Shadow1980 said:
Personally, I felt that the 3D era of gaming took a while to get good, and some older 3D classics are hard to go back to. I started off gaming on the Intellivision, old-school arcade games, and my father's Commodore 64 back in the mid 90s (I've been playing video games since at least 1984). I saw 2D gaming evolve from those simple early 80s arcade games to more complex fare like SMB and Mega Man to the epic-scale adventures of the 16-bit era. But the 3D era was something I had a hard time adapting to.
While Nintendo and Rare made some really fun games for the N64, they were about the only ones who I felt at the time were truly and consistently able to make fun 3D games for consoles. FFVII, the game I bought a PS1 for, fare a bit better as it's simple menu-based, turn-based combat was functionally not really any different from the SNES Final Fantasies. But overall I found myself enjoying the early 3D era less than the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Not only were most of those older fifth- and sixth-gen games eyesores (even at the time I felt they were less lively, colorful, detailed, visually pleasing overall than the 16-bit sprites of the first half of the 90s), in terms of gameplay many were to me quite awkward to play, with clumsy controls and bad cameras. Many of those older 3D games I find hard to go back to. Even at the time, titles like Resident Evil 2 and Shadow of the Colossus, while still good games overall, suffered from poor controls, and time has been any kinder. There were some other amazing standouts in the fifth and sixth generations that weren't made by Nintendo or Rare, including Halo 1 & 2, the Rogue Squadron games, Soul Calibur, and the amazing sprite-based Mega Man 8, that were not simply good but great and still hold up very well, but such games were rarities IMO.
Interestingly, my experience with 2D games is similar, just to a much lesser extent as I feel those kind of games age better both graphically and gameplay-wise. There are a few older 2D games that I find it hard to go back to after playing later iterations. Most notably, a Link to the Past and Super Metroid perfected and expanded on the formulas established by the NES originals to such a degree that those originals just don't as fun as they might have when they first came out. Also, the 16-bit era was to me the apex of the JRPG. NES-era Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy had considerably smaller worlds and, as a consequence, they were padded with a bunch of unnecessary level grinding. The original Dragon Quest especially hasn't aged well as it also had a simpler narrative and only a single player character, which didn't make its turn-based combat all that dynamic. FFIV was the first JRPG that I felt was a truly satifying experience that would continue offering such satisfaction for years afterwards, and that generation also brought us classics like FFVI, Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, and Lunar. For some series and even a whole genre, there were some growing pains as developers learned more about game design and benefited from superior hardware in order to offer more satisfying gameplay experiences.
3D polygon-based video games went through some serious growing pains of its own, but I felt that by the seventh generation more and more developers were finally figuring out how to create really solid gameplay experiences that made good use of the third dimension. I found myself enjoying more and more games, and I probably played more on the 360 alone than I did on the PS2, GameCube, Dreamcast, and Xbox combined (at least if you remove Halo, which is a series I've played more than anything else not published by Nintendo). The continuing increases in computing power didn't simply result in prettier graphics, but I also think they've resulted in improved gameplay, with some things that simply couldn't be done on older hardware, and I think things will continue getting better. I've had a great time with the current generation and have already bought even more games than I did last generation, and while I still go back and play a lot of 8-bit, 16-bit, and N64 games, there's precious little from the PS1 or any sixth-gen console I still make a point to go back and play.
But as they say, different strokes and all that... |
