As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
Multiplayer games in general don’t do it for me like they used to. These days I just want to get on and play a few missions in single player then hop off.
What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole “if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself” rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.
This is when the whole “if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself” rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games.
it’s the internet in general.
Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.
I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.
With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.
Same. I play games to enter a relaxation state after a long day at work. Playing a 45 minute cutthroat CS2 match with my friends where I have to be at attention constantly, while they’re all screaming at each other for being bad, isn’t exactly my idea of relaxation…
Oh yeah! I used to play Unreal Tournament every day for hours. Also played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory a lot in the past.
Nowadays these games just don’t appeal to me anymore.
I love MP but I can’t bring myself to play due to how incredibly obnoxious it became.
Same. It’s enough to team up with people at work so there’s no desire to do the same at home. I also don’t find grinding as much fun anymore. It used to be a fun way to spend time as a kid because we had too much time. Now, I don’t even pick a game which doesn’t have basic QoL features implemented.
For me it’s the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don’t hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.
I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for “the system,” but in reality they’re only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It’s not that the N64 has a top ten, it’s that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.
I’m sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef’s Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that’s the thing: It’s always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn’t know any better because that’s all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.
Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:
Majora’s Mask
Star Fox 64
Jet Force Gemini
Donkey Kong 64
Diddy Kong Racing
Excite Bike 64
Paper Mario
Paper Mario: Thousand Year DoorPokémon Stadium
Yoshi’s Story
Pokémon Snap
Mario Party
Felt at the time that there was always a high quality “AAA” release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.
Obviously a lot of them don’t stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven’t had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.
Thousand Year Door was a GameCube game.
Good point.
You seem to have forgotten Shadows of the Empire too!
Star Wars Rogue Squadron?
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer?
Yes my list was not exhaustive either and tried to focus on exclusives to make the point.
Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)
How many third-party games were any good?
We referred to Rare as a “second-party” developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.
To answer your question on third-party games, some of my favourites were…
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron
Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer
Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire
Vigilante 8
Extreme-G
Snowboard Kids
Turok
Bomberman 64
Resident Evil 2
San Francisco Rush
And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.
But I don’t see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it’s legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.
Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.
I don’t get the hype for Castlevania. I’ve never liked any of them. I also haven’t played one since the SNES.
Well, they took a pretty dramatic turn after that point. Still, Castlevania 1 and 3 are beloved for other reasons.
There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn’t butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn’t stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn’t make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.
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I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.
Can you list 20 great first party games on any platform?
I’m pretty sure I couldn’t with Sony because I don’t think I could name a single first-party game from Sony.
Microsoft is a tricky one because of how many studios they’ve bought, and I’m not sure how many platforms the PC counts as (at least three: DOS, the DOS-based Windows era and the Windows NT era.
I cannot for the Steam Deck because I’m not sure Valve has made a total of 25 games.
I’m not as familiar with Sega as I am Nintendo but they were and still are a developer in addition to the platform owner.
Atari is not impossible; it’s probably possible to come up with a list of 25 first party titles that were considered great that were published for the 2600 or for their 8-bit computers.
If I’m going to give it a go, I think I’d go for Nintendo on either the NES or SNES, though for the SNES I think I would have to ask if I’m allowed to count titles made by Rare and I bet someone would clap back if I included Super Mario All Stars.
I agree, not common, which is why I don’t understand the “only 20 or so great games” take.
Here’s the difference:
On the Super Nintendo, I can name 20 great, all-time classic games if restricted to first and second party titles, so made by Nintendo and Rare. If you open me up to 3rd party titles I can probably come up with 100 all time classics like Lufia or Desert Strike.
On the N64, I’m going to struggle to make it to 20 all-time classics if restricted to first and second party titles, and I might make it to 25 if you let me have the whole catalog. Of the remaining 350+ games made for the system, some of them were unfinished garbage like Superman 64, some of them were badly designed crap like Quest 64, and a lot of them were competent but not memorable things like Extreme-G or The New Tetris, competently made and legitimately fun games we played, finished, put away and forgot about forever.
Us N64 owners tend to have very similar memories of the platform. There aren’t many hidden gems to rediscover.
Oh right I see it’s like a quality vs quantity thing. To me I’d pick quality (as that is what triggers my nostalgia).
If I want quantity there are thousands of modern indie games I’d rather play.
There’s a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.
But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that’s where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).
This doesn’t track, Rare were banging out so many good games and as others have mentioned the Star Wars games were also awesome.
I feel you are also still missing the point about trailblazing. There was more gameplay innovation than anything since.
Speaking of innovation, the N64 was the, if not first then what I would call the first modern, console to use thumbsticks. The Dualshock was the second controller made for the PlayStation.
Yep, chuck Rumble Pak in there too.
Did platform fighters exist before Smash?
Did proper 3D platforming with free camera exist before Mario 64?
Did third person adventure games exist before OoT and has anything drastically changed the formula since?
Not to mention all these games shipped fully built with no updates and amazingly few bugs.
It seems as though OP didn’t actually experience these things at the time so making a post about nostalgia for them is strange. Firing up an emulator and going “These games don’t hold up now.” is entirely missing the point.
Did platform fighters exist before Smash?
By “platform fighter” do you mean a game where your goal is to increase damage to your opponents in order to knock them out of the arena, as opposed to draining a health bar?
If so, I don’t recall any before Smash, though my interest in pre-Smash fighters ended with the SNES.
Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years…
Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn’t exist without them.
Growing up I skipped the PS1/Saturn/N64 generation so I’ve never had nostalgia for that super early low poly 3D era
I went from getting everything to maybe playing up to 3 new games a year about the same time the PS3 came out. I know what I like and what I want, and the vast majority of games do not deliver these days.
I used to get maybe three games a year and now I hardly play at all. I still have a PS3 and absolutely can’t justify upgrading.
(I’m sure loads of the new games are great, I just don’t have the time for them)
I was a bit young when nes, and snes came out. I am still quiet fond of super mario world 2. But my favorite consoles, hands down are N64, PS1, and PS2. They were really just figuring out open world gaming back then, and they hadn’t yet figured our how to make every game constantly online, and/or gaming as a service.
I will say though, a lot of the old games I used to love don’t hold up as well playing them as an adult. They are either super hard, or have weird camera and controls, especially 007 GoldenEye for N64.
Another one that turned out to be tedious and hard is Zelda Ocarina of Time, which really surprised me. I thought the game was the greatest game ever as a kid.
I never played n64 (except maybe a couple rounds of Mario kart, but that may have been gamecube). I tried to play ZOoT, goldeneye, etc. and found the controls and camera awful. With no nostalgia for it, I was out in about 30 minutes (I think less on goldeneye be cause of that abomination of a controller).
There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.
Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.
Halo 1 was the first game I ever played online. I played a lot of it.
But I was a very different person then, and replaying it now reminds me of how stupid I was (because I got into a clan that was very based on that kind of person) and the internal ick just his a fever pitch and ruined the game for me.
I never played 2 since that was on Vista and I never went back to it after finally getting Win 7.
After that the series just felt tainted to me. When I first tried it on a console it was really weird with the control setup. I was very used to hundreds of hours on Perfect Dark with the default controls. Having a second stick and rearranging what hand controlled what bent my mind in knots for a while. But it ended up making more sense that way (as you can easily tell by how much it caught on- not saying Halo pioneered it, but it was my first experience with it).
I’ve been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren’t so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.
Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that’s the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it’s made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.
Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I’ll never be fully nostalgic for any era.
I remember how many damn licensed games came out during that period. There was just almost a game for everything, it was nuts.
American Choppers had a game. Hannah Montana had several. Let’s give Dukes of Hazzard a game, let’s give Starsky and Hutch a game. Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.
There were definitely some good licensed games!
TMNT Turtles in Time and The Simpsons are two amazing beat 'em ups.
The licensed games by Capcom on the NES are generally a safe bet for a good (if not great) game. Even into the 16-bit era, too.
The [X] of Illusion games on the Genesis are great kid-friendly platformers (Mickey Mouse games).
Plenty of great licensed games throughout the generations too. For something more “recent”, consider the success of the Lego games…which are often basically doubly-licensed.
Atari era/Pre-Windows PC era.
The Atari era is mostly because the games are short and have very little replay value. It’s a fun novelty especially when you see an angry nerd swearing at them on YouTube. But you’d get the gyst of the game after 30 seconds. Or are so confused that you don’t know what to do without the manual… even then it’s not that helpful.
Now for the Pre-Windows PC era, mostly DOS and Commodore. It’s mostly because I don’t have the right mindset to play them, and forcing myself to just makes me not want to hate them. Outside of Police Quest, Wolfenstein 3D, and F29 Retaliator (<- I can’t believe this is on Steam) which I like because they are nostalgic to me, I wasn’t able to get into Civiliation 1, Ultima, SimCity or other giants from the time.
Pre-Windows PC Era games worth mentioning:
- Wing Commander 1 & 2
- X-Wing and TIE Fighter
- Sierra point & click adventure games like Kings Quest & Leisure Suit Larry,
- Doom
- Quake
- Dune 2
- Command & Conquer
- Warcraft 1 (zug zug!)
- X-Com
- Fallout 1
The 5th generation (ps1 mostly) has aged the worst (imo) and it’s the generation I revisit the least.
I certainly feel like people tend to be more nostalgic of the 16 bit era than the 8 bit.
I think because the 16-bit astethic (when done right) still looks amazing today, where 8-bit is just a bit too limiting.
Most handhelds tbh.
I didn’t really grow up with “traditional” (home) consoles, but I always had handhelds (and a PC).
I have trouble going back to most handheld games pre-Vita nowadays, even if I remember the PSP (and GBA to a certain extent) fondly, between the controls, smaller screen and cut versions of games vs their home console counterparts, it’s hard to go back. Emulation makes it somewhat nicer for me, but still.
And let’s not begin with GB or GG games, they have a certain charm, but I usually can’t stand them for more than 5 mins nowadays.Not so much as stopped feeling nostalgic for, but realizing that there weren’t as many great games available as I thought that haven’t had better successors or remakes. And for Nintendo consoles, non-Nintendo games that stand the test of time are difficult to find outside of a few franchises that usually have more modern versions on Switch.
We are just spoiled for choice these days when it comes to games, especially with indie games. And indies these days often have better UX than most mainstream games back then.
Even though I grew up with 8/16bit I’ve never really had any nostalgia for it apart from a select few games.
Honestly, I pay for top of line parts. I realize I’m limitiing myself on good games, but…
I paid for this shit, I try to keep top of the line because it is still my hobby (though, my time doesn’t allow anymore) and I want to push my hardware.
Low bit games, however good, don’t get a chance because… god damn, I expect better. I’m a 80s baby, and 90s kid. Nickelodeon early nick toons are my jam.
I paid for it, let me experience it.
I want to PUSH my hardware, and fine tune for play-ability, as expenses allow.
That being said, I love MMOs and realize how hard they can be to “upgrade” for all users… but damn, I don’t have the time or energy anymore. I wish I could raid EQ bosses like I was 13 on summer break, but I fucking can’t.
At the end of the day, I hope creative minds create new paradigms in gaming with limited resources. At this point, it is the only way we will grow. AAA studios make rehashes of former successes, which fail, and no one wants them. Gameplay has died, its been several years, and as an “old-head” (Quest for Glory 1 was my first PC game, with parser prompts) and I miss games. Even those are simple by today’s standard - but they still stand up in a shorter format.
Most of them, honestly.
When you look back, it was cool what they were doing at the time, but progress is such that all newer games have iterated on those groundbreaking formulas and improved upon them, making the older games seem less spectacular than they were at launch. I have fond memories of playing PS2, N64 and Dreamcast, but when I go back to play some of those games I enjoyed as a kid, I find that there’s always something super sub-optimal like the controls or some arcane mechanic that doesn’t make much sense. I find this to be the consistent issue going back to PS2 era and earlier.
I think the PS3/360 era is the one I have the most nostalgia for all things considered. There were a lot of stellar RPGs like KOTOR and Mass Effect that generation. Stuff like Red Dead Redemption was coming out. Control schemes finally became generally standardized and understandable. Tutorials, saves and decent graphics were really finally all combined properly for the first time.
I find the same sort of issue with movies. When you go back passed the 80s, you start hitting pacing issues. Same with video games. When you go back passed the mid-2000s, you’re going to run into early installment weirdness.
This is broadly true, but I think that many older games that were much simpler, with a narrower focus and more fleshed out presentation have a spot on the leaderboards that won’t be knocked off any time soon. One example is the Legend of Zelda series. With Breath of the Wild and its sequel, it did some pretty innovating things. But in the process it sacrificed much of what made the earlier Zelda games great. We figured out how to make a game with “more dungeons” but they were uninspired and they all looked the same. Gone were the huge, sprawling, uniquely thematic dungeons with memorable bosses and iconic music. The overworld got much larger and they crammed more overworld activities into it, but now those activities were just the same four or five things copy pasted to every inch of the world, none of which did much individually besides making one of a few numbers go up by a tiny fraction. New technology allowed them to make huge sprawling worlds to explore, at the expense of the ability to effectively fill those worlds with stuff worth exploring for.
New games innovate in what is technically possible, but they move backwards in other areas that don’t get the same attention. It’s more than just “These old games were good for their time”. In many cases they are still unsurpassed by modern games because the focus changed.
I agree.
Even using my examples of KOTOR and ME, comparing them to (relatively) modern counterparts, Jedi Survivor and Andromeda, you can see that the storytelling has taken a back seat to the open world. ME 1-3 were all very tight corridor cover shooters, going from fully constructed combat environment to another, while Andromeda tried to shoehorn in survival crafting and exploration. KOTOR has more deep RPG mechanics and overall a better story than Jedi Survivor, and I would agree it’s because the focus changed on providing sprawling open worlds over more bespoke environments. I would also say that the combat in Andromeda and Jedi Survivor are superior to their older counterparts, but at the loss of other things.
Breath of the Wild’s equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren’t even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn’t find what was hidden in the negative space.
Breath of the Wild doesn’t have an equivalent to dungeons. There are only four divine beasts, and just like the shrines they are extremely short, and identical in appearance. They were just slightly more complex shrines with an animal theme. And the overworld doesn’t realistically have a whole lot to find, by design. Since the game is entirely unstructured, you can’t put anything to find in the game, because you don’t know where the player will go and nothing to stop them from going anywhere. Thats why nothing amounts to anything more than a fractional stat boost or a temporary weapon. The outfits and the master sword are the only things worth actually finding in the game.
As a shit your brain off and run around a pretty overworld type of game, it excels. But it doesn’t delivery anything a typical Zelda game does.
The divine beasts are not identical, though they are shorter than traditionally Zelda dungeons. The overworld has a ton to find; you just didn’t find it.
The divine beasts are in fact visually identical. The only real difference between them is which animal they’re vaguely shaped like. As for the overworld, I found all of it. It’s just that “all of it” was for the most part just copied and pasted over and over with minor variation.
