Give Commandos and Shadow Tactics to 100 random people who have played neither and 99 of them will tell you that Shaow Tactics is more enjoyable.

Same with Thief. Sure there might be some weirdo who got into gaming only now and would enjoy the original Thief games, but give pretty much any other highly rated modern stealth game and they would enjoy it far, far more than Thief. In fact mostly likely they would find the original theif games not only less enjoyable, but actually not very enjoyable at all.

Totally agree with that. Most PS1 games are hard to play (in visual terms) for me. Even some PS2 disturbs me. But the SNES/Mega Drive games have a charm that aged very well. I think the point is: more realistic games tends to age pretty bad.

Do these games bother you because of how they look in general, or how they look when processed by modern HD TVs and blown on a 1080p screen?

Well, a lot of old games certainly are terrible by today's standards, mostly because they were terrible to begin with. Yet, there are games from every single generation that still hold up very well. For example, most NES and SNES era games that are considered classics are still very much worth playing.

Of course, when we get to the early 3D era you certainly have a point, as back then most developers hadn't really figured out how to make games work in 3D. As a result you'd see a lot of really strange experiments in gameplay and control styles, simply because there was no set precedent on how things like camera controls should be done.

Most of today's games are terrible by old standards.

An interesting thing to do to judge what people think of different games is too look at the GameStop trade value.

For example, I compared the trade value of original Assassin's Creed for PS3 to Resident Evil 2 for PSOne. In both cases, I'm looking at the "Greatest Hits" edition to parse out any added value they might have as collectors items for certain people. Both games were extremely popular, sold millions of copies, and neither is particularly hard to find.

GameStop will give you $1 for Assassin's Creed and $2.50 for Resident Evil 2.

The marketplace values the game running at 240p with tank controls and pre-rendered backgrounds over the 720p game with more modern game play.

People buy ("prefer") newer games over older games because they're newer and they offer newer things. After a couple of years goes by and the dust settles though, I think you can make a more objective valuation.

Skyward Sword does have a slow beginning. Still the combat in Ocarina of Time won't be that enjoyable anyway by todays standards anyway. So you would still have a better experience even with the poor start of Skyward Sword. Still compare it to Breath of the Wild, and Ocarina of time seems like a flash game in comparison.

Never got into FF games, and for me I can approach FF15 and enjoy it simply because of the world, atmosphere, and basically presentation. (Sure it's just graphics, but it's still enjoyable if even for that superficial reason). FF7 while might be a better experience if you stick with it, but I just couldn't. The game is too dated, and wasn't enjoyable to play anymore as someone who doesn't have the nostalgia for that. In the end I went away with a better experience from FF15 than from FF7.

And the reason I put so much emphasis on "new gamer" experience is because we having lived through all the bs of the industry have accepted certain game mechanics and design desicions tht are not actually good. They've just been accepted. If said game releases with some of those mechanics now it might get called out on it more often, so we are seeing a shift of game design. However, looking back at games, no one criticises those things in retrospect. They were accepted at the time, but it doesn't mean they were good. But a new gamer, wouldn't have those preconvieved notions, and wouldn't accept bs game design, and would be able to judge more objectively. I guess I am trying to highlight how much the industry has progressed and improved if in a slightly unorthodox way.

Somebody give this guy a medal.

Yeah, that may be true. Though it could be that old games that seem bad today perhaps were never that good to begin with. There are some games that while at the time were really great at the time, replaying them again shows they weren't as perfect as we remember that, but there are old games that I still find to be excellent to this day.

Also, do you have any examples of this, OP?

Maybe it's nostalgia for me, and i'm blind, but I find myself going back every month to playing Ps1/ps2 RPGS. After I play PS4 rpgs, and i'm like "This game has terrible narrative/mechanics/characters. Where as a game like Chrono trigger/Persona/DQ/FF1 - 9 I find myself playing these games constantly to this day. Maybe i'm just nostalgia blind like you say though.