Posted October 30, 2022
As someone soon to hit 30, I have had the experience of being able to play games from the '90s and 2000s. 2010s was something of a hard fall off as I've had to deal with difficulties that have forced me to scale back my gaming until fairly recently. Nothing tragic, just turning into an adult living in poverty is not a fun experience. However, games have also changed for better and worse, but I've been going back in time to relive experiences I've had in my childhood and experiencing games that passed me by.
Today, I booted up Just Cause 1 again to try and finish it. It's not a hard game and you can probably beat it in an afternoon if you dedicate yourself. I can already tell this will probably be the first 2 Star review I give on GOG because while I had already beaten this game before, not once but twice on both the OG Xbox and 360, this third time around is actually pretty hard on my previous experiences. It was never a great game by any means but playing it the first few times going into Just Cause 2, I thought of it as a flawed gem with certain aspects I missed. 16 years later, it ends up feeling like a janky tech demo to showcase graphics that looked good at the time and its large map size which wears thin once you start seeing the repeated landscapes of jungle and boxy cities.
A few other games that'd fit the bill would be Return to Castle Wolfenstein (it's a competent shooter, but the gameplay loop of shooting the same few enemy types gets old) and Soldier of Fortune II (my childhood loved just gunning people into bits, but that's probably because I cheated. Adult me also cheated to get past a few sections. Funny how cheating made this game better because it's fun but has the same problem RtCW has, only with better set pieces).
What games have you replayed years later only to have the sheen crack? This isn't about old games you played that don't hold up, just you played it and had fun and then played it again and had less fun.
Today, I booted up Just Cause 1 again to try and finish it. It's not a hard game and you can probably beat it in an afternoon if you dedicate yourself. I can already tell this will probably be the first 2 Star review I give on GOG because while I had already beaten this game before, not once but twice on both the OG Xbox and 360, this third time around is actually pretty hard on my previous experiences. It was never a great game by any means but playing it the first few times going into Just Cause 2, I thought of it as a flawed gem with certain aspects I missed. 16 years later, it ends up feeling like a janky tech demo to showcase graphics that looked good at the time and its large map size which wears thin once you start seeing the repeated landscapes of jungle and boxy cities.
A few other games that'd fit the bill would be Return to Castle Wolfenstein (it's a competent shooter, but the gameplay loop of shooting the same few enemy types gets old) and Soldier of Fortune II (my childhood loved just gunning people into bits, but that's probably because I cheated. Adult me also cheated to get past a few sections. Funny how cheating made this game better because it's fun but has the same problem RtCW has, only with better set pieces).
What games have you replayed years later only to have the sheen crack? This isn't about old games you played that don't hold up, just you played it and had fun and then played it again and had less fun.