Been playing a lot of old games and I think I have mostly categorized them according to a bit of criteria
1) Games that hold up and are actually pretty fun to play with no noticeable loss of quality or enjoyment (I think we all know games like this)
2) Games that hold up but where you have to excuse certain parts of the gameplay to have fun (Lands of Lore)
3) Games that don't hold up but you understand what people saw in them and can see people enjoying today... (Realms of Arkania... You need to read a guide for character creation)
4) Games that don't hold up and you have no idea how anyone liked it...
and then
5) Games that don't hold up but are somehow master strokes of genius that you WISH someone would do a modern remake of...
-Note: Holds up means playable and enjoyable to an extent. This easily shifts person to person.
So I am looking at Starpoint and honestly playing the game is so painful... and yet the concept, the features, and even some of the gameplay is amazing. Basically it is Prospector a Roguelike, in fact Prospector is clearly inspired by Starpoint, except it is much more grounded in science and where exploration is "the point" of the game with trade being secondary. Your goal is to find a world similar to earth and basically report on it, you explore many alien planets and can face many foes (some quite alien... one being just a sphere of plasma... yeah don't fight that one).
Yet my WTF is the sheer number of games in the 5th category. Heck there are quite a few "pretty playable games" that are genius in the 2nd category, a few that no one even remembers (Heck one with a fully developed conversation system years ahead of any other game in existence... made in the 90s).
There is just so much untapped potential, and people say things have already been done...
I like old games for not babying their audience, yet often that comes with severe obtuseness. I kind of wish a lot of these games found a balance between those two.