Because most of the time, older games were made with player enjoyment in mind, not shareholders.
Eh, there’s a huge number of shovelware for every console generation, plus less than stellar titles. The thing is that, due to all the years piling up, the amount of good stuff just increases.
True, but back then games were made to stand on their own instead of being a poorly thought out monetization machine.
I mean Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing was shit, but at least they only expected you to pay for it once… and you can still play it, you don’t have to wait for a lobby to fill up before it lets you into the game, a lobby that will never fill up because no one’s playing Big Rigs: Over The Fucking Road Racing
The developers who made Big Rigs probably wouldn’t have the budget to make an AAA game nowadays. A better comparison would be indie games, and there’s more of them (or it feels like it) due to easier development & distribution. (Which does involve shovelware). Even excluding Indies, AA games without subscription models are plentiful too.
Edit: (AAA games are a better example of being worse, I haven’t played them but comparing Assasin’s Creed or Metal Gear back in the day to now is better to show the bad practices. Thankfully, like I said, there’s just a ton more games and you don’t need to play the crappy ones)
Naw
The people who published Big Rigs are still out there publishing terrible mainstream license games such as the new Kong game and the new Avatar: TLA game (yes, really). They’re called “Game Mill”, and they are exactly what their name is, and their games are some of the worst on shelves. They don’t keep any employees very long and they have them work on games before they even get an order so they can slap the license into the game last-minute.
Games from 1999-2007 aged really well. I’ve been playing Aliens vs Predator 2, No One Lives Forever and a bunch of GameCube, PS2 and Xbox games on my Steam Deck.
GameCube runs fantastic on steam deck! Still playing MVP Baseball ‘05 hitting mini game and I still suck
Make a player named Jacob Paterson. EZ home runs.
If you can deal with the extreme tedium of making an entire roster of "Jacob Paterson"s (changing letter casing here and there), you’ll be steamrolling everyone. Kinda ruins the fun of the game, but I find it really satisfying to watch >700ft home runs that clear the entire stadium and hear Kuip and Krukow endlessly call dinger after dinger. Pure dumb fun :D
That’s a good idea. I just use Jon Dowd, the white fictional dude who has the same stats as Barry Bonds lol
Steam Deck man. Such an effing win.
Additioaly if you count 2D games like classic RPG’s and platformers, games from SNES and PSX era are golden as well.
I wish I had a gamecube still so I could play this again (and again and again): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sight_(video_game)
Makes me wish the Deck OLED wasn’t worth blood money on this side of the pond.
I’ll be interested to see how the Orangepi Neo reviews when it releases, it’s the only handheld I reckon can hold a candle to the deck, though I suspect Orangepi’s track record of record shite support will derail that one.
Tiberian Sun, The first time I played it my PC could barely play it. That was some 24 years ago?! Now the maps load in 2 seconds. Still crashes alot.
That feel when game studios made beautiful loading screens but now you don’t get the time to enjoy them.
time for the return of the “turbo” button i guess
I am enjoying the Red Alert series. Rules.ini for the win!
“The Sims 2. A man with your specs?”
Fun fact: The Sims 2 is abandonware. Other than buying used physical media, the only way to get it nowadays is through piracy.
Super Collection (Everything up to Bon Voyage) is still for sale on the Mac App Store.
Aspyr even updated it to run on Apple Silicon.
Me playing OpenTTD on my gaming rig.
It’s not a perfect replacement and single player only if that matters, but have you tried Transport Fever 2? It’s got a TTD feel with beautiful modern graphics.
a TTD feel
beautiful modern graphics
Hmmmm…
Sorry I meant a TTD feel in terms of basic mechanics, but with beautiful modern graphics.
Yeah I was just being silly
I’ve heard good things, I’ll wishlist it and grab it in a good sale sometime!
I’m still using a GTX 1070. When I was building a new PC 2 years ago I had to decide whether to splurge on a new GPU. I thought about all of the games I played in the last 5 years and realized none of them were GPU intensive (the most intensive was Minecraft with shaders and that one was bottlenecked by my CPU). To this date I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that my GPU couldn’t handle.
Me too! I also built around the same time and had to decide whether or not it was worth upgrading… Still going strong for 1080p. (I don’t have a 4k monitor anyway)
Ah. I’m using a 2.5k monitor. 1070 seems perfect for that resolution.
I’m also on a 1070, but mine’s been trucking along since 2019. I do occasionally play something GPU intensive, but I often avoid going full MAX GRAFFICS because the laptop gets really toasty, which causes visible screen tearing due to most of the hot air being blown straight onto the fucking screen. Great engineering, ASUS, gg.
To be fair, the 10xx series are goddamn workhorses.
The 1070 was an amazing card for it’s time but DLSS 3 is a game changer, especially if you game at 4K. But for 1080p and below the 1070 can hold its own. I used one up until last year.
The annoying thing is when games are broken due to drivers not being updated by the company
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Still playing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines all these years later. Writing more than makes up for dated combat. Hoping the second one is decent.
Oh man that game is so good, they don’t make em like that anymore. Infinite replayability
To be fair, as awesome as World of Darkness is… Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is still the only good Video Game adaptation they’ve made (Why is it this hard!!!)
People I know (not PC gamers obviously) balk at the sight of me playing a PS1 game on today hardware.
“Why would you play a game that old on such a powerful computer?”
“That’s obvious, upscaling exists, and games from this era were/are more complete, entertaining and bug-free than most things released in recent years.”
“Huh… Guess that makes sense.”
Is usually how it goes anyway.
Me continuing to endlessly replay Fallout: Tale of Two Wastelands and Borderlands 2
Tale of Two Wastelands was absolutely the best playthrough I have done of any game in a very very long time. It is truly the only way to play Fallout 3 and New Vegas, in my humble opinion.
Add on NVR and a sweet preset 👨🍳💋🤌
Me, building a new gaming PC to keep playing Binding of Isaac like I have for the last 13 years.
In a way your computer is like Isaac, unloved and unappreciated for its potential by the person that birthed it.
Kind of beautiful in a twisted way.
Also, I keep it in the basement.
Doom II, Factorio, Fallout 1-4, and Minecraft.
Who do I need a top-tier PC? The ten year old rig I build still runs them like a champ.
I like playing newer games which all require pretty beefy rigs. I have a weak GPU so I can’t play most new games but it does make me sad.
I love me some some Fallout 2.
So you can megabase Factorio.
Project Brutality is a lovely mod for Doom fans.
I played Resident Evil 4 (the original 2005, not the remake) for the first time last year. That same year, I bought Diablo 4, Starfield, Hogwarts legacy, and a bunch of other games.
RE4 from 2005 was the only game that I thoroughly enjoyed playing.
Ommmm I know that is why I got a steam deck? I love video games that don’t force you to buy a super expensive gaming rig.
I don’t really fuck with emulation though I want to (dunno where to get roms honestly) but there are so many banger indie games out there that barely use any resources to run, and honestly simpler graphics is almost always better for gameplay, development, and even aesthetics because it forces developers to adopt a style with their simplified vision of reality instead of just making things look super realistic.
I hate modern strategy games where the map is super pretty and 3D but impossible to read and all the menus are animated with tiny little buttons and hard to read text against textured parchment backgrounds…. it is clear as day that giving those game developers a more powerful computer to develop on was actually a catastrophic mistake in terms of UI readability.
Vimm’s Lair is the best site I know of for roms.
If you want to do emulation on steam deck I recommend using RetroArch. Here’s a brief guide on setting it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bbr0a6b1qHI
Makes setting up emulation on the deck super easy
The soft beeping of Breakout is soothing.
How i feel playing tomb raider remakes on my ps5.