How much does nostalgia influence our opinion of "old school" gaming?


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Recently, I have gone back and played a few games that I loved as a kid/teen. The kind of games you would play for hours and hours. You'd play them so much your parents would keep saying "Why don't you go outside and get some fresh air"! Or "How can you sit in front of that thing so long"?

 

Some of these games I haven't touched in years or even a decade+ and it struck me how many of them are actually pretty crap. Poor controls, rubbish writing, (although game writing has never been Hemingway), artificially difficult, which was probably a legacy of the arcade era to encourage you to spend more coins, and just generally pretty lame. Of all the games I played in the "old school" era, very few have stood the test of time. At best, most of the old school games played today are a fun blast from the past until you realise how bad they were and at worst you realise they sucked all along and you were just to young and ignorant to realise it.

 

The SNES, which is probably still my favourite console, (admittedly that opinion is probably the result of nostalgia), had 784 official games (according to wiki). I didn't play all of them, but I played a lot, and I can only think of a handful that were particularly good and they were the ones that sold the most. The rest were unplayable for technical reasons or were just not worth playing. Before going back and playing  some of them I had this idea that they were great and modern gaming couldn't compare. Now I am starting to think that this whole fetish of old school gaming is a bit of a sham. Modern gamers are jaded and yearn for a time that simply didn't exist. Whining about how nothing now compares to the simplicity of the games of their childhood. I encourage people to go back and play some of those games they think they love and tell me if they truly feel the way they thought they did, or if indeed they're viewing the old school through rose tinted glasses.

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Not to start a post in a good topic to say otherwise.

 

I have gone back to my SNES (now emulated) and still am able to enjoy the games like I did back then.

SNES Games like Super Mario, Street fighter, Judge Dreed.

PS1 games such as MGS 1 and MGS 2, Soldier of fortune, Resident Evil 2.

PC Games like Duke Nukem(Atomic Edition), Age of empires 2, C&C Red Alert, Price of Persia (Disk based)

 

These games for me even though more simple and less challenging I can still stay hooked on them, nostalgia may influence my opinion to think they are good games, but what keeps me playing them is that story progressed well!

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I think it depends. I went "old school" over the summer and got the original Tomb Raider games for the PS3. I had so many fond memories of the games, and those memories took a bit of a hit when I tried playing the game. The controls were clunky, the various detections were poor and it didn't have the same level of wonderment.

That said, I also recently got hold of Day of the Tentacle and The Curse of Monkey Island and I installed them on my Android. I'm amazed at how well it plays, and the stories are wonderful. Unlike the TR games, where over time I had forgotten what the graphics were really like compared to today's games, these two games are exactly how I remember them, and it's brilliant.

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I played the first two resident evil games and I felt like surrendering myself to a horde of zombies. Those are games I played damn-near obsessively back in the day. Couldn't do it now.

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Depends on the game.. sure, there's a few cases of "how did I spend hours playing this",  but a lot of classics are still a lot of fun to play, even if they're fairly crappy tech wise by today's standards.  Gameplay beats out graphics every time.

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I think nostalgia influences anyone's opinion / thoughts about "older games" quite a lot, although it depends on what era of games you're talking about. For me, I played Paganitzu, Wolfenstein and Doom a lot. And I mean a LOT. I still play those games these days actually. The story line is rubbish, but I love to play them. To me, those were games you just played. Who needs stories or tutorials, just press the usual buttons and go.

 

Other games, like NFS: Hot Pursuit, Descent, I loved them. Back then. I tried playing them now and I was like: :| . The first NFS: Hot Pursuit was something new, exciting, cops everywhere, loved it. But now we're spoiled with prettier graphics, better physics and gameplay (although not all the time). So I recently found my copy of NFS: Hot Pursuit and remembering how much I loved that game. Installed it, ran it and quit it the first round.

 

I think it's general in life. You have a game, object, relationship, whatsoever with a certain thought attached to it. Games are meant to be entertaining, challenging, et cetera. Most of the time you play the genre you love and be happy with it, until something better comes along. But you keep those good memories, because you spend so much time playing that one level or you knew how to kick the boss in less than 10 seconds, et cetera. But when you go back, it might be disappointing.

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I still enjoy the classics from time to time. You must've liked some crappy games back in the day :) I don't miss flicker/slowdown of the 8, 16-bit era nor the "pop-in" of the 32-bit generation, but there were timeless gems in each. I wish developers had our tech back then without the socialization and online requirements of current games. In my opinion, games that come now have no collectibility or long term value because of those things. Everything that comes out now is fine in the moment, but thats it. Shame, but thats the way it is now.

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I still enjoy the classics from time to time. You must've liked some crappy games back in the day :)

 

:) But back then they didn't seem crappy. They seemed great, and I believed that they were until I went back and actually played them. As I stated in my OP I think I was just too young and too ignorant to know any better.

 

The old school had the capacity to make classics, which I still adore, but they were so few and far between. It seems now we have classics, great games, good games, and then mediocre and the ######. Back then there was only the handful of great games and everything else was pretty ######. Now there is a much more steady gradient between classic and ######, not a sharp drop like back then.

 

 

In my opinion, games that come now have no collectibility or long term value because of those things. Everything that comes out now is fine in the moment, but thats it. Shame, but thats the way it is now.

 

Maybe the this gen of young gamers will say that about the next gen of games. They'll hold this up as a golden era while trashing their current era.

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Most nostalgic games require a level of refinement that comes when they do a remake. For instance, I'm playing Final Fantasy on my Windows Phone 8. It's streamlined to work very well with it and even has an easter egg game on the side. As for the exploration part of it, people's patience and expectations have changed. There's no way I could play through that game without a walkthrough.

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I spent last night playing AC4: Black Flag then went onto play Super Street Fighter II - The New Challengers on my Mega Drive before heading to bed.

One can enjoy the best any generation has to offer.

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Just to be clear, I am not talking about GFX. GFX isn't the be all and end all of gaming. I am talking about the perception that gaming at a certain period was totally awesome and the belief nothing modern comes close to it.

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:) But back then they didn't seem crappy. They seemed great, and I believed that they were until I went back and actually played them. As I stated in my OP I think I was just too young and too ignorant to know any better.

 

 

I guess it's the context of when you originally played the game. I find that great games 20 years ago are still great games. I don;t think that they would be so if they were released today, but back then it was the best thing to ever come out, and there was nothing better to compare it to. 

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Just to be clear, I am not talking about GFX. GFX isn't the be all and end all of gaming. I am talking about the perception that gaming at a certain period was totally awesome and the belief nothing modern comes close to it.

For me, that context depends on the genre. Some types tend to get better obviously as the graphics improve, shooters and whatnot, the gameplay really hasn't changed much, just throwing a lot more pixels at you, and the improved graphics really do help the gameplay and overall fun factor.  Some others though have a few classics that (in my opinion) have yet to be beaten. For example, in role playing I don't think I've run into anything current that held my attention like the Baldur's Gate series, Ultima 7, etc. Some fun new ones sure, but nowhere near the storytelling, depth or complexity, and lately turning into more button mashing and purty cutscenes, less thinking.  Fun, but I still remember my first playthrough of Planescape Torment some ~15 years later.. 15 years from now I doubt I'll even remember Dragon's Age or Witcher. (Well, 15 years from now I'll probably be suffering from senility and won't remember my own name, but still...)   Shoot, I still remember the old Infocom games and such, zero graphics whatsoever, and they entertained me more than a number of some current games, some of those stories will stick with you for a good long time.  (Trinity, A Mind Forever Voyaging, etc.)

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