We're in a thread talking about old consoles. It's easy to forget that the majority of games on any console were awful shovelware (I'm sure many of us have the experience of booting up an old, fondly remembered game only to slowly realize it's crap).
This has actually never happened to me. I replay the games I played as a kid about every two years and they are always great. The game I reply the most are Kid Chameleon for Sega 16bit and Wonderboy in Dragon's trap for Sega 8-bit.
I might look into this but I cannot stand ads and I'm inapt at using mobile phones, so probably not.
All games I remember good still are, my MAJOR gripe is that post 1995 most games got standardized as to what left/right clicks are for and how movement control is performed (wasd+shift/space) so going to play game before or around that timeline with those clunky ux is a major mental drain
i.e. Fragile Allegiances, Magic Carpet, Shogun Total War are all enticing but I cannot play without getting frustrated.
Honorable mention to Master of Magic, which is completely workable.
Mobile wise since Dwarf Fortress got a mobile skin I couldn't be happier.
The few games I still like to play from my Atari 5200 days are Missile Command, Gyruss, Frogger, and Pac Man. All of them have been ported/updated but they are still fun in their original incarnation under emulation.
From my Sega Genesis days: Streets of Rage, all of the Sonic games, and the Mortal Kombat series are still pretty fun.
I'm not saying that there were no good old games. What I'm saying is they benefit from the same effect as old movies and books, where the best remembered and preserved titles are good ones and the crap is mostly forgotten about, leading to an unrealistic perspective on how relatively good or bad the medium writ large used to be. For every Super Mario Brothers 3 there's a Mystery of Atlantis.
