You know, for a website about old games, I'm sure a lot of us have bought a title from our childhood or something we heard was lauded in it's day, only for it to not turn out so finely aged.

Or perhaps on the 9th or so replay of what you thought was a beloved classic, you take a long critical look at it, and realize maybe other games were doing it better then.

I myself have had both experiences, the latter of which happened during a playthough of Secret of Mana. I just thought to myself...it isn't quite up to standards. For one, the story was obviously gutted, for two; the simple matter is a lot of the hitboxes & mechanics are rather off the mark. I don't even know if all the stats do anything!

As for the former? Neither Civ III nor Call to Power we really as nice as their initial impression had set them; they're both immediately obsolete by Civ IV.

And Cosmos Cosmic Adventure fully suffered Apogee Syndrome, where the only episode worth enjoying was the first, but I've still been plugging away at Episode II.

So, any games shatter your rose tinted glasses on replay?

Impossible Creatures

I remembered having a lot of fun designing units by mixing traits from two animals. And I still have fun with that. But the strategy game that is the core of the experience? Boring, uninspired, I can't even bring myself to play through the campaign.

It's funny to think that the same studio developed what is still one of my favourites RTS a couple years after this one.

Oooh, good one. I really like the concepts, but it came down to mass mobs each scenario. Give em' the lobsters!

A few come to mind, sure. My brother tended to get the games we got until I got my own games, and I have repurchased them out of nostalgia, so I'll list a few games that did not age very well compared to young me's imagination of them being better than they are. And you know what young me's problem was? I cheated in video games and just skipped around levels. I didn't actually get a comprehensive experience of what those games were like until much later.

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was a game I thought for the longest time better than Call of Duty (the first one), because I got an Xbox 360 download version with my copy of Modern Warfare 2 (the first one). I played CoD and then thought maaaan, this is bland and boring. MoHAA is better than this. Then I purchased it on GOG, beat it, and then thought maaan dafuq was I smoking? CoD is way more polished than this game. Funny how the tables turned. Breakthrough is actually pretty good though but it also came out nearly two years after the base game.

Likewise, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. I had first played the Xbox version with the added stuff and then I got a copy on GOG and played it, sans the opening level in North Africa and shotgun. It's not a bad game at all, but there were a lot of little issues like the weapons having horrid accuracy and the enemies becoming bullet sponges in the later levels. A more fun and balanced game than MoHAA though.

Turok 2. Had the Turok games as a kid, got the bundle on Xbox One. Weird porting issues aside, after having finished Turok 1, 2 is... not fun. Enemies are bullet sponges, levels are tightly wound corridors that are confusing to navigate and are ugly, and the game itself has a bit of a complexity addiction. 1 had a simplistic charm to it that 2 turned on its head.

I think that, when an attack collides, the game actually rolls dice based on the attacker's hit chance and the defender's evasion to see whether the attack hits.

Armor definitely works. In one particular late-game area, if you don't buy the armor that's buyable immediately before that dungeon, you're going to take a lot of damage.

(Also, the game didn't feel as rushed as Secret of Evermore, where the game just ends before you have a chance to use late-game spells enough to get them to a decent level. By contrast, in Secret of Mana there's still multiple major dungeons, big enough to need multiple trips, after you get the final set of spells. Not to mention that SoE has some nasty bugs of the sort you usually see more in WRPGs than JRPGs.)

As for me, I had the first experience with Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, and the second when playing the GBA version of Final Fantasy 4 (the game gets stale faster than other games in the series). (FF4 DS, however, was quite fun, at least after being familiar with 2D versions.)

Litil Divil - My God those controls...

Edit: There's probably quite a few DOS games where an in-game time limit or being hard-coded to 8MHz CPU speeds and relying on people hitting those "Turbo" buttons on the case for compatibility seriously conflicts with DOSBox emulation playability today.

It's not exactly a case of rose glasses shattered, because I think the game is still good, but I had the weirdest experience replaying Star Trek Voyager Elite Force. It's more like a personal Mandela Effect. The whole game was just much easier than I remembered, but it got downright bizarre in the final boss fight, because I have a vivid, almost photographic memory of that boss fight being completely different. Not just insanely hard, whereas I beat it in first try this time around without even getting hurt much, but I remember a completely different, much bigger arena, I remember the boss flying around, whereas it actually remains stationary in this relatively small room... I just really felt like was playing some alternate version of the game. I never had my memory of a game be so off.

Other than that, there are games I don't think are any worse than I remember, but my gaming habits just moved on from them. Prehistorik, for example, is still a fun game, but I just don't feel like devoting so much of my time just to beating something like that. Not without conveniences like save states. Just don't have the patience and the free time.

The funny thing is, I'm more familiar with Turok from the Game Boy subseries, and I feel that at the very least, Battle of the Bionosaurs might be a better game than these.

-Deus Ex= bad controls
-Red Faction= boss kills you in 2 shots and the shot follows you through walls...screw that!
-Hotline Miami 1&2= has no locked sphere around player character for mouse, nor mouse wheel zoom out.
-Baldurs Gate 1= pacing to a trivial end. It was fun, new, but years later....amatuerish.

This list of games I play is pretty short these days. As I get older, my patience about concessions of enjoyment grows thinner.

We explore, as everything is new in the beginning. When we, humans, grow older. We know what will make us happy for a time. The path of least resistence coupled with a realization of a limited time left, prompts a more aggressive stance towards what will and will not make us happy.

On the bright side, most of us have many options. Intellect also is a factor. The dumber a person is, the less will make them happy. Some folks cannot get enough pacman, for 30 years. Amusing for 2 minutes, I would probably find another hobby, if that were the only games available.

We actually had that. Played it on the Super Game Boy for SNES. Didn't get far, didn't know what to do. But they should re-release those games if Game Boy is getting its games ported.

Dang, now I'm nostalgia-ing over Super Game Boy. Mega Man 2 for Game Boy on my TV. Link's Awakening too. Game Boy Color games weren't compatible though.

This one stood out to me; bad controls? I can only remember maybe ] for sniper zoom being odd. And they're all rebindable controls, so...

Yeah, I don't get that either.
Deus Ex has completely standard shooter controls that are as you said fully customizable.

Now, if they had said mechanics, I would understand. But controls? Nah...

Perhaps less about the buttons and more about what they do. It feels so stiff, like a marionette with a bad delay. I find the game unplayable. Story was ok, but its able to get on my nerves to easy. Everything just does not flow like water. More like white water with loads of boulders to smack into. If you concede 1 annoyance, I find 10 more.


Also adding in This War of Mine:
1) 1 mouse button, to fool them all! Comepletely crap controls, governed by 1 button(except zoom w/ mouse wheel).
2)Combat never fails to fail, no matter what you do. Combat is a gamble....the house wins 90% of time.
3) No optional character camera follow, via a keyboard button press.
4) No wasd camera nor character movement options.

But why rose glasses? The tablet playthrough years ago gave better combat play, than it seems compared to the PC version. Perhaps I just had more patience. But it really was not as bad on my tablet. I played tablet version all the way through 12 times. As for the PC version, I cannot make it past any combat situation at all. Killing the playthrough.

Xenon 2

Recently tried to replay it, glacially slow and unforgiving even for a 16 bit game

Ah, Eurojank. That explains a lot. (Given it only appeared on ST and Amiga.)