On one, you mention games pushing the envelope and being "un-PC"; that implies the games being more assertive about controversial content.

On the other, you mention the games not pushing ideologies and propoganda; that implies the games being less assertive about such content and perhaps self censoring said content.

See the contradiction?

Well, that's a rather creative way of interpreting it.
Actually, I like both outdoors activities and "wasting" time in front of a screen. But it depends on the weather.

1st: Probably, or maybe even a bit better.

But my point was that back then more games could seemingly run on less impressive specs than now.
(minus indie titles and some others, of course)

2nd: NOLF could make use of a better card if one had it, actually, but one could also run on lower spec HW if one didn't have it.
(of course there were sometimes graphical anomalies in some user's cases...like weird colors when using the flashlight)

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My mistake for not being clear and using the proper wording: I meant that games didn't (afaik) push such messaging in as many games back then.

If they put some things(unPC or mature content) in games, it was usually just to sell units/copies.....and not as often to promote or push a belief or message.

Anyhoo, what I meant was that I want to play games to get away from the real world for awhile, and not be told what to think re: the same....games used to be more like that, and I miss it a bit.
(I am ok with some similar things if implemented correctly: i.e. stuff added as part of the game world....such as fictional characters and their beliefs/ideologies....added just to make the story and game more interesting and not push a message to the one playing)

❧ Jumping in. Not having to deal with 30 dev screens. It takes four button presses to get from turning on the SNES to playing Bust A Move. More importantly, irregardless of button presses, you're in gameplay in under a minute.

❧ Granularity. What I basically mean is there were a lot of options for tweaking and power-tweaking. Want to edit the graphics of Transport Tycoon so Toyland becomes Hell? You can do that. You could be a lot more divergent from the "intentional" gameplay and get away with a lot of silly things like an Atlas Mech loaded with nothing but machine guns.

❧ Damage Models. (Sports/racing game specific.) Because vehicle manufacturers can't separate fantasy from reality (or something), they've basically put a hard kibosh on gnarly crashes. So since the PS2 era, we've been greatly lacking in sheared vehicles, as far as I can tell.

❧ Games being feature complete on first pressing. Updates are nice, but that's what they should be. Updates. Expanding on a base game once it's golden is nice. Asking that people continue playing the game while they're still building it...I'm over that. Especially after Starbound turned out to be worse than it was.

❧ Having fun beyond the base game without having to hack it. CALLACAB, JOINTVENTURE, DYDDY, I'm sure those words ring familiarity to certain people.

❧ Limitations of technology making realistic ideas out of the question, so fun takes were put onto things. Why Regular Golf when you can Kirby Golf? Why shoot the same vaguely ethnic insurgents in the same windblasted desert people have fought over since they settled that area when you can fight colorful fun armies with zany powers?

❧ For a while, "RedbooK"/symphony quality music was impossible so musicians had to get creative. Nowadays it seems to be the same orchestral hits and stings. Whatever happened to the nice XM, S3M, IT, or other tracked sample based music? Certainly would sound better than the 400 megabyte machine gun shot sound and the uncompressed 4K sound resolution bullet casing sound.

❧ Brevity. Sometimes I want a game to finish and get the heck out. No 50+ hours of postgame. The times I've had fun giving Chip & Dale on the NES for a lunch break and actually completing it is nice.

I also think that our opinions differ in that regard. Maybe you would consider it a positive thing that e.g. The Witcher 3 would be playable in 320x200 on certain old hardware. Me, I see no point in such endeavour - especially when there's such a large amount of great old (looking) games that you (the general you) still haven't played, or finished. Just play those more recent ones in full glory at a later date, when you have the hardware to match.
I'm just sharing my personal view... do whatever pleases you (the general you, again). Yes, I know, I have little understanding for the peer pressure aspect - the need to play the new and shiny because of class mates or watercooler sharers.

It kinda derives from what you have already said, but i like that with most old games you can just boot them up and play. In many modern games your game needs to be verified by the launcher which often takes a lot. I much prefer just straight up jumping into the game.

- Old games aren't afraid to represent women as beautiful, attractive, sexy, pleasant, and normal. But these things have now become forbidden & taboo & banned in modern games, and women characters now instead must have the exact opposite traits of all the ones I just listed.

- Old games give you a lot of content for your money, usually 30 hours as the bare minimum standard, whereas new games have a standard of 4 - 8 hours, and maybe 12 -15 hours if you are "lucky."

- Old games don't have "microtransaction" scams in them, but new games are full of them.

- Old games don't have "lootboxes" and/or "gacha" and/or other types of gambling scams in them. But new games are full of them too.

- Old games usually don't have repetitive grind included in them, but most new games do, just for the sake of pretending the game has a lot of content in it, when it really doesn't, and/or for the sake of selling "time saver" grind-bypassing microtransaction scam items.

- Old games, generally speaking, are of a much higher quality than new games are, because nowadays all the huge devs just keep copying each other and making never-ending clone versions of the exact same game, and each other's games year after year forever...and the original source games that they are copying are also bad in the first place (i.e. Call of Duty, Battlefield, Ghost Recon, etc.)

- Old games were generally made for intelligent people, whereas new games are generally made for lowest-common-denominator players, and are therefore vastly dumbed-down. A perfect example of this is OG version of Mafia 1 vs the very-inappropriately-named "Definitive Edition" remake of Mafia 1.

Note that this is not true of older computer games that were played from floppies.

Also, I don't know how the Famicom Disk System compares in this sense; can you still get to the actual game in under a minute, or are load times too much?

There are good old games, there are bad old games. There are good new games, there are bad new games.

I like good games

That's not the sense I get, particularly when it comes to earlier CRPGs. Consider how much time you spend in games like Wizardry 1, Bard's Tale 1, and Dragon Quest 1 fighting the same enemies over and over again.

(I remember a segment of an old Dragon Warrior speedrun in which the player spent 2 hours just fighting the same enemies over and over to gain a few levels.)

I actually meant that (imo) it'd be nice if one could play more "major" games on today's "low spec" machines(like HD quality or so instead of 4K).

(In the past, it seemed more games could be played on a wider range on HW.....likely so that devs could sell to more customers, back before consoles started filling that niche)

I get that one doesn't need to play a game when it comes out(some of mine I didn't finish till decades after their release dates)....but what about people who use PCs they cannot modify and/or those on a budget(those who cannot replace their PCs/HW & who also want to play a game in a morereasonable time frame....say a few years after release instead of 8-10 years after)?

Dunno about others, but (when it comes to games) I was never a "gotta play it now cuz everyone else is" kinda guy.

Still, I want to complete some series...but due to the vastly increased requirements of some sequels(even ones that come out a few years after the game before) I cannot unless I upgrade or play on console. That is the sort of thing i'm talking about.

(also thanks for chatting with me on this....I enjoy hearing other people's opinions on things I also like re: gaming and etc)

While not a particularly nostalgic gamer, I tend to agree...

... older games were SP focused by default and tended to give a lot more "quality" content to the player. They also came complete -- only "later" getting free disc updates and / or extensions.

Those are my two biggest issues with modern gaming -- that games are often sold as incomplete experiences and offloading much gameplay to multiplayer schemes over SP-oriented content.

I don’t think there is anything specific I like more in old games, compared to new ones. Actually, I do not think old games were better than what we have now.

Then, why am I still mostly playing old games? Well, because time has passed, and it let the bad old games be forgotten and lost. So it’s much easier to find good old games amongst the old games that are still available, than it is to find good new games amongst all the new games out there.

Also worth noting: Older games would actually synthesize their music at run time, albeit with help from the hardware. Newer games, on the other hand, usually just playback recordings, which feels less interesting to me. (Of course, the task of creating the recordings can be interesting, but the actual game isn't doing anything interesting with music at run time.)

Yeah well, but that is the reason why I say "obsessed".

I want to diferentiate a decent design vs a "balancing" obsessed game. Just an example. In New active games like Grim Dawn the new patches are revisions, tweakings, rerevisions and retweakings of old and new added materials. Ok, I understand some things need to be fixed but the time passed and the tweakings and revisions are continous.

Well, It Could be there more examples, but what I mean is something like that. That's the idea
Don't be too hard with me about Grim Dawn, I love that game, really. :D

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And I am going to add something more anybody wasn't dare to say :D: the long loading times in the ZX Spectrum cassette were subjectively shorter than the Paradox Games ones or even the Darkest Dungeon ones. Come on developers. in the XXI century time is gold, give us a pang or a pong or a a pacman between loading screens.