Garple

Old Games That Hold Up...Or Don't

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The Atari tennis game is incredible...There's an excellent Activision Classics collection for the psx. Also: in that collection Stampede is really good. I'm amazed that such fun can be had with one button games, having been born too late to have ever been immersed in that sort of thing outside of occasional visits to the past with stuff like Donkey Kong or Space Invaders. There must be someone here who has extensive experience with gaming at the time when it was joystick + one button...could you please share some of those experiences with us, maybe even recommend some titles we may not know of?

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I'm amazed that such fun can be had with one button games, having been born too late to have ever been immersed in that sort of thing outside of occasional visits to the past with stuff like Donkey Kong or Space Invaders. There must be someone here who has extensive experience with gaming at the time when it was joystick + one button...could you please share some of those experiences with us, maybe even recommend some titles we may not know of?

Seriously...? You missed out on the Amiga/Atari ST? There's a whole world of wonderful waiting back there! We didn't need two buttons back in the good ol' days! :oldman: (Except on the games when we did :getmecoat)

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Why didn't anyone tell me it has SPIDERS??

cute_spider_keychain-p146526301355010759qjfk_400.jpg

I had forgotten about them! Like zombies and haunts, they weren't overused in Thief II, if you want to skip right to the second game. Face your fear!

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I've been playing Planescape Torment, with a lot of neat mods thanks to the most excellent guide Thunderpeel wrote. I had been wanting to play that game for so long and so far it hasn't disappointed.

Aside from some wonky pathfinding, I think it holds up really well. You don't have to mind reading, because you'd be doing that a lot. It helps that the writing isn't actually all that bad and the story is good so far!

All in all, Planescape is kind of a reminder of why it is that I love PC games so much. :tup:

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Syndicate Wars hasn't aged well. At all. If you've been toying with the idea of buying the PSN version: don't.

It's probably still comletely playable, but I can't tell because of the impenetrable swamp of grubby pixels that floods the screen whenever I load it up.

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Syndicate Wars hasn't aged well. At all. If you've been toying with the idea of buying the PSN version: don't.

It's probably still comletely playable, but I can't tell because of the impenetrable swamp of grubby pixels that floods the screen whenever I load it up.

Yep, and ironically Syndicate still looks pretty neat. I guess Wars came from that period when 3D was hip, but still in its infancy.

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I recently played Jaws for the NES, made of all people LJN.

That game still rocks.

Alot of the early 3d stuff like many have previously said suffer the most. Just about all of the N64 catalog is unbearable to play. I think I tried to play rogue squadron a few years back and had forgotten how bad the fog was.

I can still play the early kings/police/space quest games and enjoy them.

That may just be an extreme case of nostalgia, though.

Going forward in time a bit, I found that some xbox games are difficult to play. Knights of the Old Republic was pretty much just unbearable in regards to navigating through menus and reading text.

I bought bully a year or so ago to play on my 360 and that game just looked wretched, speaking of which GTA 3 is hard to go back to and enjoy, and I would argue that the originals are more fun nostalgia-wise.

Mafia still looks great, mostly due to the cut scenes.

I've recently played all the way through Jagged Alliance 2 and X-Com, those games will never get old.

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We played 4 player Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in class the other day.

They do not hold up, at all.

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We played 4 player Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in class the other day.

They do not hold up, at all.

In class!?!?!

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In class!?!?!

I brought it in to play some N64 at a society I run after university. One thing lead to another and...well, you know how these things turn out.

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We played 4 player Goldeneye and Perfect Dark in class the other day.

They do not hold up, at all.

Really? I've always felt that Perfect Dark holds up REALLY well minus the controls and awful frame-rate.

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Really? I've always felt that Perfect Dark holds up REALLY well minus the controls and awful frame-rate.

Yeah, I think that's why they are releasing the XBLA version.

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Really? I've always felt that Perfect Dark holds up REALLY well minus the controls and awful frame-rate.

I think it really does live and die when it was made. It's somewhat disheartening to shoot someone 18million times to get shot through the wall by someone else with the farsight. I think I just got spoiled with "better" mechanics.

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I never liked Perfect Dark when it was released, I liked elements of it - the guns, the multiplayer bots and so on - but I wasn't sold on it and the framerates on my non-expansion pack'd N64 obviously didn't help... but I've replayed Goldeneye a number of times (native and emulated) and I've always come back to the same conclusion that it's one of the greatest games ever made - and I'm not even talking about its hilariously fun multiplayer.

The controls take some getting used to (as they did back then), but once you've gotten over that it's plain sailing and I honestly don't feel like I'm wearing rose tinted glasses when I say that either.

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So a friend of mine recently discovered an Atari 2600 in her parents' attic, and I spent a good hour yesterday playing things like Combat and Chopper Command and Asteroids... Man, I forgot how mind-numbingly simple Atari games were. I mean, I still really love old arcade games like Pac-Man and Galaga, but those Atari games don't even hold up even on that basic level of pure, mindless fun. The games I tried, anyway. Very disappointing.

I'd say Solaris holds up really really well on the 2600. I played that recently and was surprised at how much fun it was.

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I bought bully a year or so ago to play on my 360 and that game just looked wretched, speaking of which GTA 3 is hard to go back to and enjoy, and I would argue that the originals are more fun nostalgia-wise.

I agree, but to be fair, a seperate company made bully 360 port and I'd argue that the original PS2 version would hold up at the right resolution; just int he 360 port they tried normal maps and lighting, etc.. that wasn't intended and looked pretty piss poor.

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I agree, but to be fair, a seperate company made bully 360 port and I'd argue that the original PS2 version would hold up at the right resolution; just int he 360 port they tried normal maps and lighting, etc.. that wasn't intended and looked pretty piss poor.

Why do their ports always come out so badly? (I'm reminded of the GTAIV PC port, too -- does anyone know what that's like at the moment? Did they release any patches to fix the complaints?)

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I recently re-played both Max Payne games, and I'm happy to say that they hold up quite well. The voice acting is a little cheesy, but it kind of fits in with the noir atmosphere. I'm also of the opinion that Max Payne is one of the few games that implemented bullet time effects well. It never got old, in spite of constant use over the course of both games.

I think my favorite thing, though, is the persistence of bullet casings. Even with the powerful gaming platforms today, most games either make casings disappear after a few seconds or just use particle effects in order to preserve whatever tiny chunk of memory they take up. Max Payne keeps every single casing, magazine, and shotgun shell dropped from your guns. I'm still amazed when I look back at room and the floor is covered in brass.

Right now I'm re-playing Red Faction, and it's doing pretty well. My only gripe so far is that once you start to get enemies that are carrying the rail driver, it gets a little trial-and-error. Getting one-hit-killed through a wall by a dude you didn't know was there is a little frustrating.

After that, it's on to Red Faction 2, which I haven't played before, so we'll see how that goes.

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I'm also of the opinion that Max Payne is one of the few games that implemented bullet time effects well.

Just curious since you pluralized game; what the other ones are? A little short sighted in my memory, but I recall anything other then Max Payne that used bullet time well.

Yeah, and it still holds up, I mean polycount/oldschool look aside, you crank it to high res, it's actually pretty nice to look at. The dialog is cheesy, but thats the point in a lot of it, so it's cool.

Still like the sequel a lot more though.

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Still like the sequel a lot more though.

Definitely. Improvements to everything, including the bullet time effects, make it that much more of a good game.

After wracking my brain and looking up lists of games, there are a lot less games included in that "few" than I thought there would be. I would have to say FEAR and Painkiller are really the only ones that I thought had a good use of bullet time. The use was integrated enough into the game mechanics so that it didn't feel like a tacked-on gimmick, but limited enough that it didn't feel overused. The Max Payne series is still the only one that handles the constant use of bullet time well.

As for Red Faction 2... ehhhhh... While I can't really say whether or not I would have liked it when it came out, I can say that it's been rather disappointing so far. The graphics seem to be worse than RF1. There's also this weird bad-action-movie vibe I'm getting. And not even a "so bad it's good," b-movie bad. Just bad bad. Pretty much anything anybody says is bad in some way, either because of terrible voice acting or terrible writing.

Edited by Lord Korax

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I'm going to throw Stranglehold's hat in the ring for the bullet-time discussion. It's a game that's unfortunately too flawed to recommend, but it came out with some neat tricks that have been picked up by games like Wet and Call of Juarez: BIB. It's just unfortunate that it seems like a group of people designed the mechanics and then verbally explained them to the level designers who then designed levels based on what they'd imagined and never actually playtested them.

Disclaimer: That last sentence...I'm not saying I actually think that happened. I'm just saying that the game feels really wrong. For example, you slide across tables on your knees but all the tables are really short, so it feels abrupt and awkwardly magnetic.

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I played through Castlevania 4 last weekend. That game has aged so amazingly well. It's even better than most of the Castlevania games that came out after it. I don't think any game in the Castlevania series has had the controls nailed down as well as 4. 8 directional whipping makes the game so much easier to control and your character can move in the air after he's jumped, can crawl while crouched, and throwing items is attached to a different button instead of pressing up and attack. I guess it makes the game a little easier but the challenges in the game actually come from gameplay design instead of bullshit controls. Unfortunately it seems like every Castlevania game after 4 ignored this and went back to the 4 directional whipping and inferior controls.

The graphics and sound/music are fantastic too. I mean, the graphics are old of course, but they still look really nice and have some style to them. And the music does a great job of setting up the atmosphere.

What a brilliant game.

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