It's Hard to Get Nostalgic About Games You Didn't Grow Up On

[Yahtzee Croshaw]

It's Hard to Get Nostalgic About Games You Didn't Grow Up On

HD remakes that appeal to MY nostalgic memories are few and far between.

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[Gul]

The first game I ever played was Super Mario 3 (technically Super Mario All Stars, but close enough) on my friend's (S)NES. The first game I got on a computer was Commander Keen. By your logic classic platformers should be closest to my heart, and I'll have to admit it's fairly close to truth.

I don't know whether I'd be too stuck in my comfort zone, though, despite playing Nintendo a lot more than any other console. Maybe the first Playstation.

 

[RealRT]

Maybe people who played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog now show an above average propensity to molest dogs

Ahahahahhaahahahaha, wooooow.

Fuck you, Yahtzee.

 

[09philj]

I never owned a console until I was eleven so I played games mostly at friend's houses, which I recall enjoying but none actually stick out to me, and when I did get a DS I didn't actually have any idea of what was good so got what was popular or what was bought for me. The games which stand out as influences to my tastes today are a somewhat odd selection:

Professor Layton and the Curious Village - Was bought for me, and expected to find it dull. It's actually brilliant, and completely fantastically bonkers. Thus, it makes me very sad that the last two Layton games have been crap.

Pokemon Diamond - It's Pokemon. It's also, in my opinion, the best the series has to offer. Even once I'd done everything, I made my own fun by crossing the map top to bottom, or west to east.

Halo 3 - I formed lasting friendships playing local multiplayer deathmatches. Firing up Halo 3 is usually still what happens when we're at a loose end on a night in.

Dragon Quest IX - The first JRPG I ever played. I sank upwards of 300 hours into this game. What happens in Coffinwell has particularly stuck with me.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

NES in Dec. 1989, Gameboy when it came out, SNES when it came out. PC 1996. XBOX when it came out (own money starting with this one), NGC when it came out, Wii when it came out (for my parents), XBOX 360 when it came out and PS3 in 2008. And of course constant Master Race PC upgradez.

Oh, I forget a PS1 a year after PS2 came out. And I bought a PS2 two years ago. I even got Spiderman 2 on it!!! ^_^

That's some DNA all right! Now start working on that dating site based on it!

In the meantime I'll see if I can make the time to play all those PS2 classics I got 2nd hand (Godhand, Silent Hill 2, 3 4 special editions, Shadow of the Colossus etc. etc.)...

 

[-Dragmire-]

I think my preference to own physical copies of cartridge games came from the feeling of loss associated with returning a good game to the rental store as a child.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Childhood nostalgia is overrated, probably. What's left of the fading images anyway. All i remember is the smell of cut grass, vodka and my first girlfriend's perfume. If they can make a HD remake of that, i will admittedly be impressed.

 

[Silverbeard]

Is this a thing that needed to be mentioned? I thought it stood to reason that one could only get nostalgic about remakes of games that one had indeed played in the past!

Childhood nostalgia is overrated, probably. What's left of the fading images anyway. All i remember is the smell of cut grass, vodka and my first girlfriend's perfume. If they can make a HD remake of that, i will admittedly be impressed.

Do female bears wear perfume? Do they actually buy that stuff? Or do they meander into department stores in the dead of night and rub themselves against the shelves?

 

[Callate]

POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0
LOAD "*",8,1

...Yeah, I had a Commodore 64.

Given the inordinate amount of time I spent waiting for things to load in my youth, perhaps it's surprising how little patience I have for the wave of "Roguelikes" that don't seem to care if they've wasted an hour randomly generating a world in which you simply can't win.

My formative years may also have something to do with my unease with Windows hiding an increasing number of functions away where your naughty fingers won't burn themselves, and championing "ease of use" and big clunky icons that do all the things your dad wants to do while making functions that used to be at your fingertips hide five levels into nested menus, assuming they survive at all.

But I will say that all that time with Garry Kitchen's Gamemaker and SEUCK (Shoot-Em-Up-Construction-Kit, for the uninitiated) did contribute to my own lifelong fascination with game creation.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Do female bears wear perfume? Do they actually buy that stuff? Or do they meander into department stores in the dead of night and rub themselves against the shelves?

The upper class ones do. But little do they know it's made from their ancestor's various parts. The average bears just drunkenly knock over the J-lo brands and drink the lot. Where they get the booze from is anyone's guess. Probably that jaded ex-circus bear that stares longingly into the distance midway through every damn conversation.

 

[Kinitawowi]

Case in point: Pok?mon GO.

And yeah, growing up loading off tapes for my ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC6128 has given me a lot more patience than most of the customers I deal with at work these days, who think their computer is terminally broken if there's a half second between them furiously clicking on something and getting a response.

 

[Silverbeard]

The upper class ones do. But little do they know it's made from their ancestor's various parts. The average bears just drunkenly knock over the J-lo brands and drink the lot. Where they get the booze from is anyone's guess. Probably that jaded ex-circus bear that stares longingly into the distance midway through every damn conversation.

Ah well, who can blame him? Diving through flaming hoops will give anyone a thousand-yard stare.

 

[FPLOON]

Rayman has stolen my gaming nostalgia, which I am not okay with that and I'm okay with that! (Sorry, Lemmings!)

Other than that, playing classic games [that I've never played beforehand] always feel like I'm one of those outsiders trying to figure out why video games are [still] popular...

 

[darkrage6]

Getting a little tired of the "all Sonic fans are creepy perverts" joke, but otherwise a good article.

I personally didn't start playing PC games until the late 2000s when I finally got my own computer(before then I used the family's computer in the living room) and I mostly played ports of sixth-generation titles like True Crime: New York City, Driv3r, 25 to Life, Narc, Miami Vice, Driver: Parallel Lines, Obscure, Obscure: Aftermath, Cold Fear, etc

Before that though I had a Genesis, and as much as people love to say that retro gaming is better then modern gaming(which I don't agree with one bit), there was a ton of shovelware on that system, there were definitely more bad titles on retro systems then on modern ones. Now it seems like most of the really shitty games are relegated to Steam.

 

[NoPants2win]

POKE 53280,0
POKE 53281,0
LOAD "*",8,1

...Yeah, I had a Commodore 64.

Shouldn't you be in an old folks home gumming your food? Please grandpa, tell us the story of how Commodore ruined Amiga again!

 

[CaitSeith]

I also grew up with the Commodore 64 and Amiga as gaming machines. But my first videogames I played were on the ColecoVision and the Atari 2600 (I even played the infamous E.T. when I was too young to know how to tell good games from bad ones). I played lots of old computer games like Shadow of the Beast, several LucasArts games, KULT: The Temple of Flying Saucers (aka Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess), Zaxxon, Forbidden Forest, Dan Dare, Archon, Q*Bert, Contra, Giana Sisters, Lemmings, Strider, It Came From the Desert, Summer Games, Winter Games, California Games, Caveman Ugh-lympics, Everest Ascent, Karateka, Prince of Persia, Out of this World (aka Outer World), etc.; but also tasted the licensed games back then too with Predator, Barbie, Hot Wheels, Duck Tales, Superman, Batman, Transformers (both games), Frankie Goes to Hollywood (I never understood what that game was about) and an Aliens game for C64 that still is better than Aliens: CM.

Later I got a NES because Super Mario Bros. blew my mind. But I always had a foot on PC gaming, later moving to DOS games (where I even played a survival horror game from the same studio of the old Shadow of the Beast) and eventually Windows games.

 

[Transdude1996]

Grew up playing games on a GBC, GBA, GameCube, and Windows 98/XP. In my second year of middle school I became a pirate (First two games were Halo:CE and Sonic Heroes), found out emulators exist, and got a DS (And a Wii a few years later). Four years ago, Wii was stolen. Three years ago, quit my pirating days and have been very extensive on legally collecting games. Today, still carrying that on, but I'm also more focused, and excited, about collecting older titles as opposed to newer ones.

Games I remember very fondly of are Pok?mon Gold, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons, The Mummy (GBC), Bomberman Tournament, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Star Fox Adventures, Bionicle (GC), Sonic Adventure, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (GC), Atlantis: Search for the Journal, After Dark Games, 3D Ultra Traintown, 3D Ultra Pinball, 3D Ultra Minigolf, SimCoaster, Sim Theme Park, and Island Xtreme Stunts.

There's also a number of titles I remember renting from Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, but, since I didn't own them back then, I decided not to include them.

So, does that provide enough for a psych profile?

 

[Nuuu]

I grew up with a Gamecube, so I keep seeing people rave about the games they loved to play on the N64. I fail to see a lot of the appeal outside of nostalgia most of the time.
I actually used to have a lot of nostalgia for childhood games. It got completely destroyed when I found out most of those games were absolute trash and my young self had no sense for good purchases. The only game I can say I have some semblance of strong nostalgia for is Super Mario Sunshine, and that's only because it's still good.

What I get the most flak about is not being able to have any interest at all in Ocarina of Time. No matter how much people talk about it, I just fail to see how it any better than Majora's Mask. Again, I grew up on the Gamecube, so even seeing the graphical quality of the game is a bit of a turn-off. I could tolerate Majora's Mask or Mario 64 just fine, but I can't bear to watch trying to walk through the town that is just a giant, blurry, distorted photo warping my idea of perspective.
No, I don't care if the game was awesome when it was first released, give me a reason to play it today over another, more recently released game.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Maybe people who played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog now show an above average propensity to molest dogs

Ahahahahhaahahahaha, wooooow.

Fuck you, Yahtzee.

Yahtzee's a dog?

 

[kimiyoribaka]

vic 20 (or so I'm told)
486
pentium 2
something with vista
ps2
an intergrated graphics card running 7

I feel like my geneology is particularly sparse and cryptic. Regarding the games, I had a bunch of demo discs and shareware discs, and my parents didn't seem to mind me playing things I shouldn't have. As a result, I have something like 100 games I played as a kid, and I don't think I got the same impression of them as their target audiences. To give some examples:

The Duke Nukem trilogy (3d might've probably more exciting after puberty...), Leisure Suit Larry (ditto), ZZT, Putt-Putt, MS-Paint (what do you mean it's not a game?), P-Robots, Elfland, Willy the Worm, Time Commando, World Empire Deluxe 2 (which gave me a boost in geography), Raptor, [rest abridged for space]

I also can state with certainty that I was stupid as a kid, having played most of the games again as an adult. Also, I rejected windows 3.1 when it came out in favor of dos shell and windows 95 in favor of a straight command prompt, despite being a little kid.