yes
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that movie is almost as funny as the robert pattinson movie that ends with him like looking out of an office and suddenly u see a plane coming towards him and fucking 9/11 is happening
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It is a videogame thing i think about a lot
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Unblock Gridlock is basically a digital version of Rush Hour so it’s an easy recommendation for people who like spacial puzzles exceeeept for some reason they made the player car a cop car and that’s kind of a bummer.
I mean there’s zero story outside of the tutorial but ehhh. Maybe there’s an option to change it I’ll have to look.
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I wanted to poke at this idea a bit as well, since it’s sort of fascinating.
The Kid Patience thing that OSB brings up is a huge part of it, as well as being used to fast-forward buttons in emulators like Rudie said, but
I also think that there are some game designs that were always bad, but we didn’t have anything to compare them to, so it just was “how things were.” For instance, the encounter rate in caves in Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow is, in my opinion, actually Bad, and was Bad at the time. But it was also pretty common to have high encounter rates in dungeon-type-areas in JRPGs, so it was just something you dealt with.
(And yes, I realize that Earthbound had already essentially solved this problem before Pokemon came out, but it was not widely regarded as a solution and more an exception? Plus there’s the issue that it relied on the enemies being sprites on the overworld, something that the lowly GB wouldn’t be able to handle with grace)
Some designs aren’t “bad” but are just trying to solve problems in a different way than what we’ve come to the conclusion of is the “best way.” Controlling a first-person-shooter is a prime example of this. Playing Turok on the N64 feels bad in 2020 because it’s backwards from what we’re used to - the right hand controls movement, the left controls looking. That’s a weird way of playing an FPS!! (Also the game sucks)
Goldeneye’s default control scheme is even more fucked up - the right hand looks up and down but strafes left and right. The left hand looks left and right but moves back and forth. What the fuck?
(It’s actually ambidextrous, you can use the d-pad or the c-buttons in combination with the analog stick, a rarely (never) spoken about benefit of the fucked up N64 controller)
Also Goldeneye had that weird thing where the crosshair could be moved independently of your view, right? Honestly I never played it at the time, I’m looking up the manual to find this, but I did play a lot of Timesplitters and whoo boy lemme tell you, going back to that game in 2019 was weird as hell.
Anyway, I think the main 3 reasons a game can age poorly are
- I don’t have time for this anymore
- The content itself is grotesque in some way (poorly aged jokes or concepts, not unique to games though)
- Game design itself has moved forward in a way that makes the game uncomfortable or frustrating to play
Other people will argue that graphics age badly, but I think that’s generally a superficial reading and can be more thoughtfully approached with some context.
Anyway, this is my take on it. I think a lot about the context of a game when it was released, so things aging “poorly” is a fascinating concept to me.
I think this specifically is an interesting topic to dig in on. I think a lot of it is a consequence of how Vidja Games have generally been at this weird intersection between New Tech, Functional Object, and Entertainment/Art. Like, you would never call a movie obsolete, and you would never say a toaster “was beautiful at the time of its release.” But those are both valid things to say about a video game!
Anyway, that’s my impromptu essay about video games that age like milk and/or wine. I should get back to work now bye
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I have trouble understanding it, as well. So much of what mainstream folks refer to seems to be the dubious “quality of life” features that I tend to be opposed to rather than happy about – fast travel, magic inventory systems.
UI advances have been pretty major in the post-mobile and casual scenes emerging, but the UIs of old games were usually learnable and acceptable. Expanded screenspace for comparisons is very useful, of course, but an NES shop will only offer a few items so I can figure out that the silver sword is better than the bronze one I own.
There have been major style changes in progression in the past decade (post boardgame revival) that I’d argue are very good - the move away from sim-like marginal stat upgrades towards fewer, more consequential choices (Mass Effect 1 to 2 is the clearest example). But this is usually not such a large aspect of games that it ruins older titles; and we’re at such a saturation point in RPG-coating these days that even when it’s done much better than it was it’s getting tiresome.
Accessibility options and options in general have gotten much more comprehensive as everyone has started to ignore Nintendo’s toy dogma and move towards a PC-like serving all niches. I think that’s pretty good but it never affected me much; I’m always interested in finding the most intended experience in a game and evaluate it on its original merits.
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I think this is really good and most people don’t do this (hi SB, this is why I joined the forums), but a counterpoint here is:
Shin Megami Tensei has an automap, but you have to go through a bunch of menus to get to it
Shin Megami Tensei 2 has an automap that you can access with the L button
The decision to hide the automap in the menus aged so badly so quickly that the direct sequel changed it, and then fans patched it into the first game. That’s a granular, but important, change that falls under “quality of life” but doesn’t affect “intended experience.” In fact, it may be counter to the intended experience, given that they changed it right away in the sequel. It’s one of those things of “God, I wish I had thought of that when I was making this game!!”
There’s that weird space again though! Like, games are both Art and Functional Object, and not strictly, like, authored pieces. The mechanisms for delivering the authored pieces of games can be part of the authored experience, or they can be a hindrance to it, or they can simply be transparent enough to not do anything to it. I think people often confuse the first two - sometimes a “bad” design for one game is a “good” design for another game, or at least part of the experience of that game, but people flatten that out to “this design is good, this design is bad.”
Anyway. I’m not actually lecturing you, the person who has thought about game design more than I have by about 15,000x. I’m ruminating on it publicly because I think it’s interesting how fine the line is between Intended Experience and genuinely poor design. Or if there even is a line there!
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Yeah, let’s make exceptions for Dragon Quest pre-L-button and slow menu loads and the like, I trust you all to be aesthetically conscious enough to make good decisions.
I was extended myself a bit further in that quote to encompass mod scenes, which feel out of bounds unless I’ve already been through the game and need more, a very unusual circumstance that I’ll probably only ever have with a few childhood games. There’s a genre of modern criticism towards older PC games that begins with, “Here are the mods you NEED to install to play this game” that bugs me the same way revisionist remakes that present as faithful do (I’m shocked that Square for once titled a game clearly enough to express what they wanted to achieve!)
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thank you for this! i partially agree (for instance on things like ultra-high random encounter rates in older jrpgs), though i also worry that other elements treated this way (tank controls/fixed cameras being an obvious example, but also more arcane and individual instances) are sometimes dismissed as awkward or outdated specifically because they are there to try to get you to (or just have the effect of getting you to) play or approach a game in a specific and interesting way that would be impossible with the subsequently standardized Objective Best Design Practices. this is generally true only for some games treated this way, of course, but it’s important to take seriously imo, especially because it continues to happen, albeit less frequently, with newer games that experiment with elements that significantly deviate from the collective common sense of how a game should play, feel, or look.
im ambivalent about the question of obsolescence, both because of the reasons outlined above and because concretely people used to talk about movies that way! a normal person in the 1920s was not trying to watch a movie from 1900, the technique and technology was advancing and film producers and audiences were very much interested in novelty. it took decades before widely screening old movies became a broadly culturally comprehensible or even technologically feasible phenomenon; there’s a reason why film preservation and study before a certain point is such a nightmare, because prints were regularly destroyed when a movie went out of circulation. they were obsolete! aesthetic obsolescence is obviously a different question, though if i were to put on my iconoclastic constructivist avant gardist hat i could call many artworks obsolete or “dead” as aesthetic-political-historical failures in the present, or as representing an outmoded paradigm to move past in the ceaseless modernist struggle for the birth of the new or whatever. i don’t always feel that way, but, y’know, sometimes.
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It always shifts me into reading them less as literature and more as history; I’m distanced from the humans they’re trying to breathe into existence but still feel like I’m learning about the writer and the world they lived in.
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“aging poorly” has been something i’ve ruminated on way too much in my time on this earth
it’s coming up again as i slog through the us ps2 launch title, angel studios/rockstar’s midnight club. there are pros and cons, but holy shit is this game so much less enjoyable than it was when it came out.
don’t get me wrong, it kind of sucked then, too, but it was at least somewhat novel. big, open cities, lots of content, rock solid framerate, none of the “jaggies” plaguing ridge racer v
and suddenly i am transported to a time when the word on the street was that the ps2 launch games “sucked”
dreamcast forever
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I think most of these considerations disappear, or at least become relatively orderly and comprehensible when we recognize that novelty is itself quality, and that novelty is probably the chief, or at least one of the chief, functions of art.
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Videogames as a medium are also subject to UX/UI conventions changing with the times. When a certain way of presenting a menu or controlling a character goes out of fashion and is succeeded by a dramatically different way of doing it, then a player who is immersed in the UI conventions of today may find it harder to get used to a totally orthogonal approach taken by an older game.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the newer way of doing things is better. But when you’re interfacing with a system to try and accomplish a goal, if it works dramatically differently from similar systems you’re used to, there’s a ton of friction there that can cause a lot of frustration. @VastleCania’s example of old FPS controls exemplifies this well.
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So perhaps an interesting distinction could be made between games that simply went with whatever UX conventions were popular at the time in an attempt to give players an easy on-ramp into the game, vs. games that approached their UX with a very specific aim in mind that overrode the typical design-toward-ease-of-use approach.
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a lot of the aforementioned issues with games “aging” feels like to me people coming to terms with getting used to the way games portray game space and their conceptions of the gray area between (necessary) abstractions of space within the game itself and what a person sees in their head when thinking through that abstraction
to me inventory UI/UX systems are abstractions of the space within a person’s container, just like overworlds are abstractions of the space between large cities, just like maps are abstractions of physical space. so thinking through how that change of perspective allows you to think about the world differently is really important, but just as important is thinking through the resolution that you’re losing when you decide you want to create that abstraction in the first place. for the longest time in videogames, the reason you made that decision was because you didn’t have the technical ability to, so the process of moving objects around with your hands in virtual reality is abstracted to a button that lets you pick up/drop items into an inventory, is abstracted to a resident evil-style UI overlay over a bag graphic with items taking up space, is abstracted to a list of items you have, etc.
simultaneously, each of these abstractions have aesthetic qualities that arise from the interaction with objects in the game
but nowadays, the decision to abstract space in a video game is presented as an aesthetic decision as much as it is presented a technical one. that consideration wasn’t as explicit in the past because we hadn’t come close to technical limits of game space representation. so when you bring these decisions out into the aesthetic realm, it’s easier to conceive of “aging” as people’s tastes becoming different over time, even if that taste involves people’s preferences around abstraction of space and a player’s ability to navigate that
woo pretentious woo
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stay tuned for my dissertation length article on why the decision by the company I work for to put an abstracted inventory and upgrade system for our virtual reality melee combat-focused game meant to be immersive was fucking stupid
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i feel like the discussion about game aging vs accessibility is approaching the concept from the wrong angle. a game having a terrible UX doesn’t mean it aged badly; there are plenty of games that control like dogshit compared to modern games that nevertheless have an interesting character or grit to them. goldeneye 64 feels like wrenching my neck in a car crash to play, but it’s ~so fucking weird~ that it aged astonishingly gracefully.
to me, “aged badly” means in one ear and out the other. games which exist to be consumed, polished featureless orbs which represent an ideal perfection of the moment but which are immediately superseded by more interesting, and perhaps more flawed, endeavors. TLOU is a prime example to me: game developers chasing the HBO prestige drama ideal and sanding down any rough edges that would allow players to break free of the meticulously-curated experience they want you to have.
it’s hardly just about games too. all the movies that aged the worst for me are ones which exude this baby-proofing mentality, like MCU pablum. all the movies i adore to this day are ones that do something strange or weird,
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I love being such a fucking true doom Warriors Orochi head that I capped out the save import bonus from the last game by killing too many people
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