Originally Posted by
Ed Oscuro
I am just going to jump in and play devil's advocate a bit to disagree with your argument.
When you review a car, is your purpose to be "fair" to the car? No, your purpose is to find which of the reviewed models meets your criteria. A car made in the 1930s and one made in the 1980s will reach for those points differently. You might style the Model B better looking than the Taurus, but you will probably give the edge in other areas to the "Robocop"-era Taurus.
So it is (or, as I like to think, should be) with games or any other thing. Is the purpose to artificially weigh the competition so the crap game gets a free pass? Time is limited, and just like some cars are unsafe at any speed, some games are less worthy of being played than others when you only have so many hours of living to do. (And even if that wasn't the case, you could find other things to do with that time, even if it were just replaying your favorite game.)
It's obvious (to me at least) that any game can be compared, apples-to-oranges, with any other game. For me the major issues are how successful each game was for its format or in its time, after how fun it is to play. A game that really pushed the boundaries of technology, at a time when the developers had to wait on tape drives or an old debugger or worse to even test it out, and is still a fun game, obviously gets better marks than some new era game that may have more art in it and more code but all done in a sloppy fashion while not being particularly fun. Of course, if those categories aren't so clear-cut then you have to do more thinking, sure, but it's just that - not letting some formula of "old = more free passes" that means you get to avoid the hard thinking.