What are some of your UNpopular video game opinions? (real ones, not just ones for the sake of trolling or something)

[Estil | 1,265]

38 minutes ago, Tulpa said:

That's a good example.

Also when I'm playing one of these retro games and see say, a copyright year from 20-25(!) years ago it's like I guess it's a bit late to second guess it now!   I mean there's no do-overs right?

[cj_robot | 544]

Personally, I never saw the value in saying that something hasn't aged well.

"Hey, just so you know... that old game is old."

Like, thanks for the info, dude.

Obviously I know old stuff can sometimes require an adjustment of expectations, but I have never had a problem doing that. I've can't think of a single example of a game that used to be great that somehow became not great because of time.

[Gentlegamer | 174]

15 hours ago, Tulpa said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom

I understand the meaning of the idiom, but I reject the implications in this case.

It is our tastes that age, and the fault is in them. If a game is well received at release, then poorly after time, it "aged poorly," the implication is we had poor taste then and good taste now. Similarly, when a game is poorly received at release but well received now, it is a "hidden gem," implying we had poor taste then, and good taste now. The fallacy is that "now," whatever time that is, we have good taste... simply because it is the taste we have "now." This is nothing more than chronological snobbery, the belief that what appeals to contemporary taste is good and the blindness that the contemporary taste is just one "fashion" among many that will itself fade away.

I prefer to deal with more concrete standards of criticism. Therefore, "aged poorly" as a category of criticism has no weight in itself, and I reject it wholly as a standard and even as a useful idiom.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,552]

Play 4 player Super Bomberman and report back how fun it was relative to doing the same thing at any time in the last 25 years.

Now go play 4 player Goldeneye and report back the same thing.

Was Goldeneye as fun as it used to be?  Did 2-4 players profess to it not being as fun as they remember?  Did your enjoyment slide at a steeper rate than it did with Bomberman?

Because if you tell me that everyone loved their time with Goldeneye nearly as much as they did in 1997, you're a bald-faced liar.  Bald.  Faced.  Liar. 

Label that phenomenon however you need to.

[Tulpa | 3,520]

1 hour ago, Gentlegamer said:

If a game is well received at release, then poorly after time, it "aged poorly," the implication is we had poor taste then and good taste now.

No, it's that we didn't have the insight that new developments gave us. It has nothing to do with taste.

It's not that we were too stupid or anything, but progress leads to improvements, many of which we can't even comprehend until they happen.

It's not an insult to everything you hold dear, but just a fact of progress.

[Tulpa | 3,520]

25 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Because if you tell me that everyone loved their time with Goldeneye nearly as much as they did in 1997, you're a bald-faced liar.  Bald.  Faced.  Liar. 

Pretty sure if we hooked up a polygraph to this thread, it'll explode.

 

 

[Gentlegamer | 174]

1 hour ago, Tulpa said:

No, it's that we didn't have the insight that new developments gave us. It has nothing to do with taste.

It's not that we were too stupid or anything, but progress leads to improvements, many of which we can't even comprehend until they happen.

It's not an insult to everything you hold dear, but just a fact of progress.

I also reject this implication, that the present view is the product of "progress." It can just as well be a product of regress. Pretending we are smarter, more insightful than the past is the height of arrogance.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

1 hour ago, Gentlegamer said:

I also reject this implication, that the present view is the product of "progress." It can just as well be a product of regress. Pretending we are smarter, more insightful than the past is the height of arrogance.

Nah, the height of arrogance is a few contrarians on a gaming forum pretending they’re the ones who understand that “NO REALLY GAMES DON’T AGE EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG NO DEVELOPMENTS IN A 45+ YEAR OLD INDUSTRY COULD POSSIBLY MAKE US LOOK AT OLDER WORKS IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT.”

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

1 hour ago, MagusSmurf said:

Nah, the height of arrogance is a few contrarians on a gaming forum pretending they’re the ones who understand that “NO REALLY GAMES DON’T AGE EVERYONE ELSE IS WRONG NO DEVELOPMENTS IN A 45+ YEAR OLD INDUSTRY COULD POSSIBLY MAKE US LOOK AT OLDER WORKS IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT.”

Yup.  Games are generally a product of their time.  While it's true that they don't age, and people do, it's seriously just a phrase, and an accurate one to easily describe changing individual and public opinions of things over time.  Sure, future developments might be regress over what "progress" pushed forward a particular game, technology, etc.  But generally speaking, when that sort of thing happens, it usually means that the thing in question was considered a misstep, mistake, etc.  Again, the bit about it "not aging well."  So, sure, things we now consider awful didn't change--they were always shit, we just didn't realize it at the time.

[cj_robot | 544]

5 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Because if you tell me that everyone loved their time with Goldeneye nearly as much as they did in 1997, you're a bald-faced liar.  Bald.  Faced.  Liar. 

Interesting example, because I see Goldeneye used all the time as an example of a game that supposedly has aged horribly. I speak the honest truth when I say I enjoy it just as much today as I did back then. I guarantee I have friends who would absolutely be up for multiplayer right now if I lived near any of them anymore.

Yes, absolutely, decades of playing FPS games with dual analog controls means that jumping back to N64 is going to require a readjustment period. But you make the adjustment, and enjoy the game. I honestly don't understand the difficulty people have with this. I read centuries-old literature. I watch silent-era films and am truly marveled by some of them. I play old games.

I also understand that not everyone is like me, and I'm not trying to say everyone else is wrong. I am not interested in convincing anyone they need to like a certain game. I just have a hard time grasping how something could be considered good and then somehow become not good over time.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,552]

That could be very true.  We're all different exceptions to different rules.  But if you gather a random assortment of people to play retro games together, you're almost certainly see different assessments of how fun different games are nowadays.  I've personally seen Goldeneye resoundingly fail that test every single time.

[darkchylde28 | 1,546]

1 hour ago, cj_robot said:

Interesting example, because I see Goldeneye used all the time as an example of a game that supposedly has aged horribly. I speak the honest truth when I say I enjoy it just as much today as I did back then. I guarantee I have friends who would absolutely be up for multiplayer right now if I lived near any of them anymore.

Yes, absolutely, decades of playing FPS games with dual analog controls means that jumping back to N64 is going to require a readjustment period. But you make the adjustment, and enjoy the game. I honestly don't understand the difficulty people have with this. I read centuries-old literature. I watch silent-era films and am truly marveled by some of them. I play old games.

I also understand that not everyone is like me, and I'm not trying to say everyone else is wrong. I am not interested in convincing anyone they need to like a certain game. I just have a hard time grasping how something could be considered good and then somehow become not good over time.

I feel the exact same way, I have the exact same love of Goldeneye now as I did when it came out!  None!  I thought it was ugly, blocky, badly controlling old tech at the time, and I still do today!  PC Master Race, baby!  (Not really, but seriously, the variety of FPS titles available on even low end PCs at the time Goldeneye dropped whipped the ever living dog shit out of that game in ways I cannot appropriately convey.) 

Edited October 3, 2021 by darkchylde28

[Tanooki | 4,940]

Race Drivin' on the Gameboy is the best home handheld/console version of the game, and this is sad.

I've played it on the others (SNES, Genesis) and well the Genesis one is slop and very easy to just slide off the track even worse than the other two or take a header...also seems to not want me to select the test course or real course or cars, just auto/manual.  The SNES one has the missing features, but damn does it chug even worse than the Genesis one...so bad someone hacked it a year or two back with SA1 and got it like arcade smooth to make the point.

Gameboy, of all things, that piddly system bone stock 3 games side by side, not by much, but it runs better than the others, and it has the auto/manual choices, the cars tied to them, and the ability to test drive or run the stunt course too so it's strangely intact.  So yeah, Gameboy beat out the Genesis and SNES on a 3D racing game for sucking the least and actually being fun enough and playable enough too.

[Estil | 1,265]

2 hours ago, Reed Rothchild said:

That could be very true.  We're all different exceptions to different rules.  But if you gather a random assortment of people to play retro games together, you're almost certainly see different assessments of how fun different games are nowadays.  I've personally seen Goldeneye resoundingly fail that test every single time.

But that's supposed to be one of the all-time greats!  Though obviously in my case a multi-player FPS wouldn't work for a solo-only gamer like myself.

[Estil | 1,265]

3 hours ago, cj_robot said:

I honestly don't understand the difficulty people have with this. I read centuries-old literature. I watch silent-era films and am truly marveled by some of them. I play old games.

I also understand that not everyone is like me, and I'm not trying to say everyone else is wrong. I am not interested in convincing anyone they need to like a certain game. I just have a hard time grasping how something could be considered good and then somehow become not good over time.

Yes finally!  Someone here who feels the same way I do!

[Reed Rothchild | 9,552]

Goldeneye is a good game.  If a remaster came out for Switch I'd be all over it.

But I dare you to play 4 player in the caverns

[Gloves | 11,800]

35 minutes ago, Reed Rothchild said:

Goldeneye is a good game.  If a remaster came out for Switch I'd be all over it.

But I dare you to play 4 player in the caverns

Even back in the day that level was off limits. 

[Brickman | 3,996]

I’m sure this one has already been said or maybe I even said it myself, but I just can’t get into kingdom hearts and don’t understand the hype behind it. 

I found it to be a very mediocre action RPG and the story did not interest me at all.

[Tanooki | 4,940]

Goldeneye much like Ocarina of Time(and Majora's Mistake) has not aged well.  The latter pair at least got some level of 3DS enhancement, to a point, given some lame mechanic omissions persist making them still creaky, just less so.

Goldeneye won't happen, but if it did, you'd need to more or less leave it alone to pass a purity test of sorts outside of dual analog or mouse/keys if it hit PC.  Once you start screwing with the stage map layout actual walking space, modernizing the Ai, and other core mechanics people think (and still are) most favorable of...you're screwed.  It's partly why the kind of remake on Wii bombed, took it too far into stupid territory.

It's why when C&C Remastered came out with that+Red Alert they enhanced every audio visual aspect of the game, but the core AI and build mechanics were left as is, because it would piss a ton of people off, the base they are appealing to to try and sell millions of copies as the modern gamer won't give two craps about it.

[CMR | 521]

Sometimes you just had to have been there.  I've heard people talk about older games in recent years and express how they didn't understand what the hype was about.  X-Men Arcade was a good example.  To really understand how awesome it was you just had to have been a kid in the 90's walking into an arcade at the mall and seeing that massive widescreen machine with some of the most popular characters at the time on screen.  At the time there was just nothing else like it, and it was awesome.

[Sumez | 2,969]

Here's the thing about 4 player Goldeneye. It was still terrible in 1997.

If you want to argue that "games aging poorly" is really a thing, you gotta find a much better example to dig up.

[peg | 372]

6 hours ago, Sumez said:

Here's the thing about Goldeneye. It was still terrible in 1997.

Fixed it for you.

[Reed Rothchild | 9,552]

7 hours ago, Sumez said:

Here's the thing about 4 player Goldeneye. It was still terrible in 1997.

If you want to argue that "games aging poorly" is really a thing, you gotta find a much better example to dig up.

No I don't.  You can claim to be a 1997 outlier all you want (perhaps you were), but it is a fact that the game was revered by the masses and got amazing reviews in it's day.

[Sumez | 2,969]

Sure, and the game is still fun to play today in single player - and no matter how awful the game plays, anything you can play competitively four players is always fun by default.

But you still couldn't see shit on the splitscreen view, and it was pretty painful to try. We always ended our sessions early when people started getting annoyed with it. You probably only remember the fun parts and repressed all the junk in your memories, which I can't blame you for.  

Edited October 4, 2021 by Sumez

[Tanooki | 4,940]

Were you playing with a TV meant for ants?  By the mid 90s enough people should have had something around 30" in size, more than enough given the resolution the game ran at to have a quite visible 4P mode.  The only, unlike your comment, honest issue with it, the frame rate took a dump when you got to 4P in some maps more than others, lower across the board from the standard game either way but it still was more than usable/functional for the day.