Lunchtime Discussion: Nostalgia

Everyone has some memories of earlier gaming generations, I touched briefly on my memory of platformers in the 90s yesterday. The problem is, as with everything in the past, we do have a tendency to see things through rose tinted glasses. I mean are those games from the 8 and 16 bit era really that great? Even more recent games, say from the PlayStation 1 era, can fall foul of the rose tinted issue.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t classic titles. For example games like Mario and Sonic are great, and still enjoyable today. I still play Sonic fairly regularly (I’ve talked about the number of times I own any given Sonic title far too many times to go into once again), and the gameplay from the original Super Mario remains largely unchanged in New Super Mario Bros. Even further back into arcade classics like Pac-Man and Asteroids the titles still hold up, assuming that you’re not expecting too much out of the game.

On the other hand there are games that just aren’t that great when you actually go back and play through them. Until recently I was convinced that the Master System title California Games was a brilliant sports game. I’ve gone back and played it recently, or at least I tried to. The game is horrible and clumsy to control, trying to make an attempt to simulate analogue inputs on a d-pad. As I was playing it the actual experience, rather than the experience in my head, of playing it game flooding back from my childhood. It was horrible then and it’s horrible now.

Have you ever been disappointed going back and playing an old game? Are there any classics that are truly overrated on reflection? How big a role do the rose tinted glassed play?

Thanks to RevWhiteDragon for tweeting this idea to me.