Nostalgia is a cold-hearted bitch.

Did you know that Teenage Mutant Turtles: Turtles in Time was remade for XBOX Live Arcade? Yeah, it’s apparently the new hotness.

So how does it make you feel? If you’re about my age (read: old), you probably remember playing one of the TMNT games in the arcade when it was the new hotness. What does that do for you? Does the fact that you played it years ago make it awesome again? If you’re like most everyone else, and you are, the answer to that question is yes. A blind and pathetic yes.

Emotional Tug of War

The battle between Emotion and Rationale is a difficult one. Your emotional response to these old-school rehashes makes you feel all frothy at the mouth. Where’s Rationale, that bastard? The problem with the marketplace (that’s you, the consumer), is that Rationale is almost always late to the show. To be specific, he usually shows up about three minutes, twenty-eight seconds into your oldschool gaming experience – just after you’ve fronted the money for a little byte of history. Rowdy little prick, he punches you in the face with his fist of truth, reminding you why you stopped playing this same game so many years ago. My suggestion to you is to make friends with him so you don’t make the same mistake again. Unfortunately, Rationale is the kind of friend you only remember to talk to on holidays. So, my second suggestion is to move him up in your buddy list, put him in your fav’ five, follow him on Twitter… whatever it takes to keep him around.

Oldschool remakes are usually NOT awesome

You know why you don’t have your Super Nintendo sitting in the entertainment center anymore? It’s because most of the games you played on it were crap. Don’t get me wrong, I played it tons… back in the day… and the games didn’t suck back then. But times have changed. There’s a good reason we don’t use/play/eat/drive/f*ck/watch old shit anymore. Things don’t really get better with age. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Skeletor Pfeiffer might be hot for 50, but she's still 50.

It’s not just the graphics

It might not seem like it when shit like Proposition 8 gets passed, but the world really is making progress. Our games are better than they used to be. A whole lot better. And it’s not just that they look better. Your backseat analyst friend might try to convince you that all these old games were great and that it’s you, who needs to stop being a graphics snob so you can appreciate the greatness of the old school, but there’s a reason you don’t normally listen to him – he’s an idiot. He can’t see that gaming has truly evolved over the last 30 years. Sure, we still have to weed through a lot of crap games to find the good ones, but the good games of today are infinitely better than most of the good games from years ago. It’s about time that you stop feeling like a heretic just because you think so too.

Doom sucks

Very few games hold up with time. Case in point – another blast from the past, Doom is available for the iPhone. Any one of you played Call of Duty 4 lately? Feel like going back to f’ing Doom? I hope not. Forget that it’s on an iPhone and that the controls could never feel right [and that id Software plans to republish even more of their dated pieces of trash]… It’s still Doom, and it always will be. And… it will always suck. Just because Doom is doomed to be released on every system into eternity, you don’t need to like it. It’s okay not to like it, I promise you.

Tags: Alon, Commentary

Posted By: Alon

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http://www.wakasm.com wakasm

I have to agree with most points.

Nostalgia is evil and misleading. I can not count the amount of games I have tried revisiting from my past that have been a total let down years later. Many Sega side-scroller hits are now mundane and pathetic. Did I really once somewhat enjoy Shinobi and Vector Man? Sonic games for me are complete crap in 2009 beyond the first few stages. Almost all of the beat-em-ups from my childhood like Streets of Rage, TMNT the Arcade game, Golden AXE, etc… are a chore to play now. (Oddly enough though I loved Castle Crashers!)

Yet with every bad visit I take down memory lane, I still can’t explain why the original The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, and Mike Tyson’s Punch Out NEVER get boring for me nor does the Nostalgia ever wear thin. Why can I play games such as Day of the Tenticle and The Neverhood and know every puzzle solution to progress the story and still enjoy myself? How does Donkey Kong still hold my attention at every arcade I visit that has it?

The only answer that I can come up with is that these just ARE good games. Sadly it takes a revisit to really test some of our memories.

Board games are a similar experience. I can play Monopoly and Chess with as much fervor today as I could when I was in middle-school but games like Operation and Mouse Trap are complete garbage even though I played those with as much adoration.

I think the big difference is that when we are younger or exploring new hobbies we are forgiving to mediocre experiences. Dating in highschool is the same way. Most of us have fond memories with short-term girlfriends in middle and high school, but if we were to somehow relive those experiences again, we would probably end up slapping them for how stupid and annoying they really were.

Experience trumps Nostalgia. Just make sure you take Alon’s advice and put some extra thought into what you want to revisit. My iPhone’s version of Vay says “Hello”.
http://www.meteorradio.com Axtuse

While you have made some very valid points, it all comes back to the universal question “Why do you play video games?”

Why do you spend an ungodly amount of time on something that warrants no physical rewards?

Well one of those is entertainment. And if someone finds a remake of an “old skool” game entertaining and worthy of picking up because it is yet another product of time consumption, then that is what it is.

Take the new Secret of Monkey Island game. There will not be any significant changes in the dialogue, but the graphics and some of the play mechanics will be tweaked to attract a new audience to a PC classic. Add that up with the fact that it’s coming to XBL.

Personally, I would go back and pick up Doom so I can experience the game for what it was. I never finished the game, and I never got to understand what it was that has attracted people to it for all of these years. There are some people (including myself) that enjoy playing older games to just experience what we had, and appreciate the evolution of our beloved industry.

There are even numerous older games I have played, that exhibited better play mechanics than some newer games in an overall sense.

It all comes down to the big “Why”. It isn’t fair to fit this into a microcosm of “Why are you playing old games, they suck” (especially when it is your opinion). The consumer is a human being, and all human beings are dynamic.

The popularity of Mega Man 9 teaches us this fact, when it can be argued that Mega Man 9 is no different than the others, and should have never been considered for purchase.
http://www.meteorradio.com Axtuse

A point I failed to bring up is when some IP is wrapped up in a shiny new package simply because of the popularity of the first one or two games merely to suck money out of the nostalgic gamers.

That is unacceptable.

My favorite example is when they turned StarFox into an action/adventure/platforming game. I’ll never forgive them for that.
I disagree sir

Doom Resurrection on the iPhone isnt even doom you fucking retard. The Doom port is a separate game are you 15 years old or something?
http://golgotron.com Alon

I believe you, sir, may have missed the point.

Thanks to Axtuse and Wakasm, though, for paying attention.

And to continue my thoughts… I’m convinced that puzzle games are the only ones that could really live forever. An argument could be made for fighting games, as well, but I’m not nearly as convinced as Jorge.
http://www.gamebits.net/ Kenji

I was looking over the Xbox Live Arcade offerings recently, looking for ways to spend 400 points. Many classic games caught my eye: Joust, Galaga, Tapper, Super Contra, and TRON, among others. Fortunately, thanks to XBLA’s free demos, Rationale had the opportunity to rear its head prior to me plunking down the cash. These games just aren’t fun, though I attribute that not wholly to the “progress” we’ve made since their heyday. I’m used to playing these games in the arcade, and my annual treks to get my coin-op fix are still worth it, as they’re still fun and still challenging. But they weren’t made for the XBLA, and no amount of achievements or leaderboards can make it so. My Microsoft points are better spent on newer stuff made for the medium, like Portal: Still Alive, or Bionic Commando Rearmed.
DiscordantLight

Hey Alon,

So I know your not big on story in games, tons of dialouge and the like…and I generally always agree with most of what you say, but I’ve always disagreed with you on this. I prefer the story etc…as long as there’s a decent mix of good story and gameplay, I’m generally hooked.

So recently…I broke out the old 3DO. (Yea thats right…I got one)
and played Slayer. For those of you that have never heard of it, it’s basicly a first person dungeon crawler. There is ZERO story. But a cool feature it has, is that it randomly creates new levels, everytime you play. All you do, is kill shit, the find gold key and find the exit to move on to the next level. After 10 to 20 levels, you’ll fight a boss. Save the charecter you made, level his ass up, and just keep playing. I was 13 when I had my 3DO. I played Slayer ALL the time.

So I spent some time playing it today, and I was like “Wow..this is actually just as much fun today, as it was 13 years ago” I can’t say very many games do that for me anymore. I’ve felt like I’ve become such a jader gamer over the years. So as I’m playing this game, I beat it, and the ending is of course…well..there really is no ending. Then it hit me… I was like “wow..this game has ZERO story and I could care less” I just…enjoy playing it.

I’ll probably put it all away, and not play it again for another 5 years or so, and hopefully have the same experience again with it.

I guess my point is….well some people do go WAY overboard with the old school stuff just for the sake of being “old school”

Sometimes it is nice to remind yourself of where you came from to help you better understand where your going.

Playing it today made me realize how different games are today. I like both for the different things they offer.

But the future is what scares me. To me, Nintendo has ruined videogames forever. I guess if anyone has the right to destroy gaming it’s them. Now everyone has to rip off their wacky controller and try to make us all flail around like monkies while we play a game. I’m sorry but when I’m up at 2 am gaming, I’m not intrested in jumpin around and swinging my arms around like a retard.
I just wanna play a game.

Now Microsoft has to take it a step further with Natal, let’s talk to a “person” in the game as if you we’re talkin to someone is real life. I think the people behind the games are missing the point. People piss me off all damn day long, the last thing I want to do when I get home, is replicate that experience.

I fear this generation of consoles may be the last generation I take part in if this is the so called “future” of gaming.

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