Also, from a control perspective, the cut-off for me tends to be when games started requiring a mouse to play.

I'll still play some games that require one, but I vastly prefer keyboard-only controls (espeically on a laptop) or gamepad controls.

For games that use gamepads, the cut-off seems to be when games start requiring simultaneous use of 2 control sticks at the same time.

(Again, these are upper-end cut-offs; games from before this was required are perfectly acceptable to me.)

Reminds me of Demon's Winter, which is also like that.

Unfortunately, you need to switch font at every start-up, as the game doesn't save that setting for some reason.

Ditto. Early 3D might be the games that have aged the worst. That said, there might be exceptions, like playing player vs player, or flight simulators worth it.

Love text games and Interactive Fiction games. With relatively modern games, Eador: Genesis had nice, serviceable graphics that reminded a bit those of Fantasy General, while Eador: Masters of the Broken World, had more luxurious graphics that were a bit cumbersome to play with.

Probably, with more detailed graphics, it is necessary some mastery so that the thing does not end up looking worse. But when they nail it, it might provide a better experience. That said, graphics that leave something to the imagination can be interesting, if they manage to suggest.

Yep, in Europe it was called Megadrive, Genesis in the US.
Megadrive/Genesis sound is just the worst. I browsed through some youtube videos to find some MD games to put on my Evercade and I just had to quit at some point, it was really tearing my ears apart.
Check out the title music to Super Turrican and Jim Power on the SNES. While not quite as good as on the Amiga, they really show what this machine was capable of.

The 8 Bit NES sound was ... ok. It couldn't be really bad for it's limitations, it had a given set of waveform generators, all games basically sounded the same.

But I liked the sound of the next generation of machines so much more. Except for the games, where the free bad quality brass samples were used, Amiga music topped whatever else was out there, especially when it was released in 1985. Even professional musicians like Fatboy Slim created their music on the Amiga. Only early-mid 90s wave cards like the Sound Blaster Pro, Terratec Maestro or Disney managed to produce better sound. General MIDI of course introduced a whole new generation of music, however being limited to a given set of instruments again. Creative Labs tried to fill that niche with the AWE, which allowed to use customized sound sample as instruments (therefore using only very little CPU power), like it was done on the Amiga 10 years before, just in higher quality. Croc Legend of the gobbos even used it to play backround SFX. Windows Vista/Windows 7 put an end to that quite efficiently.

The MOD soundformat can still be played in some modern PC music players like AIMP. It's more complicated however to find something that can play the Jochen Hippel sound formats. For that I only found a very very old program.
This clip was created on hardware that by now is almost 30 years old. It says 2015, but it's basically a extended version of the 1990 games' title music with higher res instruments (the mod file for this 9 minute long track is about ~300kB, that would be way too much to be used in a game).

Composers like Jake Kauffman write good NES style music, but he sometimes use way too many channels. The machines from that times could not handle that many voices at the same time.

I started PC gaming around '93 with games like Doom, King's Quest V and Lands of Lore. I'd say it's still roughly my cutoff. I can go a lot further back than my youth with movies and music, but with video games that seems to be the cutoff.

Worth noting that some Famicom games, like the Japanese version of Castlevania 3, actually had extra hardware in the cartridge that allowed for a couple extra sound channels.

I think I still prefer the tamber of the original sound channels to the ones that were added.

Something like this also happened with the MSX; some games came on cartridges with extra sound channel support.

Incidentally, one thing that's annoying is how, in many NES games, a music sound channel will cut out whenever there's a sound effect playing. It's especially annoying if it's the melody or counter-melody that gets cut out. I also don't like it when a whole sound channel is essentially wasted on a drum beat, when you don't have that many sound channels to begin with.

On PC:
Anything pre-VGA is pretty much an automatic pass for me now. It's not just graphics, but mostly those types of games would also have horrible PC speaker sounds and gameplay systems that may have aged very poorly (or not have been all that great to begin with). I also can't put up with most early mid-'90s 3D games either due to iffy controls, bad general gameplay, and eye cancer. ;)

On console (native or emulated):
For the most part I'd say anything prior to the NES generation even though there's a number of games there I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole either.

Pre-Atari 2600 is not suited for action games of my tastes.

Hmmm ... you'd miss the Magnavox Odyssey this way.

Never enjoyed the Odyssey, unfortunately.

The oldest game I currently sometimes play and still enjoy, is Wasteland.

I have a deep fondness for Sierra Online games, but purchasing the collections and trying to go back to the old ega versions of them is... painful at times. Especially when I'm not as good at a parser as I used to be.

The graphics don't bother me a lot, but what does, is I find the old interfaces with their clunkiness, I just have little patience for anymore.

Console games are a lot more forgiving for me, since they're designed to work with a controller by default. With keyboard, my wrists don't like me bending them like I did 30-35 years ago, so it's physically painful for some of the older PC games.

I dislike anything pixelated, both games from the era when everything still looked pixelated as well as the modern hype of Indie games that choose pixelated graphics.

You don't know what you're missing. But to each his own I guess.

I can understand the need to dislike pixelated Graphix


I found that Mario & Super Mario Bros 3 Bros were the best Mario Games
till Mario 64 & Mario Odysy came out... Then all I wanted to do was play
Mario 64, & now Mario Odysy just improves over the Visuals & adds more fun.

However?

I like Super Metroid for SNES, & don't like the Newer 3D Metroid Games,
they changed Samus too much, & Metroid looks goofy in 3-D...

I felt it was a lot more interesting when Metroid Dredd came out featuring a 2-D Background again...

So while pixelated adventures aren't your thing? I can understand it, but only to a degree.

Everyone has their own taste. I guess.

So EGA games or MCGA are right out, in spite of both predating VGA and yet the music sounds like this?

Apple II hires graphics. I still think the original Apple II "Prince of Persia" is beautiful.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/196/prince-of-persia/screenshots/apple2/266892/



A few Apple II lores games like "Escape from the Hombrew Computer Club" are decent but they are exceptional.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/125494/escape-from-homebrew-computer-club/screenshots/apple2/969454/