Comment by PetitPrince 2 days ago
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.
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...
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.