How much of the meme that games "age" is owed to the fact "reviews" always had meaningless big numbers at the end? Reading back they're often accurate and aware of shortcomings of flawed "classics" at release. Then 25 years later some media literate peon says the same thing and presents it as revelation.
 Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
 UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
Good games are good games regardless, there is no such thing as "age", it's an anthropomorphized cope to criticize something without really criticizing it or being smart enough to level genuine complaints about what bothers you about it.
Either make an actual point, or frick off and jump off a cliff.
Games age
Feel free to play Atari 2600 games and pretend otherwise afterwards. But it's the truth.
Pitfall still plays great, so do pac-man, centipede and space invaders.
They do age, but it's subjective.
>It's preted!!! Only I can be right!!!
How the FRICK can you possibly think an Atari 2600 game "aged"? They have game mechanics at their most raw, not being bogged down with bloat lmfao.
Adventure is very good to this day
Genuinely one of my favorite Atari games to this day
Atari games were so trash it crashed the video game industry
Those were just always kind of mid. Show me anyone who loves Atari games. They were amusements for the time. People weren't obsessing over them.
>there is no such thing as "age"
Yes there is. There are disontinued platforms and operating systems, limited number of deteriorating disks and cartridges, dead servers, and all sorts of other technical problems that games start to have with their abiliry to be played as they age. Those still are the same games, with the same flaws they had back when they were new, and can't be played in the same way now because they are old. That's how age works.
Granted, when people say that "the game didn't age well", they usually mean that its controls aren't like modern ones, and that it isn't in 60FPS. In that case, i agree with you.
uhhh... what gahm
El Witcherino Uno
Games don't age, the taste and standards of the average player just got worse.
If games don't age then why does this board exist? What differs it from goddamn Ganker if all games are supposedly not affected by the march of time?
>durr muh clever loophole
It's like immortality. Surely, you know the concept of immortality.
Someone from 1600 gets the boon of immortality. Now they don't "age" (as in, their cells don't deteriorate from change or w.e.). They live until the present day. It's still an immortal from 1600. Therefore, a "retro immortal".
A "retro immortal" will still be in a completely different zeitgeist where people expect immortals to not be wearing renaissance clothing.
If I didn't explain well enough,
>If games don't age then why does this board exist
The board is to discuss games made before 2007. These games are called "retro" by the board. What people mean by "games don't age" is they didn't change since 2007. It's a stupid question.
>Trivial semantics based on an overly-literal interpretation of the verb "age".
Or, by saying stupid shit like that you're using an overly-literal interpretation of what people mean when they say "games don't age".
If what people meant by "games age" was "this game is from a different zeitgeist" then this would be fine. However, what you actually mean is "this game/zeitgeist sucks". You're being a dishonest shit and hiding behind semantics.
>what you actually mean is "this game/zeitgeist sucks"
I never said that, you dishonest Black person. You can't go back to a time where cars didn't have suspensions after driving a car that does. Once Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64 established the rules of 3D movement, suddenly Croc 1's tank controls are just not on par (hence why Croc 2 did away with it). That's how they age - either gracefully or not.
>hence why Croc 2 did away with it
It didn't though. It still used the same base system, but had you control it indirectly, making it worse.
This doesn't make sense.
You just want everything to play the same, typical modern gamer closedmindedness, everything has to play the exact same otherwise it's "bad design"
the internet is fricked up, and focused on propaganda, and the trying to freely steal you're information
History remembers what plays well.
Are you ESL? Serious question.
Sorry, the better term to use would be "stop aging". It's too late to pretend my English is good but i'm hoping you get the point.
Don't admit defeat. When someone calls you an ESL, call them an ESL back, and call them a zoomer too, for good measure.
This board exists because Ganker was incapable of having video game discussions, and couldn't retain mods or janitors back then. /vr/ was essentially the "real" Ganker until the dreaded election fricked the internet up permanently.
most NES have aged terribly. 2d games didnt really get good until ps1
>2d games didnt really get good until ps1
You're right and I'm amazed at how few people get this. Prior to the PSX, DKC2 was the only thing released that basically would stand up to later games in the future. The PSX is a powerhouse of the best 2D games ever made, but nobody sees it like this for whatever reason.
I just played mario land, it was pretty fun and has a nice bespoke GBC palette if you don't like green
What, like Rayman, which is shit, or any of the Playstation Megamans, which aren't as good as X1?
Show me something as fantastic as Contra Hard Corps on the PS1.
Contra hard corps is too hard to be enjoyable. Looks nice but not fun. Rayman 1 is an excellent game, the 3d ones suck.
>Show me something as fantastic as Contra Hard Corps on the PS1.
*PS1
There is no "X" in Playstation, you moronic mongoloid.
There's no 1 in Playstation either.
PS5
PS4
PS3
PS2
What comes before 2?
Anon, where the frick do you see the 1 here?
The 1 naturally follows after 30 years of 2 3 4 5
>naturally
seems pretty arbitrary to me. Should we call the NES the Nintendo 8 and SNES the Nintendo 16?
There isn't a Nintendo 128
PS5-PS4-PS3-PS2-PS1
Switch-Wii U-Wii-Gamecube-64-???
Does GCN stand for GAMECUBE Black person?
It stands for GameCube from Nintendo, because National Geographic Channel already trademarked NGC.
Lots of people do call it the 8-bit Nintendo
Should we change World War 1 to World War X just because it didn't had a 1 firsthand?
It would be like claiming that nobody ever called it "The Great War" and that people always referred to it as "World War 1" even when they were fighting in it. That's a pretty damn exact analogy.
No it's not, since that's not what I argued. No one says that the PS1 was called PS1 back then.
X
Die, motherfricker.
most of my favorite 2D games are from 2007 and later
games aging is a meme made by zoomers, NO ONE said it before 2014 and most zooms REALLY hate anything old
https://www.google.com/search?q=before%3A2013-01-01+%22games%22+%22aged%22
Off by 2 years, but other than that I am right
>zoomers hate anything old
>all games older than the 2010s are being scalped to death ever since coof boredom hit
I dun gettit
They are not taken by the zooms obviously
I don't buy it, the majority of game collectors I see are some low 20s dipshits who don't understand emulation or a similarly aged moron """"investing"""" in game cartridges
>most zooms REALLY hate anything old
Bullshit. Most tiktok kids now have "nostalgia" for anything from the 2000s. They even grew an obsession with skeuomorphism.
>ONE said it before 2014
Okay now hold the frick up lmfao. People started saying it in the late 00s, primarily journalists who needed to justify why they were suddenly God awful at video games. And the reason they were shit was because modern video games at the time literally groomed them into shitters. They needed to come up with a cope.
proofs?
Games do age, Half-Life 2 is a prime example.
It had many technological innovations at the time that were seen as groundbreaking and amazing but which these days are just a bit shit like the overlong vehicle sections, the physics puzzles and the unskippable not-cutscenes.
Playing it in 2004 the game overall was great because you were so impressed by the tech, but now that the tech is no longer impressive you're just left with shit. Which is a shame since the rest of the game outside of those tech demo moments is great.
Horrible example.
Game reviews? What's next, the popular radio station's weekly charts are real and not a reflection of marketing cash?
Folks still believe in that shit?
At least back then it was like, weeeell your check didn't arrive so your game sucks, now it's like, our dei overlords are not paying you so your game sucks!
None of it is a meme, everything ages constantly. Aging well or bad always just refers to how the current culture is seeing an old thing at a particular time. This is really just basic English.
It's astounding that there are people on here that fail to understand this. And will continue to do so.
It's probably just that they're still young and haven't started noticing how everything changes constantly.
It's funny how as a dumb kid I never thought that Bob staying overnight in their house was moronic. Now as an adult I realize Dr. Marvin was right about almost everything, even if he was a stick in the mud. Sure, Bob was eventually proved as harmless, but there's no way the family could've known. From his perspective, this nut job followed him to his vacation home and won't leave him alone.
>everything ages constantly
>digital, unchanging data ages
Define aging, because I'm certain you misunderstand the concept on a fundamental level.
I kinda see your point but I don't see what that has to do with video games aging. They don't age, the mechanics might evolve as time goes by an people iterate more, but a poor controlling game back then is a poor controlling game now.
Yes but poor controls and other flaws might at the time be overlooked for some reason or another. Maybe it was the norm and people weren't aware of better alternatives yet. Maybe they were even an improvement on what came before while still being poor compared to what came afterwards. Maybe it just happened to fit perfectly into a zeitgeist which has long since faded. That's what it means to age.
>But the game is still the same, it's just that tastes have changed.
Trivial semantics based on an overly-literal interpretation of the verb "age". You might as well object to using the phrase "piece of cake" as synonymous with "easy" because "actually, cakes take a lot of work to make, they're not easy at all!" It's an exercise in missing the point. Anyone with half a brain can tell that this is what people mean when they say something has "aged" and no one outside of /vr/ has any trouble with it. If you were to say, "this topical joke about French politics from 1556 has aged poorly," no one would come barging in to say "umm, ackshually, the joke is still exactly the same as it was back then, it's just your tastes that changed!
Is the term vague and imprecise? Sure, and so I don't use it, but it's utterly trivial to understand what other people mean when they use it.
They hold up fine today but that's incomparable to their reputation back in the day.
Imagine if these games never existed were just released for the first time yesterday with nothing but aesthetic updates. Hardly anyone would give them more than an afternoon's worth of their time or think much of them afterwards, not even the people here nor the fanbase they currently enjoy. Neither would pinball have become a national craze were it invented for the first time in 2022. Their popularity was a product of their time, and even the fame they enjoy today is based more on their historical significance than on their quality and appeal relative to the vast field of games that exists today.
>Yes but poor controls
Stopped reading. 4 directions and an action button. A single button. One lone fricking button. You press it. That's it.
Getting attention is more valuable to people than enjoying old games. People just play old games to talk about them for clout now.
Games do age somewhat. What is a innovation in one year is obsolete in another.
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior has 8 playable characters. At the time, this was a massive amount for a fighting game. Nowadays if you tried to sell a fighting game with that small a cast, it would be absolutely pathetic.
There are people like us who can appreciate World Warrior in the context of its era and how innovative it was for its time. Most people just want to play a good fighting game, and that's understandable. Those people don't want to play World Warrior, and that's why it's fair to say that it's aged.
>chun barf lee
I'm concerned. I can't find any good chin li barf gifs
>chun li barf KOs
Rivals of Aether launched with eight characters in 2017 and did great moron
When people mean games "age", they mean it's not like "today's standards".
Today's standards being shit, a game having "aged" is actually a compliment.
You can't refute this.
uh old game bad because me used to new game
>meaningless
dimwit
The answer to your question is that you're so far up your ass with contrarian elitism that obvious reality slips under your nose.
>I'll kill you
I miss the old games where each person had their own losing animation. chun li barfed on my wiener. if you played street fighter in the 90s chun barfs up her noodles if you beat her
yeah it was bad ass. fighting games are gay as frick now
I've been a fan of soul caliber since the arcades, and it's just money grabbing gifting shit now
vampire hunter D should have been a downland-able character during the console wars
he's going to died soon naturally.
bless his god damned heart.
>t. Illinois American
anyone who hates totoro is a fricking moron
> not Japanese
Shit that zoomers made up. Go ask one of them.
they're fricked
The people who claim that video games "age", "don't hold up", "haven't stood the test of time" are tech bros who see video games as some sort of science instead of art. They see silent films as objectively inferior to coloured talkies, think Link's Awakening DX and other colour mods of Game Boy games are an objective improvement, that lives are "archaic" and that every game with exploration requires a map. They also never bother to read manuals and blame the game for not explaining anything to them, and see games as collectors' items that they play just so they can tick them off their backlogs. If you actually play and enjoy games, you can see that NES games like StarTropics, Castlevania and Gimmick! easily "hold up" with later masterpieces like Shadow of the Colossus and Metroid Prime.
I agree, but it's not only tech bros. Most people who are into movie games share similar opinions. Funnily enough, I know some people like this who grew up playing old arcade games.
The problem is that people now have some expectation that every game is supposed to be the same thing. Like standardisation of control schemes and mechanics is good, and not boringness that only serves to mush everything together into a nondestinct paste.
This is the crux of the argument that Morrowind "aged badly", for example.
>it's bad because the combat has misses
Except it was designed that way on purpose because it was designed to be an RPG first, and not an action game.
We HAD action games before that point. great ones too. DMC was out. It's not like no one had had the idea yet.
>well it's wrong that is was designed to be an RPG first and not an action game
Why?
Also it's built on an idea that the faults of some old games has to do with their age. The vast majority of games didn't have weird combat like Morrowind at the time. People say games with terribly slow battles like Trails in the Sky or Dragon Quest VIII "aged" because of it when earlier and other contemporary RPGs (see SMT games) had far faster combat, and some modern games are just as slow
Right, it's that way because it was designed that way, deliberately. And it was designed that way deliberately to give you a sense of character growth and roleplaying.
But people unironically think they were just too stupid to make it play good.
The entire industry is evolving towards the same "supergame" with a set of rules that are uniformly the same across all titles, only changing the plot and setting. If a game deviates from said rules, it's "objectively" bad. It's a cursed timeline we're living in.
>Like standardisation of control schemes
After playing King's Field recently, I realized that this was a huge issue. Video games were not meant to be so standardized.
Standardization is the impediment of creativity. People are only capable of putting games in specific boxes and trends. Marketing enforces the cycle to make a digestible rotting paste for all. Game's are judged for what they aren't. How far they stretch away from the box we are intended to like.
The only good thing about shit threads like this is that they separate those who like games and those who jerk off to the idea of old games.
People say a joke has aged when you need to know context from a previous time before it can be as funny to you as it was to people of that time.
Applying this to games, we can say a game has aged when you need an understanding of the context in which it released before you can appreciate it as much as it was appreciated back then. Take Goldeneye, for instance. Even leaving graphics aside, no one would understand why that game was so revered if they didn't know the context surrounding it.
>no one would understand why that game was so revered if they didn't know the context surrounding it
Bullshit. If anything people are more capable of appreciating it nowadays via the realization that the default tank controls are shit and should be toggled to something different. Actually shooting things in Goldeneye is incredibly satisfying in ways few games do as well.
90% of the time when modern gamers complain about older games having "aged" it has to do with difficulty. Lives, camera, no map etc. 10% is about games that were always bad like TES Arena
"Sonic has a... *ROUGH* transition into 3D, to say the least... and Sonic Adventure... hasn't aged all that well for the blue blur."
I started disliking the term "age" when literally every YouTube review of Sonic Adventure had it in their scripts like they all just repeat the very same opinions over and over again for much of the same audience that watches them.
It's tiresome.
Received wisdom is modern media culture in a nutshell. You're not making any attempt to engage with the work on its own terms. Everything is prescriptive.
it's just a bad term to explain the feeling that comes from missing features that were subsequently obvious
e.g. in the original age of empires you couldn't queue unit production, you had to wait for a building to finish producing a unit before you could tell it to make another. this was changed in the Rise of Rome expansion. re-playing only the original, you'll feel that it's primitive, antiquated, or "aged" for want of that feature.
but because it's a vague term it opens up a lot of room to argue: AoE 1 is still the exact same game it was on release, you can't say it got older...
I didn't pay much attention to game reviews back then. The biggest thing I notice with trying to play "older" games is the movement feels so fricking bad. I tried to play some OG tomb raider recently and I couldn't tolerate the janky ass movement anymore when I used to have so much fun with that game.
the smoothness of character and camera movement in modern games is taken for granted now.
smooth movement for smooth brain.
janky = "it's not le weighty realistic momentum movement!"
>aaaah now this is what a smooth non janky game looks like this feels so kimochi!
This is so fricking awful.
I love OG Tomb Raider but it's also because I have nostalgia for it and I have an understanding and a fondness for the historical context it exists in. That's why I like it, but it is pretty understandable for not everyone to share in that enthusiasm. It is a fricking janky game.
I guess if you really think about it there is a way to play a game like you're going on a museum tour, which is the retro enthusiast way I guess, and the "let me just have some fricking fun" way
Your enjoyment of ANYTHING is relative to your own perception of the world around you. That's why people who are addicted to porn get increasingly into weirder and weirder fetishes. Because vanilla starts being BORING.
This goes for many things in life. Including games. Some of them are fricking boring or annoying in a way that was more tolerable back then, but is not common to see anymore in 2024. THAT'S AGING. COPE. THIS IS SIMPLE.
>b-b-but how can 1 and 0 age
because it's not 1 and 0. It's a thing for humans. A man-made object that you consume for enjoyment.
I play some old games and sometimes it's just honestly about getting over the jank to the point that you become blind and numb to it as you're brain and hands does everything they can to mitigate it.
I think my most recent example is Classic Doom. The fist is janky malarkey and it was horrid for me to use consistently because of its animations, but now I can weave and swerve and kill hoards of demons with it alone. People just have fricked up perspectives because their experiences as a kid when playing vidya for the first time will be equated too much to "first time syndrome" instead of "wow this is actually dogshit to control". Like, I can still admit that the fist is kinda butt to use yet my brain knows so much about it that I won't feel the jank while playing it. I think that this kind of talk just comes down to elitism over trying to actually make a rationalization at the end of the day because people don't want to admit their favorite games has some heinous flaws.
a game like super mario bros doesnt age. you turn it on, start playing, and its fine and fun. a game like the original nes final fantasy does age. its full of annoyances that only exist because those types of games werent yet refined. for example, having to buy armor before you know if its better than what you are wearing.
Saying a game has aged is a shorthand for explaining how the context it exists in is totally different now to its release and therefore changes how different elements are appraised. HL2 had amazing physics, but a modern player has seen that before and isn't going to give it bonus points because of that. So should we explain that every time like autistic losers or just say that it aged and everyone understands what we mean?
You should be able to articulate your complaints, and expect others to do the same. When the words are misunderstood by people expecting you to say what you mean, you only have yourself to blame.
In reality, this is only one step removed from Redditors & Co. describing mechanics and themes they dislike as "icky" and "gross". The difference being that not even they know what they mean, but this directly facilities that behavior.
Awful thread.
your post is not better.
When people talk about old games, they don't bring up review scores.