Recently with how shitty things have been getting I've stopped hate playing modern day titles to understand normies and gone back to my happy place of enjoying classics or even trying out classics I never got to when I was younger.
It makes you realise when you take off the rose tinted glasses especially if you put the old programmer brain on you realise how some titles, yes some, even though they were fun generally made some horrible decisions regarding balance and general design. One game that everybody loves to rave on about including me is Rome Total War and let's be honest, the squalor and distance to capital mechanics completely break that game, it's awful.
No matter what you do you'll always be facing rebellions and riots if you start expanding your empire properly as the game seems to want you to do so it's easy to see why they got rid of that crap in later versions of the game. Even with C&C and Starcraft they all do some atrocious cheating behaviour with the AI which can make the game completely unplayable if you don't micro-manage the fuck out of everything. I also hate how early Total War games would frequently spawn tiny armies that are almost impossible to get rid of owing to the fact they can retreat 3 - 4 times at a maximum even if you have the largest army around.
What other titles can you think of that while yes are fun generally made some pretty awful design choices even for back in the day? I'm thinking of Fallout 1 and 2's RNG mechanics as another example.
I mean, yeah, nothing's perfect, but you also have to remember a lot of the games that came out of the "golden age" were basically refining, pioneering, and innovating everything on themselves within a year or less in many cases (on strict deadlines too and stiff competition). They were exploring previously unknown territory, and there's bound to be growing pains and things they couldn't fix or handle, even despite their best efforts.
Look at how much changed and improved between Warcraft 1 and Warcraft 2, that was in a single year, and it was like night and day. Similar story with Homm1 and Homm2. But that doesn't mean those games were perfect. Though a lot of those issues could also be traced to limitations of the hardware, available knowledge, and software at the time.
They aren't going to be perfect, there's always gonna be some flaws (and some big ones), but many of those games, at their core, have something amazing and timeless in them. That's why they're considered classics.
Some are more playable to me than others for sure, but that's on an game by game basis and it varies from person to person.
For example I've seen people complain about Diablo 1's playabiity, but I think its aged marvelously and I prefer it to D2's design choices personally.
Finally, someone who gets it.
I maintain that Diablo 1 was the better designed game as evidenced by the fact that prioritizing bonuses to light radius on equipment was a very real thing.
Pick any of the Far Cry series, the bad guy always knows where you are when you take a suppressed shot from 400 meters that doesn't instantly kill them (i.e. you miss.) Doesn't matter if you are in trees, up a hill, half the map away, they instantly spot you if you miss.
Counterstrike has random dispersion built into every weapon such that you can have the cross hairs on someone and every shot lands off target. I have hated Counterstrike since v1.5.1 because of this.
Total Annihilation would let the computer shoot at your units from max range, from outside of the revealed fog of war. It was always insanely frustrating to have SRBMs landing on my units, and I couldn't see the launching units or any scouts providing targeting info.
The AI cheating behaviour in a lot of these games is easily the biggest source of frustration for me. With C&C and Starcraft 1 for example recently playing through them again I realised that not only do they often get shameless infinite money cheats they also spawn buildings and units completely out of nowhere.
I found it fascinating checking all this out but it explained why I found the game so difficult and it wasn't necessarily because of the gameplay itself just the terrible decision to give the AI loads of cheats.
To be fair with cheating RTS games, computing hardware wasn't at the point where the CPU player could make good decisions with the resources they have. If they did, you'd hate it because it would be even easier than how it already is.
One of the few old RTS in which we got the source code to my knowledge is the Red alert (with the release of the remaster, they released the old source code)
In which you can see how the simple AI works and the helps/cheats it got.
Oh yes I remember that, not just Red Alert but Tiberium Dawn as well, I was salivating over that and it actually helped me form the basis of a lot of AI in my head that I'm working on these days. I feel like in terms of AI behaviour without cheating AOE2 is the best example I can think of for old games.
The first Far Cry even has a bug when you run on modern systems that lets the AI see through walls. That was later patched out but I didn't learn of that until I was halfway through the game and yelling at it for being so tough and full of enemies shooting at me from inside their tents.
the only AI that didn't make me feel like playing against Nostradamus' pupils while still being reasonably difficult was in F.E.A.R.
first Far Cry's AI doesn't even input read, it straight up cheats
Halo's enemy AI was really good for its time too
It has had problems with bullets hitting even when you have got the spray right on them because of they way it detects hits and people have claimed the randomness isn't so random now.
Re: Total Annihilation, the computer was more often a victim of that from me. You could manually have your rockets or plasma turrets attack any dot on your radar map, so I would destroy enemy bases without even seeing them.
C&C could be imbalanced but 2 games in particular were REALLY bad for this:
Tiberium sun, GDI if left alone too long, could be impossible to beat as Nod, concrete made tunneling impossible and Firestorm defence grid blocked ALL missiles while there was no blocking their Ion Cannon. It's why in multiplayer the players always rushed with infantry early in a game.
Red Alert 3, Allies fraction in general by ONE unit: Cryo copters, that unit just traumatised multiplayer veterans. It not only froze ANY unit making them extremely vulnerable but could shrink them to make them easy to crush with tanks. They actually got MORE op after the uprising dlc.
Hard to think of any others as while the AI was cheap, I was WORSE so would always bait then into hallways to funnel them against me or build my defenses right at their spawn point before they were scripted to attack me.
On the flip side, you have Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which lets me do shit that I've never seen replicated in any other game, ever, and I can control completely just using my keyboard.
Early games are all over the place, and I can forgive them for that.
I need to play Alpha Centauri I think that will be what I load up next, maybe Civ 2 as well because I've got a strategy game craving thanks to how shit modern gaming is at the moment.
If you're willing to give up several hundred hours worth to a game that likely ran in a dos prompt at one point, all I can say is... the Drones need you. They look up to you.
Also, don't get the expansion pack with the new factions. It's not really needed.
Alien Crossfire. Yeah, just plain Alpha Centauri is better.
I’m replaying Metroid Prime and good grief is that game hampered by the GameCube controller. Some of the boss encounters are so infuriating because you just can’t freaking aim.
They did the best they could with the lock-on mechanic to work around it but you often lock onto the wrong enemy or one who is in a death animation. Not sure I am gonna finish tbh. The exploration is a lot of fun but the combat is just so bad.
There's a version of a wii emulator tuned specifically for the trilogy version (that had motion aim) to allow you to play the games with mouse and keyboard.
It's amazing.
The Wii controls are far superior in the Prime Trilogy. Anyone who thinks that having to stop moving to aim up and down is somehow superior is a fucking moron.
It's always people who say "bbbbut the Wii controls aren't precise" and shit like that. As if the Gamecube controller was made for precision FPS games in the first place.
Metroid simply doesn't translate to the 3D space at all in my opinion. I always detested their decision to attempt to turn it into a FPS.
Your opinion is wrong.
My experience with Metroid Prime says otherwise.
Thing is classics are good despite their faults. Myth: The Fallen Lords is like that for me. The game is great in so many ways but is hard to replay. Camera was crap, controls were rigid and there was a bit of lack of information in the UI. But that game is great, just needs a bit of patching up. Nostalgia does play a role for me but I'm certain that with a bit of polish that game would rock today.
Other classics that are great but also full of issues: Gothic 1, HOMM 2, BG 1,
If you haven't already you can check MandaloreGaming on youtube, he has some older game reviews and I tend to agree with most of his stuff.
I wanted to go back M2TW, but like you I find the empire management stuff to be a pain the ass. They massively improved that aspect in Empire and Napoleon.
The bosses in Street Fighter 2 didn't need to charge or even put in the motions for their attacks. That's why they could hit you so easily.
I miss Half Life Mods. We have these amazing game engines ready to be used today and no Specialists or Revolutionary War.
No you're right.
Even just with movement. The good old stuff can be terrible, clunky, unresponsive and horrible to play after getting used to newer stuff. Bad graphics I can handle. But the movement and gunplay bad in the day were primitive to say the least.
If you think game AIs were bad and cheated a lot back in the day, wait until all the game AIs are developed by Indian programmers making $20/hour.
Well at least it's historically accurate.