, say 2003 or earlier. Anything newer I'd say hasn't had the time yet to become aged. Though if you can think of notable borderline cases go ahead and mention them.
Also, no external help from fan based-mods. e.g. Baldur's Gate is much more playable with the fan-made widescreen mod, but originally it used the earliest version of Infinity Explorer Engine which only supported 640x480 resolution (Planetscape Torment had the same limitaion; later games from the engine could be played at higher ones). Assume the games are just as they appeared originally.
In addition to that, do not take into account how difficult it is to install the game on modern operating systems, whether it needs Dosbox or other emulators. That's a different issue. For the purpose of this excercise assume that the game runs fine on moders OSs, or that you have a machine with an old OS to run it from. Anything else is fair game and can be used to deduct points from ageing well. Lack of autosave or save in general, no keyboard shortcuts, inabiliy to reassign keys (maybe arrows to WASD for example), low resolution, poor graphics/sounds, lack of storyline for games which are expected to have a good one nowdays. Basically any inconvenience that might make you say "Boy, I'm sure used to doing X in modern games. Wish that feature was here."
I'll start:
<span class="bold">Heroes of Might and Magic 3</span> (1999). 16 years old yet plays extremely well even for youngest of players. To a lesser degree this is true for HoMM2 (1996). HoMM1 on the other hand aged very poorly. I had trouble playing it even early 2000s (played it after I finished HoMM3).
<span class="bold">Settlers 2</span> (1996). I can still play it for hours and at 1024x768 it looks pretty decent.
Post edited March 05, 2015 by ZFR
