Game-recommendation questions were closed because everyone kept just recommending their own personal favorite game system for every question, and didn’t back up those claims the way we needed them to be backed up.
Specifically, when the problem of everyone just recommending their favorite system was first discussed, the solution was to enforce Good Subjective, Bad Subjective by requiring answers to cite actual experience doing the specific thing asked for in the recommended system. That is, we would just get inundated with answers of the form “I’m sure my personal favorite system would be great for this because...” and that wasn’t good enough. Our first step was to try enforce it through moderation tools.
It didn’t work. We still got bad answers, almost exclusively. Hence the revisit.
In short, while in theory we could have provided answers rooted in expert opinion (i.e. educated and backed-up, Good Subjective), what we actually got in practice was answers rooted in personal opinion (i.e. just a feeling, no real basis, Bad Subjective). Moderation tools (and moderator effort) just wasn’t up to the task of preventing bad answers to these questions, and/or there just weren’t enough people qualified to give good answers.
But that situation has zero similarity to this question. What’s specifically absent here is the recommendation—the querent wants to know if there are any such subsystems, not asking for any opinions on which to use. That could be a problematic list question, if there were tons and tons of them, or it was open-ended, or we expected the list to just keep growing over time. But none of those apply to a game that’s nearing 20 years obsolete.
The reasons for banning game-rec apply only to game-rec, and that’s the only thing the site has ever had consensus on.
There was a large discussion in which the community reluctantly agreed that game-recommendation had to be made off-topic, because of all these problems.
In response, the ♦ moderators of the time declared all recommendation questions off-topic. There was never any discussion of this, there was never any consensus built for this, and there was a major fight over it on the topic of tool recommendations. In the end, the ♦ moderators of the time simply declared “we are the moderators, and this is what we have decided.”
This was not, to put it mildly, how the system was supposed to work. This was not, to put it mildly, a good time for the site. No one on the site should be giving that “policy” the breadth it claimed; it was claimed illegitimately.