Shadow1980 said:
UnderwaterFunktown said:
TBH I don't fully get the glorification of 90s games. The 90s had some bangers for sure, but many games were unpolished, unbalanced, buggy (back when most games didn't get patches so you just had to live with it) or just made the weirdest design choices. I can obviously agree that games being more complete upon release is a nice thing, in the sense that there was no content sold seperately (except for the occasional substantial expansion), but on the other hand games were often made on a super tight schedule back then which definitely shows imo. Also allowing the player to make mistakes is one thing, but some games basicly let you get stuck in a loss state (either directly or indirectly) unless you had a backup save, so I'd definitely say there's a limit to when that's a positive. As for the other points I think they're more genre dependant than anything. I'm playing Disco Elysium (from 2019) right now and it ticks pretty much the same boxes. Not saying 90s games were bad by any means, there are many that I like a lot (unlike 80s games which I rarely ever enjoy), but on average I'd say games improved in the 00s, 10s and 20s even if industry practices (generally) have gone downhill in the latter two. Guess it's also to some extent a generational thing though, the 00s is where most of my nostalgia lies. |
Long post |
I was talking about a bit of everything really, but I would agree the 16-bit console games (mainly SNES as I have played very little Genesis) were probably the most consistent in quality, and definitely a huge step up from 8-bit both aesthetically and as overall experiences. I do still think a good portion of them had some of the issues I mentioned, but mostly the questionable design choices more so than being unpolished.
Going back to the 90s as a whole I think another thing I forgot to mention was hardware limitations and "growing pains" of some genres. It was probably prevalent everywhere to some degree, but particularly with more advanced genres like RTS. Even if you like them (and I do like a few) it's hard argue that 90s RTS games weren't 100 times more akward to control than later games like Warcraft III or StarCraft II.
