Comment by vlunkr 2 days ago
I love retro consoles as much as the next middle aged software developer, but realistically, the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children. Every console generation is that special generation for one group of kids.
I do agree that sometimes limitations breed creativity, but that’s not the only thing that can make the magic work.
Yeah I think that individual retro games can be incredible and stand the test of time. For me Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are timeless. As a whole though, it’s hard to measure. Today we have microtransactions, in the past we had games that threw in one bullshit level so you couldn’t beat it during a rental. (Lookin at you battletoads) and bad movie tie-ins, lazy arcade ports, etc. There’s always going to be trash.
One thing retro games obviously don’t have is hindsight. Shovel Knight feels like the best NES games, but lacks crap like lives and continues, because it learned from later games like Dark Souls that you can make death punishing without making it un-fun. Hollow knight builds on my favorite games with a couple of decades of lessons on how to make platformers more interesting and less frustrating.
The difference between microtransaction today and trash in the past is that the old games achieved success by not being trash. Yes trash existed but it was generally not successful and the market generally rewarded quality so the money and dev effort went into quality games. Today the money is made by gacha games so that's where the effort goes. Not the same imo.
There was plenty of movie tie-in shovelware that sold well. ET is obviously the infamous example, but this continued to go on into the 3D era. Sports games too. They aren't universally bad, but often they succeeded just because they have the official license. It's just like any kind of media, bad stuff can succeed because of deceptive marketing or slapping a familiar name on garbage.
This is all a vast oversimplification. There are obviously hundreds of games coming out every year without gacha mechanics.
I do feel like you miss the point if you compare retro games with today AAA games.
The good video games of today are 100% indie.
I love Super Mario Bros as much as the other guy, but a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect.
I’m a 90’s kid and I had a blast with my N64, gamecube, Wii …
But I’m also having a blast nowadays with :
- Outer Wilds (it’s forbidden to say what it is)
- RimWorld (colony builder)
- Satisfactory (time vacuum)
- Factorio (factory builder)
- A Hat In Time (3d platformer with a lot of love for the n64/gc but with its own character)
- Poi (same)
- Vampire Survivors (dopamine fountain)
- Tinykin (looks like Pikmin but actually the chilliest platformer I played : smooth, calm, beautiful, good design, good music)
- Pizza Tower (Wario Land with a pizza twist and a lot of love)
- Kathy Rain (point and click)
- Stanley Parable (idk what it is but it was fun)
- Evoland
- The Touryist (chill adventure)
- Super Meat Boy (hard platformer)
- Celeste (hard platformer but that loves you and encourages you)
- Hell Pie (3d platformer, ode to Conker Bad Fur Day)
- Stardew Valley
Etc …
There are a lot more but I can already say that each and every game of this list gave me at least as much pleasure as my childhood games.
That's not entirely untrue. Triple A is the current day shovelware. It's just that the shovel is made of gold and expensive.
I find my enjoyment in select retro games and indies nowadays. When I find a game I really like that is not an indie, it is typically something that is explicitly not AAA (such as Octopath Traveler).
Hell, one of my all-time favorites is a indie I olayed a couple of years ago - Ender Lilies. It became the best Metroidvania ever for me, when I thought nothing would ever dethrone Castlevania Aria of Sorrow.
So yeah. If gaming has a future for me, it is with indies.
1) Anyone who says Celeste’s music is better than Super Mario Bros’ is a liar, and I don’t even like Nintendo games. 2) Let’s look at some of those release dates, shall we? 2019, 2013, 2020, 2017, 2017, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2016, 2013, 2013, 2008(!), 2019, 2021, and 2016.
That’s a period of 15 years. For an American, the NES released in 1985 and the PS2 released in 2000, also a period of 15 years. The fact that your “games of today” list is kind-of competing with four console generations itself is an indication that quality isn’t higher now, even with a considerably higher volume of releases.
Also only two of those games came out in the last 5 years, so things really aren’t looking great for modern games.
Things aren't looking great for modern games as a whole because a HN poster didn't include new enough games in their list of modern games they enjoy?
Things aren’t look great for modern games because when people think ‘modern games’, they think of titles from the last decade.
Except most of those games aren't "retro" because, unlike real retro games, they are mostly still updated and they work on any recent computer/console.
So for me, even for the oldest ones, they are still part of the same "era". What I mean by that is that if you buy any of the items in this list in 2026, it will not feel like it's an "old" game.
> Anyone who says Celeste’s music is better than Super Mario Bros’ is a liar, and I don’t even like Nintendo games.
…I’m a liar, I guess.
And I do like Nintendo games.
I think that person doesn't understand what a liar is either lol.
I'm too slow to finish a game like Celeste but the soundtrack is an all timer. Lena Raine's music is fantastic.
Super Mario music is great too ... why do we have to tear one thing down to lift another up?
> a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect
As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.
I played Yoshi's island as an adult and think it's the best platformer game. I wonder if it counts as nostalgia.
I disagree.
I routinely revisit old games with a critical mind. It is an interesting thing to do.
I find that quite a few games I really loved as a kid are special because I played during a formative age, yes. Some are better left in the past.
But I find some that still manage to impress me to this day. They are not good only as a memory, they are just really good.
And a second counter is that my all-time favorite consoles are the SNES and the Switch. I have been gaming ever since the Atari 2600 days. The Switch was released well into my 30s. I have no nostalgia for it.
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.
Ahh ok. My bad, I really misunderstood your point then.
To expand on it, to not let the thread go to waste - I think there is value in nostalgia, we should not ignore our past, it makes who we are. But it is important to recognize when something is good only for nostalgia.
For example, I adore the original Phantasy Star. It was the first RPG I played and to this day I remember my absolute awe in exploring an open world. One of the first things I did there was to walk along a narrow path in between some mountains and the ocean, only to be slaughtered by a group of spiders way too strong for me. It was amazing. Getting out into the world, exploring caves, it felt like an adventure. And later getting into an starship and exploring other worlds. Alis Landale is to this day my spirit animal - When I am given the option to create a character I often make a girl with auburn hair and name her Alis.
I came back to this game twice in the past years - once playing it on Emulator with an improvement patch, another on the Switch re-release. I still had fun printing grid paper and drawing maps on my own, going into a 4 level cave to get to a cake shop, etc. But I recognize it is pure nostalgia. Recommending that game should only be done in a "if you want to see an early stage 8-bit RPG, you can do a lot worse than Phantasy Star". When I play a new RPG I am chasing the same rush my 8 year old self had when playing that for the first time.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a lot of trouble nowadays to engage with modern "blockbuster" games, or triple-A if you want to call it that. Even darlings such as Elden Ring or BG3 failed to grab me. In current times, I do find my rush typically on Indies, or at most lower spec games when made by giant publishers. It is no coincidence that I still enjoy Nintendo games, I suppose.
Maybe I am just getting old and jaded lol.
I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.
I don't disagree. I really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima years ago. By all accounts it was very much an AAA game. But enjoying those for me is the exception, not the rule.
On the other hand, I have been finding a lot of fun with Indies. Lower spec games mean seem to have a liberating effect, in that they can experiment with gameplay, aesthetics, style, narrative, etc.
It may be some romanticism on my part, but I think that when a project does not cost hundreds of millions to make, there's less anxiety with taking some risks.
Which brings me to those games made in the 90s. Those games were typically short (an RPG like FF6 that took 50+ hour to finish was gargantuan back in the day). Those games did not have obscene costs, a game flopping didn't mean the studio was closing. Things changed, if for better or worse I can't say.
>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children
if you spend some time on youtube and look at people too young to even have been around play through those games it just becomes evident very quickly how wrong that assessment is. There's an energy even among young audiences when they're playing games like Metal Gear Solid 1&2 for the first time that you hardly see for anything coming out today.
There was a level of artistic talent in that generation, also in animation of the time, that simply doesn't really have a parallel today and brushing it off as nostalgia has a lot to do with he inability of people to recognize that there's no linear progress in art. Talent can be lost, some periods are better than others, just having more cpu and gpu cycles available does not produce better art.
The fact that almost 30 years after games like MGS it's still Kojima and a lot of Japanese guys now with increasingly gray hair who end up getting a lot of awards and pushing the envelope that should tell you something.
I think people forget there were a ton of shit SNES/PSX/whatever games. I personally have a soft spot for the 16 bit era but there are plenty of indie games coming out that are just as beautiful and creative. There's also way more exploration with narrative structure now then there was back then.
yes but it's important to note they're indie games, on the periphery of the culture for a reason. Animal Well is an explicit 16bit scanlines retro game. The first game that comes to your mind is one harkening back to the aesthetic of the 90s. In 1998 you had, and this is of the top of my head: MGS, Starcraft, Thief, Half Life, Baldurs Gate, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil, Xenogears, Unreal and I'm probably forgetting some all in the same year.
That's not just games but entire modes of expressions and genres being invented. So successful the industry is still occupied with reproducing those franchises, not inventing new ones.
Animal Well was great, but it's also so exceptional now, like Expedition 33, that people frantically celebrate each AA title in an otherwise extremely bleak culture.
Look at my list here [1] but I think it’s coming back. Sure the big studios are all collapsing from everywhere and extracting value from everywhere like any shitty corporations. Nintendo feels like they are surviving a little more but even them are more and more doing corporate shit.
But what I see is also happening in parallel, is that the people nostalgic from the 90s era of video games are now 30 to 40, are now senior programmers and they are determined to create another batch of truly good games.
Sure the biggest studios have the biggest marketing budget but when you read a little about them, they are just all slowly dying. Most news about big old studios are about firing thousands of people, being bought by other corporations who will also fire people.
Sure, Expedition 33 feels like an outlier, but it’s just a game from ex Ubisoft employees. Ubisoft which is sadly also slowly dying.
Will people ever be nostalgic for the xbox one? For the iphone 14?
I doubt it. These products might even be good, but they are not like their early ancestors in several significant ways that will have them relegated to the footnotes of history. Most importantly, they are difficult to distinguish from both their immediate predecessors and their immediate successors. I don't mean to say that people won't have treasured experiences from this time that they long for in 20 years, just that I doubt the console will play as significant of a role in the memory.
I got an Xbox One in college. One thing that it had that I'm surprised my PS5 doesn't have was split screen functionality. You could play a game and watch TV (or do whatever else) at the same time. I never touched an XSX so I can't attest if it has something similar, but the concept was pretty neat.
I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic for the X1, but it was a good piece of hardware.
Just for the joke, I own the og Xbox One and it’s the only console I hated from day one.
I clearly remember plugging it to my TV with excitement and being greeted with gigabytes of mandatory updates. And then I discovered that you weren’t able to play the game from the disk and that you need to install it on the fucking hard drive !! And then I discovered that the disc reader was actually slower than my fiber connection which means it was faster to play a game from the online store than installing it from a real disk.
I think I had to wait for at least a full hour just to play my first game.
And on top of that the performance was actually not that good. 30fps everywhere, it was worse than the Nintendo games on Wii / GameCube which usually ran at 50/60fps.
I still own this shit but I never liked it. At least it was useful some month ago when I had to update my Xbox controller firmware (but since I didn’t power it on for years , I also had to wait for updates :) ).
I belong to the 8 and 16 bit home computers generation, which grew along those consoles, yet for those on my circle consoles weren't special, home computers were.
Hence why I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing, for my crowd it was always there since the 1990's.
>I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing
If anything, with current prices, it's dying. I don't say this as a 'pc v console' flame. I'm saying that if you want your hobby to be widespread, sustainable and growing it needs to be accessible to a broke highschooler. PC gaming might be affordable to us tech workers, but it isn't to them, and that's a problem. Hell even console gaming has become very expensive in the last couple years. A ps5 is $500, which is reasonable for what you get, but the $70 games and $80 / yr PSN sub adds up.
I am a bit younger (my first PC was a 486), but much like you I and most of my friends grew up with PCs. My happiest memories are endless evenings playing Counter Strike and Diablo 2 at Internet cafés.
So yeah, PC gaming is growing... back home in Europe it has always been the number one platform!
I first started with big LAN/Demoscene parties. Between 2003 (when I finished high school) and 2008 (when I finished university) I attended Euskal Encounter (https://ee33.euskalencounter.org/) every summer. LAN parties at friend's places came later, after we all moved out of our parents homes and got our own cars xD
God, how do I miss those days...
I can't believe we lugged our CRTs around too. So much weight being moved around but it was worth it!
I join my voice in disgreeing with this. While some games can indeed be rose-tinted (I have fond memory of that Game Boy Spiderman game, and it's a terrible shoverware game), many of them are traiblazer (like, invented a genre) or are still standing on their own very well.
Some? There are tons of horrible old games, vastly outnumbering the good ones. It's just by now it's fairly established what the good games are and the bad ones are mostly forgotten my most.
We simply don't have the same luxury with new games, they can be hit and miss, and reviews are untrustworthy.
I feel as though this reply doesn't really address what is being said in the prior post at all. Yes, bad old games exist. But there were literally dozens of genre-defining games that would go on to shape how games continued to be made in the decades since. Somebody posted a list of indie titles they consider good and probably half of them are outright homages to these older games. Games that are so good they define or reshape genres are few and far between nowadays. They do exist (Vampire Survivors was mentioned, and it is one), but not anywhere near the rate they used to.
That is why I specifically included "or reshape". Atari was first for many genres, but it didn't meaningfully define them, or to the extent it did they were significantly reshaped by future games. Super Mario Bros. was far from the first platformer but it, and future developments in the franchise, were so much better than everything that came before them that they became the face of the genre. We see Metroidvanias copying the Super Metroid / Castlevania formula for three decades and counting. None of those copies, not even the wildly successful ones like Hollow Knight, reshaped the genre such that future games were made in their image. And so it goes for most genres. It is certainly possible to reshape a genre in the modern era; Stardew Valley did it, for example. But it is rare for new games to pull off a concept so well that everyone after them copies their homework. Everyone is still copying the homework of the games from 20, 30 years ago.
Yeah I was responding to the opinion that old games are good because of nostalgia, which I don't agree with at all. Some are good because of nostalgia, some are good because they're just that good (there's a thriving community around NES Tetris for instance), some are good because they pushed the medium forward (Metal Gear Solid, Warcraft, The Sims, ...).
>Yes, bad old games exist. But there were literally dozens of genre-defining games that would go on to shape how games continued to be made in the decades since
The N64 had one of the smallest videogame libraries ever. It had less than 400 titles. How many of those were "Super great" vs how many were utter garbage?
The SNES had 1749!
The vast vast majority were slop.
A lot of the "great" ones are only really great in context, ie no preceding works to draw from and with the technological limits of the time.
Is Pilotwings good? As someone who grew up with similar age flight simulators but not pilot wings, it is extremely mediocre. Same for StarFox and StuntRaceFX even though both were dramatic at the time, but they do not hold up in the slightest. 12fps is not that fun.
>Games that are so good they define or reshape genres are few and far between nowadays.
Yes, this is called a new domain maturing. This is the expected outcome in all new domains. You pick all the low hanging fruit and explore most of the solution space.
Scroll through this list and tell me things were better back then
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_Nintendo_Enterta...
>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children.
If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with. I stayed at an air bnb that had a ps2. I sat down and played ace air combat; a game I'd never touched on a console I'd never had as a child, and I had a blast.
I also recently picked up fallout 1/2 for a couple bucks on steam, and while the controls and graphics weren't great, I still enjoyed the game even though I never touched it in childhood.
Realistically, there are a few games for the xbox / ps2 era where the graphics really have not aged well, but for the most part I am not a pixel snob, at all.
> If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with.
I’m not sure that’s true? Like, perhaps the preference might generalize from the several games one did play as a child to other games which are similar to the ones one played as a child, with the preference still being a result of which games one played as a child.
Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.
I know it's easy to trot out "nostalgia", but do you not think it's possible that older games can genuinely be better than newer games? I very much think it is common to find such games, even games I had never played in my youth. There were bad games then too, of course, and good games now, but I think the ratio of hits was higher. Particularly now that modern game development is so sloppy. Microtransaction-infested games rule the world, and while the indie scene does still produce excellent gems, most of them tend to be significantly less polished and rougher around the edges.