My favorite definition was when it was used to describe cheap, mass produced clothes like your work clothes from around the 16th to 19th century, sailors would dress in their slop, etc.
First, someone half-clever comes up with a neologism or repurposes an uncommon word to describe a new phenomenon.
*Monkey's paw of linguistic integration curls another of its infinite fingers*
Someone not so clever hears the word and fails to understand the word. They take it to mean good or bad because they are too simple to comprehend more than a judgemental binary. Now they use their shiny new word that makes them feel clever for everything. More not so clever individuals do the same. Now it's used by every idiot with an internet connection.
The clever person sounds like an idiot by simply being the human surrounded by parrots saying the same thing, and the concept they were trying to bring into public consciousness is treated as the noise of the rabble. It is a battle even to get people to take it seriously.
But, hey, at least the memelords get to feel clever and you can snort quietly for a half a second when you scroll past the memes.
This contextless superficial review of classics denies the groundbreaking gameplay, art styles, storytelling, and direction that these games contributed to the artistic medium that is video games.
Like saying that The Godfather sucks becuase it is derivative and stuck in the time that it was created.
It's fine. 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 20, and this kind of youthful confusion about time and aging is exactly what I'd expect from a 10 year old, so it tracks.
I have a method for estimating how many years ago something was - I think of a number and then double it. Used to work pretty well, but nowadays I'm noticing I need to add 4 to the estimate of anything that happened before COVID.
Are they just mad that the best year in gaming was 1998. Games back then can still be played today they don't need a always online servers that will get shutdown. Every multiplayer game came with a free dedicated server and you could vote kick the cheaters or just people being assholes. Mods were everywhere and encouraged by the devs not lawsuits. Most games didn't come with with a rootkit pretending to be DRM.
I miss LAN parties, everyone coming over lugging their desktops and CRT monitors, having an 8-port 10gps Ethernet hub (not switch), staying up late playing 4v4 StarCraft maps and Diablo 2 games at max capacity.
I'm a pizza delivery driver and three weeks ago I delivered to a party of 11-13 year olds who had a bunch of monitors and consoles together in a living room having a Halo LAN party. In the year of our Lord 2026. I thought I'd stepped into the past
I recently had a hankering to play Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Because the game is so old and buggy, and because I'm running Linux, it took a lot of patching and tweaks to get running. Probably took around 4 hours, because you can't tell which random fix someone posted a decade ago will work until you try it. It was a very authentic experience of gaming in the early 2000s, and the struggle made playing the game all the more fun.
If I was on windows I'm sure the unofficial patch would've done it all, but in linux I had to use a couple of virtualisation tools I'd never heard of (whereas every game I've tried from this decade runs out of the box with Proton). The most hair-pulling step was that I had to run the game via a symlink because if the full path to the executable was too long it'd crash to desktop before I even got to hear the menu music. God bless the protondb commenter that figured that out.
D2 was the OG slop. Rogue-like before Rogue-like was cool. An endless, graduated grind with minimal story and hundreds of hours of "We've changed the color palette slightly so you know the thing you're click-spamming is more difficult to kill" monotony.
It's the kind of game you play through once with glee, then get halfway through the second run at higher difficulty, gasping for air at 2am on a Wednesday night with exams the next day, and ask yourself "Holy shit, what have I done with my life?!"
Then you jam the uninstall button, snap the CD, and bury yourself in your bedsheets dreading the hangover after your brief moment of lucidity fades.
Then you jam the uninstall button, snap the CD, and bury yourself in your bedsheets dreading the hangover after your brief moment of lucidity fades.
Yeah, uninstall and snap the CD definitely not buy a couple more copies so you so you multi bot farm with D2jsp for perfect uniques. Absolutely definitely not that never ever didn't happen. Nope.
I just played Fallout 1 and 2 for the first time. Though they've certainly aged poorly in a lot of ways, both were still fun plays, and worth the experience just to see where the franchise came from, ya know?
There was certainly a good deal of that, but my main issues were with "of the time" content stuff - sexism, bigotry, ableism, etc. Things to be expected in "edgy" nerd media of the time. Like I said, though, still fun to play through.
For the more technical roughness, I highly recommend Fallout1in2 (if you have both 1 and 2), as well as the Fallout 2 Restoration Project. Both of those completely smoothed over the rough edges for me and added a number of QoL things that were very appreciated.
Yeah there are some really good mods for Fallout 2, even including some rudimentary party member control which helps a lot.
I also want to shout out the mods Talking Heads and Talking Heads Actually Talk which while yes, you may or may not want on a first playthrough are both fantastic and blends right in with vanilla.
Nice. I wouldn't stress too much about the car. It's definitely a later-game upgrade that takes a decent amount of work and resources to make happen. Definitely good to have, though, so keep it in mind as you play through the game.
Hah, yeah, it's a bit of a tease putting it at the beginning like that. I can't say if my playthrough was typical or not, but I ended up getting it about mid-way through or so. The money requirement was the biggest hurdle for me.
The big draw of Wasteland 2 and 3 for me was getting classic Fallout-style gameplay with modern quality of life improvements. They've got very similar aesthetics and chunky gameplay, though Wasteland is more squad oriented
If these games were cars you could register them as classics in California. If you played any of them on release, you should probably stand up and stretch after you read this comment
You fucking wish, these games have everything except graphics due to the time they were created and games made today have just graphics and nothing else that made 20-30 years old games amazing for a fraction of the size and a fraction of the cost.
Me: Slipping into a dementia addled bliss as I play the classics absent any DLC, Microtransactions, or fear that the studio will collapse before it finishes the series
Keep an eye out for Surreal 98. It translates Unreal Engine 1 games to Unreal Engine 5 as they run in the background. The main attraction will be the eventual VR support, though the improved graphics are very much worth it too. There's an early access build on steam. No VR support yet, but Deus Ex already looks lovely.
I played it a bit. Liberty island looks exactly as I remember it from back then, which is to say a LOT better than the original. But man, Hong Kong, with all the neons and water and everything, it's exquisite.
Zelda and halo aside, I don't disagree. I love RE2, but I'm not going to pretend it holds up in any way compared to how drastically refined games have gotten. Halo is still as fun as ever, it just shows it's age in graphics. Zelda, though? If OOT wasn't part of a franchise, and dropped on steam today, it would still blow people away.
The rest of these are pretty much nostalgia boners. Great at the time, but riddled with terrible controls, wonky character design, and absurd voice acting and dialogue.
Go ahead and tell me morrowind and deus ex aren't jank as fuck, gramps.
"With the exception of the two games I look through rose-tinted glasses all you old fucks are wrong for looking at your favorite games through rose-tinted glasses."
I'm saying those are the only two I see that aren't blatantly flawed. Put newer graphics on halo, and there is nothing modern shooters have on it. The only bad mechanic I can think of in Zelda was the camera, which wasn't even that bad ,and was modernized in the GameCube and DS versions.
Theres nothing that makes them feel like old games, is what I'm getting at.
Yeah, you have rose tinted glasses when it comes to those two games. Halo got a graphics upgrade in the MCC. It didn't magically make the dialogue less cringe, the useless guns more useful, the pacing less weird, the later levels less boring. There's a lot of what is dated about Halo because much like Half-life everything great about it has been improved upon and made industry standard. In fact just about the only thing still "modern" about Halo is the soundtrack. It's not a bad game per se, but if it released today (even with top of the line graphics) it would be considered flawed gem at best, because the industry has grown since then.
The same applies to OOT and pretty much every other game in the image. All of them have been dissected to understand what is great about them, improved on the great and the great parts have become the new standard. If you're being properly critical and evaluate the games by today's standards none of them hold up, at least not to the critical acclaim they've been bestowed.
Sorry but "slop" has been reserved for AI-relater insults only and I will not accept any dilution of that.
The friendslop genre would like a word.
My favorite definition was when it was used to describe cheap, mass produced clothes like your work clothes from around the 16th to 19th century, sailors would dress in their slop, etc.
I mean, it's a little funny. I saw people calling things quality-slop or artistic-slop
First, someone half-clever comes up with a neologism or repurposes an uncommon word to describe a new phenomenon.
*Monkey's paw of linguistic integration curls another of its infinite fingers*
Someone not so clever hears the word and fails to understand the word. They take it to mean good or bad because they are too simple to comprehend more than a judgemental binary. Now they use their shiny new word that makes them feel clever for everything. More not so clever individuals do the same. Now it's used by every idiot with an internet connection.
The clever person sounds like an idiot by simply being the human surrounded by parrots saying the same thing, and the concept they were trying to bring into public consciousness is treated as the noise of the rabble. It is a battle even to get people to take it seriously.
But, hey, at least the memelords get to feel clever and you can snort quietly for a half a second when you scroll past the memes.
Sounds like a pretty woke take to me.
/s
Me while Alexandria is burning:
You: in despair, pitiful, will never create language faster than I can bastardize it :3
Memes in a nutshell
Wtf?
Nice rage bait lol
Truly. My 7yo plays enough Earthbound to put the lie to this meme, the classics are evergreen.
lmao this takes me back to the olden days of bait when you could just call something shit and people would argue.
checks comments
Old days, huh?
Time is a flat circle, my friend.
Ragebait is the meta now for any and all content instead of just the occasional troll stirring shit.
That never happened, as I will explain in my 42 part podcast...
This contextless superficial review of classics denies the groundbreaking gameplay, art styles, storytelling, and direction that these games contributed to the artistic medium that is video games.
Like saying that The Godfather sucks becuase it is derivative and stuck in the time that it was created.
Alright I'm done yelling at clouds.
Plural? I only see one.
I've yelled at Cloud far too much in my life. 😆
"All we had to do was follow the damn train Cloud!"
What "slop"? Stop using "slop" for everything now. Fucking kid.
Calm down grandpa
No...they have a point. The word is so overused I don't even want to type it out.
This kid missed the "be seen, not heard lesson"
It's fine. 40 is the new 30, 30 is the new 20, and this kind of youthful confusion about time and aging is exactly what I'd expect from a 10 year old, so it tracks.
I love my gramp games :(
2004 was 10 years ago right? Please?
I don't know why and I know it doesn't make sense, but apparently everything feels like it was about 10 years ago to my millennial brain.
Except 2020, that was like last year.
Except for 2020..the year that never was.never ended..feels like everything changed after 2020.
It kind of did. Shit started going to hell a lot earlier, but Covid (and the associated conspiracy theories etc. going mainstream) turbocharged it.
I have a method for estimating how many years ago something was - I think of a number and then double it. Used to work pretty well, but nowadays I'm noticing I need to add 4 to the estimate of anything that happened before COVID.
Both last year and lasted 50 years
Bad news, it's 2026. So 12 years ago.
I wasnt even born in 2004 and I will technically be able to legally adopt children in a few months
goodslop
bestslop
Mmmm...slop
It's only slop if it's bad. Otherwise it's core. In this case, Grampcore.
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS
Are they just mad that the best year in gaming was 1998. Games back then can still be played today they don't need a always online servers that will get shutdown. Every multiplayer game came with a free dedicated server and you could vote kick the cheaters or just people being assholes. Mods were everywhere and encouraged by the devs not lawsuits. Most games didn't come with with a rootkit pretending to be DRM.
I would argue MOST games don’t have DRM rootkits today, just not the ones that spend more $$$ on marketing than development and writing.
Damn good times.
I miss LAN parties, everyone coming over lugging their desktops and CRT monitors, having an 8-port 10gps Ethernet hub (not switch), staying up late playing 4v4 StarCraft maps and Diablo 2 games at max capacity.
Good times.
I'm a pizza delivery driver and three weeks ago I delivered to a party of 11-13 year olds who had a bunch of monitors and consoles together in a living room having a Halo LAN party. In the year of our Lord 2026. I thought I'd stepped into the past
There is hope with the young 'uns
11-13? So born in 2015-2013? So then those would be millennials' kids, gen alpha.
The millennials loved LANs so much, they gave it to their kids. That's lovely.
Did you at least stay for a round of CTF on Beaver Creek?
Unfortunately it was the beginning of dinner rush and I need money
I know man. The copious amount of pop, Doritos/Cheetos and pizza we'd consume... We were kings.
This is so fucking stupid. If you substitute movies or books for the images it would just seem stupid.
It's weird video games get this strange space of "old".
I recently had a hankering to play Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Because the game is so old and buggy, and because I'm running Linux, it took a lot of patching and tweaks to get running. Probably took around 4 hours, because you can't tell which random fix someone posted a decade ago will work until you try it. It was a very authentic experience of gaming in the early 2000s, and the struggle made playing the game all the more fun.
The jank makes it good 🤌🤌
You needed more fixes than the Unofficial Patch?
If I was on windows I'm sure the unofficial patch would've done it all, but in linux I had to use a couple of virtualisation tools I'd never heard of (whereas every game I've tried from this decade runs out of the box with Proton). The most hair-pulling step was that I had to run the game via a symlink because if the full path to the executable was too long it'd crash to desktop before I even got to hear the menu music. God bless the protondb commenter that figured that out.
Ah I see. I've been dragging my feet moving my gaming PC to Linux and stuff like this is why. Also I'm lazy.
D2 listed as slop? SLOP!?!?!? Who created this horrible meme and where do they live? My baseball bat wants to have a few words with them.
D2 was the OG slop. Rogue-like before Rogue-like was cool. An endless, graduated grind with minimal story and hundreds of hours of "We've changed the color palette slightly so you know the thing you're click-spamming is more difficult to kill" monotony.
It's the kind of game you play through once with glee, then get halfway through the second run at higher difficulty, gasping for air at 2am on a Wednesday night with exams the next day, and ask yourself "Holy shit, what have I done with my life?!"
Then you jam the uninstall button, snap the CD, and bury yourself in your bedsheets dreading the hangover after your brief moment of lucidity fades.
Yeah, uninstall and snap the CD definitely not buy a couple more copies so you so you multi bot farm with D2jsp for perfect uniques. Absolutely definitely not that never ever didn't happen. Nope.
Who would do this? Nobody would do this!
hand shaking
To those of us who played thousands of hours of D2 this is a comical take
As soon as people started calling staples of the FPS genre "boomer shooters," I knew it was over.
That never made sense to me, since Boomers by and large weren't the ones playing games then.
Boomer is shorthand for "old". Accuracy is not a requirement for a snappy genre title.
I guess it irks me because us Gen Xers were the first ones who really started playing video games, damn it! XD
You are the boomer now. Passes the mantle
Oh I thought it was because stuff goes boom 😔
Is it called a "boomer shooter" because it has exploding barrels (or other things) you can shoot?
No, it's because they are styled like old fps like doom or hertic
So, a doomer shooter?
Boomer doomer shooter
I just played Fallout 1 and 2 for the first time. Though they've certainly aged poorly in a lot of ways, both were still fun plays, and worth the experience just to see where the franchise came from, ya know?
Aged poorly as in the controls/UI? I remember seeing that people had modded some QoL changes, but I still haven't taken the plunge.
There was certainly a good deal of that, but my main issues were with "of the time" content stuff - sexism, bigotry, ableism, etc. Things to be expected in "edgy" nerd media of the time. Like I said, though, still fun to play through.
For the more technical roughness, I highly recommend Fallout1in2 (if you have both 1 and 2), as well as the Fallout 2 Restoration Project. Both of those completely smoothed over the rough edges for me and added a number of QoL things that were very appreciated.
Yeah there are some really good mods for Fallout 2, even including some rudimentary party member control which helps a lot.
I also want to shout out the mods Talking Heads and Talking Heads Actually Talk which while yes, you may or may not want on a first playthrough are both fantastic and blends right in with vanilla.
Doing the same, just made it to Redding, trying to get this damn car working lol
Nice. I wouldn't stress too much about the car. It's definitely a later-game upgrade that takes a decent amount of work and resources to make happen. Definitely good to have, though, so keep it in mind as you play through the game.
Ugh then why did they give me the quest so early on, you bastards! Thanks!
Hah, yeah, it's a bit of a tease putting it at the beginning like that. I can't say if my playthrough was typical or not, but I ended up getting it about mid-way through or so. The money requirement was the biggest hurdle for me.
You can get it reasonably early and i would personally recommend doing so as that's when the game really opens up. I always beeline for it.
The big draw of Wasteland 2 and 3 for me was getting classic Fallout-style gameplay with modern quality of life improvements. They've got very similar aesthetics and chunky gameplay, though Wasteland is more squad oriented
all these games came out past my prime video game years, i am great gramp gamer i guess
Where do I even put the money to unlock everything?
gog.com probably has most of these
I think they were joking about microtransactions in games today.
If these games were cars you could register them as classics in California. If you played any of them on release, you should probably stand up and stretch after you read this comment
I remember playing the shareware OG doom after my not-uncle installed it on the family computer back in '94.
Yes, I'm basically dead now.
Ow, my back and my feelings
Go for the eyes Boo, go for the eyes!
...don't call it slop, you damn brat!
Thanks for the game recommendations. Can't wait to try them out!
-Slop?
The distance between a new term’s invention, its ironic use, to it then being abused is getting shorter and shorter.
You fucking wish, these games have everything except graphics due to the time they were created and games made today have just graphics and nothing else that made 20-30 years old games amazing for a fraction of the size and a fraction of the cost.
Mewgenics is goddamned amazing & looks like absolute shit, so, the tradition continues?
It does not look like shit. A resemblance to flash games was intentional and awesome.
If anything Mewgenics is weird af, so props to trying something different, not really something for me.
You: smugly laughing at video games from the 90s
Me: Slipping into a dementia addled bliss as I play the classics absent any DLC, Microtransactions, or fear that the studio will collapse before it finishes the series
We could use a proper remake of the original Deus Ex. One of the all time greats in the FPS RPG genre.
Thief would be good too, but currently KCD2 is mostly satisfying that itch despite stealth not being it's main focus.
Keep an eye out for Surreal 98. It translates Unreal Engine 1 games to Unreal Engine 5 as they run in the background. The main attraction will be the eventual VR support, though the improved graphics are very much worth it too. There's an early access build on steam. No VR support yet, but Deus Ex already looks lovely.
I played it a bit. Liberty island looks exactly as I remember it from back then, which is to say a LOT better than the original. But man, Hong Kong, with all the neons and water and everything, it's exquisite.
The cry engine was asking for dues ex to be remade in it, but sadly that's never happened. A true missed opportunity.
Maybe one day we’ll get Surreal 98 :’)
Not necessarily a remake but the engine fixes look nice.
I recently played Half Life for the first time. It was fun! There is really no issue with old games, unless they had issues from the start, of course.
And now I finally get the "Blah blah blah Mr. Freeman" joke.
If someone said this to me. I would be violent instantly.
I think it says a lot about the quality of these games that so many have remasters, remakes, or even an open source engine swap.
Where is GoldenEye?
I ain't see no Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or Red Alert 2.
There was definitely slop back in the day, but this wasn't it.
I can assure you, a millennial or older wrote this list to rile up his fellows :D
Besmerch my Fallout! How dare you! Good DAY sir!
I find it amusing that the old meme dude looks like Heihachi from Tekken 2, one of their examples of "slop".
Alright pal, you want a fight?
Dude I can smell this picture
House mildew and cigarettes?
Not what I was thinking, but yes.
Games were better when I was young!
Age of Empires II shouldn't be on this list, unless it's exclusively talking about the old CD version.
Zelda and halo aside, I don't disagree. I love RE2, but I'm not going to pretend it holds up in any way compared to how drastically refined games have gotten. Halo is still as fun as ever, it just shows it's age in graphics. Zelda, though? If OOT wasn't part of a franchise, and dropped on steam today, it would still blow people away.
The rest of these are pretty much nostalgia boners. Great at the time, but riddled with terrible controls, wonky character design, and absurd voice acting and dialogue.
Go ahead and tell me morrowind and deus ex aren't jank as fuck, gramps.
Put this man in The Library and make him do a dozen runs on the highest difficulty.
"With the exception of the two games I look through rose-tinted glasses all you old fucks are wrong for looking at your favorite games through rose-tinted glasses."
Ok gramps.
I'm saying those are the only two I see that aren't blatantly flawed. Put newer graphics on halo, and there is nothing modern shooters have on it. The only bad mechanic I can think of in Zelda was the camera, which wasn't even that bad ,and was modernized in the GameCube and DS versions.
Theres nothing that makes them feel like old games, is what I'm getting at.
Yeah, you have rose tinted glasses when it comes to those two games. Halo got a graphics upgrade in the MCC. It didn't magically make the dialogue less cringe, the useless guns more useful, the pacing less weird, the later levels less boring. There's a lot of what is dated about Halo because much like Half-life everything great about it has been improved upon and made industry standard. In fact just about the only thing still "modern" about Halo is the soundtrack. It's not a bad game per se, but if it released today (even with top of the line graphics) it would be considered flawed gem at best, because the industry has grown since then.
The same applies to OOT and pretty much every other game in the image. All of them have been dissected to understand what is great about them, improved on the great and the great parts have become the new standard. If you're being properly critical and evaluate the games by today's standards none of them hold up, at least not to the critical acclaim they've been bestowed.
OOT was ambitious for what the N64 was capable of. It was amazing at the time, but it’s frustrating to play now.
Half Life, and by extension Couter Strike, are still totally playable and enjoyable today.
Edit: and AoE 2
The Resident Evil 2 remake is a real good game.