The Nostalgia Curse

[Nomanslander]

For the longest time, I was convinced when it came to movies and music, nothing good came out after the 70s, and definitely after the 80s. The movies Jaws and the original Star Wars brought the end of cinema as an art form, and in music, Led Zeppelin breaking up and MTV taking over spelled the end of the counter culture.

It's funny I use to think this way considering I was born in the 80s and never grew up seeing anything 70s music and film had to offer first hand. I grew up in the 90s thinking everything sucked: the music, the culture, movies, TV, fashion, people in general. It wasn't until years later, actually some seven years ago I realized maybe this was all in my head and I just wasn't giving anything a chance to impress me, maybe this was just some curse that being Nostalgic for a time (in this case) I never lived in had to offer.

Well, interestingly enough I have never felt this way about video games, I mean I am nostalgic about old games, but no curse making me feel like nothing else compares like some old man sitting at a park bench complaining how times were better when he was a kid pushing a hula-hoop with a stick down a hill.

But I have noticed a lot, and I mean A LOT of people do seem to suffer from this when it comes to video games. The extreme cases of course being all those people that refuse to get anything but a Wii, those stuck playing Monkey Island or System Shock 2 for the rest of their days on the PC. Or simply just those with 8-16bit consoles watching the Angry Video Game Nerd and cursing the day Sony ever got into the business.

 

[Flying-Emu]

Um.

I think it's only irritating when it comes to Poke'mon.

It's better now, get over it, people.

 

[Lullabye]

Happens all the time.
Older=better
even when it's clearly not.
You see it happen alot with videogames too.

 

[Kollega]

Yahtzee said it really well: "nostalgia is like a mouthful of balls". In it's most extreme, "OMG everything after 1995 sucks!" form, at least.

I don't have any particular nostalgia toward any games, except maybe for Red Alert 2... a bit.

 

[Uberjoe19]

I sometimes look fondly upon my old SNES, which sits in a box in my garage collected dust. One must move with the times.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Well, generally speaking, you'll find more good stuff the further back you look, but that's a matter of search parameters. You're likely to find more good stuff if you check the last thirty years rather than just the last ten because you have three times more years of stuff to look through. What people forget is that music, movies and other media forms had just as much shit in them then as they do now, but we don't think about that because generally we can only find the good stuff left over. The not-so-good stuff died out over time from being not-so-good.

 

[atalanta]

That's because finding and remembering old stuff is easy. I'm sure there were plenty of shit games released in the 90s, but the ones people remember and bother replaying now are the real gems -- Deus Ex, Planescape: Torment, Fallout, etc.

I also suspect the people who are worst about old games nostalgia are ones who don't really have the time or energy anymore to search out good stuff in the deluge of cheerfully average games released.

 

[Hiphophippo]

Nostaglia infests video game fandoms, including on this very forum. You'll here crazy things like "Megaman Classic series is actually playable" or "FF8 is not a piece of shit" when nostalgia is in control of these poor souls.

You're either insane or I don't know what you're talking about because Megaman is the shit.

OT: There are loads of great games coming out these days just as there were then, and to forget those that came before is a great diservice. Plenty of bygone era games are loads better than some of the shit released now. Same is true in inverse however. Megaman was fucking amazing. Bayou Billy perhaps was not.

 

[Mr.Black]

"FF8 is not a piece of shit" when nostalgia is in control of these poor souls.

Hey I liked FF8. /shrug

 

[Hiphophippo]

Nostaglia infests video game fandoms, including on this very forum. You'll here crazy things like "Megaman Classic series is actually playable" or "FF8 is not a piece of shit" when nostalgia is in control of these poor souls.

You're either insane or I don't know what you're talking about because Megaman is the shit.

Oh I like Megaman, just not the classic series. X series, Battle Network, Zero, Legends, I am fine with all of these. But Classic sucks shit.

Sounds like a difference of opinions. I think everything megaman has ever done is fucking gold.

battle network aside. I could do with substantially less of that.

 

[Veylon]

Nostalgia is just reliving those moments of discovery. Playing (for instance) Final Fantasy VII as your first RPG is a huge jump into the unknown and therefore awesome. With Final Fantasy VIII you've already made that jump, so it's not awesome.

like some old man sitting at a park bench complaining how times were better when he was a kid pushing a hula-hoop with a stick down a hill.

This is the situation in a nutshell. Remember that the old man was young once and the magic of that colorful hula hoop, bounding and shining in the sun, was the distilled essence of his childhood. And, no doubt, older men yet watched him play, shaking their heads in disgust and wondering was has become of kids these days with their soda fountains and chess clubs and radios.

 

[The Madman]

But I have noticed a lot, and I mean A LOT of people do seem to suffer from this when it comes to video games. The extreme cases of course being all those people that refuse to get anything but a Wii, those stuck playing Monkey Island or System Shock 2 for the rest of their days on the PC. Or simply just those with 8-16bit consoles watching the Angry Video Game Nerd and cursing the day Sony ever got into the business.

I could think of much worse fates, seeing as both those games are amazing and if you disagree you are a crazed heretic. I mean I wouldn't *want* to be forced to play the same two games till death do me part, but if I *had* to choose two, those aren't bad options. Just sayin...

Besides, sometimes, not always, but sometimes they're right. It's not nostalgia speaking, it's simple truth; just because it's newer and it has fancier graphics doesn't make it better. I'd still say without a doubt Baldur's Gate 2 is better than Dragon Age Origins. Does that reflect negatively on Dragon Age however? Not at all, DA is amazing. I love it! It's just Baldur's Gate appeals to me in such a way that DA, despite being similar in design, cannot.

It's not nostalgia speaking, it's simple personal preferences. Sometimes people simply prefer one game over another and the age of the game in question has absolutely nothing to do with it. In the case of BG2 above it's characters, setting, and gameplay. On a similar note however I've occasionally encountered people who use nostalgia as an excuse to hate older games, saying anyone who could possibly enjoy that game is simply blinded by nostalgia because the thought of people having different preferences than their own is simply unacceptable.

What would you call that? Anti-nostalgia? Anti-old-game? Ageism? I'm not sure. It confuses me.

 

[AlanShore]

I don't think that people who play old games think that the 90's were full of nothing but absolute classic games and there wasn't a single bad game made back then.

The way I see it is that games these days are distinctly average with few games being catastrophically bad but also few being spectacular. Whereas in the 90's there was a lot of crap but at the same time there were more awesome games, because developers actually took risks and experimented with new things.

If you want to get geeky about it, if you assume the quality of games today is normally distributed, then games in the 90's were normally distributed with "fat tails".

 

[Snotnarok]

To say that games are now 100% better than before is simply not true.

Some games did better when 2D and now are forced into 3D because a developer thinks its better (Sonic and Mario). I've yet to play a new JRPG (disgaea excluded) that was great, there's a few gems here and there (Crimson Gem Saga). I know that what's above is subjective but I've got a pile of older RPGs from days long ago that I really enjoy, I've played newer RPGs and hated them, boring plots, lame characters and this amazing ability of games now a days is to avoid art (aka look more realistic) as much as possible.

I'm not about to say that all old games are better, shooters have gotten better, as well as WRPGs, but just because a game is old doesn't mean it's not good anymore. Though what people have to realize is that there was gold then as there is now, but that gold was surrounded by mountains and mountains of shit and mediocrity.

 

[Hitmann]

The movies Jaws and the original Star Wars brought the end of cinema as an art form

.................................. um, yeah, no.

 

[Low Key]

The only reason why the younger generation thinks the older generation's stuff is so great is because no one brings up the shit from back then. Trust me, there was plenty of shit movies and music from the 70s and before.

As far as games go, I've been playing video games since Atari and in no way are games from back then as good as games now. I have fond memories of playing games way back when, but every generation impresses me with what it is capable of and how much more realistic things look. I thought the PS2 was the pinnacle of gaming graphics and even my dad though Madden '04 was a real football game I was watching, but it has since been blown out of the water by both the PS3 and the 360.

 

[Riobux]

Sometimes is under-fire being of nostalgia, but more often than not, it is actually bad. To dabble into the music example you used, 90s bought some interesting good bands like Radiohead and Muse (I think towards the end). However, the 90s also released a lot of poor bands. However, if you look to the past, everything is at least somewhat decent because all the poor bands became unknown in the space of 10 years.

I think games are slightly similar, except they didn't really rely on advertising much. It was more about word-of-mouth.

 

[AlanShore]

Some games did better when 2D and now are forced into 3D because a developer thinks its better (Sonic and Mario).

Exactly this! I don't get this obsession with everything having to be 3D. I can't think of many games that started as 2D and survived the transition to 3D and actually became better because of it. Worms is a prime example of where it just didn't work.

2D, if it's done well, doesn't seem to age as badly as 3D either. Take Monkey Island 3 compared to 4, if 3 was released today I wouldn't be disapointed with the graphics but 4 just looks terrible.

 

[Snotnarok]

Some games did better when 2D and now are forced into 3D because a developer thinks its better (Sonic and Mario).

Exactly this! I don't get this obsession with everything having to be 3D. I can't think of many games that started as 2D and survived the transition to 3D and actually became better because of it. Worms is a prime example of where it just didn't work.

2D, if it's done well, doesn't seem to age as badly as 3D either. Take Monkey Island 3 compared to 4, if 3 was released today I wouldn't be disapointed with the graphics but 4 just looks terrible.

Most platformers Sonic/Mario look great today, that's mostly because they're cartoons but still. 3D doesn't age well because there's a lot of factors, animation, texturing, mouth moving. 2D it's just animation and art.

 

[AlanShore]

Nostalgia is something a lot of gamers can't let go of.

They'll always look at certain games or systems with rose-colored glasses, no matter what.

Great argument, except I played Fallout 1 for the first time after I played Fallout 3 and the original blows it out of the water in every area except graphics. And I'm still playing old PC and Amiga games for the first time now and enjoying them far more than modern games. Believe it or not there are people do genuinely think that older games were better without the rose-tinted glasses.