My first dedicated gaming system was the PS1, and in general I have no trouble going back to the sprites and chunky polygons of the mid-to-late 90s, whether on consoles or computers
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as long as I can upscale them to 1080P
Beyond that it gets a bit hit and miss- SNES and Mega Drive games look and sound fine to me and I’ve played plenty of 16 bit console games as an adult. On PC, I can enjoy 2D stuff like Sam & Max Hit the Road or the original X-Com but most early 3D, like the original System Shock, looks a bit too much like visual vomit.
Going to 8-bit, while the vast majority of NES games are too primitive to my eyes and ears, I have no problems with Game Boy/Game Boy Color games.
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(Well, at least the good ones, mostly made by Nintendo)
Is it just nostalgia because I had a GBC as a kid or is it because Game Boy games came later and had more developed visual aesthetics?
My limit is probably the very late 80s
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.
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.
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.
While I’m not hugely into NES games I can see their appeal aesthetically and they mostly still read as “video games” to me. Anything Atari starts to look a bit too rudimentary to my 90s eyes
While I’m not hugely into NES games I can see their appeal aesthetically and they mostly still read as “video games” to me. Anything Atari starts to look a bit too rudimentary to my 90s eyes
Its kinda the reason why I want to sit down and give some honest effort to play through some of the Atari XX00 console games someday. Kinda like going to a “hands on” history museum.
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.
Yeah, I kind of forgot to take arcade games into account which tend to have very simple gameplay that stands the test of time better. I’ve just never really played any to any appreciable degree.
The funny thing about the NES Super Mario games is that I did actually play the original Super Mario Bros as a kid as Super Mario Brothers Deluxe, the GBC port that had a horrible field of view due to the lower resolution of the Game Boy Color. I agree that the NES Marios are pretty fun, but I vastly prefer the All-Stars SNES remakes in terms of graphics.
I guess I’d categorise Doom as “late early 3D.” Don’t really have a problem with it or games with similar aesthetics like Descent or Hexen which I played on an old family computer.
Early 80’s is as far back as I go which is pretty far.
