What are some old games that are hard to revisit, because a more modern and superior version exists?
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If you’re revisiting BG1 via the Enhanced Edition it’s actually been changed a lot from the original game. One of the biggest differences is that summoning spells don’t scale in the number of minions you get the way they did in the original. I remember summoning great big walls of skeletons with Animate Dead and just having my entire party pelt the enemy with slings and arrows from relative safety. Can’t do that anymore!
Pelting the enemy with slings and arrows still works, but now and then they'll still target me at range and land a hit. I don't have a summoner in my party either, so I doubt I'd see a difference, especially at level 1.
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I'd say TES as well, but with Oblivion > Morrowind. I had trouble getting used to it being more toward the RPG side than Action. But it's rewarding if you see it through.
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Do the original version of Doom and Doom 2 count? The relatively recent, re-released duology is objectively superior. Also, OpenRCT2 makes classic RCT and RCT2 feel incomplete at best, and outright horrible to play at worst.
things like dsda improve the game so much. It's hard to go back to the original game files.
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I actually prefer walls of text these days. I find myself too impatient to sit through long, voice-acted diatribes. I can read 10 times faster than the voice actor can speak, so I just end up turning on subtitles and skipping most of the voice acting anyway.
I also just find that voice acting tends to compromise the amount of writing. They just won’t have the VA read a wall of text and instead they’ll cut it right down, removing tons of nuance. Voice also similarly compromises the amount of dialogue options available to the character. I have yet to see a voice acted game with the sheer breadth and depth of dialogue option choices as games like Planescape Torment or Fallout 2.
While I agree with you on how mediocre voice acting drags down most games, BG3 is one of the very few where the voice acting elevated the dialogue for me and the dialogue felt a lot less rambling than in NWN and other similar games. In BG3 the player character dialogue options are pretty robust, sometimes having six or more options to choose from, since the character doesn't speak. I haven't played Planescape Torment or Fallout 2 to compare, so I'll take your word on them.
On a side note, BG3 was one of the games where the dialogue choices do matter. The worst are games where there are only a few poorly described choices and they have zero impact on what happens after! While I live Battletech (2019) the dialoge choices were completely pointless other than microfosing information. They would have been better off just having the NPCs banter after a single choice.
Personal preferences of course, which is why I love how many games there are to choose from.
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Do the original version of Doom and Doom 2 count? The relatively recent, re-released duology is objectively superior. Also, OpenRCT2 makes classic RCT and RCT2 feel incomplete at best, and outright horrible to play at worst.
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I would love to experience X-COM UFO Defense, but the only X-COMs I've played to any extent are the two "modern" Firaxis games. Going back to the originals is a real effort, especially without having the manual to hand.
OG XCOM has a really rough learning curve for sure. It is easy to understand the fundamentals of but it takes a lot longer to get it well enough to really enjoy. Once you do learn it I feel like it is different enough from new XCOM that you can enjoy both. I love new and old xcoms a ton.
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Do the original version of Doom and Doom 2 count? The relatively recent, re-released duology is objectively superior. Also, OpenRCT2 makes classic RCT and RCT2 feel incomplete at best, and outright horrible to play at worst.
They aren't even similar
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I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later entries since there's more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm don't seem as big, you don't have a way to know that you're tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn't seem as characteristic. It's a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
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I would love to experience X-COM UFO Defense, but the only X-COMs I've played to any extent are the two "modern" Firaxis games. Going back to the originals is a real effort, especially without having the manual to hand.
OpenXcom is a fantastic reimplementation of the original, and has some even more fantastic mods. I agree if you've never played it before and aren't too familiar with old school "Nintendo-hard" games, it can be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulty. Fun fact, the original had a broken difficulty selection and reset to the "easiest" difficulty after reloading any save game, so most people never truly experienced a full run at any difficulty above "easiest", so that's just naturally perceived as the way the game was meant to be balanced. Don't be ashamed of playing on the easiest difficulty or using "cheat" mods if that's what makes it playable for you. There's nobody to judge you but yourself and what matters is that you're having fun. And it is a ridiculously fun and replayable game, to me at least.
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Goldeneye. Revolutionized the FPS genre at the time. Nigh unplayable now. Tried recently using both NSO and on an original N64, it just hasn't aged well when compared to something modern.
Perfect Dark, on the other hand, totally still holds up today in my opinion, and there's a decompilation project that works great on PC and Steam Deck.
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On the subject of fighting games, its true that modern games are more fluid and dynamic and obviously visually superior, but they are also chopped up into a thousand microtransactions and dumbed down. There are six games in the Soul Calibur series now, and SC2 is still the peak there. I'd also argue the best games of both the Mortal Kombat and Dead or Alive series lie somewhere in the middle. The latest entries in all three of these series are honestly disappointing, as well as absolutely riddled with microtransactions.
Depends on the game I think. Guilty Gear is doing better than ever with Strive and actually has a decent population base for the first time. I do take some issue with the DLC character seasons but it's hard to fault them too much for following what has become standard practice, and they've been continually releasing high quality content in every update. Their netcode needs some work but the game part of the game is pristine, it's my favorite fighting game by a mile and as they continue to add in the rest of the old roster there's becoming less and less reason to try and play the older Guilty Gear games.
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I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later entries since there's more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm don't seem as big, you don't have a way to know that you're tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn't seem as characteristic. It's a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
I have set up the original Fallout (fully modded and running through Fallout 1n2), but it's pretty hard to get into. Not because of the graphics, which are actually fine, but just because the mechanics are quite intricate and I think my ability to learn new gameplay mechanics is declining (I've only played Fallout starting with Fallout 3). I'm going to keep trying to get into it!
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I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later entries since there's more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm don't seem as big, you don't have a way to know that you're tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn't seem as characteristic. It's a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
Fatal Frame 1. I think it may be the only one with a different button map for the camera and it's so annoying. I purposely only emulate it so I can remap the buttons.
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I tried playing Harvest Moon on the SNES today and having played Stardew Valley for hours, I thought I'd try and see how tolerable the original Harvest Moon was in comparison. I know and understand it is unfair because there's a 20 year gap between Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, while also discrediting Harvest Moon's later entries since there's more than one.
Harvest Moon to me is a bit hard to revisit. Having to get used to only carrying two tools at the same time, your farm don't seem as big, you don't have a way to know that you're tired as readily, you just have to watch for the signs and the village you visit doesn't seem as characteristic. It's a basic farming sim, it has to start somewhere.
But Stardew Valley does so many things that it is easier to revisit.
I grew up playing King's Quest 5, 6, and 7. I was curious about the earlier ones and eventually found them on an abandonware site a while back and they didn't age very well. Turns out 5 was the first one that was all point and click based. Prior to that, they were text based and you needed to know the exact wording or alternatives that they had thought of or you couldn't do anything. I'm sure they were great games for their time but I just couldn't get into them.
More recently, I bought the collection on steam. I'm not sure how well someone who has never played them before would enjoy them, but I found 5 and 6 still stood up, despite being like 30 years old. Though it might also help that I could still remember a bunch of the puzzles, as they could be pretty unforgiving of mistakes. Save often because you could die at any moment, and hope you don't miss picking up an item you'll need later on or you might get eaten by a yeti or something.
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Goldeneye. Revolutionized the FPS genre at the time. Nigh unplayable now. Tried recently using both NSO and on an original N64, it just hasn't aged well when compared to something modern.
You can actually play it with modern controls on NSO if you do a fair amount of tweaking. Makes it MUCH better.
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While I agree with you on how mediocre voice acting drags down most games, BG3 is one of the very few where the voice acting elevated the dialogue for me and the dialogue felt a lot less rambling than in NWN and other similar games. In BG3 the player character dialogue options are pretty robust, sometimes having six or more options to choose from, since the character doesn't speak. I haven't played Planescape Torment or Fallout 2 to compare, so I'll take your word on them.
On a side note, BG3 was one of the games where the dialogue choices do matter. The worst are games where there are only a few poorly described choices and they have zero impact on what happens after! While I live Battletech (2019) the dialoge choices were completely pointless other than microfosing information. They would have been better off just having the NPCs banter after a single choice.
Personal preferences of course, which is why I love how many games there are to choose from.
Special shoutout to Astarion. His voice actor adds a LOT to the character, more than any of the others.
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Special shoutout to Astarion. His voice actor adds a LOT to the character, more than any of the others.
I don't normally like that kind of character but he really grew on me fast. Astarian, Gale, and Karlach are my absolute favorites but the cast as a whole is solid.
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I don't normally like that kind of character but he really grew on me fast. Astarian, Gale, and Karlach are my absolute favorites but the cast as a whole is solid.
Love Karlach, but I couldn't stand Gale.
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Love Karlach, but I couldn't stand Gale.
That's what I am glad they included enough for personal preference and included the ability to respec them so they weren't locked into their starting classes.
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That's what I am glad they included enough for personal preference and included the ability to respec them so they weren't locked into their starting classes.
While I didn't like his class much, it was his personality that really got me. I saw he can become a literal god in some endings. Sure didn't happen in mine!
