This is something I've been noticing for awhile, but it seems like most discussion of "retro gaming" ultimately comes down to everyone endlessly talking about the same big hits that we all already know already.
Rinry (a female reviewer I enjoyed watching--wow that sounded wrong) had a crossover with some dude where they took a side on the 16-Bit war and talked about what they considered the three best games on each platform. Rinry disappointed me by going the boring route: all three of her choices were first-party Nintendo games. The other dude (I forget his name) surprised me by mentioning Comix Zone, but then his other two choices were rather typical, and yes, one of them was Sonic.
For another example, I was glancing at the topic about magazines and saw the Retro-Gaming Magazine (as in magazine *about* Retro) and... the cover story was "We're gonna talk about how f***ing awesome Doom was!"
Yeah, look, I get it, these games are classics.
But seriously.
Retro Gaming becomes totally boring when "the classics" are all anyone ever talks about.
To quote Gggmanlives: "Did you really watch this video just to see another person sing the praises of Half-life? Didn't think so."
By the same token, I don't watch retro gaming videos or join retro gaming groups just to circlejerk about Mario and Sonic all day.
If I talk about the Genesis, I want to see if other people have played the anime game with blue-haired She-Ra, or that RPG that spanned three generations, or that platformer about the possum with the jet pack, or that action-RPG where the plot was driven by you only being able to talk to animals, or that other action-RPG that used a tilted perspective and had a healing drug called "EkeEke" (is that pronounced "Eek Eek" or "Eh-kay Eh-kay"?), or maybe the times we got console-exclusives based on pen-n-paper that didn't suck. And I used descriptions instead of titles because I want to see how many of you are real fans and actually know what games these are.
And when I don't want to share my own memories, I want to hear about the games I never played, but may have heard of and/or be curious about. I'm sure somebody asked for Sonic one Christmas and instead got Saint Sword (maybe your parents assumed it was a religious game) and so how did that turn out? Or "hey was that James Bond sidescroller any good?" Or for that matter, I keep seeing this series about a superspy who happens to also be a fish, what's the deal with those?
It's not that I hate the first-party franchises. It's just that talking about the same thing all the time gets very dull, very quick. Besides, I honestly don't see the "big names" as being console-defining (except maybe Sonic because of how hard Sega pushed him) since a console is defined by its whole, not the sum of its parts. If the Genesis really only had Sonic and nothing else, it truly would be a worthless system. Likewise if the SNES only had Mario and Zelda and nothing else, it would be no better than the Gamecube.
So does anyone else get annoyed with this "all we ever talk about is the games you already know about" aspect of the retro scene or am I the only one who has even noticed it?