Modern technical advancements in gaming can feel a bit...
underwhelming at times. Ray tracing only seems to exist so I can briefly admire an FPS-tanking reflection or puddle I would have otherwise walked straight past. Chromatic aberration is mostly there to be turned off.
My once-spacious SSDs are quickly clogged up by multi-gig patches that either add something I'll never find the time to see or fix a problem I didn't know existed. I thought the future was going to involve a lot more shiny people taking over cyberspace and hoverboards, and far less sitting hunched over a keyboard updating my drivers or elbow-deep in a settings menu fussing over various forms of AA. During these disappointing times I like to run back into the creaking arms of ye olden dayes.
Which to me is anything between the era when games spanning four floppy discs were considered a luxurious extravagance and 800x600 was an excessively high resolution, to the time we all got excited about some weird new Quake clone with textured grass and vehicles (surely that'll never catch on) called Halo. These older games aren't automatically better —plenty of this year's new releases have been incredible, and there's a steaming mountain of old games best left forgotten—but the games below can legitimately hold their own against anything else already in your digital library, and feel as fresh and fun today as they always have. Bright and beautiful Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug (1982) Namco's game may be older than t.
