I always loved retro-style games, long before I learned that they’re considered retro. I’m not sure what makes them so fun but they completely dominate my gaming nowadays.
Naturally, I became curious about the games that had inspired my favorite titles. I tried many of them, and eventually came to a conclusion: most of the time, retro games are nothing but a historical curiosity.
Ultima 4 has fairly unique concept but falls flat with its roleplaying feeling forced, its bland gameplay and its setting with no originality whatsoever.
Compare this to Moonring. Gameplay rivals many modern roguelikes (the classic definition, so Brogue, not Isaac), great setting that sucks you in immediately, and so so many mysteries.
Ambermoon pretends to be an open world RPG but is actually a linear RPG-lite with combat feeling more like a puzzle (and a wrong solution punishes you by 15 mins of you and your opponents missing each other every turn).
That’s not to say that retro games aren’t important - the modern indies are standing on the shoulders of giants. Yet I can’t say that retro games worth the trouble of getting into them, compared to the polished modern indie titles.
Classic XCOM is really fun imo, but it does suffer from some quality of life issues. It’s possible to fix some of that with mods though and imo it still holds up. I’ve definitely put more time into the reboot of the series, but the original has a grittier feel, a bit more “open world,” where you’re gonna miss UFOs and you’re gonna have to cut and run sometimes, and there’s also a lot of exploits and tricks you have to figure out on your own (intended or otherwise).
Xenonauts is a more direct remake and it’s good, more balanced and polished, but when I play it sometimes I just say, “I’d rather be playing old school XCOM.” Hard to put my finger on it, and it might just be that I already know the tricks for the original, or that the jankyness makes it fun. Xenonauts does hold up on it’s own but it’s hard not to compare the two.
Generally games have gotten better but I’d say there’s a handful that have withstood the test of time (especially with basic UI improvements).
I had a mini movie night with two colleagues, one is around middle age like me, and the other in their twenties. We were going through some DVDs and Blurays, and Die Hard came up. We two older folks said we liked it but the younger said that they’d never seen it. Well obviously we had to watch it right then.
Afterward, the young colleague said they found the movie boring and unoriginal. Talking it over, we came to the conclusion that while Die Hard had done so much in fresh and interesting ways at the time, it had been so thoroughly copied from by so many other films that it offered little to an uninitiated modern audience, looking back.
Although I haven’t played it myself, to read someone saying that Ultima 4 is derivative and lacking in originality feels a lot like that experience with Die Hard. Additionally, I think that the real old games usually expect a level of imagination and willingness to put up with discomfort that even I sometimes find a little offputting in 2025, despite the fact that I grew up with many of those games and had no issues with them at the time. If I don’t remind myself of it, it can be easy to forget that old hardware wasn’t limited only in audio-visual power, but also storage size and processing power.
I still search through old games, but I’m looking for ideas that maybe didn’t work well or hit the market right the first time, but still deserve further consideration, especially in light of technological advantages that have happened in the intervening years.
Your point more or less comes up a lot in discussions around Lord of the Rings compared to modern fantasy novels. There are a lot of people who, while they can appreciate what it did for the genre, find the novels dated and feel like they have seen the ideas too many times and/or done better elsewhere.
Though on the flip side, I personally find sometimes it just takes a few hours to “see past the age”. For example, I was introduced to Fallout by 3. The show made me want to try the originals, and after a few hours of struggling through the ui and dated graphics, it started to “click”. Now the original only competes with NV in my list of favorite Fallout games. Have a friend who had basically the same experience with the original KOTOR.
i don’t think so at all. i just played through Grandia for the first time in my life and really enjoyed it. i think your perspective is what makes the difference, but that’s also up to you. i try to enjoy things through the lens they were created usually, it helps ground my experience more. the crumbled building is not a ruin, it’s where real people lived their lives.
Modern quality of life upgrades make it so hard to go back. There was a harvest moon game i adored and i tried to replay it, but just changing tools was a pain.
I mean…yea?
Game development and design has evolved tremendously over the decades since those retro games were made. Systems are also just physically capable of so much more.
This inevitably means that a lot of the small design mistakes of those old titles have long since been rectified because we understand now that those aspects weren’t part of what made those games fun — they were just the limitations and scope of knowledge of that era.
This isn’t to say those games are bad, I still play the old classics on my Switch when I have access to them, same with the classic catalogue on PS+, but definitely a lot of them just have modern parallels that do the same thing so much better that it isn’t even worth going back to play them.
Things that were once revolutionary or novel for the time can only exist in that space for so long. The elements that worked can feel mundane and like a trope by our modern standards. The mistakes will also be only more highlighted over time as well.
Obviously that’s just a generality. Even if those games aren’t as good, it doesn’t mean they aren’t still good and enjoyable.
The sad part is, video games age so much quicker compared to other forms of media. It’s been only 20 years but Morrowind already so clunky that even those who like the game would rather play literally any other RPG over it. 2d games suffer less from this but the lack of accessibility options, unusual controls, technical limitations and their influence on mechanics (e.g. life system) are all still a big problem that gets only worse with time.
Retro games can be enjoyable but whether they are worth the struggle is questionable.
I still like playing Morrowind.
Depends on the game. There are no indie games better than the original Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI on the SNES.
While Chrono Trigger and FFVI are among my all time favourites, they’re kind of like an prog rock superbands. They’re a pinnacle of the era, impossible to top in their own categories. But if you know where to look there are probably some guys doing stuff as impressive, if not more, out of their garages. Sea of Stars and Chained Echoes come to mind.
I’ve tried those.
Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger’s great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars’ defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don’t compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.
Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn’t quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.
Yea. The JRPG genre has a lot of amazing modern titles. It is just that the genre fell out of popularity for a while and the newer titles never got the major marketing that Chrono Trigger and FF received.
Though, good news, the genre does seem to be heading towards a revival.
Of course. I am a big fan of the original Doom games (Heretic and Hexen included) myself. But still, I feel like these are exceptions, not the rule.
It still depends on the genre and what games you are exposed to. Super Mario Bros 3 is still the best 2D platformer of all time, I am not aware of any indie game even close to the polish of SMB3.
I agree that I can’t talk about genres I’m not familiar with, like platformers and action games (which I guess are the best contenders for retro gamers). With that said, even when I played through widely acclaimed as one of the best RPGs - Ultima 4, I still couldn’t enjoy it. I’m curious how common this experience with popular retro games.
I agree that I can’t talk about genres I’m not familiar with, like platformers and action games
Kudos for acknowledging it.
I cannot really think of any indie action game that came close to Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden II, God Hand… etc.
That said, I’ve seen a lot of people claim Hollow Knight is better than Castlevania: SotN, so it’s definitely genre-dependent.
I think that’s probably a fairly uncontroversial opinion. In the city-builder genre, Lethis: Path of Progress aimed to be the definitive city-building game of its time, hoping to match the peaks of Caesar and Pharaoh in the city-builder heyday. Instead, Lethis ended up being a huge flop, precisely because it slavishly copied the mechanics of Caesar without understanding that games as a whole have evolved since then.
Lethis lacked certain quality of life features that now feel obvious and baseline. What’s sad is that these features had already evolved towards the tail end of the city-builder heyday, in games such as Children of the Nile, and now feel glaringly obvious by their omission. Other city-builders that haven’t been so tied to the classics have seen more success (although there’s been no true breakout hits, sadly, no great renaissance in the genre).
I had a similar thought while playing through Skald: Against the Black Priory earlier this year. There is something of a best-of-both-worlds about retro feeling and looking games, but without all the retro clunk.
I think this a pretty accurate take. One place I’ll add that retro games shine is fast forward, but that’s not the games themselves as much as the platform. To me, that’s their killer feature. When it comes to animations, I’m definitely not a patient gamer. And modern design seems to get this wrong constantly.
This is why I absolutely loved classic Doom: finally a shooter with no cutscenes, dialogues or stupid animations that blocks my sight. Neither Doom 3 nor modern Doom are capable of achieving this power!
Can you imagine if you had all the time back you spent watching attack animations in RPGs over the years? There is definitely an immersion argument to be made, and this is why I just want the option to be available. I tend to be very mechanics focused and I play mostly puzzle games so I’m just here to ‘figure it out’. For visuals and storytelling I’m reaching for different media first, that’s personal preference not a knock on VG.
I just want to illustrate that I kind of still have ‘down time’ where I’m just staring at a screen that isn’t changing, but the difference is that I’m playing the game in my head and thinking through things not being trapped for 2 seconds to watch somebody swing a sword. Especially if I’ve seen it a million times already and fully finished appreciating how cool it looks.
Your argument is really strong when it comes to action games though, but I guess we could also think about how it creates a build up and release of tension if applied mindfully. But that’s usually not the case, it’s just ‘the formula says we need a cut scene here’.
Maybe the convergence of ideas here is to stand up brighter lines between playing and watching?
