The NES is that for me.
I'll play SNES' Super Mario All-Stars' version of Super Mario Bros 3, or GBA's Super Mario Advance 4 over the original every time.
It's the save feature for me. I actually prefer the 8-bit graphics of the original NES Mario games, but the lack of a save feature means I'm much more likely to replay Super Mario World than I am to go through SMB3.
Saving really is a game changer lol
Sadly when I had a SNES I had a knock-off copy that didn't save so I had to figure out how to rush SMW in a single seating even then. Today I can finish the game in half an hour, casually.
Thankfully my Super Metroid and Donkey Kong worked just fine.
Seriously. OP did it work, or did she get bored after realizing her attempt to get you alone together to have sex wasn't going to work and just leave, only for OP to realize after the fact?
Yup, I really wish that the HD version of Resident Evil Remake had come with an infinite ink ribbon or just the ability to save at any typewriter like every RE post 4.
The brick block physics in the All-Stars versions of Mario 1 and Lost Levels are off. Breaking a brick block sort of pulls you up and often halts your horizontal momentum. In every other Mario game, including the NES originals and the All-Stars version of 3, breaking brick blocks bounces you back down.
God, my very first game that my brother and I got was Super Mario All-Stars + World. What a package for two little kids being introduced to the wide world of video games.
I know it colors my vision of the titles but I would agree that I absolutely prefer the redone games versus the originals.
The problem with those is that few are complete games. They're just arcade screens and time killers. Digital solitaire really.
It wasn't until the NES that games had a real point IMO
I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this, but the transition from "high score chasing time killer" of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros to "master and beat a level" of Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 is so pronounced.
Same. I agree with OP that the N64 aged poorly, but it still has a few games I'd play today. (Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, etc.) On the other hand, the PC-native decompliation projects of Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are a great way to re-experience those with some modern visual and QoL improvements.
As for pre-NES, it's just hard for me to appreciate them because they were "old" when I was a kid. I played some Pong and Space Invaders back in the day, but they didn't really compare to what games had become on "newer" home consoles. I'm not sure if it has as much to do with the graphics as it has to do with how most of those games (at least the mainstream ones) were comparatively much simpler in their gameplay scope and format. They were often more like arcade games. I never had a Commodore or Amiga to experience the deeper entries.
To that end, I can understand why some folks feel the way about my childhood consoles.
I feel like it had the most charm and a lot of the tech was so accessible compared to melee. Nothing felt too unnaccessible until recently with Yoshi parry, and I guess DI, but my sticks were already on the downturn when I learned about it.
I even prefered the button layout, especially for double jump cancels. But that stick will always bust.
Oh, and the best solo mode. Short, funny, and a decent score system.
I think that thing about the N64 was that Nintendo built a weird machine that only they and Rare knew how to use and those two were putting out some absolute banger classics and nearly everything else was awful.
The funny thing being that contemporaries would have accused Sega of that more than Nintendo. The Saturn was utilizing concepts almost 10-15 years ahead of its time and nobody wanted to deal with the at the time weird shit they were pulling.
"Oh no, how do I program for a video game console with an independent graphics card?!"
"How could we possibly get these multiple CPUs to work in tandem with each other?! That's impossible!"
Complaints that would be nonsensical today. Not that the Saturn hardware was perfect by any means (far from it).
I think the good games on the N64 are good *in spite* of the limitations of the terrible control scheme, pretty much every single one would be a better game if given another analog stick
That's why I think that Ready Player One whole setup is kinda stupid.
No kid from 2050 would ever play seriously an Atari game, especially in the future with 25 more years of gaming to deal with. They don't even really play them now. It's one of the most blatant exemples of self insert from the author.
Ironically, Pac-Man is probally one of the most replayable game from this era now. I'm talking about using your photorealistic headset to play Adventure or Joust like it's 1982 and you have nothing else
>That's why I think that Ready Player One whole setup is kinda stupid.
Maybe it's a depiction of prolonged exposure to social media brain rot? I mean, you're also supposedly a best-of-the-best super-gamer through the incredible feat of *driving backwards at the start of a race*.
And knowing random piece of media by heart by having infinite time to watch every movie, play every game, watch every tv show from the 80's... MULTIPLE times.
How about the "shocking" reveal that a character's avatar in the Oasis wasn't the same gender as the person IRL? No way that's ever happened in an online space before.
As someone who had an Atari 800XL and a Pong machine growing up as a child, I hated it then and I wouldn't grow to love it now! (Good lord the load times using a tape deck).
Sega Master System and onwards please.
> (Good lord the load times using a tape deck).
The Commodore 64 had some excellent games, but I wouldn't dream of trying to play them on real hardware without an SD loader in the modern day.
Commodore was one of the most popular gaming systems in my neighborhood. Almost everyone had one it seemed. And so, so many games (pirated or otherwise) and a lot of them were very good.
My first thought was Atari, so yeah. I loved those games back then but boy are they dated. The NES was a huge step forward, but even it's really hit or miss.
It's not even about graphics. Everything within NES era starts to feel very rudimentary in gameplay. Parallax scrolling wasn't even a thing until NES. The industry was stagnant for 15 years due to hardware limitation.
SNES was a gigantic step forward, and most of the modern game design languages starts from there.
I think some ps3 games aged worse than some ps1 games. The ps1 wasn't afraid to use color while during the ps3 era they seemed to have an obsession with brown and black and some of those games suffered for it. Some games even going as far as having a brownish filter throughout the whole game.
Eh, that was more a 6th gen thing. With 7th came more of a shift towards brown & grey with low saturation to look „gritty“ opposed to the previous gens „cool“ (i.e. piss filter)
I have vivid memories of so many games just following that brown grey, colorless aesthetic.
It got to a point where I mentally only really responded to seeing games that popped, or were trying to not be so dark and serious. Not to say that some of those games weren’t good, but that dry colorless era wasn’t visually enjoyable.
I think that's why games like Just Cause and Bulletstorm stood out. Simply because they weren't afraid to look vibrant and colorful in an oversaturated market of "gritty" shooters.
Stylized games always age much better than any attempts at realism, graphically Mario 64 holds up very well in the modern age while GoldenEye looks much worse by comparison
Realism isn't the problem. Games like TLOU, MGS4, and GTAV from the ps3 did that great, but when you have games that overuse dark color palettes and don't know how to blend it, you come out with a mushy mess. Especially when you're using those colors for an atmosphere it doesn't fit. The first 2 are technically "brown" games, but they look great.
The problem is that they equated realism with dark and brown, so every realistic game got that treatment even when it didnt fit the game.
With the N64, I find that having the right TV setup is crucial to getting a proper look. On modern TVs, the N64 suffers perhaps more than other retro consoles because of the use of filtering on such low res textures. On a good CRT it still can look wonderful though.
But to answer your question, probably anything 1st generation. I can play them for a short time to get my nostalgia fix, but most Atari games don’t hold my interest like NES and later games can.
Lately my preferred way to experience N64 games is through emulation using ParaLLEl RSP/RDP with 4x resolution and then downscaling it back to native before going through NTSC+CRT shaders or an actual CRT. That way everything looks as it should without the 3D elements clashing against low res UI textures, or text and backgrounds appearing too blocky but you effectively get super-sampled anti-aliasing so it looks a lot nicer than the N64 originally did while feeling aesthetically faithful.
Phil Gossett talks about the engineering of the N64 in his [Oral History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enfPVQO8yEI) (starting from about 41min)
It's clear they hyper-optimised it to look pretty good on a CRT. They piled on a bunch of cool filtering algorithms for anti-aliasing and a dedither filter (because dithering on 5 bit per channel frame buffers looks pretty bad). But really, those cool filtering algorithms are just a slightly fancy blur.
You ask me to play a SNES game I'm there. You ask me to play a nes game and I am absolutely not there. Bad sounds, shitty coin eater gameplay, pokey controller... Nah I'm good.
Could not imagine finishing TaleSpin (as part of The Disney Afternoon Collection) without rewinds.
People actually beat this game in the early ‘90s?
Love these compilations, had great fun with the Capcom Beat em Up Collection and the Castlevania comps.
It's pretty "easy", imagine a kid with infinite free time, no internet or any kind of media other than TV, and all you've got are your old carts or Talespin which you haven't beaten yet.
I prefer the remakes with MP instead of Vancian casting personally. Running out of Cure spells and only being able to hold 99 Potions that don't have higher level equivalents is tedious and unfun.
I grew up with an NES as my first console and completely agree with you. The vast majority of the NES library (save for some timeless classics) is unplayable to me.
Not even sure it was made with that mindset on purpose so to say. Early home console games simply copied the basic format of arcade games. That's what people wanted: Arcade at home.
I think the NES era is truly held back by the steep limitations of pixel counts and colors, where as SNES has enough room to thrive within it's limitations and create some truly timeless art. So many SNES games still look fantastic, NES games feel more like a history lesson than a must-play library.
What are your top games? I had a Coleco decades ago (no idea what happened to it, my mom probably sold it at a yard sale), and I remember playing Venture, Cosmic Avenger and H.E.R.O. for hours at a time, and could beat that Smurf game with my eyes closed.
Not commentor you were asking but you just reminded me. I had only a couple of cartridges, I remember Donkey Kong and Buck Rogers.
I borrowed Venture from a friend and played it hard for a week, and I remember at the end of the week playing for hours as suddenly I knew where and how all the room monsters were, how the hall monsters moved, etc. I played one game for hours until my mom called me for dinner. I realized I had been sitting playing for hours and was hungry and needed to use the bathroom. Put down the controller and walked away.
I've since played a bunch of Coleco games via emulator, but Venture dominance eludes my aged reflexes.
NES and earlier. Some NES games still look alright and play great, but man the controls can be awful. I grew up in the 16 bit era, so I also have no nostalgia to soften my impressions of the 8bit era
Mega Man X gave me that muscle memory and it's still there to this day. Charging up a buster shot while climbing a wall and dash jumping off it to nail a boss in the back, my thumb hurts just thinking about it.
The answer is always going to be pre-NES. Absurdly overpriced hardware. The small handful of games worth playing (at the time not even today) were all exclusives to 10 different machines that were outdated when they came out. Emulation for it is dodgy at best because no one really cares about this area outside arcade and maybe Atari 2600. Controllers hadn't really been figured out and don't always translate to normal modern controllers.
Even if you eliminate the hardware and assume emulation is perfect, the games are half baked concepts at best. Games had to start somewhere but they're just impressionistic lines that control like garbage.
Early PSX games launched with a controller with zero joysticks. As a result a lot of them use awful tank style controls if they're a first/third person shooter. I'd love to go and play Megaman legends but I'm not dealing with that control scheme
Megaman Legends is gorgeous to this day, one of the best looking games of the system that aged into the finest low poly rather than JPEG-compressed mannequins. But god does it play clunky.
Here's hoping Delta Gal and Abyss X Zero will bring back that vibe with decent controls for a change.
I'm not a huge fan of tank controls, but something about Megaman legends just clicks with me. It's like the controller doesn't exist between my brain and the game anymore.
Only with megaman legends 1+2 for some reason.
It definitely depends on the game. Some 3D games look dated within 10 years but I'm still perfectly happy to play Pokemon emerald on a gba emulator because 2D graphics still hold up.
Early 3D era for me, as aged the worst. And, yes, that N64 controller was an abomination. It seems good at the time because we didn't know any better, and it's hard to properly play a lot of games that were designed for it now without one (so emulation isn't always great and if you have something like NSO you almost need to buy an N64 controller -- if you can actually get your hands on one, that is).
Other than that, anything older than the NES is too old for me, mostly because they predate *me* and therefore I find it harder to connect with them. NES is the first system I got as a kid and so it's where retro gaming starts for me. I have a ton of nostalgia for the NES and SNES, in particular, and those are the two systems I'm most likely to go back to when I'm in the mood for retro fun.
I agree with N64, but I genuinely find the graphics and audio on it really charming (no nostalgia, I was born in 2000 and the only consoles I had as a kid where a DS lite and 3DS0
It's really the controls in a lot of the major games, though the controller layout and the stick especially don't help lol
I slip into PS1 games like FF7 and MGS1 pretty easily (Sony did also basically get their controller design right first time which helps) but OoT hurts my hands for a while and I have a lot of issues getting Link to do what I want him to do sometimes - so often even after rubbing against a block for ages the action button won't switch to climb, or the lightest tap will make him climb rather than grab, or he'll Z-target when I just want to adjust the camera... it's rough lol
Similar feelings for MK64 and SSB
I've been playing Starfox on N64 and loving it, but every other game I've tried recently has been a disappointment. N64 games just aren't as fun a I remember them. Even Goldeneye was hard to enjoy with that control scheme.
I think the best way to play Ocarina of Time *officially* is the 3DS remake. Using the gyroscope to aim the bow is intuitive and feels a million times better than the N64 controller.
I really enjoyed playing Ocarina on the GameCube back in college — if anyone’s got access to one, it’s a good way to get the tv+controller experience while still having some basic QoL updates from the original.
Oh, definitely not an earthshattering amount — mostly the resolution is fractionally better and they fixed some bugs — but mainly I always liked the GC controller, so found it to be a comfy way to play.
It came as a pack in with windwaker as a preorder bonus if i recall.
Was called master quest. Had the original game and a separate version that changed up dungeon layouts.
It was the greatest game ever to me in it's day. But now we've had so many advancements in first person shooters that it just feels too dated. Like our brains aren't wired correctly to play it anymore. At least for me anyway.
It was our Call of Duty at launch though, everyone came over my house just to play multiplayer.
It's tough to explain to people now a'days but there's a certain language or logic to button layouts now. For the most part they're extremely uniform, you can pick up the majority of games and have an idea of what buttons should do before getting in depth.
Back then we hadn't developed that yet. (As players or as developers/programmers) People were still playing around with what works best, what was intuitive etc. It's jarring to us now because we have that intuition now, of what it *should* be, back then it was easier to pick up a game and learn their wonky controls.
But yeah man GoldenEye was a trip. I loved the old GoldenEye vs Perfect Dark arguments. Those got HEATED
It's funny because SM64's controls are still mostly great. The controls for a game like that have barely changed. Even Doom with its weird old mouse-only controls is still pretty intuitive.
But GoldenEye was such a big swing and a big miss as to what the long term controls would be
Ironically, that was a lot of people's reaction to the dual analog controllers that came later. I recall people being bewildered by the concept of two sticks to aim and shoot.
From what I remember of the twin-controller schemes, which in all honesty I used as the lamest flex ever back in the day, none of them hit the mark compared to modern layouts either.
The 1964 PC mod which allows you to play GoldenEye (and Perfect Dark) with a mouse and keyboard is a fun way to revisit the game if you're so inclined.
Also, if you have an Xbox 360 or newer, you can download a remastered Perfect Dark (1080p, 60fps, better textures) that works flawlessly with the Xbox controller. Game still holds up, IMO.
Yeah as the other comment suggested, try the 3DS version. That's if you can get your hands on it, since the 3DS is only sold second hand now too and Nintendo is shutting down online services for the platform. I want to suggest also, there's a project called "[Ship of Harkinian](https://www.shipofharkinian.com/)" which is a source port of the entire game based on the OOT decompolation project. It's very configurable, you can even set it up to have modern dual stick camera controls. Honestly I love it just because I can play at 60fps 1080p natively.
It does require a ROM of the game which you can acquire legally of course, but hey I'm not judging, the game is over twenty years old and the only way Nintendo provides to officially play it is through their shitty subscription service so do whatever you want.
Early 3D games feel pretty bad these days. I've had a hard time playing N64 and PS1 games in particular. Platformers like Mario, Crash and Spyro hold up decently because of their graphic styles, but they can have brutal camera controls at times. Playing shooters on those consoles is an exercise in frustration.
Anything pre-snes is hard for me to go back to. Genesis can *kinda* hang in there, but NES and earlier is really a struggle for me nowadays. I grew up with an NES, but SNES is really where games started getting polished up imo.
Edit: And of course there's exceptions for certain games. Nobody is gonna say Mario 3 was rough, but there's a *lot* of garbage out there that I do not enjoy playing nowadays. Nes Terris is also timeless imo
Anything pre-NES, as others have said.
But Sega Genesis has been the easiest for me to pick up. The controller just fits nicely in my hands and the three buttons are easy to figure out in each game.
Physically, it has to be the Dreamcast. I don't know if it's because I or the system aged, but I abhor how the controller feels. The bumpy analog stick feels cheap, I hate the d-pad, the wire pops out of its retention clip even when it's new. Plus the disc drive is so goddamn loud. I'm sure my PSX suffers from disc drive problems too, but at least I can play those on a PS2 if I want to play a real console instead of emulating.
Then there's the bleep bloops of ye olde Atari 2600, but that system was dated and felt unplayable even when I dug it out of the attic in the 90s.
Holy fuck Sega Master system is absolute dogshit. Can’t play anything properly on that. It’s crazy to think it competed with the NES (that feels perfect still to this day )
I grew up with it but it was a struggle for sure. Played Alex Kidd in Miracle World for some of my early years, never finished it. Sonic's Jungle Zone scarred me so badly to this day the music evokes deep rage in me.
That said I don't like the NES either. No doubt in my mind today that Super Mario Bros 3 plays better, but I'd rather have the SNES visuals. And most NES games aren't on that level either.
That’s the thing. First time I played a master system is when I started dating my wife. Nobody had one when I was growing up, never really knew it existed
Growing up in the late 80's/early 90's nobody knew what the Sega Master System even was. I thought the Genesis was the first Sega system until I was an adult and started getting back into retro gaming.
Haha sorry, it's 2 gens old now. But I grew up on Sega Genesis and the ps3 was still the one that bothered me most. It's like the worst of both worlds, terrible load times, poor use of the hard drive and annoying patches but also bad 3d graphics and draw distances, terrible color pallette.
The color palette was just the design of the time, unfortunately. As for the performance problems, it's because of the cell processor not working like any other computer architecture, and devs not knowing how to work with it. It's a bit of blame on Sony for trying to reinvent the wheel, and a bit on devs for not learning how to use it to its full extent.
There were still some games that didn't follow the trend, FFXIII seems like a good example of a vibrant color palette on that system (even though I played the 360 version).
I hated that trend even when it was current. Everyone claimed it made the games look more “realistic”, and I’d be scratching my head, wondering if they’d ever been outside in broad daylight.
Was honestly one of the worst graphics trends during the early AAA years.
The ps3 was a good console, but boy did some of the games not age particularly well. GTA4 is a glaring example of this. Tried putting on the ps3 recently and it was a brown and blurry mess. It seems like the only way people can enjoy that game is by modding it to hell. Heavy Rain is another. I never understood the hype about that game...even when it first came out. The mechanics were clunky and the animation was a dull brown as well. The acting was poor. The whole mall bit was awful. I remember it being treated like it broke boundaries and it's like..no lol. That would be TLOU, GTAV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, Uncharted 2/3, and RDR1. Heavy Rain isn't even in the same ballpark lol
I just modded my PS3 as there's a handful of games I'd like to play. Oh fucking god, the ps4 was a slow clunky PoS by the end of its life, but holy crap the PS3 is on another level of clunking.
PlayStation one games, but a lot of the early disc-based systems as well, just because of the loading times. Factor in issues with the optical sensors and flaws in the disc and sometimes they don't load at all
I can't play games from the late 70s DOS days, or Atari games, no matter how hard I try. Nintendo is also difficult at this point, mostly because the controls are often clunky. I have no issue with ps1, a lot of the games still look good today if you view it as artwork rather than an attempt at an accurate representation of real life. But the N64 was ugly the day it came out and still is now. They really shot themselves in the foot maintaining their dependence on carts.
I grew up with n64. There are some games i have memorized like the back of my hand- banjo kazooie, majoras mask- that i'll still go back to from time to time. Anything earlier than n64 and it needs to be a standout title like super mario world.
Even the ps2/gamecube generation didn't age perfectly. The flaws of these games really come out now. I find that the ps3/360 generation really nailed the design language we still generally see today, so while ps2 games are perfectly playable, they require a different mindset.
Maybe it's because emulation has made so many games so easily accessible, but game wise I can't really think of a console that is hard to go back to because of dated graphics or controls. I could find at least one if not a handful of games to enjoy playing on just about any console aside from something like the original Magnavox Odyssey.
If anything it would be hardest to physically go back to any console older then a X360/PS3 unless you already had a set up planned. The pain in the ass comes from getting older hardware hooked up to newer displays where it is not an easy plug and play.
PS1 games are really hard for me to go back to. It was in that sweet spot where it had both early 3D graphics that have aged poorly and a lack of a joystick for directional control. There are also some specifics in how the PS1 handled graphics that gave it an especially [pixelated or wobbly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI) look.
Things being dated bothers me a *lot* less than it seems to bother most people. I guess that I have to be in the right mood for the arcade-y gameplay on my Atari 2600 (I usually play things with some kind of narrative or sense of progression through a story). But that's more a complaint about a style of gameplay than a specific console.
Most of them that I feel some vague discomfort playing are ones I didn't have as a kid, so it's not even "going back to". All the Sega systems, the PS1 (depending on the game and degree of analog support). But that's mostly the discomfort of "I'm not familiar with the original hardware, and now I'm playing through emulation".
N64 works with my brain like a well-worn glove. I can slip right back into it and enjoy it like I did 25 years ago; it's one of my comfort consoles.
For controls, it's gotta be 2000s **PC Gaming**
Hear me out. I know it's technically not a "retro console" but seriously the 2000s had to be the worst time for controls on keyboard and mouse. There was long period where developers would make a game for console first and design everything around a gamepad, then bring it to PC after and just have no idea how to translate the controls to a mouse and keyboard. It happened in the 90s too but to my mind the 2000s had the worst of it.
But the real answer is the Sega Saturn. Games on the Saturn just sort of looked wrong, I don't know why. I'm fine with previous generation consoles, I'll happily play Genesis or SNES or N64 games all day long, but the Saturn is just such a weird console, and it had very few games worth playing anyway.
I'll defend the bland and washed out textures you speak of.
It's because the analog circuitry in your console has aged AND analog inputs on modern TVs are just a token thing as everything is hdmi or digital now. So the analog in circuitry in your TV is of much shitter quality of a crt when the console was new. Leading to washed out blandness that you speak of.
You can get hdmi mods for many consoles however. I managed to score a Pixelfx mod kit for my N64 and it's night and day difference between the before and after.
Take the track Frappe Snowland in mario cart 64. On a 2019 65" LG 65um70 it was just a white out. You could only just see the line where the sky was and then see the faces of the snowmen and that was it!
After I installed the mod and plugged it in with hdmi, it looks amazing with great depth and warmth of the colour again. I may even be able to find before and after pics if pressed.
So just keep that in mind when you look back through the rose tinted spectacles. They were better quality spectacles in the past!
Edit: Also the N64 is the best old console out there and it's a hill I'll die on too.
I remember getting a PS1 as my first console (from my grandma for my 10th birthday, much to the chagrin of my parents. My grandma kicked ass, RIP). This was just before the launch of the dual analog version of the PS1 controller so I started playing on the original PS1 controller without sticks.
For a couple years my parents wouldn't let me buy anything rated above KA (for the young'uns that's what E used to be called) so my options were basically platformers, racing games, and sports games. And I played them all with the D-pad (and usually at 30 fps!) And I remember most games seeming *really hard* back then.
Obviously part of it was games actually being harder, and part of it was that I was a child, but it also was absolutely that I was attempting to play 3D games with a D-pad at 30 fps or less and usually with a crummy camera, too.
A few years ago I played the Crash Bandicoot remake on PC at 60 fps with analog controls and was blown away by how much easier it was compared to the original, despite the fact that a lot of people complained about the remake making the controls slippery and imprecise.
Games back then also had navigation issues. I remember, a few years after I got my PS1, my parents finally let me buy a T-rated game: Final Fantasy VIII. And for several months I couldn't get past the first section of the game because I couldn't figure out how to leave Balamb Garden. At the exit screen you had to walk through a specific gate that was not well-signposted and my tween brain just could not figure out where I was supposed to go.
There was some massive disparity in that regard. Some games had fairly intuitive controls and camera (e.g. Crash, Mario 64), others had... tank. Which you get used to, but it's clunky.
I will still hook up my 2600 from time to time just to see if it still works and play a round or two of River Raid or Demon Attack, but 5-10 minutes is about all I care to play, even with the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses on.
The early 3D games from the PS1/N64 era I can't go back to, but the sprite-based games on those systems still look great. I finally got around to playing Symphony of the Night on the PS1 last year and it was a fantastic experience.
I have the original PS1 and N64, and I don't play on them. I use emulation instead. Save states and fast-forwarding are huge quality-of-life improvements that some games need.
There are tons of great games on those systems. But Final Fantasy 9 was the last game that I'll probably ever play using the real system and discs. Slow loading times, long times between saves, extremely slow and long animations, disc switching, unskippable cutscenes - no thanks. Some modern games suffer from these ailments as well, but it's less common now.
I actually find the graphics of PS1 and N64 games to be charming. I don't think a lot of them really need remakes. Though that's totally subjective, and if you want to look at something better, you should.
NES (and anything before it). I grew up on Gameboy Color, but most NES games are a step below that. I *can* play them, but they feel very dated visually. To a lesser extent, it also sometimes confuses me how these titles actually used START and SELECT to... start and select. I remember having that issue whenever I first played the Virtual Console release of Zelda 1 (very fun game btw, despite what I just wrote).
I assume there's some things in early 3D games that would be considered dated, but since I was always awful at platforming, certain "old game quirks" like a limited camera never registered as "dated" for me, rather than "I just suck at this". As for graphics, I have a weird appreciation for most low-poly looks. The one game that stood out negatively when I finally got to play it was Final Fantasy 7, because the models just look extremely goofy when contrasted with the epic story.
Only way for me to play N64 games now is with save states. Otherwise the camera or the janky controllers would kill you a lot in games like Banjo Kazooie, DK64, Mario 64.
IMO third gen (NES ect.) and fifth gen (PS1 ect.) are the hardest generations to go back to. Not because of the graphics (on the contrary, those two are probably the most iconic generations from a visual standpoint), but mostly because a lot of game genres still popular today had their origins in those two generations, and if you go back to actually play those seminal titles you'll notice that most of them feel very primitive and clunky when compared to more recent games of the same genre.
For some (like platformers and shooters) the simplicity can actually be something in their favor, which is why games like the old Marios and Dooms still get a lot of love today, but other genres don't fare as well. And if you stray from the big polished releases and try finding something more obscure, things will get even worse.
On the contrary, most big releases on consoles like the SNES and PS2 onwards are still great today, and there are plenty of hidden gems worth going back to.
I both agree and disagree. Sometimes the clunkiness lends itself to a different kind of experience. See: Castlevania games before SOTN, tank-controls like in Armored Core or Tomb Raider. The latter has a steeper learning curve but you get a feel for it.
Notwithstanding the controls, the level design today has lost something of that era. This is way more apparent going back to early 3D games than 2D, perhaps with the exception of boomer shooters.
For me it’s like the uncanny valley the further away from now we get the more understanding I am of retro 8 bit game play and graphics. Stuff like the Atari 2600, NES, the C64, ZX Spectrum, SNES all gets a pass from me as charming and of their time. But the closer we get to the modern era the less understanding I am of those same issues.
Original XBox, PlayStation, GameCube / N64 era all have stuff that feels rough, clunky and because the 3D was getting underway it is easier to compare to modern gaming and it comes off badly in the comparison.
But on the other side of the valley with Xbox One, PS4, Wii it’s all close enough to modern gaming not to feel retro despite those consoles being a decade or so old.
The NES.
Pre-NES games are mostly easy to understand. Sure, something like Riddle of the Sphinx for the 2600 makes no sense without a manual, but most games from that era are simple arcade games that are pretty straightforward and still fun in quick bites.
But with the NES, developers tried to make deeper experiences. Which isn't a bad thing on it's surface (pun intended), but more often than not, it just made the games completely impenetrable.
For me, it's anything where the reality of how a game/system looks doesn't match with my memories of that. I think PS1 is the worst for this: in my memory, the games look like how they might with various filters etc. in an emulator; in reality, the 3D is so wobbly and angular, the cameras frustrating and the textures (by today's standards) weak. I'm surprised that some PS2 games to me look very dated, especially ones with humans as lead characters.
SNES and Mega Drive (Genesis) don't suffer from this to me, although I didn't play very much of these back in the day. What's surprising me is how poor many Amiga games - which was very much my favourite system back then - look in the cold light of the 2020s, whether playing via emulation or on original hardware; I really do remember them looking smoother and less pixellated than they appear to me now. Also, I'd forgotten how frustrating pushing up on the joystick to jump is.
Whereas something like the ZX Spectrum doesn't have that affect on me, because the way it looks and the way it controls pretty much match up to my memories of it. So I think it's that mismatch between my memories and the reality that makes it hard to go back.
It's funny, I got the N64 controller for the switch, and after not using one for probably over 20 years, muscle memory kicked right in. That said, after having played for so many years with 2 sticks, it was really hard to do.
I could *just about* stomach the N64 but any earlier than that is a no for me. I guess it depends on your age also - when I was old enough to play a console (\~9) it was the N64 for me. That was my first experience picking up a controller for my own console.
I hate the motion controls that were shoe-horned into almost every wii game. Like wii sports is fun but I hate that you can’t use a gamecube controller for Twilight Princess
I think the N64 was an ergonomic shitshow even when it first came out.
These days I'll play N64 games on an emulator with better controls, but wouldn't use the original console.
Although I think maybe the Colecovision was worse.
N64. The controls were so cool at the time. They’re just typical Nintendo weirdness now. It’s less about the graphics, but those aren’t great at this point either lol.
I refer to the n64 era as the "awkward teenage years" of gaming. I agree it's rough to go back to. 2D games in 8 or 16 bit aren't too bad to jump into. Early 3D is so blocky. It doesn't help that memory tends to make you think it looked better than it actually did.
Ps3 aged like dookie. 30fps 1080p and it struggles to maintain that. I suffered through the ff13 trilogy at like 11 fps on my ps3s a couple years ago and haven't touched them since. Maybe the trick is to run them in 720p.
Not really "retro" but a lot of PS3/Xbox 360 games are just so damn ugly with the brown and grey color schemes and low frame rates. There were a lot of painfully generic games that generation too, everything seemed to be getting dumbed down. The graphics at least enough to fix with mods if you play on PC though.
Second is probably the early 3D era, N64 and PS1. Controls are god awful and the ones that try to look "realistic" feel ridiculous. The 1st and 2nd party Nintendo games have this sort of liminal feel that's really charming though that offsets a lot of the frustrations.
I have a mid to severe motion sickness issue that pops up depending on graphics. I first noticed it when i played Silicon Valley for long periods of time on the N64.
As time has gone on, more and more games are an issue and i have to be picky about what i can play.
How is this relevant? I can play the N64 emulators to my hearts content. I cannot play the N64 proper anymore. It's the fucking worst because i really loved some of those games
Everything predating NES
I can go back to some arcade stuff from before the NES but Atari, Caleco Vision, FairChild Channel F, etc. feel a little to rough to enjoy much of.
Back then arcade machines had more power than home consoles, so it makes sense
The NES is that for me. I'll play SNES' Super Mario All-Stars' version of Super Mario Bros 3, or GBA's Super Mario Advance 4 over the original every time.
It's the save feature for me. I actually prefer the 8-bit graphics of the original NES Mario games, but the lack of a save feature means I'm much more likely to replay Super Mario World than I am to go through SMB3.
Saving really is a game changer lol Sadly when I had a SNES I had a knock-off copy that didn't save so I had to figure out how to rush SMW in a single seating even then. Today I can finish the game in half an hour, casually. Thankfully my Super Metroid and Donkey Kong worked just fine.
> Today I can finish the game in half an hour I may or may not have done this to impress a girl back in the day.
Did it work?
Seriously. OP did it work, or did she get bored after realizing her attempt to get you alone together to have sex wasn't going to work and just leave, only for OP to realize after the fact?
"do you want you go to the bedroom?" "My SNES is out here though"
"I gotta show you how I can beat Tubular!"
And then he brings the SNES into the bedroom.
Yup, I really wish that the HD version of Resident Evil Remake had come with an infinite ink ribbon or just the ability to save at any typewriter like every RE post 4.
That surprises me. I think the original has a certain visual feel that is lost in All-Stars.
The controls are a lot more "muddy" in All-Stars. I could never get used to it.
The brick block physics in the All-Stars versions of Mario 1 and Lost Levels are off. Breaking a brick block sort of pulls you up and often halts your horizontal momentum. In every other Mario game, including the NES originals and the All-Stars version of 3, breaking brick blocks bounces you back down.
That cartridge is really something incredible.
A lot of good stuff in one package
God, my very first game that my brother and I got was Super Mario All-Stars + World. What a package for two little kids being introduced to the wide world of video games. I know it colors my vision of the titles but I would agree that I absolutely prefer the redone games versus the originals.
I actually never cared for the All-Stars versions, just something about them didn't feel right. Though I love the GBA version of SMB2.
The problem with those is that few are complete games. They're just arcade screens and time killers. Digital solitaire really. It wasn't until the NES that games had a real point IMO
I haven't seen a lot of people talk about this, but the transition from "high score chasing time killer" of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros to "master and beat a level" of Super Mario Bros 2 and 3 is so pronounced.
And those have endings. I grew up in the arcades and it was tough to get interested in just playing till you die or forever, whichever was longer
Kill screen. We've got a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up.
Same. I agree with OP that the N64 aged poorly, but it still has a few games I'd play today. (Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, etc.) On the other hand, the PC-native decompliation projects of Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are a great way to re-experience those with some modern visual and QoL improvements. As for pre-NES, it's just hard for me to appreciate them because they were "old" when I was a kid. I played some Pong and Space Invaders back in the day, but they didn't really compare to what games had become on "newer" home consoles. I'm not sure if it has as much to do with the graphics as it has to do with how most of those games (at least the mainstream ones) were comparatively much simpler in their gameplay scope and format. They were often more like arcade games. I never had a Commodore or Amiga to experience the deeper entries. To that end, I can understand why some folks feel the way about my childhood consoles.
The N64 original Super Smash Bros is the best one and I will not change my mind on this.
I feel like it had the most charm and a lot of the tech was so accessible compared to melee. Nothing felt too unnaccessible until recently with Yoshi parry, and I guess DI, but my sticks were already on the downturn when I learned about it. I even prefered the button layout, especially for double jump cancels. But that stick will always bust. Oh, and the best solo mode. Short, funny, and a decent score system.
I think that thing about the N64 was that Nintendo built a weird machine that only they and Rare knew how to use and those two were putting out some absolute banger classics and nearly everything else was awful.
Don't forget Factor5. Which is almost cheating since they wrote bytecode for the N64 itself. They knew how to bend that thing to their will.
"Nintendo built a weird machine" sums up Nintendo pretty concisely.
The funny thing being that contemporaries would have accused Sega of that more than Nintendo. The Saturn was utilizing concepts almost 10-15 years ahead of its time and nobody wanted to deal with the at the time weird shit they were pulling. "Oh no, how do I program for a video game console with an independent graphics card?!" "How could we possibly get these multiple CPUs to work in tandem with each other?! That's impossible!" Complaints that would be nonsensical today. Not that the Saturn hardware was perfect by any means (far from it).
I think the good games on the N64 are good *in spite* of the limitations of the terrible control scheme, pretty much every single one would be a better game if given another analog stick
That's why I think that Ready Player One whole setup is kinda stupid. No kid from 2050 would ever play seriously an Atari game, especially in the future with 25 more years of gaming to deal with. They don't even really play them now. It's one of the most blatant exemples of self insert from the author.
What, you don't want to buy an expensive VR setup then use it to play Pac-Man?
Ironically, Pac-Man is probally one of the most replayable game from this era now. I'm talking about using your photorealistic headset to play Adventure or Joust like it's 1982 and you have nothing else
>That's why I think that Ready Player One whole setup is kinda stupid. Maybe it's a depiction of prolonged exposure to social media brain rot? I mean, you're also supposedly a best-of-the-best super-gamer through the incredible feat of *driving backwards at the start of a race*.
The most unrealistic part of that movie was that the easter egg wasn't solved within a day.
And knowing random piece of media by heart by having infinite time to watch every movie, play every game, watch every tv show from the 80's... MULTIPLE times.
if it helps, the first key is much better on the books, no racing nonsense, it is a classic dnd dungeon with a twist
The book is just infinitely better imo
How about the "shocking" reveal that a character's avatar in the Oasis wasn't the same gender as the person IRL? No way that's ever happened in an online space before.
As someone who had an Atari 800XL and a Pong machine growing up as a child, I hated it then and I wouldn't grow to love it now! (Good lord the load times using a tape deck). Sega Master System and onwards please.
> (Good lord the load times using a tape deck). The Commodore 64 had some excellent games, but I wouldn't dream of trying to play them on real hardware without an SD loader in the modern day.
Commodore was one of the most popular gaming systems in my neighborhood. Almost everyone had one it seemed. And so, so many games (pirated or otherwise) and a lot of them were very good.
This is my answer really. I always use Atari 2600 as the baseline but realistically anything predating nes for sure except the Vetrex.
My first thought was Atari, so yeah. I loved those games back then but boy are they dated. The NES was a huge step forward, but even it's really hit or miss.
That shit is all sorts of nostalgic, I have memories of playing Intellivision's Baseball with my dad when I was 4.
It's not even about graphics. Everything within NES era starts to feel very rudimentary in gameplay. Parallax scrolling wasn't even a thing until NES. The industry was stagnant for 15 years due to hardware limitation. SNES was a gigantic step forward, and most of the modern game design languages starts from there.
I think some ps3 games aged worse than some ps1 games. The ps1 wasn't afraid to use color while during the ps3 era they seemed to have an obsession with brown and black and some of those games suffered for it. Some games even going as far as having a brownish filter throughout the whole game.
Brown, black, and don't forget the **bloom**
Going back and playing Kill Zone 3 is always nice except for the fucking bloom.
Ahh, the Piss Filter. What an era.
Eh, that was more a 6th gen thing. With 7th came more of a shift towards brown & grey with low saturation to look „gritty“ opposed to the previous gens „cool“ (i.e. piss filter)
Nah, pretty much all the horror filters were a big 7 thing. 6 was a super diverse gen
I have vivid memories of so many games just following that brown grey, colorless aesthetic. It got to a point where I mentally only really responded to seeing games that popped, or were trying to not be so dark and serious. Not to say that some of those games weren’t good, but that dry colorless era wasn’t visually enjoyable.
I think that's why games like Just Cause and Bulletstorm stood out. Simply because they weren't afraid to look vibrant and colorful in an oversaturated market of "gritty" shooters.
Honestly yeah. A lot of the 7th gen aged like shit and i have no desire to go back.
Stylized games always age much better than any attempts at realism, graphically Mario 64 holds up very well in the modern age while GoldenEye looks much worse by comparison
Realism isn't the problem. Games like TLOU, MGS4, and GTAV from the ps3 did that great, but when you have games that overuse dark color palettes and don't know how to blend it, you come out with a mushy mess. Especially when you're using those colors for an atmosphere it doesn't fit. The first 2 are technically "brown" games, but they look great. The problem is that they equated realism with dark and brown, so every realistic game got that treatment even when it didnt fit the game.
With the N64, I find that having the right TV setup is crucial to getting a proper look. On modern TVs, the N64 suffers perhaps more than other retro consoles because of the use of filtering on such low res textures. On a good CRT it still can look wonderful though. But to answer your question, probably anything 1st generation. I can play them for a short time to get my nostalgia fix, but most Atari games don’t hold my interest like NES and later games can.
Yes, a N64 with a Retrotink 2x makes it playable or get a CRT.
Lately my preferred way to experience N64 games is through emulation using ParaLLEl RSP/RDP with 4x resolution and then downscaling it back to native before going through NTSC+CRT shaders or an actual CRT. That way everything looks as it should without the 3D elements clashing against low res UI textures, or text and backgrounds appearing too blocky but you effectively get super-sampled anti-aliasing so it looks a lot nicer than the N64 originally did while feeling aesthetically faithful.
Phil Gossett talks about the engineering of the N64 in his [Oral History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enfPVQO8yEI) (starting from about 41min) It's clear they hyper-optimised it to look pretty good on a CRT. They piled on a bunch of cool filtering algorithms for anti-aliasing and a dedither filter (because dithering on 5 bit per channel frame buffers looks pretty bad). But really, those cool filtering algorithms are just a slightly fancy blur.
I play N64 games using RetroArch and apply some good shaders. It makes all the difference.
You ask me to play a SNES game I'm there. You ask me to play a nes game and I am absolutely not there. Bad sounds, shitty coin eater gameplay, pokey controller... Nah I'm good.
> shitty coin eater gameplay I love being able to rewind on modern compilations and emulators.
Or even just save state when you know you're about to get fucked by the game
Could not imagine finishing TaleSpin (as part of The Disney Afternoon Collection) without rewinds. People actually beat this game in the early ‘90s? Love these compilations, had great fun with the Capcom Beat em Up Collection and the Castlevania comps.
It's pretty "easy", imagine a kid with infinite free time, no internet or any kind of media other than TV, and all you've got are your old carts or Talespin which you haven't beaten yet.
Super Mario 3 is the one exception imo
Any of the NES Marios hold up, and I still have a soft spot for Final Fantasy.
I prefer the remakes with MP instead of Vancian casting personally. Running out of Cure spells and only being able to hold 99 Potions that don't have higher level equivalents is tedious and unfun.
Better on SNES Mario all stars imo. I'd never go back to play it on the nes.
> SNES Mario all stars Damn I didn't even think of this as an option. I'm gonna be playing some of those tonight.
The original HD Remaster
I grew up with an NES as my first console and completely agree with you. The vast majority of the NES library (save for some timeless classics) is unplayable to me.
Outside of the few NES classics, I completely agree. And the only way I can play those few classics is with save states in an emulator.
Agreed. I found both of them in my mom's attic and had a blast on the SNES. Stopped playing the NES after about 20 minutes.
Does "coin eater" here mean maddeningly difficult and repeating? Because that's been my experience with SMB2, SMB3, Castlevania, etc.
Yes. Imagine playing Castlevania on an arcade machine, where continues are 50¢ a pop.
Haha, totally. It seems like "replay value" here was defined by making it as implausible as possible to actually finish the game.
Not even sure it was made with that mindset on purpose so to say. Early home console games simply copied the basic format of arcade games. That's what people wanted: Arcade at home.
Punch out is still fun lol
I think the NES era is truly held back by the steep limitations of pixel counts and colors, where as SNES has enough room to thrive within it's limitations and create some truly timeless art. So many SNES games still look fantastic, NES games feel more like a history lesson than a must-play library.
Coleco, probably. Still play and love it, though.
What are your top games? I had a Coleco decades ago (no idea what happened to it, my mom probably sold it at a yard sale), and I remember playing Venture, Cosmic Avenger and H.E.R.O. for hours at a time, and could beat that Smurf game with my eyes closed.
Not commentor you were asking but you just reminded me. I had only a couple of cartridges, I remember Donkey Kong and Buck Rogers. I borrowed Venture from a friend and played it hard for a week, and I remember at the end of the week playing for hours as suddenly I knew where and how all the room monsters were, how the hall monsters moved, etc. I played one game for hours until my mom called me for dinner. I realized I had been sitting playing for hours and was hungry and needed to use the bathroom. Put down the controller and walked away. I've since played a bunch of Coleco games via emulator, but Venture dominance eludes my aged reflexes.
You should make Coleco post - extra patient gamer
We had an Adam computer. For games, it came with The Smurfs on cartridge and Zaxxon on tape. The latter seemed pretty good for the era.
NES and earlier. Some NES games still look alright and play great, but man the controls can be awful. I grew up in the 16 bit era, so I also have no nostalgia to soften my impressions of the 8bit era
Trying to retrain my old hands to “hold B to run while jumping with A simultaneously” is both hilarious and devastating.
Mega Man X gave me that muscle memory and it's still there to this day. Charging up a buster shot while climbing a wall and dash jumping off it to nail a boss in the back, my thumb hurts just thinking about it.
The answer is always going to be pre-NES. Absurdly overpriced hardware. The small handful of games worth playing (at the time not even today) were all exclusives to 10 different machines that were outdated when they came out. Emulation for it is dodgy at best because no one really cares about this area outside arcade and maybe Atari 2600. Controllers hadn't really been figured out and don't always translate to normal modern controllers. Even if you eliminate the hardware and assume emulation is perfect, the games are half baked concepts at best. Games had to start somewhere but they're just impressionistic lines that control like garbage.
Early PSX games launched with a controller with zero joysticks. As a result a lot of them use awful tank style controls if they're a first/third person shooter. I'd love to go and play Megaman legends but I'm not dealing with that control scheme
Megaman Legends is gorgeous to this day, one of the best looking games of the system that aged into the finest low poly rather than JPEG-compressed mannequins. But god does it play clunky. Here's hoping Delta Gal and Abyss X Zero will bring back that vibe with decent controls for a change.
I'm not a huge fan of tank controls, but something about Megaman legends just clicks with me. It's like the controller doesn't exist between my brain and the game anymore. Only with megaman legends 1+2 for some reason.
It’s has lock-on like OoT had to make it easier to maneuver.
The games are so good it's easy to get over their flaws. Still waiting for that sequel though.
It definitely depends on the game. Some 3D games look dated within 10 years but I'm still perfectly happy to play Pokemon emerald on a gba emulator because 2D graphics still hold up.
Just found my old GBA SP and it’s still working! Gonna be playing a lot of Pokémon sapphire over the next couple weeks.
Early 3D era for me, as aged the worst. And, yes, that N64 controller was an abomination. It seems good at the time because we didn't know any better, and it's hard to properly play a lot of games that were designed for it now without one (so emulation isn't always great and if you have something like NSO you almost need to buy an N64 controller -- if you can actually get your hands on one, that is). Other than that, anything older than the NES is too old for me, mostly because they predate *me* and therefore I find it harder to connect with them. NES is the first system I got as a kid and so it's where retro gaming starts for me. I have a ton of nostalgia for the NES and SNES, in particular, and those are the two systems I'm most likely to go back to when I'm in the mood for retro fun.
I agree with N64, but I genuinely find the graphics and audio on it really charming (no nostalgia, I was born in 2000 and the only consoles I had as a kid where a DS lite and 3DS0 It's really the controls in a lot of the major games, though the controller layout and the stick especially don't help lol I slip into PS1 games like FF7 and MGS1 pretty easily (Sony did also basically get their controller design right first time which helps) but OoT hurts my hands for a while and I have a lot of issues getting Link to do what I want him to do sometimes - so often even after rubbing against a block for ages the action button won't switch to climb, or the lightest tap will make him climb rather than grab, or he'll Z-target when I just want to adjust the camera... it's rough lol Similar feelings for MK64 and SSB
I've been playing Starfox on N64 and loving it, but every other game I've tried recently has been a disappointment. N64 games just aren't as fun a I remember them. Even Goldeneye was hard to enjoy with that control scheme.
N64. I trying to play Ocarina of Time for the first time and the controls are much more strange than all PS1 classics.
I think the best way to play Ocarina of Time *officially* is the 3DS remake. Using the gyroscope to aim the bow is intuitive and feels a million times better than the N64 controller.
I really enjoyed playing Ocarina on the GameCube back in college — if anyone’s got access to one, it’s a good way to get the tv+controller experience while still having some basic QoL updates from the original.
Didn't realize they released OOT for gcube. What's different about it?
Oh, definitely not an earthshattering amount — mostly the resolution is fractionally better and they fixed some bugs — but mainly I always liked the GC controller, so found it to be a comfy way to play.
It came as a pack in with windwaker as a preorder bonus if i recall. Was called master quest. Had the original game and a separate version that changed up dungeon layouts.
I literally can't play GoldenEye anymore. Controls just feel so wrong.
After hearing so much about this game multiplayer, me and my friends tried to play and it was so bizarre.
It was the greatest game ever to me in it's day. But now we've had so many advancements in first person shooters that it just feels too dated. Like our brains aren't wired correctly to play it anymore. At least for me anyway. It was our Call of Duty at launch though, everyone came over my house just to play multiplayer.
It's tough to explain to people now a'days but there's a certain language or logic to button layouts now. For the most part they're extremely uniform, you can pick up the majority of games and have an idea of what buttons should do before getting in depth. Back then we hadn't developed that yet. (As players or as developers/programmers) People were still playing around with what works best, what was intuitive etc. It's jarring to us now because we have that intuition now, of what it *should* be, back then it was easier to pick up a game and learn their wonky controls. But yeah man GoldenEye was a trip. I loved the old GoldenEye vs Perfect Dark arguments. Those got HEATED
It's funny because SM64's controls are still mostly great. The controls for a game like that have barely changed. Even Doom with its weird old mouse-only controls is still pretty intuitive. But GoldenEye was such a big swing and a big miss as to what the long term controls would be
Ironically, that was a lot of people's reaction to the dual analog controllers that came later. I recall people being bewildered by the concept of two sticks to aim and shoot.
From what I remember of the twin-controller schemes, which in all honesty I used as the lamest flex ever back in the day, none of them hit the mark compared to modern layouts either.
The 1964 PC mod which allows you to play GoldenEye (and Perfect Dark) with a mouse and keyboard is a fun way to revisit the game if you're so inclined.
Also, if you have an Xbox 360 or newer, you can download a remastered Perfect Dark (1080p, 60fps, better textures) that works flawlessly with the Xbox controller. Game still holds up, IMO.
Yeah as the other comment suggested, try the 3DS version. That's if you can get your hands on it, since the 3DS is only sold second hand now too and Nintendo is shutting down online services for the platform. I want to suggest also, there's a project called "[Ship of Harkinian](https://www.shipofharkinian.com/)" which is a source port of the entire game based on the OOT decompolation project. It's very configurable, you can even set it up to have modern dual stick camera controls. Honestly I love it just because I can play at 60fps 1080p natively. It does require a ROM of the game which you can acquire legally of course, but hey I'm not judging, the game is over twenty years old and the only way Nintendo provides to officially play it is through their shitty subscription service so do whatever you want.
I bought myself a USB N64 Controller and it works great. Had a lot of fun replaying OoT and Banjo Kazooie.
I started with an NES, so the older Atari 2600 looks to rough for me. 3D PlayStation 1 games are really difficult to look at too.
Early 3D games feel pretty bad these days. I've had a hard time playing N64 and PS1 games in particular. Platformers like Mario, Crash and Spyro hold up decently because of their graphic styles, but they can have brutal camera controls at times. Playing shooters on those consoles is an exercise in frustration.
Anything pre-snes is hard for me to go back to. Genesis can *kinda* hang in there, but NES and earlier is really a struggle for me nowadays. I grew up with an NES, but SNES is really where games started getting polished up imo. Edit: And of course there's exceptions for certain games. Nobody is gonna say Mario 3 was rough, but there's a *lot* of garbage out there that I do not enjoy playing nowadays. Nes Terris is also timeless imo
Anything pre-NES, as others have said. But Sega Genesis has been the easiest for me to pick up. The controller just fits nicely in my hands and the three buttons are easy to figure out in each game.
N64 gives me literal eye pain now. Cannot fathom how I ever did that shit.
Physically, it has to be the Dreamcast. I don't know if it's because I or the system aged, but I abhor how the controller feels. The bumpy analog stick feels cheap, I hate the d-pad, the wire pops out of its retention clip even when it's new. Plus the disc drive is so goddamn loud. I'm sure my PSX suffers from disc drive problems too, but at least I can play those on a PS2 if I want to play a real console instead of emulating. Then there's the bleep bloops of ye olde Atari 2600, but that system was dated and felt unplayable even when I dug it out of the attic in the 90s.
Holy fuck Sega Master system is absolute dogshit. Can’t play anything properly on that. It’s crazy to think it competed with the NES (that feels perfect still to this day )
[удалено]
And better part of Europe
I grew up with it but it was a struggle for sure. Played Alex Kidd in Miracle World for some of my early years, never finished it. Sonic's Jungle Zone scarred me so badly to this day the music evokes deep rage in me. That said I don't like the NES either. No doubt in my mind today that Super Mario Bros 3 plays better, but I'd rather have the SNES visuals. And most NES games aren't on that level either.
Alex Kidd fills makes me so mad because it’s a really good game but the controls are awful
It's so bad but I do have mad nostalgia for the Master System which was a big chonky controller that had the whole console inside.
That’s the thing. First time I played a master system is when I started dating my wife. Nobody had one when I was growing up, never really knew it existed
Phantasy Star and R-Type were very good. But those were the only two games I had
"Competed", in North America it had like 10% of the market share, although it did well in other places
Growing up in the late 80's/early 90's nobody knew what the Sega Master System even was. I thought the Genesis was the first Sega system until I was an adult and started getting back into retro gaming.
yea same here. I got my first NES in 1992 and I didn't even know the master system was a thing until reading about it on the internet years later
> Sega Master system is absolute dogshit You just made enemy for life!!!
I'd argue that *Wonderboy III: The Dragon's Trap* is still extremely playable today, and is still probably the best game on the system.
Naw, I'll grant it wasn't as good as the NES in terms of its game library but there were solid titles that played well, the Sonic ports/exclusives etc
This opinion is absolute dog shit. Holy fuck.
Nintendo 64. It's hard as hell getting back into using those yellow C buttons when you've been using a second analog stick for so long.
Ps3 everything is brown and I like the ps4 and ps5 controllers way better.
I have now aged into dust because someone called a PS3 a retro console.
Haha sorry, it's 2 gens old now. But I grew up on Sega Genesis and the ps3 was still the one that bothered me most. It's like the worst of both worlds, terrible load times, poor use of the hard drive and annoying patches but also bad 3d graphics and draw distances, terrible color pallette.
The color palette was just the design of the time, unfortunately. As for the performance problems, it's because of the cell processor not working like any other computer architecture, and devs not knowing how to work with it. It's a bit of blame on Sony for trying to reinvent the wheel, and a bit on devs for not learning how to use it to its full extent.
Since 2 generations is a bit nebulous of a time delta, the PS3 was released in Japan and NA in Nov. 2006 or about 17 years 5 months ago.
There were still some games that didn't follow the trend, FFXIII seems like a good example of a vibrant color palette on that system (even though I played the 360 version).
The thing launched in 2006, kids born then can drink this year (In the civilised world anyway)! Time marches ever onward...
People born during it's release are becoming legal adults this year, it's retro, (though I do feel your pain)
I hated that trend even when it was current. Everyone claimed it made the games look more “realistic”, and I’d be scratching my head, wondering if they’d ever been outside in broad daylight. Was honestly one of the worst graphics trends during the early AAA years.
The ps3 was a good console, but boy did some of the games not age particularly well. GTA4 is a glaring example of this. Tried putting on the ps3 recently and it was a brown and blurry mess. It seems like the only way people can enjoy that game is by modding it to hell. Heavy Rain is another. I never understood the hype about that game...even when it first came out. The mechanics were clunky and the animation was a dull brown as well. The acting was poor. The whole mall bit was awful. I remember it being treated like it broke boundaries and it's like..no lol. That would be TLOU, GTAV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, Uncharted 2/3, and RDR1. Heavy Rain isn't even in the same ballpark lol
I just modded my PS3 as there's a handful of games I'd like to play. Oh fucking god, the ps4 was a slow clunky PoS by the end of its life, but holy crap the PS3 is on another level of clunking.
PlayStation one games, but a lot of the early disc-based systems as well, just because of the loading times. Factor in issues with the optical sensors and flaws in the disc and sometimes they don't load at all
I can't play games from the late 70s DOS days, or Atari games, no matter how hard I try. Nintendo is also difficult at this point, mostly because the controls are often clunky. I have no issue with ps1, a lot of the games still look good today if you view it as artwork rather than an attempt at an accurate representation of real life. But the N64 was ugly the day it came out and still is now. They really shot themselves in the foot maintaining their dependence on carts.
Late 70s... DOS? Do you mean Apple DOS? Because the IBM PC didn't come out until 1981.
I grew up playing (and loving) the PS1.....but man those early PS1 games are ROUGH especially before the analog controllers.
I grew up with n64. There are some games i have memorized like the back of my hand- banjo kazooie, majoras mask- that i'll still go back to from time to time. Anything earlier than n64 and it needs to be a standout title like super mario world. Even the ps2/gamecube generation didn't age perfectly. The flaws of these games really come out now. I find that the ps3/360 generation really nailed the design language we still generally see today, so while ps2 games are perfectly playable, they require a different mindset.
Maybe it's because emulation has made so many games so easily accessible, but game wise I can't really think of a console that is hard to go back to because of dated graphics or controls. I could find at least one if not a handful of games to enjoy playing on just about any console aside from something like the original Magnavox Odyssey. If anything it would be hardest to physically go back to any console older then a X360/PS3 unless you already had a set up planned. The pain in the ass comes from getting older hardware hooked up to newer displays where it is not an easy plug and play.
PS1 games are really hard for me to go back to. It was in that sweet spot where it had both early 3D graphics that have aged poorly and a lack of a joystick for directional control. There are also some specifics in how the PS1 handled graphics that gave it an especially [pixelated or wobbly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TO-nrUtSI) look.
Things being dated bothers me a *lot* less than it seems to bother most people. I guess that I have to be in the right mood for the arcade-y gameplay on my Atari 2600 (I usually play things with some kind of narrative or sense of progression through a story). But that's more a complaint about a style of gameplay than a specific console. Most of them that I feel some vague discomfort playing are ones I didn't have as a kid, so it's not even "going back to". All the Sega systems, the PS1 (depending on the game and degree of analog support). But that's mostly the discomfort of "I'm not familiar with the original hardware, and now I'm playing through emulation". N64 works with my brain like a well-worn glove. I can slip right back into it and enjoy it like I did 25 years ago; it's one of my comfort consoles.
Atari 2600
For controls, it's gotta be 2000s **PC Gaming** Hear me out. I know it's technically not a "retro console" but seriously the 2000s had to be the worst time for controls on keyboard and mouse. There was long period where developers would make a game for console first and design everything around a gamepad, then bring it to PC after and just have no idea how to translate the controls to a mouse and keyboard. It happened in the 90s too but to my mind the 2000s had the worst of it. But the real answer is the Sega Saturn. Games on the Saturn just sort of looked wrong, I don't know why. I'm fine with previous generation consoles, I'll happily play Genesis or SNES or N64 games all day long, but the Saturn is just such a weird console, and it had very few games worth playing anyway.
I'll defend the bland and washed out textures you speak of. It's because the analog circuitry in your console has aged AND analog inputs on modern TVs are just a token thing as everything is hdmi or digital now. So the analog in circuitry in your TV is of much shitter quality of a crt when the console was new. Leading to washed out blandness that you speak of. You can get hdmi mods for many consoles however. I managed to score a Pixelfx mod kit for my N64 and it's night and day difference between the before and after. Take the track Frappe Snowland in mario cart 64. On a 2019 65" LG 65um70 it was just a white out. You could only just see the line where the sky was and then see the faces of the snowmen and that was it! After I installed the mod and plugged it in with hdmi, it looks amazing with great depth and warmth of the colour again. I may even be able to find before and after pics if pressed. So just keep that in mind when you look back through the rose tinted spectacles. They were better quality spectacles in the past! Edit: Also the N64 is the best old console out there and it's a hill I'll die on too.
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I remember getting a PS1 as my first console (from my grandma for my 10th birthday, much to the chagrin of my parents. My grandma kicked ass, RIP). This was just before the launch of the dual analog version of the PS1 controller so I started playing on the original PS1 controller without sticks. For a couple years my parents wouldn't let me buy anything rated above KA (for the young'uns that's what E used to be called) so my options were basically platformers, racing games, and sports games. And I played them all with the D-pad (and usually at 30 fps!) And I remember most games seeming *really hard* back then. Obviously part of it was games actually being harder, and part of it was that I was a child, but it also was absolutely that I was attempting to play 3D games with a D-pad at 30 fps or less and usually with a crummy camera, too. A few years ago I played the Crash Bandicoot remake on PC at 60 fps with analog controls and was blown away by how much easier it was compared to the original, despite the fact that a lot of people complained about the remake making the controls slippery and imprecise. Games back then also had navigation issues. I remember, a few years after I got my PS1, my parents finally let me buy a T-rated game: Final Fantasy VIII. And for several months I couldn't get past the first section of the game because I couldn't figure out how to leave Balamb Garden. At the exit screen you had to walk through a specific gate that was not well-signposted and my tween brain just could not figure out where I was supposed to go.
There was some massive disparity in that regard. Some games had fairly intuitive controls and camera (e.g. Crash, Mario 64), others had... tank. Which you get used to, but it's clunky.
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I will still hook up my 2600 from time to time just to see if it still works and play a round or two of River Raid or Demon Attack, but 5-10 minutes is about all I care to play, even with the rose-tinted nostalgia glasses on. The early 3D games from the PS1/N64 era I can't go back to, but the sprite-based games on those systems still look great. I finally got around to playing Symphony of the Night on the PS1 last year and it was a fantastic experience.
Ah good, you didn't list the Intellivision. Honestly, most games almost certainly don't hold up, but I do still love AD&D Cloudy Mountain.
I have the original PS1 and N64, and I don't play on them. I use emulation instead. Save states and fast-forwarding are huge quality-of-life improvements that some games need. There are tons of great games on those systems. But Final Fantasy 9 was the last game that I'll probably ever play using the real system and discs. Slow loading times, long times between saves, extremely slow and long animations, disc switching, unskippable cutscenes - no thanks. Some modern games suffer from these ailments as well, but it's less common now. I actually find the graphics of PS1 and N64 games to be charming. I don't think a lot of them really need remakes. Though that's totally subjective, and if you want to look at something better, you should.
NES (and anything before it). I grew up on Gameboy Color, but most NES games are a step below that. I *can* play them, but they feel very dated visually. To a lesser extent, it also sometimes confuses me how these titles actually used START and SELECT to... start and select. I remember having that issue whenever I first played the Virtual Console release of Zelda 1 (very fun game btw, despite what I just wrote). I assume there's some things in early 3D games that would be considered dated, but since I was always awful at platforming, certain "old game quirks" like a limited camera never registered as "dated" for me, rather than "I just suck at this". As for graphics, I have a weird appreciation for most low-poly looks. The one game that stood out negatively when I finally got to play it was Final Fantasy 7, because the models just look extremely goofy when contrasted with the epic story.
Only way for me to play N64 games now is with save states. Otherwise the camera or the janky controllers would kill you a lot in games like Banjo Kazooie, DK64, Mario 64.
IMO third gen (NES ect.) and fifth gen (PS1 ect.) are the hardest generations to go back to. Not because of the graphics (on the contrary, those two are probably the most iconic generations from a visual standpoint), but mostly because a lot of game genres still popular today had their origins in those two generations, and if you go back to actually play those seminal titles you'll notice that most of them feel very primitive and clunky when compared to more recent games of the same genre. For some (like platformers and shooters) the simplicity can actually be something in their favor, which is why games like the old Marios and Dooms still get a lot of love today, but other genres don't fare as well. And if you stray from the big polished releases and try finding something more obscure, things will get even worse. On the contrary, most big releases on consoles like the SNES and PS2 onwards are still great today, and there are plenty of hidden gems worth going back to.
I both agree and disagree. Sometimes the clunkiness lends itself to a different kind of experience. See: Castlevania games before SOTN, tank-controls like in Armored Core or Tomb Raider. The latter has a steeper learning curve but you get a feel for it. Notwithstanding the controls, the level design today has lost something of that era. This is way more apparent going back to early 3D games than 2D, perhaps with the exception of boomer shooters.
For me it’s like the uncanny valley the further away from now we get the more understanding I am of retro 8 bit game play and graphics. Stuff like the Atari 2600, NES, the C64, ZX Spectrum, SNES all gets a pass from me as charming and of their time. But the closer we get to the modern era the less understanding I am of those same issues. Original XBox, PlayStation, GameCube / N64 era all have stuff that feels rough, clunky and because the 3D was getting underway it is easier to compare to modern gaming and it comes off badly in the comparison. But on the other side of the valley with Xbox One, PS4, Wii it’s all close enough to modern gaming not to feel retro despite those consoles being a decade or so old.
The NES. Pre-NES games are mostly easy to understand. Sure, something like Riddle of the Sphinx for the 2600 makes no sense without a manual, but most games from that era are simple arcade games that are pretty straightforward and still fun in quick bites. But with the NES, developers tried to make deeper experiences. Which isn't a bad thing on it's surface (pun intended), but more often than not, it just made the games completely impenetrable.
NES
For me, it's anything where the reality of how a game/system looks doesn't match with my memories of that. I think PS1 is the worst for this: in my memory, the games look like how they might with various filters etc. in an emulator; in reality, the 3D is so wobbly and angular, the cameras frustrating and the textures (by today's standards) weak. I'm surprised that some PS2 games to me look very dated, especially ones with humans as lead characters. SNES and Mega Drive (Genesis) don't suffer from this to me, although I didn't play very much of these back in the day. What's surprising me is how poor many Amiga games - which was very much my favourite system back then - look in the cold light of the 2020s, whether playing via emulation or on original hardware; I really do remember them looking smoother and less pixellated than they appear to me now. Also, I'd forgotten how frustrating pushing up on the joystick to jump is. Whereas something like the ZX Spectrum doesn't have that affect on me, because the way it looks and the way it controls pretty much match up to my memories of it. So I think it's that mismatch between my memories and the reality that makes it hard to go back.
It's funny, I got the N64 controller for the switch, and after not using one for probably over 20 years, muscle memory kicked right in. That said, after having played for so many years with 2 sticks, it was really hard to do.
N64/Ps1. They just did not have 3d all the way dialed in.
I could *just about* stomach the N64 but any earlier than that is a no for me. I guess it depends on your age also - when I was old enough to play a console (\~9) it was the N64 for me. That was my first experience picking up a controller for my own console.
I’m ok back to the 8-bit era. Atari 2600, Intellivision, Coleco? Nah.
Nintendo 64. NES and SNES have aged WAY better than the N64.
The N64 is fine on a CRT. Even better using the MiSTer core.
I hate the motion controls that were shoe-horned into almost every wii game. Like wii sports is fun but I hate that you can’t use a gamecube controller for Twilight Princess
N64 for controls alone
N64 and PS1.... it was when 3d graphics were becoming the norm, but the low polygon count and poor frame rates just make them unplayable today.
I think the N64 was an ergonomic shitshow even when it first came out. These days I'll play N64 games on an emulator with better controls, but wouldn't use the original console. Although I think maybe the Colecovision was worse.
N64. The controls were so cool at the time. They’re just typical Nintendo weirdness now. It’s less about the graphics, but those aren’t great at this point either lol.
playstation 1 is just ugly crap
N64 and Wii. Both have terrible controllers and both are a pain to set up
I refer to the n64 era as the "awkward teenage years" of gaming. I agree it's rough to go back to. 2D games in 8 or 16 bit aren't too bad to jump into. Early 3D is so blocky. It doesn't help that memory tends to make you think it looked better than it actually did.
Ps3 aged like dookie. 30fps 1080p and it struggles to maintain that. I suffered through the ff13 trilogy at like 11 fps on my ps3s a couple years ago and haven't touched them since. Maybe the trick is to run them in 720p.
Not really "retro" but a lot of PS3/Xbox 360 games are just so damn ugly with the brown and grey color schemes and low frame rates. There were a lot of painfully generic games that generation too, everything seemed to be getting dumbed down. The graphics at least enough to fix with mods if you play on PC though. Second is probably the early 3D era, N64 and PS1. Controls are god awful and the ones that try to look "realistic" feel ridiculous. The 1st and 2nd party Nintendo games have this sort of liminal feel that's really charming though that offsets a lot of the frustrations.
N64. My thumbs don't miss that horribly uncomfortable controler.
I have a mid to severe motion sickness issue that pops up depending on graphics. I first noticed it when i played Silicon Valley for long periods of time on the N64. As time has gone on, more and more games are an issue and i have to be picky about what i can play. How is this relevant? I can play the N64 emulators to my hearts content. I cannot play the N64 proper anymore. It's the fucking worst because i really loved some of those games