this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games.

I've just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it's in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it's because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.

But I've grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I've forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.

Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.

I'm more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Multiplayer games in general don’t do it for me like they used to. These days I just want to get on and play a few missions in single player then hop off.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole "if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself" rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

This is when the whole “if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself” rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games.

it's the internet in general.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.

I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.

With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Same. I play games to enter a relaxation state after a long day at work. Playing a 45 minute cutthroat CS2 match with my friends where I have to be at attention constantly, while they're all screaming at each other for being bad, isn't exactly my idea of relaxation....

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Oh yeah! I used to play Unreal Tournament every day for hours. Also played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory a lot in the past.

Nowadays these games just don't appeal to me anymore.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I love MP but I can't bring myself to play due to how incredibly obnoxious it became.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Same. It's enough to team up with people at work so there's no desire to do the same at home. I also don't find grinding as much fun anymore. It used to be a fun way to spend time as a kid because we had too much time. Now, I don't even pick a game which doesn't have basic QoL features implemented.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (2 children)

For me it's the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don't hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (9 children)

I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for "the system," but in reality they're only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It's not that the N64 has a top ten, it's that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.

I'm sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef's Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that's the thing: It's always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn't know any better because that's all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:

Majora's Mask

Star Fox 64

Jet Force Gemini

Donkey Kong 64

Diddy Kong Racing

Excite Bike 64

Paper Mario

~~Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door~~

Pokémon Stadium

Yoshi's Story

Pokémon Snap

Mario Party

Felt at the time that there was always a high quality "AAA" release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.

Obviously a lot of them don't stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven't had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thousand Year Door was a GameCube game.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

You seem to have forgotten Shadows of the Empire too!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Star Wars Rogue Squadron?

Star Wars Episode 1 Racer?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yes my list was not exhaustive either and tried to focus on exclusives to make the point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Kind of sad that all of the games named were made by Nintendo or Rare (which was basically owned by Nintendo at the time)

How many third-party games were any good?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

We referred to Rare as a "second-party" developer at the time. So sad when they got bought by M$.

To answer your question on third-party games, some of my favourites were...

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

Star Wars: Episode 1 Racer

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

Vigilante 8

Extreme-G

Snowboard Kids

Turok

Bomberman 64

Resident Evil 2

San Francisco Rush

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

And that is when you start seeing pockets of people defend their favorites. Very hard to gauge.

But I don't see a lot of people defending the Castlevania games on the N64. If you were expecting Castlevania to hold up to it's legacy if you picked N64 over PS1 back then, you were in for a world of disappointment. And there were no released Contra games for the N64 either, there was a canceled title, but no known releases.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Pretty sure the aforementioned list makes up for one mid Castlvania game.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't get the hype for Castlevania. I've never liked any of them. I also haven't played one since the SNES.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64...and that is about it.

You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren't. Like, "Here's 25 MORE games that should have been on it." and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn't wangle the rights for.

Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora's Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that's basically it. You'd have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin' USA, and you'd never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or...whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.

I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn't, it's because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don't all have the same memories.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years...

Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn't exist without them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Growing up I skipped the PS1/Saturn/N64 generation so I've never had nostalgia for that super early low poly 3D era

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I went from getting everything to maybe playing up to 3 new games a year about the same time the PS3 came out. I know what I like and what I want, and the vast majority of games do not deliver these days.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I used to get maybe three games a year and now I hardly play at all. I still have a PS3 and absolutely can't justify upgrading.

(I'm sure loads of the new games are great, I just don't have the time for them)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.

Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Halo 1 was the first game I ever played online. I played a lot of it.

But I was a very different person then, and replaying it now reminds me of how stupid I was (because I got into a clan that was very based on that kind of person) and the internal ick just his a fever pitch and ruined the game for me.

I never played 2 since that was on Vista and I never went back to it after finally getting Win 7.

After that the series just felt tainted to me. When I first tried it on a console it was really weird with the control setup. I was very used to hundreds of hours on Perfect Dark with the default controls. Having a second stick and rearranging what hand controlled what bent my mind in knots for a while. But it ended up making more sense that way (as you can easily tell by how much it caught on- not saying Halo pioneered it, but it was my first experience with it).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I was a bit young when nes, and snes came out. I am still quiet fond of super mario world 2. But my favorite consoles, hands down are N64, PS1, and PS2. They were really just figuring out open world gaming back then, and they hadn't yet figured our how to make every game constantly online, and/or gaming as a service.

I will say though, a lot of the old games I used to love don't hold up as well playing them as an adult. They are either super hard, or have weird camera and controls, especially 007 GoldenEye for N64.

Another one that turned out to be tedious and hard is Zelda Ocarina of Time, which really surprised me. I thought the game was the greatest game ever as a kid.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

I never played n64 (except maybe a couple rounds of Mario kart, but that may have been gamecube). I tried to play ZOoT, goldeneye, etc. and found the controls and camera awful. With no nostalgia for it, I was out in about 30 minutes (I think less on goldeneye be cause of that abomination of a controller).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I've been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren't so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.

Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that's the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it's made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.

Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I'll never be fully nostalgic for any era.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

The 5th generation (ps1 mostly) has aged the worst (imo) and it’s the generation I revisit the least.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Atari era/Pre-Windows PC era.

The Atari era is mostly because the games are short and have very little replay value. It's a fun novelty especially when you see an angry nerd swearing at them on YouTube. But you'd get the gyst of the game after 30 seconds. Or are so confused that you don't know what to do without the manual... even then it's not that helpful.

Now for the Pre-Windows PC era, mostly DOS and Commodore. It's mostly because I don't have the right mindset to play them, and forcing myself to just makes me not want to hate them. Outside of Police Quest, Wolfenstein 3D, and F29 Retaliator (<- I can't believe this is on Steam) which I like because they are nostalgic to me, I wasn't able to get into Civiliation 1, Ultima, SimCity or other giants from the time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Pre-Windows PC Era games worth mentioning:

  • Wing Commander 1 & 2
  • X-Wing and TIE Fighter
  • Sierra point & click adventure games like Kings Quest & Leisure Suit Larry,
  • Doom
  • Quake
  • Dune 2
  • Command & Conquer
  • Warcraft 1 (zug zug!)
  • X-Com
  • Fallout 1
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Most handhelds tbh.
I didn't really grow up with "traditional" (home) consoles, but I always had handhelds (and a PC).
I have trouble going back to most handheld games pre-Vita nowadays, even if I remember the PSP (and GBA to a certain extent) fondly, between the controls, smaller screen and cut versions of games vs their home console counterparts, it's hard to go back. Emulation makes it somewhat nicer for me, but still.
And let's not begin with GB or GG games, they have a certain charm, but I usually can't stand them for more than 5 mins nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I certainly feel like people tend to be more nostalgic of the 16 bit era than the 8 bit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I think because the 16-bit astethic (when done right) still looks amazing today, where 8-bit is just a bit too limiting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Even though I grew up with 8/16bit I've never really had any nostalgia for it apart from a select few games.

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