Icemael

Almost any 2D game that was mechanically tight and well-designed when it came out will still hold up today. 3D games have aged more poorly overall but there are still a whole lot that are worth playing. One could list literally hundreds of games to answer your question.

10 years isn't that long either. In just over three months Dead Space will have its 10-year anniversary, and if that game was released today with cleaner visuals it wouldn't feel dated in the least. Same goes for some other 3D games released in 2008 or earlier, e.g. Gears of War 2.

I'm playing on Give Me God of War too, and flaws that are probably barely noticeable on lower difficulty settings really are amplified in this mode. Not only have I gotten stunlocked for three hits in a row a bunch of times (in a mode where that's enough to take all of your health), but what's even worse is that there are a bunch of moves with long animations that give you invincibility for most of the duration, but still leave you vulnerable right at the end of the move, before you can block or dodge. These include some of the most useful moves in the game, like the executioner's cleave and the projectile parry. And since these moves' animations are longer than those of enemy attacks, what this means is that in any situation where you're facing more than a single enemy (i.e. almost all of the encounters in the game) you're almost never completely safe to use them. Once I parried a projectile, then got hit and stunlocked at the end of the animation before I could block, and went from full health to dead in a matter of seconds.

"That's what you get for choosing the hardest difficulty setting" is nothing more than a shitty excuse for poor design. There are plenty of very hard games (certainly harder ones than God of War) that are perfectly balanced and free of bullshit, and if this one isn't, then that's entirely on the developers.

Oh, and don't get me started on some of the checkpoint placement. Like that section in Alfheim where every time you die on a certain fight you have to go through two cutscenes and a segment where you get scripted Spartan Rage and just mash for while before you get back to the fight that actually matters. I cannot fucking believe that there are developers that to this day are placing checkpoints before cutscenes and the like. It's like they've never played a video game in their lives!

Overall it's still a pretty great action game though. Some of the encounters have been truly brilliant, and I think I still have plenty of game left so I'm looking forward to what's coming.

This show has had some pretty bad episodes, but this was one of the worst to date. Why, when he had right in front of him a dragon which was a) stationary, b) closer than any other dragon, c) carrying several human enemies of his plus the kidnapped zombie, and d) the largest and strongest of the dragons and consequently the largest threat to him and his army, did the Night King opt to throw an ice javelin at a dragon that was a moving target, farther away, and carrying nothing of importance? If he had just thrown the javelin at the dragon sitting on the ground in front of him that would've been the end of both Daenerys and Jon Snow. (And why, for that matter, did he not throw ice javelins at Jon and his crew when they were camping on that island? Why didn't any of the zombies throw anything? Do they somehow have the motor skills necessary for sword-fighting but not for throwing rocks or spears?)

Then there's the fact that only a single day passed between Gendry beginning to run towards the wall and Daenerys appearing with the dragons, the very convenient fact that all zombies but one died when they killed that White Walker, the weak out-of-nowhere Jon-Dany romance, Jon not getting on the dragon for no reason whatsoever, uncle Benjen somehow appearing at just the right time to give Jon his horse and sacrifice himself (Dany's appearance with the dragons was quite enough -- you don't need two fucking savior-in-the-nick-of-time moments that close together, especially when both of them feel as contrived as these), Jon surviving a long ride in sub-zero temperatures after having his whole body and all of his clothes submerged in freezing water, etc. etc.

I feel embarrassed watching this garbage.

The Iliad, King Lear, Anna Karenina -- all just baby steps paving the way for the real crowning achievement of human storytelling: the tale of a man whose name is a euphemism for a boner.

In terms of mechanics and mission design they are both middling, but Arkham Knight is a lot more mechanically expansive what with the Batmobile, the grappling hook, the gliding, all of the gadgets etc. Shadow of Mordor does have the Nemesis system which is a cool idea, but it actually adds very little of value to the game.

What Arkham Knight has that Shadow of Mordor definitely doesn't, though, is one of the best audiovisual experiences in video games. Everything in the game looks and feels amazing. The city is gorgeous, sidequests are beautifully presented and integrated into the flow of open world roaming in a way that deserves to be taught in game design classes, the Batmobile feels like an absolute beast that shatters everything in its way, and the animation and sound work makes the fights feels satisfying despite the fact that the combat system is every bit as deficient as it has always been (including when it has been copied by other developers in games like Shadow of Mordor). Even something as stupid and ridiculous as the "fear multi-takedown" mechanic that lets you stealth takedown up to five guys in one go is okay with me when it's presented as beautifully as it is.

It's a much better game than Shadow of Mordor.

Play it on PC. Great game, expands and improves upon every single aspect of the original. The early parts are a bit weak but it keeps getting better as you unlock new abilities and areas. Turn off runner vision completely (seriously, makes for a much better experience) and don't spend too much time on generic side activities (especially early on), go for the main missions and those of the side missions that are given by named characters.

@ezekiel said:

They are also good for lightning-fast shooters like Vanquish. And, more pertinently, for beat 'em ups like God Hand, which is certainly faster than any of the God of War games. Not that I'm expecting the people behind the God of War series to design combat nearly as good as what can be found in either of those games.

New IPs =/= innovation. There was never a game like Breath of the Wild before Breath of the Wild, or The Phantom Pain before The Phantom Pain. Alien: Isolation takes first-person stealth and centers it around the motion sensor and a single formidable enemy with excellent unpredictable AI, and there is no other game like it. Mirror's Edge: Catalyst expands on the first game's parkour and marries it to a big, complex open world environment for an experience that you cannot get in any other game, including the first Mirror's Edge. There is no necessary connection between new IPs and cutting-edge game design, or between old IPs and a lack of innovation.

Inventory management and menus are a mess. Having to pause the game and go through menus every time you want to drop a shield or bow is incredibly frustrating, especially when you want to pick up a new weapon from a chest, which means watching the chest-opening animation twice. Also, you can quickly throw away close combat weapons you want to get rid of which is nice, but what if you want to drop a sword without damaging it, pick up another one temporarily, and then take back the first one? Then you have to pause the game, go through your inventory to find it (potentially six or seven screens to flip through if you're currently in the food part of your inventory), and choose "drop" just like with bows and shields. This shit is especially bad when you want to do it while dealing with enemies, because it breaks the flow of encounters completely.

Then there's cooking where you have to go through menus to pick each individual ingredient for every meal you want to cook. No recipes, no batch cooking. I deliberately avoid cooking as far as possible because it's just dumb busywork and way too time-consuming. This relates to the stamina system, too. Stamina limits are easy to circumvent by cooking meals and elixirs that give stamina recovery. However, this is the most tedious thing in the world. So either you put in the time and spend a bunch of time navigating menus to cook that shit, and then spend even more time in menus during that long climb/swim since every time you want to use food or elixirs you have to pause the game, or you give up the idea of climbing that mountain or swimming to that island, which is also frustrating because you know that you could do it and that it wouldn't even take any skill -- just a bunch of time and menu navigation.

Also, the way shrines and dungeons are partitioned off from the open world is stupid. Most of the world is seamless in a way that's really great, but every time you want to enter a shrine that means skipping two cutscenes, watching a load screen, and then skipping another cutscene. Then at the end of the shrine you have to spend a few seconds watching the unskippable cutscene where the monk's energy cage splits open, skip the cutscene that follows, accept the spirit orb, skip the cutscene that follows that, and then watch another load screen. I don't care that my completing the shrine has "subverted a prophecy of ruin", monk dude, I've already been told that forty-six times so just give me my fucking spirit orb already! It's the same tedious fucking process for every shrine, and there are over a hundred of them. There is no reason why it should be like this. They could easily just have had the shrine interiors be continuous with the open world instead of separated by load screens (to prevent you from bringing in items from the overworld they could just have had you walk through a door or an energy field or something through which you couldn't carry anything but equipment), and removed all those little cutscenes which are completely unnecessary and identical for every shrine.

The dungeons (or at least the one dungeon I've completed so far) are even worse, because they look like they're continuous with the open world while in fact they are not. I tried jumping out of a dungeon and gliding into the water surrounding it and suddenly just fell to my death. There is no in-world justification for this, like "this structure is surrounded by an energy field that's keeping you from leaving" (and even if that had been the case it would still have been stupid) -- I just fell to my death for no reason whatsoever. As with the shrines, there is no good reason why it should be like this. It didn't help that the dungeon's puzzles were mediocre and the boss fight at the end of it a joke.

Then you have the awful framerate drops, the middling combat system (it's the same system from two decades ago only they added parries and pseudo-Witch Time -- not that it's the worst system in the world, but other open world games have done so much better), the terrible voice acting, the bad writing (in voice-acted cutscenes, that is -- some of the other writing in the game is pretty funny -- I especially love how many opportunities there are for being a dick to NPCs) etc. etc. The game has tons of very obvious issues, some of which are pretty serious -- you could easily write thousands of words about all of its flaws. It would never in a million years have gotten the reviews that it did if it had been developed by, say, Capcom, with a different title and different character names.

It speaks to the game's strengths though that despite all of these problems, it's nevertheless very enjoyable -- and enjoyable in a way that's completely unique. There are better open world games for sure, but none of those better games offer the same kind of open world adventure. The closest experience I can recall is Dragon's Dogma, but even that is a very different game from this. Nintendo have something really special going and if they can build on this foundation (ideally on a more powerful system than either the Wii U or the Switch -- if there was ever a Nintendo game that deserved to be playable on more powerful hardware, it's this) and fix the myriad of issues, a future sequel to this might actually warrant being one of the highest-rated games of all time.

The regular enemies have gotten more interesting as I've progressed. Also, I've run into one cool area that actually kind of felt like a place rather than a tileset, though in general the areas continue to not be as interesting as I'd like.

Also worth mentioning that I've been having performance issues. I'm talking chugging with single-digit FPS. The game runs perfectly fine for the most part and these episodes usually only last a second or two, but they're not that infrequent and are extremely frustrating when they happen e.g. during crucial moments in boss fights which has happened probably a dozen or so times so far. One time the game dropped to single-digit framerate and kept running like that until I restarted. The nearest save spot was only two screens back but I couldn't reach it because even something as simple as jumping between platforms became impossible due to the horrible framerate coupled with some really bad input delay. This shit is not acceptable.