Is nostalgia dangerous? Are old games truly as great as we remember them, or were our standards simply set much lower at that time? This blog entry is largely in response to a topic made by another user on the above subject. Do ancient "classics" still truly matter, or are we just glorifying them because of fond memories?

 It depends. Certainly older games retain their incredible gameplay value to this very day, while others are virtually obsolete. I believe it also has a lot to do with genre types. Genres that rely heavily on graphical power and a good physics engine, namely the FPS genre, become obsolete *very* quickly. However amazing Half-Life was at the time, it really doesn't hold up at all these days.
  On the other hand, take a genre like turn-based strategy, where graphics mean virtually nothing. Civilization 2, which is much older than Half-Life, is still incredibly fun to play, and retains its value to this very day. If it was just being released for the first time, it would likely still score highly on every value except graphics, which it doesn't really need in the first place. It's a remakarbly deep and inifinitely replayable game.
Also, I've noticed that a lot of genre-defining games manage to retain their gameplay quality longer than others. NES games like The Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. are still quite playable and fun even in this new generation, as we've seen by the excellent GBA Classic NES series. However, old NES games that were popular at the time, like the original Final Fantasy, are barely playable now, and downright obsolete.

  What defines the lasting qualities of a game? It's certainly not style. No matter how incredible a grame's graphics or physics engine are, you can be sure that they will be obsolete in only a short few years. However, certain games have a *substance* that can last far beyond the point where their graphics expire. How else can a person explain the massive success of Starcraft now 8 years after its initial release? It's still the most popular RTS in the world by far. And what about timeless RPGs from the SNES days? To this very day, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI remain as some of the finest games ever created. Despite their outdated graphics, their plots and character development are as stellar as ever, and the gameplay mechanics still manage to be up to standard all these years later.