Team Fortress 2
Cruelty Squad (okay, the game is only a couple years old, but the art style is so intentionally shit that I just can’t see it aging at all)
Jet Set Radio, Jet Set Radio Future, and (I predict) Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. BRC also is only a couple years old, but it shares the same style as JSR(F), which has aged very well.
Minecraft
Doom and Doom II (just remember to turn off texture filtering, or set it to nearest neighbor).
The Sims. No, really, I think The Sims games have all aged very, very well. Some better than others, but I feel like each one of them has a visual style that still works today.
TF2 might be the best example of this honestly. It looks like it could have come out today.
TF2s aged beautifully (in terms of graphics), the art style carries it astoundingly. Half life 2 and portal look definitively dated but TF2 holds up really well (I know it had graphics updates but still).
The Sims 1 is great because they were basically rendered sprites.
Also most of the music on Sims 1 is just… some of the best music I’ve ever heard.
Mirror’s Edge
Wind Waker is probably the go-to answer for this. I think Xcom 2 is a good example too, even though it’s fairly recent.
Wind Waker is definitely my answer whenever this question pops up. It’s one of the few fully-3D games from that era that still holds up moderately well today. A lot of Gamecube games definitely look like Gamecube games when emulated with out-of-the-box settings, but Wind Waker looks like an indie game that could’ve come out last year when emulated.
The Zelda art teams really are masters at their craft.
The art direction at Nintendo in general is really top tier. I was looking looking at their WiiU games not too long ago. I noticed they don’t usually have a lot of complex shapes in their models, they use a surprising amount of flat area, but they jazz them up with extremely well done texturing and shaders.
Any game that isn’t trying to go for realistic graphics. Some off the top of my head:
- Braid
- Okami
- Outer Wilds
- Ori and the Blind Forest
Super Mario World. It still looks great.
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island too! So stylized it could release today and still be considered beautiful
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
The music from that is still stuck in my head after all this time.
Great game!
