At Christmas, many of us are getting new computer games.

With the season, we also turn to nostalgia & looking back on the past. It's often hard to shake the feeling that games of our youth were simply better than games coming out now. Let's explore why that might be (1/22)

"Well, that's clearly because games in the 80s and 90s didn't have any politics and forced inclusivity"

Nope, that's complete bollocks, and nothing to do with why you remember those games so much more fondly

(maybe I should have started the thread with this, lol) (2/22)

For the purpose of this exercise, I'm going to arbitrarily draw the line between modern and old games at roughly the early 2000s.

For many, the 'golden age' of gaming is the era from the SNES/Genesis to the early years of the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. (3/22)

There wasn't just one thing that made games from that period feel so great. In my opinion, it came down to 7 interlinking key constraints. As development teams & players looked to overcome them, they had to either mitigate or innovate.

Let's look at each of them in turn (4/22)

First up we have:

'Just enough' hardware performance

Games were finally able to look *amazing*, as long as developers knew the limits of the platform they were working on. You couldn't push for realism, so instead you had to commit to an artstyle. Reply with your favs! (5/22)