The original Pong is still good in the context it was meant for (a bar or arcade), if you run into one somehow.

Since you mentioned the NES specifically: Super Mario Brothers 3 holds up the best, but they still make Mario games that are just as good, so I think Mega Man 2 would be my biggest recommendation. In either case, I'd consider an infinite lives Game Genie code; standards changed for the better there.

You're right that early 3D looks terrible. Except Doom, which still rules.

I think older games generally become less playable over time, but the high points tend to stay around a long time. The old games people say are still great aren't nostalgia, they're survivorship bias. Using SNES RPGs as examples, everyone says you should play Final Fantasy 6, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, maybe the other Final Fantasies and Lufia II. But nobody recommends Breath Of Fire anymore, even though at the time it was considered good enough to have a whole series spawn off of it.

Helldivers 2. I don't like retro games so anything older than that just feels clunky and outdated to me.

Platformers, specially the old ones, tend to be more frustrating than interesting. But I have no idea why Ninja Gaiden (the original one) is insanely fun to me.

Not as old but when my videocard went kaboom and I was stuck on integrated graphics the original Dark Forces was actually really fun for me. Except the sewer level, fuck that.

I've enjoyed games as old as Zork from 79 and find that most of the notable games of the NES and SNES era pretty easy to go back to.

The only older games that I have difficulty playing are the really early 3d ones. Most developers just didn't have a handle on making stuff in 3d and alot of it is unplayable now.

If you didn't get forced into a high school "work experience" day by going to your dad's office, only to find out that they all just play Wolfenstein 3D all day and don't actually do any work, don't @ me about classic video games.

I think historical-materialist forces cause an evolution of an artform that make earlier forms less accessible. For example, only the hardest-core movie buffs watch films from the Silent Era. The same forces affect video games.

It's no secret that earlier games are simpler, both graphically and gameplay. Games are simulations. When earlier computers were less capable, fewer things could be simulated the game. It's not like earlier game developers didn't have grandiose ideas about what they wanted (see: Dungeons and Dragons), but those limitations means only the absolutely necessary make it into the game. Many games of the 80s and 90s came with a manual because they could not fit all the descriptions/tutorials/story within the game executable itself. It also meant that affordances from later games are conspicuously absent, and can make going back in time a frustrating experience. On the flipside those limitations also made games paradoxically easier to make. When you accept the technical limitations and don't try to achieve beyond them you get endless franchise-powered games, like Disney movies or games-as-vehicles-for-toys. Go back far enough and you get Atari shovelware was put out faster than the Steam store, resulting in a collapse of the US video game market in 1983. As games became more complex (graphically, gameplay, etc), and thus more expensive to make, it became harder for franchise-vehicle quick-buck games to sell.

That being said, there's something about an artist that takes the limitations of their medium and works through it. Charlie Chaplin films are still fun to watch despite the limitations of their time. You can appreciate a game's "Art History", coming to understand the evolution to where games are today by how previous artists worked (and failed) in the past.

tl;dr: It's not just you. Games are better than ever now.

I could pretty much enjoy games of any era except for games from the Atari consoles. Those were basically just shitty versions of contemporary arcade games. This was during the time when consoles were seen as portable arcades, which was still true well into the early 90s where a lot of Genesis games was just ports of arcade games. And as an aside, that would make Gameboy the portable version of the portable version of arcades, which was also true when it came out.

But going back to the Atari consoles, besides them just being inferior arcade games, I heavily dislike the aesthetics as well. It just looks like ass to me. Just look at this. That 7 at the top is so awkward looking. It's like ASCII art wasn't standardized yet or something, so all their art have this weird look where they're afraid of drawing diagonals or curves.

Their 7 is like this:

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When ASCII art 7 is more like this:

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I don't play anything before the NES era - the gameplay is just too rudimentary most of the time.

Will make exceptions for arcade style games though, like space invader, defender etc.

Lots of early NES games are still great though, stuff like Zelda and Mario. Punch-Out! is still a very unique game that holds up well. Its only competitors are its sequels.

visually old games are fine, but design wise they can get iffy for me. I'm sorry but random encounters just aren't fun, it stopped me from playing persona 2

For 2d stuff my limit for non-nostalgic enjoyment is probably around:

• super Mario world
• Zelda LTTP
• ultima 7
• xcom

Stuff like that holds up pretty well IMO.

I agree with others about early 3d stuff being harder. Bad 3d physics especially drives me nuts. Carmageddon is the first game I remember with tolerable 3d physics, but I don't think it was until around Halo that games were consistently getting it right.

I've played some older DOS games that were simple polygon/vector graphics and text boxes and with the exception of some QoL things that have become standard in the ... holy crap..30+ years since the 80's ( soooo ooolllddd) I could get into them for a while and find them enjoyable.

I keep thinking I'm going to dig into the old Atari consol roms (had a few of the Atari consoles for a while as a kid long before the NES) but it seems a bit daunting to relearn how to play a game with a "joystick" and "one button".

I also keep thinking I'm going to try playing the ancient text adventure/interactive story games but every time I try... my brain just can't figure out how to deal with things as a more casual enjoyer of video games. I wind up giving up after about 30 minutes to an hour of "playing".

Though I still have a blast playing Rogue with ASCII graphics every now and then.

I mostly play older games via emulation, and the biggest issue is the rough transition from 2d to 3d graphics (PS1 and N64 mainly) that was smoothed out with the Gamecube and PS2 (and Atari 2600 garbage, I doubt anyone seriously played those classic collections). I think the PS1 especially jumped the gun with 3d, where stuff like Rayman and Symphony of the Night are really timeless. For the N64, I still really like Majora's Mask and Ocarina of Time.

Ms. Pacman. Those arcade screens hit different and its crazy how much you could modify an older game by just plugging in a chip.

Mario 3 is the goat old school NES game

I think it really varies, especially by genre.

Going back to the dark ages of gaming, some of the more fully-realised genres are quite playable (shoot-em-ups, 2D platformers) whereas some just lack the playability and QoL that the genre successors have (RPGs and, in particular, I'm thinking of the grandaddy of all RTSes: Dune - if I remember correctly, you can only issue commands to individual units one by one and not groups, the pathfinding is really lacklustre etc. which makes it borderline unplayable these days.)

There was also a major shift that occurred somewhere along the line in the gaming industry, I'm guessing it's around the late SNES/Mega Drive (Genesis) era as things moved towards PS1 and that generation of consoles; prior to this era there were a lot of ports for consoles and the arcade was king. What that meant was that a lot of games were designed to be short, with a high demand on skill and/or luck, and (at least for the time) thrilling. This means that a lot of games are extremely difficult by modern day standards because if you could get the player to chew through lives quickly playing a punishing game then you are also chewing through their quarters which makes the whole venture more profitable.

So a lot of the older style of console gaming was either a direct port of these unforgiving cash cow games or they mimicked the same style.

Obviously you get games that are outliers to this, such as Moonstone: A Hard Day's Knight or Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap which, despite the era, weren't designed to gobble up your loose change and you get the later entries in the Contra series such as Contra: Hard Corps (that seems to have been renamed to Probotector in some regions, possibly due to the Iran-Contra Scandal lol) which are still true to their arcade game roots and they really have the difficulty and demand on skill of a game like Ghouls 'n Ghosts. All of these games mentioned in this bit are very playable today despite the eras they were released in.

Nostalgia definitely plays a factor but I'd say that a lot of Game Boy games were an outlier to what I've described above as direct ports or near-direct ports weren't a possibility so the games had to be designed from the ground-up and often they were built around a non-coinsuck model.

There were games that were blockbusters and genre-defining in their time, some of which have held up and some of which absolutely have not, but if we remember or imagine back to the era that these games were released it was a content desert by today's standards which meant that a significant part of the allure of many games was that they were an antidote to boredom as much as they were fun to play.

It's no surprise that people of our generation typically don't play solitaire or mahjong whereas the older generations were and often still are avid fans of these games. To us they probably seem boring or maybe enjoyable for a round or two but prior to the advent of mobile phones and the internet, people spent a lot of time waiting or filling in time and so this goes a long way to explain why these games used to be so popular - because it was a good way to kill time.

It's a bit like if you took kids camping or whatever and they didn't have access to phones and tablets - I'd expect that playing tic tac toe in the dirt and similar sorts of games would dramatically increase in popularity.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot of games that were good for their time or even today are good, but not great, that don't really deserve a second look unless you love the genre or the series or you're an aficcionado of retro games but there are some games that are really great even going way back into history and those are worth trying out; this is not dissimilar to movies from 50+ years ago.