while all of those qualities are great, they alone don’t make game great.

Many retro games are better. AA games were made with heart back then & that made it possible to make games that are incredible both in terms of artistry, grandeur and gameplay. Games like Baldur’s Gate 1-2, Chrono Cross etc are not possible in today’s climate.

On the other hand we have been handed indie games like Celeste and Hollow Knight, so I don’t know. Amazing games still exists, it’s just not really comparable.

I just finished playing the original FF7 for the first time in like two decades. I always secretly dreaded trying to play it again, worried that it wouldn’t have aged that well as a game, or that my nostalgia was propping it up as a masterpiece when perhaps it wasn’t.

It sucked me in and I ended up doing a 100% completion playthrough. The experience has shifted my thinking and now I’m more willing to replay older games. Just last week I found my old CD Keys and started up Diablo 2, the original, not the remaster. Now I’ve been sucked into that.

I personally am finding that mechanically, these older games have systems with lots of depth and creativity. They give you so many options and choices, and they rarely explain all of it so your kind of left to just… experience it. I am sure this is not true for every retro game ( and ditto for some new games ) but it is something I have been feeling when playing older games.

Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.

Retro games (console & computer), indie games and open source games for the win, absolutely.

I’d say that the Indie game experience can still match that. Doesn’t have to be old titles.

Nah. I mean, I like old games quite a lot, but for all the gems, there’s a litany of duds. I do agree that anti-cheat and online multiplayer have hurt innovation, but the indie scene is where it’s at, if you want innovation or a focus on storytelling. Still, some of my best memories are with modern online games like Shadowbane, WoW, Warframe, Deep Rock Galactic, etc., and yet no game has yet replaced my experiences with the older Myst series.

Size of games is certainly problematic if you have a slower internet connection, but even SSDs are quite economical at this point.

If retro games are your jam, then awesome! But I think they’re just a single facet of the broader hobby of gaming.

I think nostalgia plays a pretty big factor in retro games. Like, yes, I agree that enshittification marches onwards and the state of the industry today is pretty lame.

Every time I’ve gone back to a retro game I find myself vaguely disappointed. Quality of life has come a long way, and development is iterative so it makes sense that games made twenty years ago are lacking some features that make life easier for the player. Things like fast travel in metroidvanias, or inventory and quest management, or just trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do next in an RPG are often quite lacking. Or at the least, they’re not up to today’s standards.

Survivorship bias plays a pretty big role here too. We remember the good games that stand out from the rest of them, and we forget about the crap. There was shovelware back then too, maybe not to the degree of the modern app stores with F2P games loaded with microtransactions and dark patterns, but they were there too.

Anyway, long story long, the trick in whatever generation you play seems to be to find games that respect your time as a player. I’d also recommend checking out indie games, they’re made with love, and you can find all kinds of retro-styled where you can tell the devs were passionate about games of the era.

Here’s a short list of games I’ve enjoyed that give me that retro SNES feeling:

• Bzzzzzt - Just delightful
• Gravity Circuit - Megaman, but the platforming actually feels good and fast
• Nuclear Blaze - This one has a unique offering where have to put out fires while platforming
• Skull Girls - okay, this one’s a bit older too, but in another comment you said you like Street Fighter so this might be up your alley

The one time I’ve asked for a refund on steam was when I mistakenly bought the remastered instead of the original version of an old game I wanted, and found that it had been ruined by the addition of a (not easy to bypass and wouldn’t run under wine) “launcher” that was there for the sole purpose of getting you to register an account and log in so they could collect whatever data they wanted.

There certainly was a “golden age of gaming,” where the cost for a studio to exist and make a game was pretty low and they were more willing to experiment. The thing people forget is that there was so, so, so much trash and shovelware made during that era as well. We remember the incredible game that innovated and drove the medium forward, and we forget the movie tie-ins and genre knockoffs.

These days, AAA has forgotten how to innovate, and nearly all of it is being driven by indie titles. This is because, once again, the cost to develop is now so low that literally anyone can do it. The amount of trash and shovelware we’re getting is almost ludicrous though, so it’s a lot harder to find the great titles that are overlooked, but extremely high quality has a remarkable way of cutting through the noise.

Play what you enjoy. The old games can look better because you skip through to the best ones over the last 50+ years. Many were buggy, had terrible controls or were just boring. You’re probably not wasting your time on those.

Depends on the game. As great as retro games are, I could never give up newer indie titles like Baba Is You or Brok The Investigator, which would be much shorter games or have other problems if they were made for consoles pre-internet games download days.

Though I will say that retro games like Sonic 1 & 2 on Genesis or Ratchet and Clank on PS2 are pretty much infinitely better than the triple AAA slop they’re throwing at us today.

Especially when we have companies (like sweet baby inc.) forcing characters to be changed to Mary Sue’s all because we need inclusivity. I have no problems with inclusivity at all, but I have a major problem with poorly written characters in games that have absolutely nothing going for them besides being perfect.

I mean, let’s not forget that the early consoles had their own pitfalls, a period of gaming that spawned tropes like ‘Nintendo Hard’ and ‘Guide Dang It’ in order to, among other things, pad out the length of what we would consider an otherwise barebones game, and to sell time on their hints and tips hotline. I do feel like there was less bullshit in the past, but it definitely still existed.

Just be careful not to idealize the past as some golden age of gaming. During the SNES era, worthwhile titles were few and far between on top of spotty regional availability on account of profitability (supposedly). The bar to entry for gamedevs was huge: the dev tools were obtuse and the distribution methods were shit and centralized (toy stores, computer stores, magazines). The offer was also ridiculously sanitized, at least on consoles.

It’s great that we can still enjoy the good games of the past, but I absolutely love what indies come up with nowadays. There are so many and they’re so creative! ❤️ Some talented big studio devs even manage to release something nice once in a while despite the organizational structure they work in. I never want to go back to gaming in the 90’s. Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that there are many past titles being hailed as classics solely based on some unconscious nostalgia for youth (I’m looking at you GOG).

There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.

One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.

But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.

If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.

It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.

I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.

In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.

Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.

I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.

Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.

But in a word: no.

You are not.