Has your nostalgia changed?

[rkotm]

Do you visit back to old games (Say, Super Castlevania 4) and feel a different nostalgia from say 10 or 20 years ago? Has age/life changed your nostalgia for the better? Like for instance, Earthbound for SNES has definitely changed from how i used to play it/remember it. I play it differently now, battles, using items i never have before, and i understand the game much better than i did (also found lots of text from talking to different people, so its like never having played certain parts before) and i look at the game in general differently, however its still a fun, endearing game to me.

[lackofcolour]

Nostalgia is weird, haha. I remember games like Crash + Spyro having the 'best graphics ever', until I went back and played them again. Sometimes I wonder if I should play through a game again because it might ruin the nostalgia I have for it. Then again, I have no trouble going back and playing Pokemon on the Gameboy, haha. Maybe in my case it's graphics, Crash + Spyro don't hold up so well but Pokemon hasn't changed. I am better at games in general now though, so that can ease the strain of the jagged lines on my eyes. :)

[Boltorano]

I'm not sure if it has changed too much, but I do take some strange steps to maintain it.

I only play Final Fantasy VI, my favorite game, in the late autumn/early winter, because I first rented it from the local video hut around Thanksgiving 1994. That, and the changing of the seasons seems to fit well with the themes of the game.

[Edmond Dantes]

It kind of has. Like for example there was a game I owned since I was a kid that I thought I would never sell, but then recently I realized I don't actually like it that much, and just let go of it. That's been the theme of my life lately, letting go of things, and in doing so finding things I actually like that I shouldn't let go of.

On another level, for me old-schooling used to be about the nostalgia. Nowadays its not really that its old school, but that there are games I like that happen to be old.

[Kyle15]

On another level, for me old-schooling used to be about the nostalgia. Nowadays its not really that its old school, but that there are games I like that happen to be old.

Absolutely. I'm still catching-up with stuff I missed, not just for the sake of being old.

[Rickstilwell1]

I have a different take on nostalgia. I can feel just as nostaligic about an early Playstation 2 game as I can a Genesis or NES game. They just bring back different memories for me. The Nintendo 64 always reminds me of my old neighbor coming over to play multiplayer with me for example.

[Steven]

when I first got BACK into the SNES early 2006, those were some major major nostaliga days. firing a game up like COMBATRIBES or WORLD HEROES (2) put me in a major OMG I REMEMBER THIS 10-12 years ago!

Or that same year whenever I read through old 1992-1994 EGM/GameFan issues, seeing certain reviews, previews and ads I fondly recalled in my youth... these things blew my mind in a nostalgia trip sense.

Nowadays, I don't feel that OMG burst of nostalgia quite the same anymore. One is familiarity. The other is, I think you tend to yearn for your childhood in your early-mid 20s, you know, that moment you have the means to recapture your childhood (buying old games, old cartoon shows on DVD etc.). I'm now heading into my late 20s and that yearning is different now.

[Emperor Megas]

I'm a little different from most in that I never truly leave those times -- at least not when it comes to games. Sometimes I cringe when I watch 80's cartoons today, but when I fire up a SEGA Master System or Vectrex or any other vintage video game it's same as when I first brought it home. I do find it difficult to play through some PSOne games because they look so terrible, but it's not a hindsight thing because I THOUGH THEY LOOKED TERRIBLE WHEN THEY WERE NEW!

I was quite literally the only gamer I knew who would talk about how Godawful early 3D games looked when everyone else was gawking and spouting out tech specs and industry buzzwords that they didn't even understand, which sold magazines, but didn't make the games play any better (actually, that's not entirely true; I had like one friend who felt the same way. I saw (early) 3D as a gimmick, which is was in most of the early games, not unlike motion controls today. SONY required developers to make 3D games for their system, with no consideration for quality, and so most of the 'games' that came out then were little more than 3D tech demos.

Another thing is that I never sell any of my games, and frequently revisit them, so I'm never far removed from the experience, at least everything before the Saturn/PSX/Nintendo 64 generation anyway. Games started to get really long after that, and I enjoy short games that I can play through in a matter of hours because there are so many games I enjoy and so little time in the day. This is why my backlog is as large as it is. I have hundreds of games that I haven't gotten around to playing or even unwrapping yet. Fortunately, I'm not spoiled by he graphic capabilities of modern consoles, and can still enjoy older games that are new to me as much as I did the other games from past generations that I've already played (assuming they're good games of course).