Poll of the Day > Old vs New Video Games

(+) Yeah! (+)

Were old or new video games better? Also what do you consider to be new or old?

I like old video games better with my favorite being for NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis. I think my purest gaming moment was playing either donkey kong country or Mike Tyson's Punch out. I have a lot of memories of picking up old games in the late 90s

I still think I have the most fun with snes games and old arcade games

but my favorite game ever is rdr2 so I love both

I think they're about equal, though the ones worth playing are swimming in a bigger sea of crap now.

I enjoyed them most in the PS2-Xbox 360 era, but I feel like that might not have been due to them being better, and me being more receptive to them.

There were some definite bangers in that era though.

old games:
-can play offline
-no patch updates, if there's something you can exploit you're free to do it as many times as you like. if you want to cheat, no one is going to ban you from the playing the game.
-cosmetics, songs, and other unlockables are free! just keep playing or use some kind of password!

new games:
-single player games require you that are online 24/7
-using mods? that's an permanent ban
-you want this scar on your character? it cost $5.10 and we only sell our in-game currency in bundles of $5,$10, $20, $50, and $100.

Older. Newer wise would be Indies for me.

Really old games (like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, etc) kind of suck because they are boring and repetitive. Modern games suck because of all the DLC and pay-to-win, and they're just so freaking long that most people just don't have time to play them.

It's the games in between that as the best. New enough to have some depth and story, but old enough not to be a cash grab. Deus Ex, Unreal, Quake, DOOM, HeXen, Battlefield: 1942, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, KotOR, TIE Fighter, etc.

Donkey Kong 94 is an amazing update to the original Donkey Kong. I wonder what Nintendo would produce if they were tasked with making that today

KJ_StErOiDs posted...

I think they're about equal, though the ones worth playing are swimming in a bigger sea of crap now.

I kiiinda agree, but I think the ratio of good to bad games is pretty similar today to that of yester year. There were a ton of crap old games, I just think we remember the good ones more.

Damn_Underscore posted...

Donkey Kong 94 is an amazing update to the original Donkey Kong. I wonder what Nintendo would produce if they were tasked with making that today

I don't know about today, but as recently as 2015 you can see what they did with the idea in the Mario vs. DK series.

green_dragon posted...

I kiiinda agree, but I think the ratio of good to bad games is pretty similar today to that of yester year. There were a ton of crap old games, I just think we remember the good ones more.

While you're not wrong that there's a huge amount of survivorship bias involved in any claim that old stuff was better, there are definitely more bad games today than previously. Accessible development tools, asset libraries, and digital distribution have done amazing things to help people produce fantastic games that otherwise would never have been made, but they've also made it possible for less scrupulous studios to churn out hundreds of barely-functional asset flips with zero effort. Last year alone, there were over 15,000 games released on Steam, the vast majority of which were garbage. The NES' entire library was only about 2,000 games, for comparison, and it took almost ten years to get that many.

Now, there are also more good games being released than ever before (so much so that it can be a real challenge to keep up with them), so maybe the ratio hasn't changed, but I'm inclined to suspect that the ratio of good:bad has dropped considerably, given just how many bad games come out these days.

That being said, who cares about the bad games? What matters is not how many bad games exist, it's whether or not enough good games exist to satisfy us. In that regard, the industry is probably actually better than ever, even if the bigger picture includes a whole lot of things going very terribly wrong. If I were to compare today's "good" to the "good" of 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, I think I'd give the edge to modern stuff just because there have been so many quality of life improvements to gaming conventions over the years (older games are still perfectly enjoyable, but often with the caveat of needing to accept a certain degree of jank), but ultimately it's all well worth playing and I don't feel compelled to put serious effort into ranking them.

Older stuff
More original ideas, zero remasters/remakes, development times and budgets werent astronomical, zero software and hardware patches and updates..
cheat codes

It was an all round healthy industry with friendly competition where the consumer came out on top.

I'd rank the eras:
1. PS2, dreamcast, Xbox, GameCube
2. SNES genesis
3. Ps1 n64
4. Now
5. PS4 switch Xbox one
6. Nes master system
7. Ps3 xbox360 wii

Well obviously the games that I played during my childhood were coincidentally peak gaming, everything that came before is too outdated, and everything that came after doesn't have the same magic that games did when I was 12.