Great Video Games That Have Aged Terribly

In a world filled with multi-hour install times, crucial features distributed via premium downloadable content, multiplayer matches infested with trolls, endless sequels, busted launches, microtransactions, and mandatory patch downloads, people keep asking one question: why aren't video games be as fun as they used to be?

Spoiler alert: they are. Sure, that old Nintendo 64 shooter, PlayStation platformer, and PC strategy game might've been a big deal back in the day, but nostalgia is a powerful drug, and none of them are quite as good as you remember. Trust us. You can't go back again, and it's better to leave well enough alone than to sully your happy memories by revisiting these classic titles:

In many ways, Crash Bandicoot was ahead of its time. Development on Crash started back in 1994—a full two years before its main competitor, Super Mario 64, came out—when designers Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin tried to imagine what a 3D character-based platformer would look like. The end result was a third-person adventure that placed the camera behind the character, which that the duo promptly named "the Sonic's a** game". And from those auspicious beginnings, Crash Bandicoot was born.

Graphically, Crash Bandicoot still holds up pretty well (better than Mario 64), thanks to ingenious art design, a number of clever technical workarounds, and a big emphasis on creating a likable, relatable main character. The rest of the game doesn't and, by the developers' own admission, it's mostly Mario's fault. The original PlayStation's controller—which, in its earliest iterations, only had a D-Pad for movement—doesn't offer the kind of nuance that modern-day players demand after years and years of 3D Mario titles. There's the camera, too. Crash Bandicoot's worlds are 3D, but the game only shows the action from pre-set camera angles. That feels clunky and dated, especially when the camera angles are a little off, making it hard to gauge distances between jumps.

Still, Crash has a chance at redemption: the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane trilogy updates the first three Crash games with modern controls, graphics, and full recreations of the original's levels, ultimately bringing the game more in line with modern players' expectations, while preserving the original's levels and overall design. Sounds like all the more reason to never, ever touch the originals again.

Tommy Vercetti can't swim. Okay, fine. He grew up in Liberty City, not Vice City. He just moved to a beachside town. That doesn't explain why he drowns the second he gets knee-deep in the water, but given Tommy's impeccable sense of swagger—the guy probably just doesn't want to get his stylish clothes wet—we'll let it slide.

But you know what else Tommy can't do? Enter a majority of Vice City's buildings. He also can't climb over walls, even tiny ones. Or ride bicycles. Or fly planes (save one). Or hold more than one gun at a time. Or access most of the game's map, at least not until he's completed a number of missions.

"Open" is the operative word in the phrase "open world," and while Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was groundbreaking back in 2002, it feels constrained when compared to later Grand Theft Auto games (and their various knock-offs). Zooming around Vice City in stolen vehicles is still fun, thanks largely to the game's over-the-top, nostalgia-drenched '80s vibe, but these days you'll spend a lot of the time focused on what Tommy can't do, not what he can (the frustrating targeting system and loose free-aim controls don't help, either). That makes it hard to buy into Vice City as a real place, and if you aren't immersed in the fictional world, then what's the point of playing Grand Theft Auto in the first place? (Other than commandeering a tank and waging a one-man war against Vice City's police force, of course. That will never get old.)

Myst wasn't just a popular game — it was a cultural phenomenon. For almost 13 years, Myst held the record for the best-selling PC game of all time, and it's credited with single-handedly making CD-ROM drives ubiquitous throughout the '90s and (early) '00s. With a whopping 700 megabytes of storage space available, developer Cyan Worlds crammed Myst full of breathtaking 640x480 images, thrilling full-motion videos of gears and cranks, and (if you're lucky) some grainy footage of a couple of nerds stuck inside a pair of books.

You can see the problem. Multimedia—just, y'know, any multimedia—isn't really impressive in this day and age, and calling Myst "dated" is a gross understatement. Of course, it doesn't help that the game controls like a PowerPoint presentation, or that many of its puzzles were so obtuse that they were basically random (see, for example, the steps you need to take to unlock Myst's mysterious green book, which is the only way to see the game's real ending). Modern entertainment owes a lot to Myst (remember Lost?), but if you want to see what all the fuss was about, you have better options than playing it—like, say, watching the impending television show.

In its efforts to give us more Final Fantasy 7, Square Enix copied all the wrong things and called it Final Fantasy 8. The flexible, gratifying Materia concept was gone, replaced by the confusing (and easily exploited) Draw system. Instead of a fantastic world that fused fantasy and sci-fi, Final Fantasy 8 skews way too modern, with cars and machines that make the setting feel strangely dull. But like 7, we ended up with an angsty protagonist who's hard to like (but who has great hair), a needlessly complex storyline full of unsatisfying twists (so, everyone knew each other as kids, but they conveniently forgot because, um, magic?), a vague conclusion, and so on.

In Final Fantasy 7, those were new plot elements. By Final Fantasy 8, they were tropes. Looking back at the Final Fantasy series as a whole, 8—which does have some interesting features and a number of thrilling cutscenes—looks like the place where things started to go off the rails. Knowing that, it's hard to judge the game on its own merits. There's just too much baggage.

The underwater city of Rapture was breathtaking back when Bioshock debuted in 2007. It was still gorgeous when we revisited it in Bioshock 2, back in 2010. By the time we returned in Minerva's Den, it had lost some of its luster. When Bioshock Infinite's Elizabeth traveled there in 2013 for Burial at Sea Part 1, Andrew Ryan's utopia started to feel awfully familiar. By Burial at Sea Part 2, we'd been there, done that, and gotten the plasmids.

That's what happens when a game focuses on plot and setting instead of gameplay. Bioshock is a perfectly competent shooter, but that's not what made it such a revolution — It was the story. Rapture itself is a fascinating place, the game's philosophical musings are interesting (if a bit heavy-handed), and the game's big plot twist—the "Would you kindly?" moment—expertly played with the tensions between what happens to a character in-game, and what the player itself is doing.

But we've seen it. Returning to Bioshock for a second time robs its world of all of its mystery, making you focus on other things, and they're not all great. The Vita-Chamber-driven resurrection system makes the game a little too easy. Bioshock's big moral dilemma—do you harvest or save the Little Sisters?—doesn't really amount to much, and is awfully simple in light of the nuanced choices you have to make in games like The Witcher 3. If you haven't played Bioshock, it's absolutely worth going through once. Then, lock it up in a drawer, throw away the key, and don't boot it up ever again.