Forums > Contributor Zone > Falling Stars

This used to be a popular topic of discussion in the old days, so I'm bringing it up again for the hell of it.

People have top fives and tens over the years, and some folks are smart and never replay games on their favourites list, so nostalgia permits those games to forever remain on top in their hearts. Others make the mistake of going back and replaying those favourites, only to realize they don't like them anymore, for one reason or another.

That's what this topic is about. And so, in no particular order:

Revenge of Shinobi
Sigh. I used to love this game. I'm a sucker for a good soundtrack, and RoS has one of the best ever in an action game. The hero is cool (he's a ninja, duh), and he's got moves, and the enemy assortment is awesome (Godzilla, Terminator, Batman/Spiderman, etc)... what could go wrong? Apparently I used to put up with the shittiness of Joe Musashi's double jump. I can't anymore. It's so bloody temperamental. And guess what? Level two -- so VERY EARLY ON -- we get to do lots of jumping against a waterfall backdrop with death in the cards for many a missed double jump. Fantastic. I remember a friend of mine activating Fushin to do this level, so that the double jumps wouldn't be necessary. He shouldn't have needed to. The timing on the jump reminds me of the fussiness required to pull of the cyclone kick in Double Dragon II, but that was a special move -- this is not.

Ristar
I sang this game's praises to anyone who would listen. I said it was better than any Sonic game and I truly believed that. It's still gorgeous, and the music is memorable... but it's bloody long -- too long considering you can't save progress as in Mario 3 -- and much of it seems too easy. Early deaths come about due to your being lulled into complacency by the slow, slow build that won't quit.

Quackshot starring Donald Duck
Shameless plug, I know, but I don't want to retread these tragic steps...

More later.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

Pretty much any Nintendo 64 game. There's something about the single analogue stick control in early 3D games that just hasn't aged well. I used to love Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and other games like that, but man they are hard to get into these days.

I played Goldeneye on a N64 a few years ago, and while I wasn't a huge fan of the game at the time, I found it unplayable due to how far first person shooters have evolved over the years.

If Nintendo releases a N64 Mini, I'm probably going to pick one up, but I'll happily admit that a lot of SNES games have aged better.

I can avoid death by not having a life.

Interestingly enough, crusty old FPS games have aged just fine, since the keyboard + mouse setup hasn't changed all that much. But yeah, early forays into 3D were all the rage at the time cuz of the novelty, but now? Jaggy edges and bad cameras abound.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

I absolutely intend to replay Quackshot next year to see if I fall into the same pit of disappointment and Golding & Venter, or if my taste remains more refined.

I don't have a lot of these; the old games I used to love then I still love today for the most part. I still play the Sonics, the Shining Forces and the Phantasy Stars of this world. I went back and replayed BioHazard Battle not long ago; that was still awesome. My very favourite game of all time remains 1993's X-Com. I can still lose entire days to 1995's Dungeon Keeper.

But in an attempt to be a productive member of this topic, I replayed Xenon 2 a few years ago and I hated it. It's not so much aged badly as I no longer have any idea why I used to hold it in such esteem. Review plug HERE.

For us. For them. For you.

"But yeah, early forays into 3D were all the rage at the time cuz of the novelty, but now? Jaggy edges and bad cameras abound."

When I first saw this topic, this is the first thing that came to mind. I've recently played or replayed the first two PS Spyro titles and the camera is just annoying as hell by today's standards with how it gets caught on walls with regularity and, even in open areas, swings really slowly compared to your mobile hero. And they were among the better 3D platformers of that time. And the graphics might have been groundbreaking then, but are just weird now. I remember a few years ago I planned to replay Final Fantasy VII, but could barely get into it because of how jaggy and funny everyone looked. "Hey, Tifa, I like those pyramids sticking out your chest!"

Also for me, a decent number of NES games I liked a lot back in the day fall into this status to some degree. Going through the old Mega Man games on the PS2's Anniversary Collection, I think the thing I was most impressed with was how "fair" the difficulty was. Because you could do stages in any level, you had a consistent degree of difficulty through most of the robot master stages (I mean, some would be tougher due to the type of challenge -- fucking Plant Man in 6 with all those "hop on springs over pits with fish jumping up to smash you in mid-air" jumps -- but overall, if you could beat 1-2 of the stages in any given game, you should be able to beat the other 6-7) with the fortress stages being more of a "final exam" where you had to simply be proficient with every challenge you'd seen beforehand, as opposed to simply skyrocketing the difficulty.

But a lot of games from that era didn't do that, so you'd have all these games that were comically easy in the first stage or two...and then near-impossible as you get closer to the end. I mean, the main offenders weren't those classics that got overwhelming love, but they were games I played a lot back then. Like, I love The Guardian Legend, but its final couple levels are pure hell. Battle of Olympus, too.

Of classics, I'd agree with Super Mario Bros. 3. It's a great game, but unless you get a port of it (I recommend Super Mario All-Stars for the SNES), you have to deal with a long game where you about have to use the warp whistles because you can't save anywhere and it'd take hours upon hours to actually play it level by level. If you're going to make a game "play in one sitting", you should at least make it reasonable to do so without having to skip half of it. I'd say I'd check and see if I feel the same way about Ristar as you do, Marc, for that reason, but my version of it now is on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, so I'd be able to save at will and only do a level or two at once.

Adventure of Link used to be my favorite Zelda. I'd speed-run it via the "second quest" where you start with all the experience, strength, magic, etc. as you finished the first run-through regularly, getting to where I could beat the game in about 2 hours. Now, if you gave me the choice of Zeldas to play, it'd rank in front of the more modern "why does it take so long to get anywhere" Wii-era ones, but below the original, Link to the Past and Ocarina for sure. On the other hand, LttP probably has risen a bit in my estimation. It is up there with the original and Ocarina as far as best ratio of time spent doing fun stuff to stuff doing busy-work, but has a better world than either of those two (the original was essentially a big maze that contained 9 smaller dungeon-mazes, while Ocarina's world was a drab hub containing infinitely more interesting dungeons).

Dragon Warrior IV fits to a degree. I LOVED it when it first came out and still really like it, but it's tedious as hell early on because you're doing four introductory chapters before the main part of the game, so you're spending a LOT of time re-re-doing those early-RPG motions of slowly grinding against weak foes to buy the damn Silver Spear at the weapon store so you're strong enough to not have to run out of dungeons to heal up every five minutes. And Taloon's chapter sucked, as he was weak and solo and had that annoying "collect a ton of weapons and armor of certain types to start up his equipment store" job at the end.

I definitely understand the more modern backlash against old survival horror games and their tank-like controls. Of those games, I only really play a couple old Silent Hills...and that's more because of the atmosphere, story and overall vibe than any overwhelming joy I feel at controlling an awkward mofo as likely to blunder into a monster's mouth than anything requiring a normal human amount of dexterity.

A couple others in short:

I've never gotten as big into Baldur's Gate II as I'd have expected due to its reputation as a classic PC RPG. Part of it was circumstance (first time, I was married and didn't have the time to devote to a game this huge; second time, my old computer broke down while I was in the Spellhold dungeon) and part of it is just that its faithfulness to AD&D rules makes it feel a bit cheap as a video game with all those role-playing deals like undead draining experience levels, Mind Flayers draining Intelligence so they can kill fighters in like one or two hits and you needing to cast about 15 buff-dispelling spells to even fight wizards. At times, I feel like getting my older lap-top out of storage, as it has a CD slot so I can re-install the game there. And then I remember things like that one time I battled a Lich and got nowhere while it nuked me with spells and then summoned a Pit Fiend to nuke me with more shit. FUN!

Some fell because another game made them obsolete to me. I put in over 400 hours into Oblivion, but when I got Skyrim, I never played it again (but I did put over 500 hours into Skyrim!).

Gran Turismo is probably the only other I can think of. I used to love that series, but whenever I think about playing a game in it now, all I can think of is spending hours inching through dozens of license tests so I can actually advance as a racer. Blech...

I'm not afraid to die because I am invincible
Viva la muerte, that's my goddamn principle

Some fell because another game made them obsolete to me. I put in over 400 hours into Oblivion, but when I got Skyrim, I never played it again (but I did put over 500 hours into Skyrim!).

This is a big one I hadn't gotten to yet.

I was never that big into Metroid, but after Super Metroid, what little love I had for it was completely gone. Why play it? Same goes for the first Zelda after playing ALttP. In fact, it seemed to be the SNES's job to go around supplanting NES classics. Except!

The first Contra still holds up so well. It's definitely more fun than Contra 3, and probably any other run-and-gunner, ever, really.

Actually, now that I think about it, while it may have been the intention that the SNES make a SUPER version of every NES classic, they really failed with a bunch of them, didn't they? Super Adventure Island isn't really better than Adventure Island 1-3, is it? Super Double Dragon is definitely not better than Double Dragon 2. I already covered Contra. And as much as I love Super Castlevania IV, Castlevania III is probably a better game.

Still, the novelty of seeing all our dusty 8-bit games fleshed out in wondrous 16-bit with the classic blips and bloops orchestrated with proper instrumentation was well worth any small drop off in gameplay.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

I still love the original Zelda, still play it probably more than any other game around. In fact, I played it today, shortly before coming to the forum and seeing the latest comments. It's better than A Link to the Past because it gives the player more freedom to run around and do things in any order, much though I do enjoy A Link to the Past. The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES still remain two of my favorite games of all time, and that sense of freedom is a big part of it.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

I reckon that what you grew up playing might have something to do with it; I didn't really play Zelda in my formative years, but I did Zelda III. I consider Zelda III better for all the advancements it made in terms of accessibility alone. The map and the save system make the newer game much less of a pain to play. Not to mention the awesome soundtrack. But I get that the original is way less linear and there's something special about it being the first.

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

@Marc

Do you still remember the rain?

I can avoid death by not having a life.

I was all aboard the Final Fantasy VII hype train in junior high, but I wouldn't rank it very highly these days. It's a decent game, but a step down from FF6, not to mention FF9 becoming the definitive PSX Final Fantasy.

Xenogears is an even more severe fallen star. I tried replaying it this year after enjoying the heck out of Xenoblade 2, but I quickly got fed up with the slowly scrolling text. This sort of thing normally wouldn't bother me, except Xenogears has a ridiculous amount of dialogue, and it's mostly terrible to boot. The mecha battles are also really awful, and they're supposed to be the focal point of the game. I'm glad Monolith Soft has shifted their focus toward gameplay these days. Xenogears does suck.

Now, the most heart breaking case of this for me is Mario Kart DS. Back in 2005, I considered it the epitome of Mario Kart games. After playing Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 in 2015, I thought it would be fun to order a used copy of MKDS and revisit it ten years later. I was not ready for how poorly it had aged. The courses were still great, but the controls, mechanics and A.I. were so bad that I ended up selling the game back after I was finished with it. It might be best never to revisit Double Dash either.

JOSEPH VALENCIA was able to build this sig IN A CAVE…… WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!

Yikes. I replayed the original SNES Super Mario Kart and still thought it was a lot of fun, but then, I don't have much experience with the series on the whole. I'm probably easily impressed as kart games go.

Jerec: I'll never forget the rain. Nor will you!

I don't have to prove I'm refined - that's what makes me refined!

Super Mario Kart is still a blast! I think the series mostly went slightly downhill with each subsequent installment from there, until 8 brought things back in line. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on Nintendo Switch is about as good as Mario Kart is likely to ever get, and always fun to play with friends.

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." - John F. Kennedy on reality

"What if everything you see is more than what you see--the person next to you is a warrior and the space that appears empty is a secret door to another world? What if something appears that shouldn't? You either dismiss it, or you accept that there is much more to the world than you think. Perhaps it really is a doorway, and if you choose to go inside, you'll find many unexpected things." - Shigeru Miyamoto on secret doors to another world2

I think Mario Kart is actually a series that gets better over time rather than worse. Time will tell if MK7 and MK8 end up feeling as dated as the MK games before it.

JOSEPH VALENCIA was able to build this sig IN A CAVE…… WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!!