The "Good For Its Time" Defense

[Zero Kirby]

I just wanna say...that actually, despite popular belief, Hydlide did it all first, a couple years before even!  Zelda just became more recognized.

And that's why Zelda is the one that people say was "good for its time" and why nobody cares about Hydlide even if it did come first. (Which is fairly common knowledge and doesn't really matter in the context of the discussion since it's about "good for its time" not "who did it first"? Besides it doesn't really matter which one did it first, it's "which one did it right" that matters, honestly.)

That's what "good for its time" means, I believe. "It's a game that set or held up to a standard when it was made, and although it is outdated it should nonetheless be recognized for what it was and can still be enjoyable to many people because they know it's flawed they just don't care because they grew up with it and they're having fun dammit stop raining on their parade."

"Good for its time" is just easier to type than all that.

But wouldn't that be better phrased as "acceptable" or "innovative" for its time, rather than "good?" After all, something can't be good one day and bad the next, because the content is fixed (i.e. not changing, constant).

I don't really understand how "acceptable" is any more... well, "acceptable" than "good" since in this context they mean pretty much the same thing. I think at this point you're just being persnickety about semantics.

EDIT: I suppose I should clarify - I do agree that "good for its time" is a bit of a defeatist argument and is generally an admission that the game has not aged perfectly. I don't think it's an entirely invalid defense when talking about how much you like a particular game, however, or when talking about the impact that game has had on the medium at large.

Using Pong as a counter-example, I think, is rather absurd. How can you really improve a game that's so simple? It's timeless because nothing much can be done to make it better as a game. The thing about video games for the longest time, however, was that they could only be improved upon in later installments - this was before patches, after all. Think about why you never hear how "chess was a good game for its time" since chess as we know it now wasn't chess 1500 years ago, but chess is a game that can be modified on the fly. We don't have "Chess 15: The Reckoning" after all. The Legend of Zelda on NES, however, in its purest form, is immovable and concrete and therefore can't be "improved" except by making another game later on - hence why it was "good for its time." Sometimes you won't know something's bad until something better comes along. (This is disregarding game mods that "fix it" which shouldn't count when arguing whether the game itself is good or not.)