13 Classic Video Games That Unfortunately Haven't Aged Well

As the launch vehicle for one of gaming's strongest heroines, one can't be too hard on Tomb Raider, given its contribution to the industry. However, one can criticize the living hell out of how awfully the game's playable elements have aged. The simplest tasks, such as jumping, are turned into monumental hurdles of challenge. 

The graphics are so bad that Lara Croft's chest is a single, triangular prism. It's hard to play, hard to look at, and hard to revere for anything outside of its groundbreaking main character. 

Twisted Metal 2 was a truckload of fun when it was first released. However, it has one major thing going against it, something inescapable as time progresses and benchmarks rise: it's ugly. Super ugly. Entire buildings are made out of single pixels and the car models are rudimentary, even by PS1 standards.

It's like street food, in a way. You know it's tasty beneath the surface, but looking at the sloppy mess in front of you is almost enough to ruin the appeal. 

Janky physics are the tip of the iceberg with GTA III. It features shoddy vehicle control, downright cruel level structure, and poorly-tuned mission difficulties, resulting in every main narrative objective being an endless gauntlet of trial-and-error-infused suffering. While the fun of running over hookers is still present (as are all the other hallmarks of the Grand Theft Auto series), III's particularly poor mission design heavily weighs it down when compared to the more sophisticated structures of its successors.

What happens if you cross bad game design with bad controls? Donkey Kong 64, that's what. The flaky camera does whatever it wants and leaves you to blindly operate the game's ultra-sensitive controls across poorly designed levels that you'll have to slowly backtrack through over and over again to snag collectibles.

That's right: repeat the exact same overly-expansive levels again and again as different Kongs, looking for boring little items. That's all there is to Donkey Kong 64, hence why most have left it in the rear-view mirror and never looked back. 

While the slippery controls, boring mission structure, and bland modern-day story were all excusable flaws at the time of the series' debut, the subsequent titles of Assassin's Creed serve only to diminish what little value the original game still holds. Now that Ubisoft's refined their structure and gotten Assassin's Creed down to a perfected by-the-numbers mold, their original experiment looks weak.

The graphics are gross, the controls are shoddy, and every facet of the game has since seen countless facelifts across its infinitely superior sequels. 

Weird isometric camera angles, clunky animations, and poor game design plague the original Resident Evil, making it a marvel the series ever took off and spawned so many superior sequels. Silly design choices run rampant within Resident Evil, such as having to stand still to shoot, interacting with objects leaving you open to unseen enemies' attacks, and a user interface that requires a PhD to operate.