Unangbangkay

Cohost of @unangbangkay on Twitter

Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid

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Kayin
@Kayin

If you worked with raspberry pi emulators, or retro gaming handhelds you'll notice a common theme pop up a lot in comments and on reddit boards. Setting up these devices can be a hobby unto themselves. Curating roms, downloading logos and screenshots, scraping data, picking themes, tweaking and customizing until... you realize your done. Maybe you should actually play a something.

... And then you'll see threads of people talking about the same thing.

Hey, have any of you guys actually played anything? I mean I messed around with mine and loaded a few classics, but now that I'm done, I... don't know what to do with it. I feel like I had more fun setting it up than playing with it.

Now, there is nothing wrong with enjoying the process more than the end product. A garage carpenter doesn't necessarily make a chair for the pleasure of sitting. They can make it for the pleasure of making. Sitting is a bonus. That part isn't the problem. The problem is... the sadness that comes after, the sense of loss someone feels when you're not prepared for this.

You'll see this with nintendo themed "man caves" or whatever, where having the games... having the right screen and the right connectors, isn't enough... having the games of your childhood aren't enough. Gotta collect more, gotta try and get everything. Satisfaction isn't playing a new game, satisfaction is "New in Box". The hobby switches form. The hobby is no longer playing video games. The hobby is paying tribute to the memories of your past, the aesthetics of video games. What they can't force themselves to play anymore was still, at some point, formative and important to them. They can't let it go. The music, the pictures, the symbols of these old game still resonate in their heart.

So instead of actually playing, they construct shrines of worship to the warm, comfortable memories of their youth. This is, of course, nostalgia.

I hate on nostalgia a lot but there isn't anything inherently wrong with it. In most places, it doesn't matter. The people whose love of Star Wars hasn't grown in decades can still watch the movies they like and enjoy them. A few hours, a few times a year, relaxed on a couch...

Gaming, on the other hand, takes some stubbornness. It takes some skill. Investing Effort. Investing the increasingly scarce resource of time.

It's more than understandable. We grow an change with time. The problem is when that they don't recognize any of this. So when they go back... there is nothing but a weird emptiness and frustration. For those who don't even realize they've grown out of gaming entirely, gaming becomes an endless line of disappointing games, and growing backlogs, scattered with a few high points. We don't know how to manage nostalgia in the gaming space.

Hell, by we, I feel like I'm only speak to my fellow Millennials. Those of us who have been on the content treadmill from the start, back when games advanced so quickly, year by year, that we never had a moment to stop and collect our feelings. Deeply influential pieces of media in our lives got let go off within years, or even months, because the next thing was that much crazier. Whenever I look at the release timeline of the 90s I feel like I'm going insane. "All those things couldn't have happened that quickly."

We call things retro and they feel retro because our whole timeline was stretched by the insane technological race we grew up in. We'll argue up and down, comparing eras and design styles but... I don't think I've ever seen a Zoomer refer to a game as retro. Some games are merely old. These new gamers exist, seemingly, at the end of time, free to pick from the fruits of the past. A lot of them aren't too technologically savvy, but those who are use emulators end up using them more freely and explore more deeply than a lot of my peers. The peers who don't emulate "because it just doesn't feel right". On their couch, in their pajamas, on a sunday, playing on a fuzzy CRT. They're not burdened by our memories. They're us, picking through our parents vinyl, free from context. Their childhood memories aren't being rushed out the door for the next thing like ours were. They're... kinda free?

But we exist at the same time as them. At the end of time. The freedom to reach back to the past at our leisure has been there since NESticle came out in 1997.

I'm not even sure who I'm talking to. While I personally know too many peers who have fallen into this nostalgia trap, most of them don't follow me in places like this. And not every zoomer is some super media literate history hunter either. Most aren't. Most people aren't. But my interactions with these groups and how they contrast each other keeps rattling in my head. I'd much rather talk to a 20something about the SNES than someone of my age group. Because if a 20something is playing old games, they probably have a cool attitude and curiosity while... many of my peers cling to the past like a childhood blanket they've long outgrown. They don't need to throw the blanket away -- it's a precious memory. But they also need something to actually cover them up. They don't realize they're freezing to death.

I said on twitter (those threads are... here, here, and here) that if your favorite NES games now were the same as they were 30 years ago then I don't want to talk to you about old games. Not that you're hurting anyone, not that you're taste must be bad, but... 30 years is a long time. The games might not change, but you will. If your opinions haven't changed in any major ways (even if it's as simple as 'I played Mother 10 years ago and it's in my top 5 now!') that implies that... you haven't had any active growth in your gaming tastes and opinions.

Which is fine! We can talk about something else! Not everyone should care about old games, but too many people who say they care have let their emotions stagnant for decades. They say they care because gaming became their identity and now they're stuck. Stuck regurgitating the same canon they are too incurious to stray from and that they themselves can barely manage to replay. You have to let the relationship you have with these games change. You don't have to throw out your blanket, but you can't rely on it to keep you warm. You've grown too much.

The biggest issue with those twitter threads was... accidentally implying that the change was the point. That you need to cast away everything you loved, painfully, to grow and to find the 'correct opinions'. Instead what I'm saying is... the change should be unavoidable. The relationship you have with your long term friends, the family you still have in your life, changes, year to year, decade to decade. You both change, and the context of your relationship changes. You feel like nothings changed, but the vibe now vs 10 years ago has shifted. You can't stay the same. At best things are similar. Heck, if it hasn't changed at all, something is probably wrong. Every interaction is a chance for tiny changes that enrich and build upon what was there before.

I always hated the notion of "wishing you could experience something again for the first time". To me, it always felt like wishing you could start a friendship again from scratch. My relationship with media is active. Each time I replay a game my experience with it grows. Our relationship grows. People say you only get to do something for the first time once, treating your first time like this precious, ephemeral experience that must be protected at all cost. But how can that compare to an experience developed over years or decades? Like sex, the first time has all the memories, but it's also usually some of the worst you'll ever have.

Every game you play, every movie you watch, every book you read is context and experience that changes, even if only minutely, how you feel about everything else. You don't have to replay something a million times, you can think about it after new experiences, wondering about how it re-contextualizes what you felt the last time you played. As you understand the history surrounding things, as you get better at judging, appreciating and naturally enjoying things with their context and historic place in mind... your opinions on other things will change. It's not that 8 year old you liked dogshit and now you like The Good Stuff -- you will probably like some good things less while developing an appreciation for things you used to hate. Hell, you might end up loving a few things that are objectively bad. But you'll be somewhere new, emotionally, exploring, and developing deeper, richer relationships with the things that are important to you. Nothing gets thrown away, it simply changes. Just because an old top 5 favorite game is now in your top 50 doesn't mean that relationship is gone or that you hate it. Things simply change. People change.

I make new games that draw from old games... but I can't say I really feel nostalgia for these titles because to miss something, it has to go away. IWBTG isn't about games I loved in my childhood, IWBTG is about games I love. I didn't like NES Castlevania games until I was almost 30 and now I'm 40 making the same quasi-fan game I've been making for over a decade.

(If you think an opinion on a game can change a lot in 10 years, imagine how you feel about a game you started 10 years ago)

I still feel nostalgia. When I go to upstate New York, to my grandma's house I barely see, laying in the moss I barely get to touch, looking at the sights I barely get to see, I feel something. When I hear a pop punk song that meant the world to me in 95' that I haven't thought about in 20 years... hearing the opening notes when I'm not expecting it hits something deep inside me. There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. But if I love something enough to make it an active part of my personality, to make it a part of my whole life... I owe it a real, active relationship.


iiotenki
@iiotenki

It's been a long time since I've talked about this, but being completely broke after graduating from college and having nothing but my PS2, a pair of Swap Magic discs, and a stack of burnable DVDs to play games with in mid-2013 is the single biggest reason I both still love games as strongly as I do today and attained the breadth of knowledge and experience about unlocalized Japanese game history I'm so lucky to have. When you're in that sort of position, exploring these old Japanese games partly just to try novel experiences and partly to stay in touch with the language after graduation as best you can muster, you quickly learn that canon isn't really this universal metric that somehow transcends time and language and culture. It's an entirely relative and ultimately localized phenomenon, whether it's to a niche community of fans or developers or on perhaps a slightly larger geographic scale. Even the most dominant forces of nature in one region or on one platform can be an inconsequential footnote elsewhere simply by virtue of a lack of access or proper commercial support. Canon is what individuals and, at most, like-minded groups of people make of it and when you learn it's okay to immerse yourself in different ones, it's nothing short of liberating and it gives you a much better idea of the truly big picture that exists for a given subset of games than the most popular accounts of game history alone will ever provide.

Popular western nostalgia doesn't have room for things like open world pachinko RPGs. Things like eroge, or dating sims, or games about summer vacations, or countless other types of games that didn't fit the molds that platform holder themselves deemed acceptable for foreign consumption—a structure whose very existence in past years should give people pause if they think the media they love ever arose through pure meritocracy. That nostalgia cannot even conceive of these sorts of things existing or at the very least mattering to people. Yet all of these games did exist and I can tell you from talking to plenty of Japanese players and developers over the years, they did matter to people in different orbits, and sometimes they made a difference on those games that did make a bigger, more international splash. Invisibility through one lens doesn't inherently mean irrelevance through all lenses, and the sooner you learn to appreciate that, the sooner your relationship with games becomes one of genuine enrichment and not simply visceral, repeated consumption in search of sustenance masquerading as content.

Even for all of the industry's current problems, some of which I myself I have to confront myself on a daily basis, I've never loved games themselves more than I do now, and it's been truer with every passing year since committing myself to this path. I owe a lot of that to my willingness as a 23 year-old to forsake historical Canon as an unimpeachable, unyielding force and learn to embrace games as individual texts. Text that have their own contexts and may well exist in conversation with other games, but individual texts as valid to explore as any other and I wouldn't trade the knowledge, growth, and friendships I've gained from that outlook for anything.


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in reply to @Kayin's post:

I listened to rock radio a lot in my teens, in its transgressive heyday around here in the late 90s. I can't stand to listen to rock radio now. My appetite for rock music hasn't changed (though my overall preferences certainly have) but I still can't stand it. Because rock radio now is a museum, and not a good one - what used to be a format that reached all the weird, niche, less polished but more interesting stuff that was coming out at that time. The format is now a shrine, so to speak, to the most popular I dunno 300 or so songs of the era. I like the songs but knowing that the radio DJs will never drop anything outside the consensus picks is an absolute downer. I don't need to tune in for Guns'n'Roses' Greatest Hits, I've got mp3s thanks.

I bring this all up to talk about the state of mind of someone who does all the setup work for retro consoles but never gets around to deeply engaging with the games. If I had the bandwidth to get around to setting up retro consoles, that'd probably be me. I think you have it in mind that when people are doing that they're standing pat with the specific memories and influences of their childhood, and certainly some are. But I think the impulse there - certainly for me - is also an attempt to preserve a broader ecosystem that they never got to appreciate in its time but now feel they have a unique connection to on account of their memories of, y'know, CRT monitors and dingy arcades on the boardwalk. I'd love to dial back time to listen to 90s radio again, but more for what I missed or failed to appreciate in its own time than to listen to Spoonman for the millionth time.

I wonder if the sense of one's childhood memories being hollowed out until you have to really work to recreate the vibe of the era is something that is just more true for kids that grew up pre-internet than it will be for later generations? Certainly the radio stuff is confined only to old fogies who aren't interested in Spotify or whatever it is the kids listen to music on these days. Y'all have the loss of Web 1.0 to contend with, that's for sure. Anyway that's my $0.02.

I think you're right but I think the problem is they haven't like... allowed themselves to really comfortably explore this shit, right? I simplified it down to 'chasing the childhood dream' but that is kinda standing in for some really complicated relationships They often have these nostalgic impulses and probably real curiosity and sometimes people cross thee bridge and develop new relationships and become cool as game historians but other times they just... end up filling a void that can never be filled.

But yeah that pre-internet experience really puts us between times and I really feel it here.

I feel that some of the retropi and other small computer tinkering might also be from a like... Innate need to make something? Carpentry, small engines, classic cars, all were things that were hands-on hobbies but we just don't have the space or money for it anymore. Building something tactile still feels good, and might also be why gunpla has exploded.

I like the section about how we should be changing and growing in our relationship to things as we grow. Sometimes it's fun to zoom out when thinking about an old game that I liked growing up and trying to piece together the wider context surrounding that period. Why Final Fantasy 8 of all games when I played 7 not long after? Was it because I owned one and borrowed another? Was it the first game I was able to stay up until 2 AM playing (no that was Madden 96 when I snuck down to the living room to play the Genesis). Why do I like it more now than I did? How did the remake of 7 change how I feel or think about the original?

Self reflection is funny like that where you can do all this thinking and just shrug because it's so hard to pin down a Why. I'm not a smart man, so I never have many answers, but sometimes the process is enough for me.

I hope a lot of those Retropi people who hit a brick wall realize they now have skills they can apply to a lot of stuff cause gosh it IS fun. It's only a problem if they let it bum them out.

And yeah, the journey is the fun part Someone was like "what if I don't care about having the right opinions???" and it's like... right opinions??? I ended up liking Jurassic Park Trespasser!!! It's the journey!

When I was little, the first RPG I ever played was Secret of Mana. I'd learned a little bit of English from watching tv, but not how to read it. When that was the only option and I really really wanted to know what was going I sat with an actual Swe/Eng dictionary translating dialog boxes. SoM is 100% the reason why I didn't need to study for any English classes in later grades.

I've replayed SoM since then, and my perspective on it now is that it's a beautiful game with stale combat and misguided systems for leveling and kind of a nothing-burger script. I'm still impressed by the atmosphere it managed to create, with music, art style, fog effect layers and the like. But I also have very little interest in replaying it given the other stuff.

It's a game that I feel like I should have a ton of nostalgia for considering how much it affected my life, but I don't. The first thing that comes to my mind now is grinding magic levels, or holding down a button to charge a mediocre attack for 10 actual seconds.

There are absolutely games I'd like to experience again for the first time, but not really from nostalgia, I think. It's more that sometimes it feels like you can only have an experience once, and every future attempt to do something similar will be, well, familiar. For instance, I really loved getting lost in Hollow Knight. It was a bit frustrating, but it also felt like an adventure! I've of course gotten lost in other games, but then usually because environments looked very similar and repetitive, sometimes intentionally. I've played games that try to do something similar to HK, but I'm better armed to deal with that structure now, and as a result it doesn't affect me as strongly. And sometimes that makes me a little sad. Is that what they call instant nostalgia? Maybe that's it...

This is kinda going offtopic from the original post, but the thing you mentioned about your experience with HK, I think its possible to have that experience with another game, it just needs to be a game made by a sicko who is willing to push it even further.
A lot of my favorite games nowdays are games designed for people with certain specific game literacies. I guess to wrap back around to the original topic, allowing yourself to analyse the games that gave you these feelings without the lens of nostalgia is what allows you to understand what about these games generated those feeling, and maybe how to recapture it.

I agree with you in theory, but it's a difficult balancing act too. The reason why I could enjoy being lost was because of all the other elements that make the game great. It would take an incredibly skilled, dedicated sicko to be able to maintain those elements while expanding on the niche. I have yet to find anything like it but I guess that doesn't mean it doesn't, or at least won't, exist.

Lovely post, thanks for writing it!

You have to let the relationship you have with these games change.

I have a different perspective on this point, although I get the sense that we may probably feel similarly but use different words for those feelings.

In some areas of my life, consistency is something I value highly. For me, I gain a lot of satisfaction in having had the same name and avatar for decades, not because of some "I'm better than people who are finicky and can't decide" feeling (one could say that I'm stagnant and uncreative in retort), but because sticking with that identity and presentation over a long period of time is a fulfilling form of effort for me. It helps me feel more connected to my past self.

When reading this I was thinking about my relationship with my "favorite game" Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which has been my favorite game for a loooong time. My relationship with the game has changed over time, between learning about dropped items I didn't know about as a kid, or solidifying my game knowledge and routing through watching speed runs.

But an important part of my love for it is precisely because it's been with me for so long. It's reliable in a way many things in my life aren't. It's a comfort I can turn to and do a run through when I am otherwise struggling to start a new game or hobby and need a break. I'm going through motions I know by heart, and in a way it's a meditation; an opportunity to be present and enjoy the mechanical feeling of getting through the game without having my mind get in the way trying to figure out what to do next.

Now, that experience could easily be viewed as a form of change, as each playthrough builds another layer of experience and the change is simply that experience growing larger with each layer. Or we could just say that experience is valid but it doesn't form an interesting opinion for discussion, which may have been your point with the tweet. That's all fine, and I don't feel attacked or anything lol. I definitely have seen the toxic nostalgia effect you're referencing too.

Rather, my point is that I find that saying my relationship has not changed with this game in decades is the most accurate phrasing, and it is actually a fulfilling thing for me rather than a sign that I'm holding myself to a nostalgic vision of the game.

My top 10 lists of games in various consoles or genres are probably always in flux. My top 3... wiggle. But there are usually more than a few things kinda locked in. My relationship with Super Metroid changes-- how I view and describe it changes, how I praise it changes, but it's been my uncontested favorite SNES game for years.

I've been Kayin since I was 14 and my relationship with that name has changed wildly but that history is important. It's like the Friend comparison in the original post. That long time friend has so much history.

So yeah nah i agree.

I feel pretty similarly in terms of who I like talking about "old stuff" with. Like if someone says their favorite Zelda is Ocarina of Time, that's fine, every generation of the series did things a little differently. If their favorite game is Ocarina of Time, I know this person has not played a single videogame released between 1998 and today.

(Before I'm mauled by OoT fans, this is obviously an overstatement.)

But I do feel like there's a lot of value in specifically setting out to revisit something you have nostalgia for, specifically to see what new lights shine on it. For myself, being trans and not knowing trans people existed until I was nearly in my 20s due to the hellishly repressed area I grew up in, there's a lot of old favorites- games, books, movies, everything- I've been picking through and seeing now why a few of these fit in the category of "I don't know why I like this, I just do."

It's also opened the other side, of revisiting things I remember not liking, and now re-evaluating them. Some are still bad, sure, but there's other things that now I understand the heavily complex mechanics or layered themes and appreciate!

Yeah someone got upset with me on twitter because I said I don't care about the gaming opinions of people whose opinions haven't changed in 30 years and she said it was 'my loss' and like... I didn't want to argue at that point (it wasn't doing either of us any good, no hard feelings) but I felt like maybe I should have said the part that I assumed everyone knew. That all these people have been telling me the same thing for decades!!! 😭 It's like you know what they're going to say before they do!!

Also hell yeah good luck on the rediscovery and re-evaluation!

This is something that has baffled me for ages. I've met so many game collectors that have these massive collections of games. Sometimes they're really impressive. Like they've got their og NES games from their childhood still complete in box. Sometimes they're just loose cartridges, other times they've purchased replica display boxes as a way to keep their cartridges a little bit cleaner.

But something that I noticed was a common thread: None of them really knew anything about the games themselves. I can't imagine spending all that money, just to have a shrine.

we grew up with the GBA and nintendo DS, and it's interesting going back to it because it well and truly is exactly the same, in terms of experience. We don't have a dream we're trying to chase down with emulators and display adapters and special TVs. I can pop a game into the DS Lite, and the screen looks exactly like it did when the thing was new. The games do exactly the same thing on it now as they did then. They sound the same as they always did through its speakers. So we've been able to truly just revisit a lot of these old games by just booting them up. No journey, just there it is there's the game.

It's been really really cool to be able to do with our new context. Some of them suck, and we remembered only ever playing them when we didnt have anything else we felt like playing at the time too. Some of them are just weird and we didnt realize how weird they were at the time because we just accepted it (Sim 2 DS comes to mind). Some of them we're playing a lot now like we did back then cause its just a good solid game, and we're a lot better at many of them.

But there's also a ton of other games we never got to have at the time because they weren't in the store when we happened to be, and exploring that has been kind of incredible. Understanding what the actual full range of the console was. We keep getting blown away by what was possible on this hardware, what people were doing at the time. Even moreso when we learn about all the homebrew scene which, given we weren't really social online at the time, was completely outside of what we could even imagine back then.

when we're playing new GBA/DS games, we're still playing games that are contemporary with a time we actually experienced, so we consider them with our window into that cultural context implicitly. We don't have that when we go back to the NES/SNES/N64 era. Learning that the original Mario RPG explicitly mentions Bruce Lee for example feels so foreign to me because its so completely outside the realm of the Mario series' relationship with the outer world that I'm used to. But there's also really cool things, like playing SMB3 on the NES. That game was a game that we first played young on the GBA, and so to us, SMB3 was "the kind of thing a GBA can do". The original NES version is a little rougher around the edges, but playing it for the first time recently felt kinda nuts. Like almost the entire complete 2D mario game formula is there, except for the currency you can get in a level to spend outside of it that got added with new super mario bros. Actually playing NES games completely changed the way we saw the NES, but of course the way we were seeing it before was as someone who'd never played on an NES.

Gosh the NES is such a weird console when you look at it through it's history because it's like originally this 'kinda junky single screen arcade game home console' to these really complicated and rich platformers. It's so easy to both over and underestimate the NES's library, based on wherever you start looking.

on a technical side, it's kind of awe-inspiring how different early and late NES games turned out. I don't think there was any plan in the original NES design for mappers at all; the CHR banks were fully intended to be stationary, fixed ROM, and "sprite 0 hit" detection was probably only there for feature parity with the Atari TIA "missile" collision option.

yet, later games integrate increasingly complex mapper patterns, with RAM in CHR space and other feature enhancements like firing an IRQ the moment the PPU hits a specific CHR cell, and doing mid-raster nametable changes to animate level components on the fly.

as a kid, growing up on NES and later SNES, I never understood why some NES games were a lot more "full" than others. We had SMB1 and 3, Spy Hunter, StarTropics, TMNT, Duck Hunt and Tetris, plus whatever we rented from Blockbuster. I remember going from Spy Hunter (with its linear and repetitive gameplay) to Kirby's Adventure on a rental, and having a "how'd they do that?" moment. It wasn't like it isn't an NES game - it looked and felt the part, very much - but it seemed a clear evolution on the formula.

Looking back, it's clear to me now - among other things, the later games had more rich mapper choices, and the NES hardware was finally reified, to the point that cartridge ASICs exploiting bus-level quirks were the norm, not the exception now.

My tastes have been kinda basic with it, but between my RasPi setup and my Mister, I have played a fair amount of games, even to completion. Just last month I did a 96 exit run of Super Mario World, cleared the one route of Seiken Densetsu 3 i never finished before, and played entirely too much Panel de Pon.

On the RasPi, i did a fair number of Mega Man X and Super Metroid speedrunning.

Thank you for the post, it really has left me to think and clarify about the thoughts and feelings I have on my nostalgia.

Until recently I used to feel that if I'm stuck with something, I should be stuck with that something. Because NFS Most Wanted and Test Drive Unlimited are the first video games I played and loved, I should always be in 'touch' with them. Because I always dreamed of becoming a car designer, I should always have interest in design, art and cars. Because playing games on my decade-old PSP was such a fun experience, I should play my PSP every once in a while. All of that started to fall apart from this year, when I realized how much hassle I have been dealing with just for a short amount of not-so remarkable experience - all the mods and settings I have to add on for the PC port of NFSMW and TDU1, pressuring myself into drawing that end up just messing things up, and how my PSP is aging and that PPSSPP feels way more convenient and powerful to run PSP games.

I decided to break away from the nostalgia from defining me and feel free to change my hobbies from this summer. And it did lessen my stress! (Well, I still deal with so many other kinds of stress, but) Right now I'm dealing with photography, and I occasionally think that I might end up losing interest and move onto something else in the future. And now such move-on doesn't feel so terribly wrong anymore - which makes me kinda glad.

I definitely feel like one thing I didn't clearly emphasize enough is "letting go is okay too". Like you clearly took that from it, which is a relief. I spent a lot of words talking about maintaining an active relationship, but pruning a stagnant one is just as important... making room in your heart for what's next.

I hope photography goes really well for you!

most of my favorite 16-bit and earlier games as a kid (mario 3, sonic 2, super tennis etc) are very different to my favorites in my 20s (umihara kawase, shiren the wanderer), which in turn are very different to my current favorites (mostly arcade games). there are plenty of games and genres that i loved as a kid and still love today, but the way i think about them now is completely different to the way i thought about them when i was younger.

i've never really enjoyed talking about videogames with people who see them through a typical american millennial nintendo-loving retro collector lens, but i always chalked that up to the fact that i'm not american and have a different history with games than they did. and also that they mostly seem to ignore or dismiss arcade games entirely, which feels extremely weird for a group that loves playing 8-bit and 16-bit action games so much. but your post really gets to the core of the actual difference. thanks for putting it into words!

When I said the thing about "not wanting to hear your opinions unless they've changed" I know at least one person thought it was me being elitest when it was really "No, for real, I've heard this. I've heard thje millenial nintendo-loving retro collector lens thing too many times." so I get you. Like god I'll indulge and make fun of like... 90s era euro games but god as soon as one of my european friends want to talk about them??? I'm so excited just because it's new. Or when central or south americans talk about games through the lens of the weird game piracy going on down there??? aaaaa love it.

While I still prefer people who are more... passionate about the games they enjoy, the north american retro game canon has been done to death. x_x

exactly! people can like whatever they want, and there's nothing wrong with liking exactly the same things that american console game magazine writers liked in the 80s and 90s, sometimes even for the exact same reasons that those people liked them. but it can get boring to have that conversation for the hundredth time.

Media tastes start out like a baby duckling imprinting on whatever they see at an impressionable time. Whatever music we listened to in high school is the best. Whatever video game we first spent 10+ hours with is an all-time great.

Then nostalgia for the thing combines with nostalgia for everything around the thing - for a time when you could go over to a friend's house and play for hours. Do we actually want to play old video games, or do we just want to be young and healthy and carefree again? Retro games are bittersweet because they're linked to people who are long gone, and sometimes those people are our younger selves.

There was a certain point in my life where I thought "maybe I really am just nostalgia obsessed" but then I looked at it rationally and thought about what I WANT and what I DO NOT WANT and came to the proper conclusion -

I like certain game mechanics. I do, in fact, like most of the same game mechanics today that I did twenty years ago. And I am, generally, fairly upset that I can't get those today. (Or can't avoid the ones I don't want.)

But, that isn't because "it was better before"; I'm under no illusions that these mechanics can't be made today by anyone. It's just that most people aren't.

If I want a linear games where you travel a locked overworld and get diegetic items to solve problems and there are no stats or player customization, what's happened is those games have become less common. They certainly are not being made by AAA studios anymore and there's like 3 solo indie devs right now making something that matches all the traits I am looking for.

But as long as those developers don't botch it, their games will probably be some of the greatest ever made. New things are generally better than old things, but only if they actually do the best possible things and avoid the worst possible things.

It's just easier to do worse things than great things, really. And so many games have somehow succeeded by doing terrible things, so many other games copycat those terrible things, and fail to be good.

Obviously, there were terrible games 20 - 30 years ago. But, there were also great ones that successfully identified SOME OF the best ways to do things, even if the games that did some of the best things didn't necessarily do all of them or had some bad things as well or didn't do all the best things perfectly.

I don't think there's going to be a point in my life where I identify the best or worst things significantly differently than I do now. I doubt I will ever reach a point in my life where I say "skill trees are good, actually" or "you know, I really could go for some +5% critical chance".

But I'm not nostalgic for them. I just know where my bar is set, and I'm often disappointed because I'm an optimist and set it very, very high. I want that bar to be crushed today, tomorrow, and every day after, as often as possible. It's not unreachable, there's just so few people who are bothering to do so.

There are two things I run into a lot on the subject of games, and growing up with games:

One; someone once told me that "the most important games are the ones you play between the ages of 9 and 15" and, honestly, as someone born in '86 that is a range that includes stuff like Super Metroid, SotN, FF VII and Tactics, Tony Hawk, Suikoden, Diablo 1, OoT....and like yeah those are all fine video games that I would indeed call formative! And from conversations I have had with people around my age range, very much common experiences! But that feels kind of like a trap, in its way. It doesn't make room for the games I saw in magazines as a kid and only played decades later as an adult and loved; or how it took until an hour-long set of Continuum Shift against a stranger in a hotel for me to start understanding how to play fighting games past a basic level; or how I have grown closer to friends both old and new just by shooting the shit while diving into Fightcade stuff we never had regular access to, etc.

Two; among a lot of people who are holding tight to old flames...there is this strange sort of negativity, even on stuff they like. How quickly does someone who brings up their love of the NES Mega Mans turn to grumbling about Yellow Devil or Boobeam Trap? Ninja Gaiden and Jacquio (or a few of the later stages in general)? Tekken 3 and getting their asses kicked by an Eddy Gordo player? Like, it makes sense-frustration is an emotion that will stick out in your memory, and of course you're going to better remember the walls where you spent more time then the areas you navigate smoothly-but it's damn weird for things like this to veer into the bad memories as quick as they often do.

All that said, this post did make me wonder a lil': how much of what I liked then versus what I like now is a matter of access. Like, I enjoy Splatterhouse 2 a decent amount. If I had GoodROMs sets when I was a kid, and that wasn't just The Cool Game I Saw In A Magazine, would I have gotten over how quick the difficulty leaps up between the first two levels? And, alternatively, would I still like it today if I didn't have that secondhand nostalgia of wanting to play it for years?

I really appreciated this post, as someone still adjusting to being 30 now. I have a lot of nostalgia for games I played growing up, but not that much time to really play them with everything else I need to do or even want to. I've had other hobbies fall to the wayside too due to life circumstances - can't play any musical instruments due to noise issues, and because of my fiancee's chronic health issues I haven't been able to really pursue my old love of geocaching much since, oh, about March of 2020. But gaming is something I should still have some time for, and indeed, I do still manage to get in a fair enough amount of it, if never managing to get through as much as I would like to. And I still enjoy a lot of games I played as a kid or teenager, and want to go back to them now and again. But I've managed to, as far as I can tell, avoid stagnating too much, and I think the reason is that I've really opened up a lot since I was younger and made space for more things, while still realizing that that doesn't always require dumping out what was there to "make room" in my heart or mind.

I started playing games at the tail end of the SNES and beginning of the N64 era, and my childhood and teen years extended pretty nicely through the later part of the Wii era. And if it seems conspicuous that I use Nintendo consoles to mark the time, there's reasons for that. That's what I mainly grew up with, even as the PlayStation and Xbox came onto the scene. I had a PS1 my neighbor gave me when he got his PS2, and my family eventually bought a PS3 for the Blu-ray player (because back when that was new, it was nowhere near as cheap to get one, so it was just the economical option if there was any interest in gaming in the house). But I never owned a PS2, or any Xbox or Sega console, and the games I had for non-Nintendo systems were fairly limited. That said, I'd like to think I was never the most obnoxious version of Nintendo fanboy - I still liked games on other consoles some when I got to play them, I just tended to be most satisfied with the genre spread on Nintendo's systems since I never really got that into the RPG or FPS genres for the most part. My bread and butter were the games I played a lot of in that time, and I still hold a lot of those near the top of my favorites list for those memories. (Though even then my experience had blind spots - for some reason I never got into Metroid until Fusion and Prime, so going back to Super always feels super jank to me, and while I don't have the same trouble with DKC2 and 3 since I played the original, that first one is the only one I played until the Virtual Console happened so it's where the nostalgia goes.) Stuff like Banjo-Kazooie, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Mario Galaxy, it's all in that space of "if you insist that I only like them because of nostalgia I will fistfight you in a Denny's parking lot".

But that said, I've grown since turning 18 the literal day that Ocarina of Time 3D dropped in the US (a coincidence that I still find amazing to this day), and I've somehow managed to still love those games while expanding out in new directions. I only rarely touched a Pokemon game growing up (my parents refused to buy them - not for the usual dumb "it's the devil" reasons, but just out of fearing the obvious looming money pit the series would become for a kid with little financial sense), and I only managed to really get into the games buying a secondhand copy of Platinum right as everyone else was getting X and Y. And from there I got interested in other RPGs like Xenoblade or my "problematic fave" of Persona. Even in later high school and college ages there were games I avoided strongly that I've since come to really like. My fiancee finally convinced me to try Bloodborne around 2018 or so and now I actually get the Dark Souls series. Same with Skyrim, actually. And after I moved in with her and tried out the original Halo on her Xbox, I could finally sort of see what people liked about it when my brief experiences with 3's multiplayer in high school had left me pretty confused and uninterested. ...And now I got the whole MCC on a Steam sale and am trying out the other four games (343i? never heard of 'em), and it's just been a blast.

Ultimately I think that my philosophy I've developed into over the years has helped a lot - I'm willing to try just about any game once, no matter what general consensus is, and even if there are glaring problems I try to look for things to appreciate. Even if I don't like a game I know someone else does, and there's usually a reason that goes beyond just "bad taste". And honestly, I extend that even to the current state of the games industry. While there are a lot of problems on the developer end, I feel like there are more quality games than people often realize, and more quality in some games people clown on than the common perception would indicate. That's not to say that people should just accept the problems that do happen, there's definitely some bad trends that exist, but I prefer to at least try to focus on the good. Even with that jab at modern Halo I made at the end of the last paragraph, I'll still give Halo 4 an honest shake when I get to it. Even expecting it to not be as good as the other games in the collection, I'm enjoying those enough to be willing to at least have the understanding to make a comparison. I try to never become jaded, and while I'm willing to judge things honestly if I see a problem I try to not assume that I will so hard that I can't acknowledge if I'm wrong. And that goes for older games I go back to too. And even if I go back and play a game I liked as a kid and find it's not as good as I remember, I don't tend to think I'll then suddenly dislike it, just that I'll see the issues that didn't stand out so much at the time, but still enjoy it enough to have a good time regardless. Really, I'm not that hard to please, when it comes right down to it, and I think that helps a lot with the problems you describe. I never feel stuck with my older preferences - I can expand, and refine, and maybe that'll be weird to see my childhood favorites slip down my rankings, but those change so much anyway even without new additions that it's not really that big a deal to me anyway. Things don't have to be perfect to be enjoyable, and I try to live by that standard. Maybe I don't always but hey, that's just called being human.

Sorry if that's all waffly or doesn't really relate to what you said, but I still appreciate the input. Older games aren't always the "best", but that doesn't mean you can't like them. And my opinion isn't any more important than anyone else's, but that doesn't mean it's meaningless either. What matters is engaging with those opinions and thinking them through instead of just becoming an immovable object out of a sense of obligation. Nostalgia should be a comfort, not a barrier to having new experiences.

Oh man, revisiting old games is such a re-contextualization. Learning what worked and what didn't about my old favorites is such a worthwhile endeavor, it feels like I'm learning more about the art and the craft whenever I truly understand it with the benefit of years hence.

That or playing an old game that sucks ass, blowing it off, and then coming back to it with historic knowledge. "What, Hydlide was IMPORTANT????" and then approaching it with those eyes.