For me, I'd have to say Old School X-COM (UFO Defense, TFTD, X-COM Apocalypse to an extent). I love them in a way that I just do not enjoy NewCOM, but the interface was quite possibly based on the recovered works of a 13th century scribe, and is very difficult to get used to for an unfamiliar player.
I recently replayed the COD 2 soviet missions. Good stuff, I'd say it's aged quite well since Infinity Ward figured out how COD should feel with this game and basically just made the same game over and over again. Although the enemies were always extremely spongy, I'll give you that
System Shock 2 is a slow janky ugly mess with inventory tetris and weapon durability, but man I love it. At least, it's slow if you don't go for a goofy sanic psi build lol
Donkey Kong Country is a series I speedrun every few years. Probably the nearest and dearest to me, off the top of my head. Ocarina of Time would be another one. Lost so many hours to that, the swordless link glitch, and a gameshark.
Fun fact, you CAN find the Triforce in OoT. You just can't do anything with it. You gotta float over Zelda's Courtyard, and it's just sitting outside of the clipping zone below the grass.
Definitely agree with OoT, loved it, but it confused the crap out of me as a kid. I had no clue what I was doing after getting the master sword.
I remember absolutely HATING the water temple until I got a little older. After that it was like "oh...yeah, yeah, raising and loweing water levels, I get it"
Love me some Morrowind, i will never mod that combat to remove hit chance.
also i played a lot of Master of Orion 2, Civ 3 and other older 4x games recently.
Older games are usually a lot of fun to play if you can get past the horrid UI design
There's something hypnotic about the Morrowind cadence of moving forward and backing up repeatedly until a spear hit lands... it's so satisfying.
I would have a gambling addiction if I gambled, wouldn't I?
MORROWIND Edit: And also yeah I keep the dice roll mechanics in too lmao
People who complain about Morrowind's combat have "played" Morrowind in the same way that a person who drops a book during the prologue has read that book.
MOO2 is my sudoku. Played so many hours that it's mostly a solved game for me, and the ease and familiarity makes it kind of zen.
Hit chance being the way it is is fine. If it bothers you that much, you can just throw money at the problem via trainers.
But magic not regenerating is the one thing I always mod to fix. Just annoying to take a half-week long nap or keep a shitton of potions every time you get into an encounter with magic.
FTL is pretty outdated these days but I keep coming back for another run.
My problem with the game is it has almost zero challenge until the boss fight. It makes it hard to tell if I’m scaling up to it appropriately.
It is quite fun though.
I can't beat it on normal in like, hundreds of hours of trying. :sadness:
I only have a few dozen in it because the boss is just anti fun. I’ve heard there’s a really good mod that rebalances everything, might try that eventually.
I'm not sure I get this one. It felt pretty streamlined last time I played it. I mean ig Into the Breach's graphics looked better but that doesn't really invalidate the original game imo.
The entire Commander Keen franchise.
There's just something about the pre-Doom era of PC gaming that still appeals to me. Maybe it's the "golden age of sci-fi" aesthetic, which seemed to promptly vanish from PC games after Doom was released (but quietly came back in the PS2 era, thanks to Ratchet & Clank.)
Anyway, apart from the 'obvious' ways in which it hasn't aged well (graphics, sound, gameplay style, etc) some of the flavour text in one of the games contains an (almost jarringly nonpartisan) George H. W. Bush joke.
It was, and still remains, a bit puzzling to me that Commander Keen episodes 4-6 and Doom had basically the same dev team (Carmack/Carmack/Romero/Hall/Prince). I have no idea what was going on behind the scenes during that period but from where I'm standing it represents a "David Bowie in the 70s" level of self-transformation.
for the others, perhaps. for carmack, he never gave a single damn about the actual games. he liked tweaking engines.
with keen, his interest was the smooth scrolling he was able to squeeze out of shit hardware. the i bet the entire rest of the game occupied 1% of his attention or less.
Oh I thought this meant politically. I quite enjoy GTA:SA and IV but fuck me all the political satire was piss poor from the start and it still somehow manages to have aged even worse
I keep coming back to the old Total War games. They're janky and weird but they are ultimately a good time.
I think the oldest I'm really willing to dip is like Shogun 2 these days, the Rome remake was plenty fun but reminded me of recent innovations in the formula. I kinda miss the old Shogun and Midieval classic board style though, it was fun moving the pieces one tile at a time
The Three Kingdoms one made me really not miss how your units used to be like No! Wait! Steve has to walk back to his spot! Nobody shoot until Steve gets back to his spot!!
Oh and the diplomacy, they made it so much more bearable to actually deal with people and gave some indication of how they felt and what it would take to strike the deal where in old games it was just obscured such that it doesn't make any sense.
I also really liked the retinue system changeup even if it didn't really stop me from just building clone doomstacks of Tactician w/ 2 archers, crossbows and trebuchets + Red Horse Lord w/ 6 beastly Charge Cav (the red cavalry lines were all busted as hell, the melee cav was absolute pants in comparison even the peasants because the charge attack would wipe out basically any unit you wanted to attack with cav anyways) + Green or Purple lord with the heaviest infantry I can muster.
you can fix diplomacy in rtw & m2tw by using force-diplomacy to make the ai agree to reasonable terms :garf-troll:
I couldn't afford the Rome remake and I don't think my laptop can even run it, so i'm just happy running mid-2000s software. I mostly play Rome and Medieval II, so that's what i enjoy the most.
Back in the day I installed Rome Total Realism and oh man, it's so good, way more provinces including some tiny city states and you can do way more tactics because armies don't die off and retreat faster than it takes for a unit to walk 100 yards. The original creators didn't want to force you to use fast forward. You just use fast forward for RTR and it's perfect
Oooh i never got into mods for RTW. I might give them a try.
I'm the exact opposite. Shogun 2 feels like the series' peak to me, but everything newer just has too many things that feel gimmicky. I don't like all of my units having special abilities, or my general being this super special guy. I don't want skill trees for my stack, I just want to move units around the map and stack up as needed.
RTR 7 is the best Total War experience for my time. Zoomed in map focusing on the mediterranean, your generals are also politicians so there's a constant tension between campaigning and administrating, a deep and meaningful system for conquest beyond just winning the battles. My dream strategy game is basically that mod but bigger and with better sieges.
There are elements I like about Medieval II that aren’t present in later TW titles (like the armies not needing to be attached to generals, or the simple province system) but it hasn’t aged well in a lot of other respects. Still oh so satisfying to nail the flank of an enemy blob with cavalry or assault infantry. Plus, the Third Age mod is probably the best Lord of the Rings strategy game out there.
Check out PK Scramble if you haven't. Very nice way to re-play the game over and over.
PK Scramble
ok this looks wild. but it says a playthrough is only 7 hours? how does that work?
Instant text speed, run button, and you knowing the game already to some extent.
Also the speedrunners can do the full 8-sanc run in under 2 hours.
Also the speedrunners can do the full 8-sanc run in under 2 hours.
fucking how
The inventory system is maddening at times and the battles are slow but idk if anything else about earthbound really aged poorly. I'm probably being too generous tho
Doom is so fucking good! I find that I really prefer modern controls. Even clunky ass Wolfenstein slaps with fully modern controls. A lot easier though lmao
I first played Doom in like 2010 and i remember it still blew me away. Yeah running around in circles because you missed a key kinda sucks but everything else about it slaps even today.
I'm actually going to completely disagree and say that turn-based combat is timeless. Sure, the specific implementations in those games were perhaps limited by the technology of the time, but if you play a game like Paper Mario TTYD you see a very smooth and engaging turn-based battle experience. I feel like real-time battling was just pushed so hard because it was something they could brag about, but in pure RPGs it often isn't really that relevant. I'm going to ignore the question of turn-based tactics since that's very obviously a different ballgame, but even for these simpler fights there's a lot to work with. Even in more of a pure menu-based system games like LISA for example had really engaging combat.
I’m actually going to completely disagree and say that turn-based combat is timeless.
As someone currently really enjoying Darkest Dungeon II hard agree
I’m actually going to completely disagree and say that turn-based combat is timeless.
DQ11 has great turn based combat.
Exactly! The reason it's so common in RPGs is as essentially a filler to keep it from being a VN, and to control pacing. The real draw for a lot of those games is meant to be story/setting/characters and the combat is fine as long as it's just kinda ok.
Since you can tolerate turn based combat I highly suggest Breath of Fire 3 and 4. I believe they're the best non-Final-Fantasy RPGs on Playstation, they're so good. Like Final Fantasy, each entry is a self-contained story so you can play any of them without touching the others. It's Playstation-era Capcom so you know the spritework is quality.
Railroad Tycoon 3 still has the best economic simulator I've seen in a game despite being 20 years old. Industries evolve over time based on a heat map of commodity prices, towns grow in response to the goods you provide, and other railroads compete on a stock market where you can do hostile takeovers.
I came here just to say, "fuck you that game didn't age poorly at all, it's still great" and ... that is exactly what I'll do. X-Com is awesome. The UI isn't bad, it's just old. Big difference. Some old games have bad UI just like some new games do, but X-Com's UI is fine.
The game is borderline unplayable without a fan mod showing you TU costs for your moves in advance. There's no indication of how far a soldier can throw a given object. Grenade timers going up to 30 turns is just patently ridiculous, and the way those timers behave defies player expectations. Managing your characters' equipment is a nightmare beyond words. Buying and selling every little piece of equipment, down to spare mags and flares, is silly and pointless. I have hundreds of hours playing oldcom in its various forms, but I also have eyes.
The game is borderline unplayable
Better tell that to all the people who have completed and enjoyed it then. :wojak-nooo: nooo its not playable you need MODS the game DOESNT WORK stop pretending to have fun!!!
The entire point of this post is that people can still have fun with games that are poorly designed.
the point im making is that people unfairly level the "poor design" accusation at games that are perfectly well designed for no other reason than that they come from a different era. which is exactly what you're doing.
I mean nobody says this shit about Pong or PacMan or shit, those UI's are old but they do their jobs perfectly. The reason it's being brought up is because it's clunky and creates friction between a player's actions and their intentions. For example, in nucom, the game will notify you when you aren't performing research but have a project available, whereas oldcom will happily let you trundle along without having any going. This is just an objectively worse experience - it has nothing to do with age or aesthetic, one interface has a UX problem (a player who would want to do research is unaware that they could be doing some, wasting in-game time and falling behind due to a communication failure on the part of the game) and the other resolves it without any sacrifice to gameplay depth.
the thing is, if this is the standard for games being broadly "poorly designed" then there are almost no well designed games in existence. you can nitpick any game out there and then say "breath of the wild is BORDERLINE UNPLAYABLE without a mod to remove weapon durability"
just because the game has a flaw you can name does not make it a "poorly designed" game or "borderline unplayable"
Alright I've had enough of this discussion, I would say unkind things if it continued. I wish you the best, I'm glad you're enjoying video games :)
You do not start the game with a research already active, this tends to happen mostly in new games. That said, I've seen cases where someone started a project and forgot to assign any scientists to it, which is functionally identical to this.
Used to play these old real time strategy games based on The Lord of the Rings made by EA. Battle for Middle Earth 1 and 2. Played the shit out of those and their expansions and mods for years. Never as polished or advanced as the big RTS stuff like Starcraft but I loved and still love them. The graphics and enemy AI of course look their age almost 20 years post release. What I wouldn't give to have them remade or remastered or something. EA doesn't have the license anymore and its out of production so it's hard to get legitimately these days but you can pirate them all just fine which is nice because I think I lost a few of the installation CDs. I'd give any thing for a modern remake with a better engine and graphics. I feel like RTS games just don't get made that much anymore 😕
