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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.
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Final Fantasy 4 (2D version). The game was fun when I was younger, mainly due to the fact that it was one of the few JRPGs that actually saw release outside of Japan. However, once I had a chance to play other games in the series, I found that I've ended up liking the game less over the years.

Part of the problem is that the game is lacking replayability; you always have the same party at any given point in the game, and there's no way to customize your party members' abilities. (So, for example, when fighting that octopus your party always consists of a dark knight, a summoner who only has one weak summon and a small number of weak non-summon spells, and a sage who has some spells (including a nice healing spell) and a lot of MP for that point in the game.

There's no way to try out a different party, or try out a character class at a different part of the game (you have no summoner in the mid-game, and no sage in most of the late-game, for example).

Add to the fact that this is the first FF game that has a fair amount of cutscenes, which again are always the same, and the game just doesn't age that well over repeated playthroughs.

(It also didn't help that my most recent play of 2D FF4 is the GBA 1.0 version, which was rushed and it clearly shows; that version gets more interesting when you reach the endgame and can choose your party (but still have a required paladin and no option of a sage), but it is plagued with many issues and outright bugs, including one bug that can delete save data.)

(Note that neither FF3 nor FF5 have this issue, due to the stable party (well, mostly in FF5's case) and the job system that allows you to easily change character jobs.)
Oh dear.

More or less any 3D videogame aiming at realistic graphics. pre-2020.

I remembered Bloodlines as gorgeous, and yet it's visually unplayable no matter how many mods I stack on it.

I'm currently playing Fallout New Vegas, again, trying to mod it to some amount of watchability, still my teeth are grinding in front of these clunky visuals. I don't dare going back to Morrowind. terrified by what I might find behind my shiny memories.

In a different style, Dune 2 used to represent the epitome of ergonomics, the smoothest conceivable user interface for a strategy game. Now I just can't, with its individual clics an its stamp-sized map view.
I seem to remember a similar thread not long ago, so I'd say quite a lot more recently that the one that I did find now. But maybe I'm confusing it.
... Ah yes, I think this is the one I was remembering, but not quite the same thing. But also found one for positives and negatives.
Anyway, just putting these here in case anyone wants to check their previous answers :)
This is why I won't be buying The 7th Guest. I enjoyed playing it years ago, but I'm pretty sure that it hasn't aged well at all.
Star Wars: Rebel Assault II. It aged a tiny bit better than the first game but both are absolute relics of 90s gaming but I still love playing them. It's more of a guilty pleasure though. As a kid, they inspired so much imagination for Star Wars (alongside the Jedi Knight games) but as an adult, I realize that they're heavily flawed and have aged poorly. I still have so much fun playing it though, because it brings me back to better times.
The original Uncharted from 2007 is not a very fun game to play these days. I don't know about the PS4 version, nothing that special is probably addressed, but the game as it is on the PS3 is not very good. The game has this kind of odd UI even just in how it cannot seem to quite pick if it wants to present itself as a platformer or as a shooter. The gameplay makes this abundantly clear though, the game only "works" as a shooter. Not even a fun shooter mind you but it works better than anything else. Drake falls off every surface for some reason and he's too weighty while being too floaty, it feels like they were trying. I am not strictly in the Drake is a psychopathic homicidal maniac camp per se but his humor and personality are more grating than anything, and I unironically believe he is still probably the best character. The other characters are trite memes and tropes played to a T even in the subsequent games. Honestly, the way they wrote the dialogue feels like this tongue in cheek "people are going to eat this up" nonchalant none-too serious trash that does not earn any of its cool creds. Lastly, the graphics do not look very good. John from Digital Foundry lost me when he said that this game looked like it could have been released today, whenever that was last decade. I think he could say that about either of the other on the PS3 Uncharted games but the first one really does not look very good anymore.

Edit: Sorry, I missed the final paragraph when Uncharted came to mind. I enjoyed Uncharted the first time I played a demo of it and then when I borrowed a PS3 but about a year later when I actually had a PS3 to play and I played through the game to the end was not fun so it does not really qualify. Back in 2007 when this game was in the awards shows it was one of the best looking games and I assumed it was super fun. Unfortunately it really was not.
Post edited October 30, 2022 by AnimalMother117
For all the praise I can give to Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, only the shareware episode proves worth playing. Episodes 2 & 3 jump from the nice medium the end of the game was at, and straight into Lost Levels precision platforming. This can be applied to a lot of iD, Apogee, and other episode based shareware games. Jill of the Jungle and Commander Keen both fall into this trap, leaving entire swathes of levels too unmanageable to play.

In base form Creatures is a simplistic world, that while based on an awe inspiring actual model, is a very tiny world. And in most cases, you don't even want your norns to wander that far off, as getting them back home would prove a bit hard and there's deathcap mushrooms over there. The gentle winking out of the modding scene has also made retrieving some beloved COBs and worlds a bit tricky.
Carmageddon is my most gruesome experience with this. It looked horrible, and I couldn't bare to play it. And I loved that game back in the day :(
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Telika: More or less any 3D videogame aiming at realistic graphics. pre-2020.
Do you mean 2002 perhaps?
I don't think there is any. The closest thing might be the first Tony Hawk's Pro Skater game, as the lack of manuals makes it pretty hard to combo if you're used to the possibilities for lines in later games. But even there it just takes a little while to get used to it and then it's fine.
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Telika: More or less any 3D videogame aiming at realistic graphics. pre-2020.
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teceem: Do you mean 2002 perhaps?
No. (I'm a brute.)
Almost any FPS from the PS1. I remember loving Medal of Honor Underground as a kid, even though i could never complete it as i had no memory card, but recently i tried to replay it and the controls do really pushed me off(reminder that the Dual Shock scheme wasnt used back then, damn, Dual Shock wasnt even a thing then).
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Lord_of_D: Almost any FPS from the PS1. I remember loving Medal of Honor Underground as a kid,
Wow I didn't even know there was second MoH game for PS1 and you played as a woman in there? Imagine the shitshow if it was released recently, lol.