Things improve and evolve over time. Something could have felt great to play 20-30 years ago but feels terrible to play today. Not aging well is just a way to describe this fact, it's not rocket science.
And a lot of games (most in fact) don't age well. It doesn't mean they weren't great for the time period they were released, it just means advancements in gaming have made even average games of today feel better to play than many of the best games back then.
The original RE4 was fine for it's time but if you released it exactly as is, for the first time today, it would be absolutely panned by both critics and gamers for its story, it's pacing and most certainly for it's controls.
I wholeheartedly disagree with that statement.
for a game to be good, the controls need to feel responsive, the Leveldesign needs to be good, the challenge needs to be fun, and the presentation needs to be pleasing.
any if a game is good, was good, is going to be good, they ALL fall within these "requirements" of being a good game.
Resident Evil 4 is a good example for that.
let's look at the basic gameplay:
it has super responsive controls, a good camera that is never in the way, great audio-visual feedback, and easy to understand controls.
Leveldesign:
it's on the linear side with small pockets of exploration. it is varied enough to not become stale, and it's never convoluted.
Challenge:
the dynamic difficulty and the perfectly tuned enemy behaviours, as well as the placement, are fun and compliment the abilities of your character well.
it has enough moments of "terror" where it makes you feel panic when playing for the first time, and it's never unfair at any moment.
Presentation:
the graphics look nice, the character design is good, the atmosphere is great, and the graphics look decent even today.
conclusion:
a game that was good, is good, and will always stay good, because everything about it is well made.
aging badly would mean that something about it wasn't good... and how can you say that something was good in the past but since became bad?
how does that make any sense in the context of a game?
good controls will always stay good controls... good game-feel will always stay good game-feel.
this stuff can not age.
it's either good, or bad, and it will remain that for eternity.
"aging badly" simply means people had lower standards at the time because they didn't know any better, it doesn't mean that the games were good and then became bad.
it means these games WERE BAD from the beginning, and over time people realised they were bad, once they got used to actually good games.
Isn't it weird how games made by really good developers and game designers somehow didn't "age poorly"?
it's almost like they were always just good games, while the others weren't.
almost all of Capcom's 8bit and 16bit library "aged well", well of course it didn't age well, it was simply always good.
Nintendo is in the same boat... Konami to a degree as well.
meanwhile games made by Virgin... a lot of crap among those... and they always were crap, they didn't get worse over time.
LJN? mostly dogshit games then and now...