The old games that still hold up incredibly well
I'm just going to assume that many of us have backlogs of games, whether on Steam or some other console, that we keep putting off in favor of the latest Shiny New Toy (game). In addition, as time goes on and we end up getting these newer games and consoles, you can definitely start telling the difference between old and new, whether it's in gameplay or graphics.
And yet... I have made an interesting discover. I don't know what factor it is, but I've been playing a lot of the ORIGINAL Metroid prime. Yes, the one made for Gamecube, of which I also have an original. The funniest thing for me is that between it and BioShock (okay, and Dishonored- anyone remember THAT game?), they're the only FPS games I find myself enjoying. I have never been able to get into and CoD games, and I've also never been an Xbox user... which rules out Halo.
But I digress. Considering how many generations back Gamcube is, the thing that has struck me the most is arguably where you'd normally see the biggest difference: the graphics. I'm well aware Metroid Prime was finally ported to the Switch... but even on Gamecube, I would swear I was playing a game with Switch-level graphics- which means that they are excellent despite the old system. Again, I don't know what factor it is- maybe GC was well-made, maybe Nintendo puts out good products, maybe it's because my TV is only about 19" (and I think LCD, but not actually sure)... but the fact that a game that is over 20 years old at this point can actually pass for a modern-day game fascinates me. I actually tried to compare with a few of my old PS2 games... and that graphics difference there was VERY noticeable (to be fair, I tried it with the PS2 original FFXII, and FF has always tried to be at the top-end of graphics... I should experiment with other games, but it may also be a Playstation thing).
Chrono Trigger (released in 1995) is still a great introduction to JRPGs.
This game holds up well despite being released nearly 3 decades ago. In fact, there are some things this game does better than many modern JRPGs -- the seamless battle transitions being the obvious example. The graphics have also aged well (the only noticable drawback being being the low resolution, which makes UI elements unnecessarily large).
Moreover, unlike other JRPGs from the SNES era, the game does actually open up at some point, allowing the player to take on multiple sidequests. These sidequests are actually meaningful, too, providing more backstory for the characters, changing the arc of story (and even the conclusion), and rewarding players with some in the best equipment of the game.
Oh, plus it has one of the best video game soundtracks of all time.
In short, it lacks the jank associated with JRPGs of that era. If it had been released this year instead of 1995, people would still be lauding it as a very tight game.
This is the game that immediately came to mind when I saw the title of this thread.
I still remember my mind being blown in the pre-internet game guide days when one play through I decided to spare Magus instead of fighting him only for him to join my party.
I still play through Chrono Trigger and FF6 annually.
I just started a fresh playthrough of FF6 a couple of days ago. It still holds up very well.
(Steam Deck and RetroArch FTW!)
Love it. That sounds like a solid setup. If I'm playing it on the go, then I usually just use an emulator on my phone but my favourite is using those fake SNES controllers with my PC. Makes the nostalgia hit hard.
What your favourite end game party? I have endless fun with Terra/Celes/Sabin/Edgar, largely because I can't be bothered to put in the work to make Strago or Gau good.
Yeah, one of the neat features is that RetroArch via Steam has SteamCloud support, so it automatically syncs my saves between the Steam Deck and my PC. I haven't played as much on-the-go lately, but I have really enjoyed being able to get in a little FF6 "snack" while lying in bed before going to sleep.
Regarding parties, I tend to gravitate towards Terra/Celes/Sabin/Cyan as my core team. And yeah, I've tried once or twice with Gau and but never had the patience. I'd get bored of the Veldt and just want to move on with the game.
Ah, that's cool and good to know if I ever get a Steam deck.
Eww, Cyan? You must enjoy pain. Yeah Gau can get crazy powerful but it can be random. I have had runs where I get the powers I want super fast on the Veldt and others where it takes hours. He is fun to use, but I just can't be bothered spending the time anymore. Strago is slightly better because you just have to go track down the monster you want.
That said, you can crank so much magic power into Terra and Celes that it often isn't worth the time at a certain point.
Still the only JRPG I truly enjoy, for all the reasons you mentioned. Especially the music!
For anyone wanting to check it out, I consider the DS remaster to be the definitive version, but the mobile versions are decent (the hi-res text matched with lo-res graphics weirds me out). Can't speak for the PC version.
The new content in the remasters is…okay, save for the new "true final form final boss" which makes a connection to Chrono Cross, which just got a remaster for the Switch.
CC is not really a sequel or even a spiritual successor but expands on several themes from CT. There are several "choices matter" points that wildly change your party's trajectory and available characters you can recruit – all of which have unique responses to events with incredibly well-translated dialogue. There's a wild magic system that uses no MP while still offering summons and even traps so you can steal enemies' spells. There's a post-battle "use remaining spells, consumables, or both to heal your party?" screen.
There's also an insane way to complete it "correctly" which is really hard to suss out without help from the internet. The story is more navel-gazey and much harder to follow than CT. The map feels really limited in comparison to CT after being able to navigate between multiple different time periods, and the "travel" in CC can make things a little confusing since it's more or less the same world map.
Don't know if Squeenix is listening when people spend money on the Chrono games, but it sure would be nice if we got a third entry in the series.
A third entry is not likely to happen because all of the most important creative staff have left. Yasunori Mitsuda is busy running his own music production company, writer and director Masato Kato is freelancing around, and the games wouldn’t be the same without both of them.
Oof, I'm getting old. 😂 I saw the title and was not prepared for Bioshock or Dishonored to be in the list of old games. My back is starting to ache in response and my knee is sensing the incoming rain!
Good old games (taking a wide view of old) that hold up, or that I've played and enjoyed in the last few years.
Jones and the fast lane.
Twinsens odyssey.
Age of empires 2.
System shock and system shock 2.
Diablo
Kirby Super Star
Jones and the fast lane in a hilarious local co-op commentary on being an adult. Hilarious especially when played with people unfamiliar with it.
So many good games though!
I'll throw in one new game as well. Wingspan! It is the computer version of the boardgame and is beautifully done, chill card game with objectives without being super competitive. You can play live and asynchronous games, as well as local single player and co-op. The tutorial is a little overwhelming but after your first game it all makes sense.
I play Age of Empires 2 weekly with pals as well. Believe it or not, it's the 67th most played Steam game these days.
Oh man, Jones in the fast lane... loved that game! Me and my brother spent hours in front of our computer playing that as kids (37yo now)!
I LOVE kirby super star, my sister and I would play for days together.
Just the other day I downloaded Little Big Adventure 2 (different name for Twinsens Odyssee) and so many memories came rushing back! Mainly how weird the controls were and how the music was very generic, yet somehow very specific? Anyway I think the original makers are working on a remaster.
24 years later, I'm still playing Homeworld (Remastered) and its mods. Homeworld offered a new way of playing RTS accompanied by a compelling (linear) story with beautiful visuals and music.
We'll see if Homeworld 3, scheduled for March, can deliver.
I was never able to get into the others in the series quite like Homeworld. I played so much of it back in the day. It even stands as the first game I got to play online!
Did you try its mods? Homeworld Remastered has some killer Star Trek mods and a brand new lovingly crafted Battlestar Galactica mod. Remastered is on sale for super cheap on Steam right now, IIRC. $3.49?
I played a fair bit of the star wars mod (warlord?) in the past. I actually own remastered, I revisit it every few years. It's a nice walk down memory lane.
How is this post this old and this long and I am the first to say Portal? A+ art, incredible story, first of its kind physics, wonderful world layouts, action and puzzles.
Probably because people don't think of Portal as old. It was only made in 2007, (17 years ago), and that was just yesterday.
It's sometimes hard to know which games are held up by my nostalgia for them and which games hold up by themselves, but the first games that come to mind are World of Warcraft classic, Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, Halo 1-3, Half Life (all of them), and the 3D Jedi Knight games.
World of Warcraft and Oblivion both have gameplay that doesn't exactly hold up to modern standards. Both have some clunky systems, but are both ultimately very playable. Wow Classic is obvious, since it literally has millions of players. The thing that holds those games up, to me, is art direction and the game world. Both games have massive worlds that are still fun to explore 20 years on. Sure the graphics are dated, but WoW's almost cartoony look is nearly timeless and Oblivion's colors and overall world design help the game world feel vibrant even if individual textures are low res. It's immersive in a way that even some modern games aren't: I legitimately still get more immersed in Oblivion than in Starfield.
With the Halo campaigns and the Half-Life games, I feel like both series were so far ahead of their times that they still hold up as legitimately great shooters even by modern standards. Those games also have a similar thread to the ones above in that their art direction helps the games out quite a bit. However, the gameplay is smooth as hell in all of these, which helps. Even though I still regularly play the Master Chief Collection, myself, I don't feel that the multiplayer for Halo 1-3 holds up. I do think it's still very fun, but I don't see a completely new player to Halo sticking with the multiplayer for more than a dozen hours, even though veterans still play the older games by the thousands.
The Jedi Knight games also feel pretty good when playing them now, but they feel more dated, gameplay wise, than Halo or Half-Life. There's a bit of jank to them, but they're also just fun to play, still. They also probably nailed the star wars vibe more than any other game, so Jedi Knight 2 is a bit of a comfort game for me when I just want to go throw some stormtroopers around.
Oblivion has a lot going for it but honestly I'd say it's leveling system really keeps it from holding up. It was poorly implemented at the time and only looks worse as time goes on. It's a darn shame too because otherwise I agree that it had more flavor than anything Bethesda has done since.
Oh yeah, there are for sure some dated systems in the game, but I do think it's still pretty playable for being 17 years old. Like I said, though, that might just be my nostalgia talking, since I've basically played it at least once every few months since it came out, ha.
Insaniquarium Deluxe came out in 2006, and is still fun to play today. It was an absolute favorite of mine as a kid. The only thing that maybe doesn't hold up is that I imagine nobody today would use the Screensaver option...
Honestly, I think it would do pretty well ported to a tablet; it almost seems designed for a touch screen.
Pickup any game from PopCap games and you just knew it's going to be super fun. Insaniquarium, Zuma, Feeding Frenzy, Pizza Frenzy, were released around same period. All of them were insanely addictive.
It wasn't until you made this comment that I realized that OP wasn't talking about Santiarium.
It's on sale for $0.99 on steam until tomorrow as well
Because I recently talked about this: Warcraft 3.
The game that lay down the foundation for World of Warcraft, but also on it's own an excellent package. The graphics, in my opinion still hold up despite being early 3D, they nailed the artstyle so well. The story is great and the amount of content you get in the base game plus the expansion is staggering.
As if laying the base for WoW was not enough, the game also shipped with a custom mapmaker that resulted in the creation of DotA, which in turn, while not being the first (Aeon of Strife preceded it) defined the new genre of Action RTS and directly caused the creation of League of Legends, Dota 2, Heroes of Newerth and others.
Heroes of Might and Magic 3 holds up today, it’s still a lot of fun to play.
I loved this game! Still one of my favorites!
That's more about stylization and how much computing power you need to fullfill the style the game goes for. Wind waker is another example of a game that holds up well. Cell shading combined with the simple designs of characters hides the vertices of the polygons and the simple but strong pallet the game uses does not need more GPU power to make it shine.
A perhaps stronger example is pixel art. Computationally, I'd say it really peaked during the GBA era. It's a perfectly valid style to this day, but after that point consoles were simply strong enough to completely fulfill the ambitions of pixel art style games. Celeste doesn't necessarily look better than GBA games, which isn't a knock against Celeste. So after that point, if you take various games that have a pixel art style, you'd be hard pressed to give era names to them.
Photo realistic or cinematic style, though really a very broad category, is of course of the hardest ones to emulate in real time. But, it is one that most if not all people hold dear - in the end, we do seem to love the world we live in. I don't find it strange that many games have been seeking it out all this time, even if it does age poorly in hindsight.
How do you currently play Wind Waker if I may ask? I am very much hoping that there will be Nintendo Switch port, but I am not sure it is ever going to happen.
In 2020 I played it on GameCube with HD textures and upscaling. Once I got all the shaders in place after activating them all it was really smooth, but you'll even see stuttering with asynchronous compilation.
Wouldn't WiiU version be preferable thanks to Cemu these days or is GC one better thanks to how rock solid Dolphin is?
I used Dolphin because it is rock solid, more mature, and simply ran smoother. Cemu felt a little janky, so part of my challenge was to try to get HD Windwaker, basically.
The only issues are the mappings, I'd recommend just using the modern Nintendo layout on the controller, and there are some black bar effects that I don't think work 100%, but they're enough that you get the point, and aren't game breaking. The rest of the game looked and played great.
Not OP, but I literally got hold of a Wii and hacked it so I could play Wind Waker again on real hardware. Totally worth it. It's the best Zelda game IMO.
As a side note, Wiis are a lot easier to hack now than they were before. It took like 10 minutes, and the rest was mainly getting the games copied and fiddling with settings to make the launcher look nice.
For me, there's a gulf between expectations and reality, where modern "photo realistic style" games fall right into the Uncanny Valley. This is where "intentionally stylized graphics" will win over photo realistic AAA games 100% of the time (for me).
Water looks impressive these days, fire is pretty convincing, and rocks have so many textures now. But none of these look like the outside world. Humans look better than ever but they're still not live action.
Give me Loco Roco's yellow hillsides, or Patapon's 2-dimensional monochromatic monsters, Slime Rancher's rainbow hued moon that smiles at you, or a silly Untitled Goose that honks with visible audio lines. Give me (2022) Dwarf Fortress's dwarf-sized Fluffy Wamblers and the newly released isometric (2023) Mobile Suit Baba. for modern games.
Photorealistic is "decent for its era", but stylized is intentionally beautiful forever.
This is my issue with Cyberpunk. I like the game well enough, but for all the amazing graphics, it pulls me right out when NPCs do NPC things or there's something that looks not quite right. All those little dips in quality stand out all the more when everything else looks so damn amazing.
I still play StarCraft.
Also you can now play Red Alert 2 in your browser:
https://chronodivide.com/
StarCraft: Brood War is the game I thought of first when I read the title to this thread. Arguably the first eSport, and one that still has a thriving pro scene. Brood War was my childhood, and it still holds up to this day. I think the remaster that Blizzard put out a few years ago was one of the best things they have ever done for StarCraft, definitely better than the dumpster fire that was WC3:Reforged.
Old games don't magically become bad just because of their age. They just often take a bit more effort to get into because of different standards in the GUI and controls. I see it as similar to watching a black & white or in some cases even silent film - Metropolis is almost 100 years old now and it's still a great film (especially when watched with a live band).
Here's a small selection of games that I played for the first time in recent years and found them to be better than 99% of games that came out since then:
Baldur's Gate 2 (it's ridiculous how just the intro dungeon is more complex and interesting than whole acts in many other RPGs)
Thief 1 & 2 (still no better purely stealth game)
Fallout 2
Quake (especially with mods - people know how influential the Quake engine was, but imo underrate the game itself - the gameplay is just as timeless as in Doom and the design is not just "brown" but amazing)
Ultima Underworld (it's hard to believe how good and complex it is while being older than Wolfenstein 3D)
Arx Fatalis (basically a more modern version of Ultima Underworld)
the STALKER trilogy (played with mods that fix bugs and improve a couple weird mechanics)
And slightly less perfect but still completely unique games:
Might & Magic 6: The Mandate of Heaven (didn't finish it because it was just way too long, but until some point it was a beautiful and relaxing dungeon crawler with a feeling that no other game really managed to emulate)
Mafia (an open-world but linear homage to gangster movies that came out just a year after GTA3 and does not at all feel like a cheap imitation)
As for graphics, people mention how stylization helps and I agree. But even games that do not look heavily stylized and simply were held back by the technology in my opinion often look great. The lower graphics fidelity kind of tells my brain to see the things in the game as symbols, not as real things, which really helps the suspense of disbelief.
I've recently experienced the opposite. Metro: Exodus is full of long in-engine cutscenes where you just watch NPCs talk for several minutes. The graphics in Exodus is amazing and you can see a lot of effort and money went into this. Unfortunately the facial animations are bad, the voice acting is bad, the writing is okayish I guess, but they couldn't even do the timing of the dialogues right (with strange pauses between people's lines, unnatural reactions etc.). Because the graphics is so good and the cutscene so long, my brain interprets it more like a movie than a video game. And as a movie it's bad, not even cheap b-grade slasher film level.
Taking it to the extreme: If I was just clicking through a dialogue and watching character portraits, this would not have happened at all.
I think that's the issue. You may be able to adjust to tank movement controls, camera control on the shoulders, and multiple nested layers of menus to select actions. Not everyone will, and it's why old games may not sell as much even with a faithful remaster that does nothing more than upscale the graphics.
Less appreciated tends to be some QoL choices. Some people cannot play older action games well becaue they are used to a soft "homing" mechanism that pushes the character towards the enemy. Some can't play FPS's of old because of the lack of aim assist (be it due to skill or physical disabilities). RPGs tend to have some of the biggest roadblocks because they lack many tools that more or less are expected now: bestiaries, quest markers and organiztions, minimaps, randomized encounters. The lack of these simply add tedium for some players and that can add as much friction as any performance or technical shortcomings in modern games.
Yes, I agree with those things, but quite often people just can't be bothered to get used to something different, and I see that as basically the same as refusing to watch a critically and popularly acclaimed old movie because it doesn't look exciting enough. It's still a good movie, and oftentimes it's worth it to spend the effort to watch it and learn to appreciate it.
I don't play old dungeon crawlers without a minimap either, but from talking with people who do it honestly sounds like it might be a lot of fun to do that, with a software map editor, as it puts the focus on different aspects of the game and forces you to pay more attention.
I am currently playing through the first Stalker game for the first time. And it should not feel as good as is it is at the age that it is at. What I mean is that The movement is a lot more fluid than most of the games that came out around The same period. The only thing that did not age well is the graphics.
As for the issue for Metro Exodus, just play it with the Russian voice overs, which should fix that issue. And the immersion would go up because you are in Russia, you should be hearing Russian and not English speakers putting on a bad Russian accent. Although apparently the Russian VA that plays Sam, the American member of the team, has a American accent when he speaks.
Clear Sky and Call of Pripyat use a newer engine that in many ways still looks pretty good. The textures are too low-res and the grass fades out too close, but it's really not bad and it is a surprising improvement over Shadow of Chernobyl.
Yeah, I probably should have done that, but I didn't like the game enough to play it again. I may replay 2033 in russian though.
2033 is probably my favorite one out of the ones (which are 2033 (both the original and the Redux) and Last Light) that I had played, the atmosphere that game makes the game. The Russian is good, in my opinion (which isn't much because I can't speak that language), I think I only played it on Russian because of the accent thing that I have. And do I just find it weird that Russians are speaking English in the middle of the Moscow metro.
You might want to check into stalker anomaly gamma while you are in the stalker mood. I have been meaning to check it out. It seems stalker had a very active mod scene that has added an intense amount of things to all the games. I believe you can even play everything without having any base games.
I suggest looking into Anomaly or GAMMA after playing the original trilogy. I've had fun with GAMMA, but its story is basically a shortened fanfiction tier retelling of the original games, so it makes the stories have a lot less impact.
I really want to see Metropolis with a live band. It would be such an incredible experience. I really loved the soundtrack to the remaster (the one released before the discovered Argentina filmstock), and it's got a really sweeping "modernist" sound to it that would be great to be able to physically feel the sound wash over you.
I purposefully ignore new games because hype means that people drastically overestimate the games’ quality and fun. Plus if I wait a while the prices drop dramatically.
In regards to graphics, the one thing that people tend to get confused about is technical achievements versus aesthetic achievements. Westerners generally tend to fawn over the technical stuff; lighting, shading, anti-aliasing, and things like that. That stuff looks good now but it ages pretty quick. On the other hand, aesthetics last forever. Jet Set Radio is an even older game but people still love how it looks. The pixel art on even older games is loved so much that it is still aped in countless modern releases. A good way to think about this divide is to look at early games with pre-rendered 3D graphics; some still look pretty good like Donkey Kong Country, but the vast majority of them are terrible (think X-Perts, Foreman For Real, Batman Returns, etc.).
In the case of Metroid Prime specifically, it had the advantage of both good aesthetic design and quite a lot of work on the technical side; it was a very high achievement for the time. But I would imagine you are probably playing it emulated rather than playing it on the GameCube itself, so you will have the advantage of the improvements the emulator affords with your vastly more powerful hardware.
Nope, I'm playing it on the original Gamecube I bought back in the early 2000's. Which is why I made this post in the first place- since then, we've had the Wii, WiiU, and of course Switch (and Switch Lite), so it's about 3~4 generations old now. I have the three-color connector (I forget the official term) hooked up to my TV, and I feel like I might as well be playing an actual Switch game.
Of course, as many other replies here are pointing out, Gamecube and Metroid Prime had a lot of good things going for them, so that's why it looks so good.
This thread is a godsent as I'm getting into older games a lot lately. I especially like games that don't mind being different, one that comes to mind is Neverhood. The visuals are nothing I've seen before or since (which I guess makes sense with the rise and fall of point and click games) and the music is spectacular.
Katamari Damacy isn't as old, but the music made an impression more than the game did first time I played it.
2004 for katamari...
The soundtrack is so great. All fun songs in different genres that I would never seek out but work perfectly with the gameplay.
Super Mario RPG. Even better now than before, because like Chrono Trigger, it's tight. So many game these days, particularly JRPGs, demand dozens and dozens if not hundreds of hours of me. Whereas by the time most JRPGs "get good", you've already finished Super Mario RPG. As someone with a family and a job, it's an incredible breath of fresh air.
There's so many good, old games out there, especially when it comes to CRPGs. I tend to replay Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and KOTOR 1 and 2 about once a year. I play the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate now, which are newer, but the originals still hold up as well. Planescape Torment holds up well too, and I think that got an Enhanced Edition recently. Fallout 1 and 2 are also good choices.
Gameplay-wise, they're all great, but graphically you can definitely see their age.
I mentioned F-Zero GX in a previous thread under the context of the graphics - also relevant, the game somehow makes its flat high-tech style look good without any crazy style choices - but I think games with impossibly high skill ceilings and enjoyably low skill bases just plain work indefinitely, and GX is up there with games that anyone can pick up but few can master. I think SSB Melee holds up in the same vein, even if Ultimate is a better everyman party game for sheer choice.
(I personally think Metroid Prime's design holds it back a bit - game is a bit easy due to its pace being cemented by the pre-dual stick controls, and it constantly requires backtracking across multiple worlds with few shortcuts and a lot of respawning enemies. The levels themselves are great, but you go back through them too many times; dark shoutouts to that one Chozo ghost room. I played Super Metroid a bit before it and didn't feel the burn nearly as much.)
Bro, GX is the fucking shit. I still bust out my cube every now and then to play it. I've been wanting a Switch port with added online play, and I'm glad that Nintendo seems like they're testing the waters with FZero99. I just want a new FZero :( I want to customize my machines :( I want to make sure my g diffuser system is online :(
I was trying a few SNES games recently and the one that stood out to me was Top Gear. I'd never played it before and wow, that was fun. I played it with a coworker and we were having a blast.
The sequels (Top Gear 2 and Top Gear 3000) are also great and arguably superior. Think of it like Doom 2 to Doom. I love that entire series so much.
One of the games that stood the test of time for me is Star Wars Knight of the Old Republic (and 2). There hasn't been any single (RPG) game that would be that good and from SW universe. I'm replaying it right now and it still plays perfectly ok, the same great game it was back in the day.
Thinking about that - Baldur's Gate 1&2 also stood the test of time very well. Especially with and thanks to their enhanced editions. They are great games that were made really well and can be played today as well as more than 20 years ago.
And I have to mention Age of Empires 2. I know there is HD and Definitive Edition, but if they were not made, people would be still playing the good old one AoE2. Perfect game!
You mentioning the PS2 reminds me of the of the cartoony art direction many games went for, which allow them to age pretty well, at least graphically. I've completed SSX3 this year, and played Ratchet & Clank 3 for several hours (both SP & MP), both of which I had a blast with and still look decent. Some other examples that I can think of are Ape Escape, Banjo Kazooie, Sly, in fact the entire PS2 vintage look that is based on these franchises is pretty popular these days too.
The gameplay in each was surprisingly good as well, with SSX in particular I felt that the arcadey controls might as well be a stylistic choice albeit a bit too easy. What makes a modern, similar game stand apart would be the more realistic, physics based gameplay that aren't necessarily more fun. I'm thinking of SSX 2016 in this instance, but you could also make this comparison with racing games. Thinking about it I would really like to play a Hot Pursuit 2 or Auto Modellista type game with more of a challenge and some QoL improvements, but I digress.
This is an amazing list so far! I'd like to add in suikoden 1 and 2. I played them in the modern era for the first time on emulators and while I'll frequently quit older games that I don't have nastalgia for, I ran right through both of these without issue, and they are still great stories with great pixel art that hold up, highly reccomend.
There is a remaster of both on the horizon if you like to play that way as well.
I have another one, beach spikers on the GameCube. It's still one of my favorite volleyball games of all time, though there are not a lot made now a days. I recently did a sp play through on an emulator and it was still a ton of fun. This game plays really well with other people though. It is also deceptively responsive and seems simplistic but there are a lot of things that it lets you do to score or defend points where skill comes into play.
Anothrt is master of magic. There are some remakes and fixes that I haven't tried, but I've found myself playing this game still years on, I'm not sure if it's nastalgia driven for me so hard to claim if it's timeless or not.
Myth 2, the fallen lords is another that is unique and holds up imho. There are a few modernization patches out there and I believe you can even play coop through the campaign with some of them.
I have no idea why I haven't played through Suikoden 2 yet. Especially because I'm a big fan of Miki Higashino and that game is supposed to be her magnum opus.
I've always been more a 2d Zelda fan than a 3d Zelda fan. Link to the Past, Oracle of Ages/Seasons, Link's Awakening, Minish Cap are all continue to be bangers. The gameplay loop is genre defining (I could live without gathering the kinstones in minish cap).
This might be the Elder Millennial in me, but I prefer Pokemon Blue/Red-Gold/Silver over newer entries. They're minimal but it's pokemon. I don't need cut scenes of 11 year old in my Pokemon games and the graphics don't really bring much to the game for me.
So, here I was starting to pull a mental list of old games. And I mean games like Red Alert 2, Age of Empires 2, Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty 4, etc. But then it hit me.
GTA V is over 10 years old.
Jesus Christ. I'm old.
So, yeah. Old game. Still holds up really well, many triple A games today do not rival it in terms of animation, smoothness, physics, etc. If someone didn't know any better, they could be fooled into thinking it was released last year.
For RTS, Rome Total War is still good. And there's a remastered version out now too.
I always say I'm a retro gamer because there are more games in the past than the present.
Metroid Prime is a good example because it is pretty much perfect in the three pilars: game play (feels good), game design (makes sense), and graphic design (looks good).
But I'd rather use the term Art Direction to talk about the graphics. Nintendo and their trusted partners do this extremely well, and most other developers either don't understand the concept as fully, or can't execute on it as well.
Style over fidelity, all the time, every time.
One of the more recent examples would be Elden Ring (though any FromSoft game will work for this) where yeah sure, you can find a game that has better graphics purely when speaking about fidelity, but it's really tough to find a game that has a more evocative style and looks prettier.
Sea of Stars does this too with an incredibly powerful graphic style that just pops off the page. It's far prettier than most modern games. And it's pixelart!
A bunch of titles I was going to suggest have already been covered here, so I am going to go with Tactics Ogre. It has had a few fairly distinct remakes, but every single version is top notch IMO. It basically redefined the strategy RPG genre and was the direct basis for Final Fantasy Tactics which also holds up very well. There was a new remaster/remake released very recently that was excellent and highly recommended for those that like the genre.
Edit: I forgot to mention Total Annihilation, one of my all time favorite RTS games. It holds up extremely well and can be had for almost nothing on GOG. The spiritual successor Supreme Commander is also excellent.
I'll add:
And Final Fantasy 1-6, if we're allowed to count the Remaster versions that were just released.
I still haven't found a strategy game that's as fun or engrossing as the Shining Force games. I don't know why more games in the genre don't have the free movement and exploration elements that these games do; they really do a lot to make the world feel more real.
The Gamecube was one of the more capable machines when it was launched. The Switch is definitely a lot more capable than a Gamecube, but it's much less of a gap than something like the PS2 compared to the PS5! Nintendo games also tend to be fairly stylized.
Old games can have graphics that hold up perfectly fine in the modern day, the main factor in my opinion is largely whether they considered the technical limitations of the time and tried to make something that matched the capabilities of the machine that was visually appealing. A lot of games that try to be realistic and cram a bunch of terrible looking trees and grass on the screen don't hold up, but stylized games often do... Half Life 2 is starting to show its age as well, but I think it's held up remarkably well too because (for the most part) they only really used objects that could look decent at the time, despite having a more realistic style.
I play a lot of old games. Sometimes I try to appreciate the graphics for what they were in the historical context, and it can be really interesting to see what effects they decided were important to spend their limited resources on. But, there's plenty of great games with mediocre graphics too. It's also great to see how things have developed over time and how things have changed. There's plenty of old games which just work very different from modern games, which can feel a bit samey to me these days... A common example of this is that old games tend to be less forgiving than modern games, which can be nice in a way (though sometimes frustrating)? It's definitely worth looking into some other older games, though. There's even entire genres that are relatively neglected these days.
I think that most of us forget that the Wii was released with basically the same GPU but with a few extra bits tacked on. Then when Nintendo made the Wii U they did use a more powerful GPU, sure, but then the Switch is barely a step up from there yet again; You'd have to be looking really close to see the difference between the two versions of Breath of the Wild.
Yeah, Nintendo is sort of weird about their console generations. The Wii was basically a GameCube, and then the Wii U got a fairly substantial graphics boost (but I don't think it was ever considered a particularly powerful machine, just more in line with a 360 / PS3), and then my understanding is a Switch is pretty similar in power to a Wii U... So for the past little while their consoles have only really gotten a major spec bump every second console or something. It's an interesting approach compared to Sony / Microsoft for sure.
To my memory, the Wii U was just a bit more powerful than a 360 or PS3 but with vastly more RAM, so in theory cross-platform games would look notably better. But it was also right at the end of that generation so it wasn't really ever known as a graphics powerhouse. Nintendo was also doing a lot of complaining about how much more expensive it was to make games for it with the massive increase in resolution (which is pretty fair considering they basically skipped over 720p altogether). But there really weren't many cross-platform games released for it; most stuff that left the system came around much later for more powerful hardware.
Yeah, I think you're right about the Wii-U being more powerful than the PS3 / 360, but it came out just a little bit before PS4 / xbox... one(??? I can't keep the xbox names straight!). So, I guess when the Wii-U came out it was the highest-end console, but it was also at the end of the generation right before the substantially more powerful Sony / Microsoft offerings came out.
I've never had a Nintendo console (well, I guess I had a GBA), but I remember being really impressed with some of the stuff they were putting out on the Wii-U. Mario Kart 8 and stuff looked great in HD, and it was so nice to see SOMETHING with colours... The 360 / PS3 era was just awful for being these grey / brown messes with bloom and bad aliasing :(. Seeing some of the HD Nintendo stuff was honestly such a breath of fresh air. It's not like there were absolutely no colourful games on the PS3 / 360, but it wasn't the norm at the time.
The Wii U actually had some fabulous games for it. The problem was that basically only Nintendo made them. IMHO most of the best switch games are just ports of Wii U games.
There were some that looked great for sure! I was really tempted, and was tempted by the Switch too... but at the end of the day I don't think I'm ever going to own a Nintendo console. Just seems like a bit of an expensive walled garden.
Populous (1989)
Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 6, Super Metroid, Zelda LttP, Quake 1-4. OG Halo. Unreal Tournament 99 and 2k3. StarCraft + Brood War. Metal Gear Solid. Armored Core 2. Man I love older games!
Cave Story. One of the best indie games ever made in my opinion and 100% worth playing through. Gameplay isn't the most riveting experience but the story and characters are great.
Freeware (original): http://cavestory.org/
Plus (Paid, official translation and "remaster"): https://store.steampowered.com/app/200900/Cave_Story/
While I typically recommend paying creators, this might be an exception since the publisher isn't run by great people.
I get what you mean. I ended up just sticking to freeware since I don't feel too good about supporting Nicalis. To keep the record straight though, they have treated Pixel with respect as far as we can tell. Source
If you are interested in supporting Pixel but don't want to support Nicalis, check out Kero Blaster
GC had programmable shaders. Pixels hit edges in the geometry arbitrarily which causes awful jaggies. This is counted by antialiasing but that blurs the image.
Metroid Prime perfectly matched the textures and the geometry and the filters so the images look neither blurry or jaggy. Newer games are much more details and have fancier effects but because Metroid Prime put a lot of work into tuning the look it comes across as “perfect” as it is.
Classic WoW is essentially 20-year-old and I played it this morning. So yeah, I think it qualify.
I have a few. All of these are colored by nostalgia to some extent of course.
Signus: The Artefact Wars(pre 2000) - a turn based strategy game taking place in a conflict on a colony world. Has some really good logic for the ai for localized encounters, not so much for the whole map which is either prescripted or nonexistent. Can turn really tedious in later missions due to number of units and control scheme but is otherwise really good. Nowadays it is freely on GitHub.
Original War(around 2000) - has or at least had as of a few years ago an active community around it, patching it and adding among other things a whole new campaign. Real time with pause strategy game featuring time travel as premise and taking place in prehistoric times. Factions are Americans, Russians, Arabians and eventually their subfactions. With the mod(Arabian Nights) all have their campaign, respectively the subfactions get their own branch. Personally I really liked the focus on the human units, modularity of vehicles and turrets and the (very)lightweight logistics elements.
Zax: The Alien Hunter(around 2001) - an isometric shooter on an alien planet. Has somewhat good progression of weapons and variety of enemies. Except one backtracking section in the middle it was pretty straightforward and fun.
Port Royale(around 2002) - a business simulation game with real time battles. I like how open and simple but complex it is. Personally I like hunting the excessively spawning pirates instead of the simulation aspect but that is one nice things about the game since it does not push any playstyle excessively. I get a crash regularly though.
Cardhalia(around 2005) - a fantasy dungeon crawler. Expansive, pretty solid overall. I hit a nasty bug corrupting save files so I would recommend regularly backing them up if someone wants to check it out. I could run it on Windows 10 on XP service pack 3 compatibility mode, it is also needed to run the .bat file first.
ParaWorld(around 2006) - a real time strategy game in alternate dimension with dinosaurs. Over the course of the campaign you will control several different factions. Also has a system where you have limited units of each tier.
Its really sad youre unwilling to try Halo. The first 3 are unquestionably some of the best shooters.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a recommendation with a couple caveats:
Morrowind is a Good Old Game to me for three reasons: It's a classic in a great series, and it has a robust engine reimplementation in OpenMW, and you can easily find a mod to fix any rough edge you don't like. It's also just a great RPG that doesn't suffer from janky content additions like Bethesda's more voice-driven games.
The only unfixable flaw is the "given instructions" in lieu of map markers are occasionally (rarely) wrong, but I've never had an issue.
Master of Orion 2(1996)
Is a great game I still play from time to time.
You can get it on good old games.
I'm very late to this party, but I saw that you mentioned playing the OG Metroid Prime and wanted to mention Primehack. It's a mod that allows you to play Metroid Prime on PC with native Mouse/Keyboard controls! It is PHENOMENALLY well done. It takes a little bit of setup to get your settings dialed in, but once you're there you're set. The game pretty much just works, there's very little jank to deal with and I absolutely loved playing it on PC.
Is the game easier with a mouse? If you're using lock-on aiming, yes it is. However, I found it very easy to modulate the difficulty by forcing myself to just aim shots manually, and it was very enjoyable. Here are relevant links in case you're interested in trying it:
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEFtQDGvKvE
Forum thread: https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-fork-primehack-fps-controls-and-more-for-metroid-prime
GitHub (to download the mod): https://github.com/Kekun/primehack
As for where to get the Metroid Prime ROMs for it in case someone wants to try it, I torrented them. I still have them and can share if you can't find them, just PM me.