At least they talk about a topic most players avoid like the plague: admitting that old games aren't necessarily better.
No mainstream publication wants to tear down a big AAA release after a major hype train unless safely vindicated by an ongoing public outcry; in the same way, no one wants to rake up downvotes, dislikes and unsubs by shit-talking a "classic", to the point where you cannot tell whether someone truely likes or dislikes a game, because they might just as well be worried about their standing in whatever community they are a part of.
I'm surprised that they picked the games they did (though me needing to mention it is precisely the problem I'm talking about) but I have played a lot of old games during my night shifts and I have done a lot of catching up on "classics" and "legendary games". Many of them are pure garbage, and since I have no nostalgia to clog my eyes, I find myself unable to relate to all of the people who swear by them.
The fact that the best games ever are somehow always the ones they played when they were kids is probably just a coincidence. The fact that they replayed a game countless times is probably because the game was just that good, not because they had like three games and wouldn't be getting a new one until Christmas four months away.
Wait, actually behind all their posturing, I do relate to them: notice how almost all Steam reviews for old games follow the same pattern? Positive review, "I played it countless hours as a kid"... and time played: 23 minutes. Because the game is so fucking awesome that they ran it and barely a few minutes in they went "actually, fuck that shit".
You hope to recapture the "magic", but the "magic" was simply you being a fucking kid. Only a dumb kid cries when Aeris dies, only a dumb kid is afraid of going down that ladder in Eternal Darkness, only a dumb kid finds the plot and characters of Tales / Final Fantasy to be anything other than vapid Japo bullshit.
Notice none of these examples have anything to do with the evolution of technology, because it doesn't matter, it doesn't change the fact that they would have fetishized any game that checked the proper boxes at the right moment in their videogame personal history. In high-school with the only 2600 on the campus? NEET with your 486 and no Internet? Only one NES game from your uncle? Withdrawn abused kid with your Game Boy Color as your only friend? Freshly moved in after a divorce and you brought your Saturn? The games could be the shittiest piles of shit ever and you would still revere them.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug: The novel.
"We had been staring at the Ocean Loader for 6 minutes on the Commodore 64, when the drugs began to take hold."
It's amazing to watch small groups whose interests are centered around a specific old console or home computer. On one hand such a group has a lot of resources on hand for dealing with hardware issues or refreshing people's memories, as this helps keep the platform alive. Hell, with luck there's someone in there building neat little devices to help overcome some of the platform's hardware shortcomings and offer some modern amenities. But on the other hand there's always a certain self-delusion going on, how they're talking about game titles either exclusively as they appeared on that platform, or only in relation to similar platforms of the day. Very rarely does anyone speak of them in the Big Picture, and those that do tend to get shushed at a lot.
A good example I saw recently were people in such a group talking about all the fond memories they had with the bundled software that came with a brand new, store-bought computer... a bundle I was unfamiliar with personally, so I looked closer at the software in that bundle... and despaired. There's a fun game in there alright, but everything else is truly
horrible. One of them is even consistently voted "Worst Game of All Time" for the platform... and it's bundled with the computer! That goes a long way towards setting the bar for people's expectations: The launch titles are shit, so upcoming titles that even rate as average are gonna seem awesome by comparison (which most of them ended up being) and people liked them as a result.
So it was interesting to see a guy pop up in that group a while back who pointed out the obvious: The platform is plagued with either bad games or bad conversions, and finding a decent title on the platform was actually a challenge. It turns out he didn't get the bundled software package with his machine, but got a handful of store-bought titles instead from the previous owner... who clearly had some
taste, as those handful of titles are the ones consistently voted among the Top Games of the platform. For the longest time he thought those handful of games set the bar for the overall quality of the platform's software, but once he realized the truth he decided to share with the others his discovery about the Emperor Not Wearing Any Clothes. (That didn't end well.)
And you would be in your right to do do, until you decided to wall yourself off many potentially great more recent games because they failed to recapture the feeling that you lack the introspection to accurately identify and swear just has to be an undescribable "magic" that was miraculously only ever present in whatever you played when you were extraordinarily receptive.
Because games didn't lose their magic, you did.
This is where we differ in opinion, at least somewhat.
If anything, the ratio of Good Games among All Games has been somewhat consistent through the decades, though the sheer volume of titles nowadays is bringing the ratio down. Worse than that, the number of games that are copying one another to the point that you can't tell them apart anymore is making a lot of people realize just how similar many games are. If you've played one 'tactical' FPS game, odds are really good you've played them all. There's no magic at all involved in playing a Battlefield title, then a Medal of Honor game, then a Halo game, then a Rainbow Six title, then PUBG and then CS:GO. It's masochism, if anything.
And then it gets downright depressing once you realize that there were some truly deep and engrossing games released 20+ years ago that sold well back in the day, but have no modern contemporaries... solely because the Marketing department doesn't see them as viable financial investments. This creates a trickle-down effect that discourages developers from taking risks, meaning we end up with scores of titles that are All The Same... and there's no magic to be found in that.
Games
did lose their magic, and as such we lost our magic as well. That's one of the reasons I'm doing the same thing you are: Sifting through the games on these older platforms to try to find some decent titles worth playing today. It's a challenge, but a fun one that offers up plenty of surprises.
