in short, the idea here is to put lightning back in the bottle under the assumption that it will somehow trigger a return to the successes of old. as others in this thread have already noted, this exact thing has already been tried a number of times, and it failed every fucking time, because that's just not how shit works. like it or not, profit drives commercial game development, and most often the limiting factor in game development is not hardware, but simply money. also, nostalgia is a fucking meme, all those timeless classics you're remembering as paragons of the era were in the massive minority. I would say, conservatively, a full 70% of the software released for any given platform is pure shovelware that now lies forgotten in a landfill somewhere. for every Super Mario Bros or Legend of Zelda there are at least a dozen Imagine Babyz or Barbie Horse Adventures. on top of that, a good number of games that are considered classics still are actually shit (Goldeneye lol). making an artificially limited console won't magically resurrect a past that never happened. since there's no profit in developing for a platform like this, the best you're gonna get is a handful of autists and troons squeezing out some uninspired "retro" slop just to say they did. it'll get a couple bemused headlines on soy game news sites before becoming another footnote for discussion whenever this topic inevitably re-emerges because some faggot YouTuber dares ask, "Why aren't modern games cool like the stuff I had when I was a kid?"
I had made the point of that most of what OP wants is games without the cancerous shit that plagues most games, indies and AAA alike.
The other problem I didn't mention is how crowded the "retro" market really is. People who have fond memories of
Chrono Trigger and
DOOM (1993) are going onto make basically imitations of the game that are just as bloated as anything else without the understanding or talent that made the originals so compelling and revolutionary to begin with. Of course, there are also a bunch of other games that just don't receive any "updated" versions whatsoever.
It's evident that retro-makers are incompetent because they rehash the same genre of 2d platformer or sidescroller. Where's my marble madness, road rash, megalomania, syndicate wars, tomb raider (OG) clones? They can't be made because devs are incompetent.
It's stuff like why
Pizza Tower was so well-received, it was both lacking in wokeshit but also a new take on a relatively unused game (
Wario Land 4) without copying it too closely. But even then, I don't really want to play rehashed versions of games I played 20+ years ago, I want something that captures the spirit of how video games used to be, that is, excited for improvement. I might've mentioned this elsewhere but when it comes to when exactly the "golden age" ended it was when games stopped trying to improve. I wouldn't consider
The Last of Us an objective improvement in video games even if it featured better writing, even if had good graphics.
Bigger and better games would be something if I had something like
Crazy Taxi (or some other game that figures driving in an urban area prominently, GTA would be a bad example since there's lots of other stuff), but bigger.
If I had a game, for instance, where it mapped 600+ square miles of the San Francisco Bay Area, from Richmond (it's just north of Berkeley) down to San Jose then back up to San Francisco on the west side, that would be something I would consider innovative, even if you had to visibly cut corners on textures and models (which would still be very recognizable, not like
Vette! where it's just boxes). But there are very few games that truly push boundaries in that way, and without those games you'd basically end up with another Ouya.
In short, the Past worked because boundary pushing games + no cancerous features, but that all boils down to a game; projecting that onto a "PS2-like console" is missing the point entirely.
