Famicom Dojo Podcast: Nostalgia Goggles

Very interesting episode, guys!  I too have had thoughts like this before, wondering if I like retro games because of nostalgia, or if they were just really good games.  Video games as a medium is certainly still very young, but already they have produced games can be considered a masterpiece.  Players will keep coming back to these games again and again because they are just great games.  People who make great games understand that art direction is way more important graphics. 

So here are some classic games that I’ve found don’t quite hold up today.  This is not to say they are bad games, and they were of course important for the time.  I just don’t feel the need to go back to them again.  The original Metroid comes to mind immediately.  Samus controls poorly.  You can only shoot in one direction, and many enemies go under your shot.  The corridors all look the same, and it’s very easy to get lost, and if you die (and you will probably die), you have to spend the next 30 minutes grinding on enemies to refill you energy tanks.  I’m also super fond of the Metroid II, but I don’t think it holds up either.  Of course, Super Metroid an absolute masterpiece and easily a contender for greatest games ever.  I’m also not that fond of the original Super Mario Bros. or the Lost Levels anymore (Super Mario USA will always be Super Mario Bros. 2 to me.  I don’t care if it’s just a cover of Doki Doki Panic, it’s way more fun to play.)  It was one of the first two games to come with my NES (the other was that wretched TMNT game you talked about), and I had a lot of fun playing it at the time, but now I feel that the sequels just did everything that game did, but better.  While not outright ugly, the game just doesn’t look as good as it’s sequels, nor do I feel like Mario controls as well as he does in later games.  I just rarely feel like I need to play the original Mario again and again, unlike SMB3 or World.  On the other side of the coin, I think the Mega Man games only got worse with time and graphical improvements.  9 and 10 are really interesting games to me, if nothing more than to see the melding of modern and retro. 

As for Final Fantasy 7, I completely agree with Vinnk.  I had never touched a Final Fantasy game because for some reason I thought they looked too complicated, though I had played other RPG, most notably Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Secert of Mana/ and Chrono Trigger (I might have rented Chrono Trigger thinking it was Secret of Mana, actually).  But I never played any of the Final Fantasies until I bought and played through FF8 (great one to start on because they only got better from there!)  Afterwards, I picked up all the games I had access to, and played them in order to see what I had been missing (so that’s 1, 2/4, 5, then 3/6).  After playing through and loving the heck out of 6 (I think it was the re-release PSone version), I started 7 a week later.  And while it was good, I could not for the life of me figure out what all the hype was about.  Maybe I was more forgiving of 6 because I’d played other SNES rpgs, but I like to think that FF7 just wasn’t all that great.  People just remember it fondly because it was their first RPG for a lot of Americans. 

One of the things you didn’t comment on (but easily could in the future) were remakes and releases.  After all, that’s how so many of these older games stay in the publics mind and reach new audiences.  A lot of people lamenting the fact that SquareEnix isn’t planning on doing a remake of FF7 for the PS3, and I’ve played and enjoyed the DS remakes of FF3 and FF4.  Remakes are nothing new, even the original SMB trilogy got a graphical remake for the SNES.  But at the same time, other people dislike how companies are just remaking older games, and would rather see something new. But perhaps that’s a discussion for a later time. 

I think the thing with old nes games is that they take so much investment, many of them are aquired tastes..  When I was young, if you rented or bought a game and you didn’t like it right away, you powered through (at least I did) and got past the shortcommings (because you had no choice 🙂 and only gave up if it still sucked after like a full weekend of playing.  I still think TMNT is an awesome game because I haven’t put it down for all that long, whereas another game, say flying warriors, which I used to love but haven’t touched in ages..  will feel completely terrible when I plop it in.  However, I think if I put in the investment, after playing it for a long enough while it would grow on me again.  I think many retro games are like coffee, but I think they always were like that for me.
 
Personally I always thought that the he-man movie was terrible even when it was released even though I loved he-man toys :)

i am 16 and i love retro games my favorites are earthbound and super mario 3