What turned me off from multiplayer games was the entitled obnoxiousness of the other players. Playing with others is cool for a few minutes, but if you run into several shit players, ruins everything. This is when the whole "if all you find are assholes, you must be one yourself" rhetoric does not apply when it comes to multiplayer games. People just choose to be bastards.

Since publishers are allergic to dedicated community servers nowadays, I’d argue there‘s just no feeling of community anymore and hence it‘s worse or at least different than it used to be. You just get matched with random people you‘ll never see again and that makes it easier for people to be unhinged pricks.

I think I‘ve spent hundreds of hours on an militia only server (uk2 or sth?) in cs1.6 in the past and hundreds on a back to karkand (or so?) rush only server in bf3 back in the day. I recognized a lot of names on these servers every time I played.

With how multiplayer games work now, I also try to avoid them.

Oh yeah! I used to play Unreal Tournament every day for hours. Also played Wolfenstein Enemy Territory a lot in the past.

Nowadays these games just don't appeal to me anymore.

Same. I play games to enter a relaxation state after a long day at work. Playing a 45 minute cutthroat CS2 match with my friends where I have to be at attention constantly, while they're all screaming at each other for being bad, isn't exactly my idea of relaxation....

I love MP but I can't bring myself to play due to how incredibly obnoxious it became.

Same. It's enough to team up with people at work so there's no desire to do the same at home. I also don't find grinding as much fun anymore. It used to be a fun way to spend time as a kid because we had too much time. Now, I don't even pick a game which doesn't have basic QoL features implemented.

I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for "the system," but in reality they're only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It's not that the N64 has a top ten, it's that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.

I'm sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef's Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that's the thing: It's always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn't know any better because that's all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.

Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years...

Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn't exist without them.

I remember how many damn licensed games came out during that period. There was just almost a game for everything, it was nuts.

American Choppers had a game. Hannah Montana had several. Let's give Dukes of Hazzard a game, let's give Starsky and Hutch a game. Do they have to be good? Nope, they never were but let them be a thing anyways.

I never played n64 (except maybe a couple rounds of Mario kart, but that may have been gamecube). I tried to play ZOoT, goldeneye, etc. and found the controls and camera awful. With no nostalgia for it, I was out in about 30 minutes (I think less on goldeneye be cause of that abomination of a controller).

I used to get maybe three games a year and now I hardly play at all. I still have a PS3 and absolutely can't justify upgrading.

(I'm sure loads of the new games are great, I just don't have the time for them)

Halo 1 was the first game I ever played online. I played a lot of it.

But I was a very different person then, and replaying it now reminds me of how stupid I was (because I got into a clan that was very based on that kind of person) and the internal ick just his a fever pitch and ruined the game for me.

I never played 2 since that was on Vista and I never went back to it after finally getting Win 7.

After that the series just felt tainted to me. When I first tried it on a console it was really weird with the control setup. I was very used to hundreds of hours on Perfect Dark with the default controls. Having a second stick and rearranging what hand controlled what bent my mind in knots for a while. But it ended up making more sense that way (as you can easily tell by how much it caught on- not saying Halo pioneered it, but it was my first experience with it).

Pre-Windows PC Era games worth mentioning:

• Wing Commander 1 & 2
• X-Wing and TIE Fighter
• Sierra point & click adventure games like Kings Quest & Leisure Suit Larry,
• Doom
• Quake
• Dune 2
• Command & Conquer
• Warcraft 1 (zug zug!)
• X-Com
• Fallout 1

I think because the 16-bit astethic (when done right) still looks amazing today, where 8-bit is just a bit too limiting.

This is broadly true, but I think that many older games that were much simpler, with a narrower focus and more fleshed out presentation have a spot on the leaderboards that won’t be knocked off any time soon. One example is the Legend of Zelda series. With Breath of the Wild and its sequel, it did some pretty innovating things. But in the process it sacrificed much of what made the earlier Zelda games great. We figured out how to make a game with “more dungeons” but they were uninspired and they all looked the same. Gone were the huge, sprawling, uniquely thematic dungeons with memorable bosses and iconic music. The overworld got much larger and they crammed more overworld activities into it, but now those activities were just the same four or five things copy pasted to every inch of the world, none of which did much individually besides making one of a few numbers go up by a tiny fraction. New technology allowed them to make huge sprawling worlds to explore, at the expense of the ability to effectively fill those worlds with stuff worth exploring for.

New games innovate in what is technically possible, but they move backwards in other areas that don’t get the same attention. It’s more than just “These old games were good for their time”. In many cases they are still unsurpassed by modern games because the focus changed.