I think your right, many of us played these older games when we were much younger and weren't critical or even aware of the underlying systems that made up how a game worked (at least I didn't, I was a child, I didn't care how it worked, just that it worked and I was too young to be so critical and anal of how things worked unless it was obviously broken, which I rarely picked up on).

Part of me feels like if people like MoM so much, then go play MoM, it's still there and you can enjoy it for all the glory you think it is. The other issues is that Stardock basically made it very clear that Elemental was to be very much a successor to MoM in it's own original idea, I think that gave people romantic ideas of how much fun they had playing MoM 15 years ago. Granted, a lot has happened in 15 years, everyone grew up and became critical to what worked and how it worked and the pressure was now there to anyone who played MoM to notice the discrepancies, so we did.

I think in hindsight its a bad idea to say a game is a successor to a previous older game unless you truly stay very close to the original. I also think the community created this perception more than Stardock honestly, then again Stardock didn't exactly squash that assumption in any heavy way either.

Honestly, I think older people's jaded and anal view of looking for the issues and bugs is what is partially responsible for older games not being what you remember, you once were younger and not so concerned with the anal ways in which the game worked or how the UI worked or whatever. In many ways I think a lot of us have failed to just give into the mystique of games and their made up worlds and are too quick to look for the cracks in the foundation and the bugs etc. We could learn more than a few things from children and from suspending our disbelief a little more, all games would be better if we didn't treat games so seriously.

If you think AC sucked then you just have bad taste in video games. That or you're so blinded by Elemental fanboyism that it's making your brain think crazy thoughts. AC and MoM are still playable even today.

I posted this post to put a thing in perspective.

I disagree with that.  It has been my experience that it's younger gamers who can be unreasonably critical, as if they're so intent on looking for flaws that they forget to simply have fun.

How old are you, to still use "fanboy" comments? I'm perfectly capable of having a clear opinion without being hype-brainwashed.
But thats the way the internet works today, if you like something you are a fanboy and your opinions are nothing but mad ramblings from a brainwashed dev-asskisser, and if you dislike something you are an idiot and your opinions aren othing but idiotic ramblings from an, idiot.

I didnt say I think AC sucked back when i loved it, it sucked yesterday when i went back to it.

why do ppl talk about being a fan has something bad? 

I agree that graphic/technical quality has greatly increased recently, but the basics of what is good gameplay are the same as they've been for hundreds thousands of years.  Now, technically, it's possible to squeeze more 'gamplay' into a computer game now (AI, features, etc.) but still the basics are the same.  Plus, pre-computers, there were boardgames -- what game is more strategically/tactically complex, has more gameplay, than chess or go?  Compare the 1985 boardgame Advanced Squad Leader to the most recent Total War entry --  it's easy to argue ASL is more complex, more tactical and strategic, and has 'more' gameplay.

If anything, the early computers decreased gameplay due to their limitations, and it's just recently we're seeing computers advance to where computer games are regaining said gameplay.

I disagree all around, and I think you confuse graphics detail and capability with all around game design.  Quality has not improved in games ... programming and graphics have become more bloated and cumbersome.  A car made out of red plastic looks hot, but being made of plastic -- has the quality really improved?

Games had a lot fewer bugs back then.  I'm not sure if its laziness on account of "oh, well, if its not perfect, anyone can just download a patch 'cuz everyone has Internetz," programming so complicated that its less likely to pull it off bug-free, or "I don't like negative people, and QA folk tend to be negative, so I don't want to spend too much money on those naysayers."  Its sounding like, in the case of Elemental, its the latter.  I don't know Brad personally, of course, and maybe chalking it up to QA-being-viewed-as-too-naysaying is presumptive on my part ... but that's been par for the course in just about every company I've worked for.  Yeah, I worked in QA myself -- not for games or anything computer-related, but in two different industries:  Agriculture (a potato farm) and an aerospace factory (no, not Boeing, but Boeing was one of their biggest customers).  Especially in aerospace, every other department rolled eyes at me when I mentioned we were having problems -- particularly management, sales and production.  I am guilty of it myself -- I don't like to hear about problems I am causing, and I've worked on the production floor at several places just being joe blow laborer.  Its important, though, and I think most companies in the U.S. have lost sight and value of it.  Our "domestic" cars have many of their subcomponents outsourced to Mexico, if not overseas -- they are mostly just assembled in the U.S.

Anytime you naysay the naysayers/"negative people"/pessmists, you're striking a blow against quality.  It would be hypocritical of me to call it evil or sinful, as I'm guilty of it myself -- but we all need to work on our ability to handle criticism.  Based on the propensity of this in society in general, the companies I have worked for, myself and even my friends I know, coupled with Brad's testimony to us customers that it was a lack of QA, I think that's probably the problem.  I have never worked as a professional programmer, but from what I remember of programming courses over a decade ago, one of the big things they taught was code was always checked and tested.  Every subroutine, and testing between subroutines to ensure they didn't do anything unpleasant and unexpected.  From what I surmise today, having read the news that, for instance, Microsoft was found guilty in civil court of providing false technical information on the Windows API so that its own software would be more Windows compatible than its competitors ... that can't help, given how much I guess a lot of programming is offloaded onto the OS these days instead of my projects back in the DOS era when a program did everything, and memory management and graphics handling were handled a lot more by the program and not the OS.

There is certainly room to improve, though, even if the problems are buried in the closed-source OS API that software publishers like Stardock don't have access to, eventually through enough testing, you should be able to figure out what does or doesn't work.  I experienced a taste of that when I did website design -- there were the technical HTML specifications, but no browser in existence fully implemented every HTML spec, and even those that did, there was wriggle room that allowed each browser to implement specifications differently.  It was still up to me to make my site and pages behave well on all browsers.  I know, websites are a lot less complex than computer games, and there is an impossibly huge variation in computer hardware to test games on, but I think a similar principle applies.

Honestly, I'm doing absolutely nothing to stop any of these things. But, I do think it's funny that a "Putting things in perspective" post is only saying that other games are worse than Elemental (which they are). That really isn't much in the way of perspective. My world certainly isn't ending because this games has problems, and I can't really put myself in the shoes of someone who is genuinely angry about this.

With that in mind, I agree with the broad point of the poster. I'm not interested in getting into a big nerd-fight about this, but there is "perspective" and there is perspective. That's all I have to say about that.

Um ... I played MoM after I played Elemental ... as of 1.06 Elemental, MOM is much, much better.

I disagree with the OP completely. Good game design easily makes up for outdated graphics and UI. Why? Because the games are still loads of fun.

Played MoM last week: Great game, still loads of fun! I'm sorry to say that I think that all 18 MBs of 1994 goodness are still better than Elemental 1.06 in terms of gameplay and fun.

Played X-com last month: Amazing game, tons of fun, graphics not so important.

Played MOO2 last year: had a blast.

If I could find a copy of Alpha Centauri somewhere I know I'd have a great time playing that one again too. Wish Firaxis would make a sequel.

Conclusion:

Good gameplay and game design is much more important than fancy graphics.

I agree! People always say graphics are so much better today, but are they really better, or just more expensive? I think graphics have taken a step down since about 2002 or so when every freaking game, no matter what genre, had to be in 3D. I would argue that beatifully drawn 2d images like in Tropico 1&2, Pharaoh and Zeus or Patrician 2 are much more pleasing to look at than heartless 3d objects like in Warcraft 3 or Starcraft 2.

Sure it has helped 3d shooters, but not our kind of games.