Patient Gamers

Pretty much all of the iconic games from my early teens. (I was a teen in the late 80s and 90s). The games that I grew up with, that I fell in love with, are unplayable now.

Dragonstrike, a flight sim where you fly a dragon in the D&D Dragonlance world was mind blowing when I first played it. Now, it's so bad that replaying it spoiled my memory of the original experience!

Life

This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I'd bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There's definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.

Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I'd paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money's worth.

Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels 'modern' enough that I don't usually have this problem.

Persona 1 and 2. As a Persona fan I see some people saying how great they are, and the story does seem interesting, but I can't deal with that map movement, battle system and endless random battles.

Really, any RPG with random battles is a little harder to get into compared to overworld monsters you can avoid or target at your own pace.

Gta 5. Story progression is just awful. You play a mission, it ends and you're forced to do open world activities instead of continuing the story. Then just when you're getting into the groove in the open world you get a call to do a story mission and it turns out to be shooting imaginary aliens. The missions are too linear and short. Gunplay is weak. Also the characters feel like they were written for 10 year olds who think swear words are funny.

I'm hoping rdr2 is better

You'll have to sail the high seas since it requires THUG2 which isn't for sale anymore but THUGPRO is a mod that will let you play classic Tony hawk levels with all the mechanics from later games.

I tried to play fallout 3 and new vegas after falling in love with fallout 4 but I just could not stomach it. The games looked ugly and controlled strangely. I had more fun and enjoyment playing the original fallout from the 90s.

Lord of the rings online looks terrible but I’ve always wanted to explore.

I'm playing through Knights of the Old Republic right now. The only thing that makes the graphics tolerable is playing on my switch. The screen is small enough to minimize the bad graphics and jank. But if I was playing it on a TV or computer screen I wouldn't be able to continue. It hasn't aged well at all.

I was always a console gamer in my childhood so I missed the boat on a lot of the most iconic PC games.

I feel like I might catch some heat for this one, but recently I tried Half Life 1 and I just couldn't get into it. The game just feels so...lifeless. I got about 10 chapters in, which is like 60% or so of the way through, and every moment just feels like I'm playing House of the Dead in the arcade, walking down a hallway and shooting jumpscare enemies. I think the lack of any semblance of story or motivation for what I'm doing is especially egregious to me.

Mario 64. it's so frustrating.