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It's all just an old videogame
- raldi 4y agoSince it’s kind of buried, if you’re wondering what the title refers to, it’s the feeling you get when replaying an old video game and finding it doesn’t seem as amazing as it did when you first played it. Weirdly, I’ve replayed most of the video games from my youth (and beyond) and I’m hard-pressed to come up with any memories of ever experiencing that feeling. Now, TV shows and movies, and especially processed food, on the other hand…
- greenbit 4y agoWell, they keep remastering the old shows, and the makers of the processed foods are perpetually tweaking their recipes. So there's that.
- Sin2x 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ygjD04vyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0ygjD04vyU
- jfoutz 4y agocastlvania. I could consistently get to Frankenstein, but always struggled with Igor. 25ish years later, I still feel the same frustration. But, uh, yeah. I can't really think of a "fun" example.
- mehphp 4y agoTo me, it happens when the game was graphically mind-blowing at the time. If, I remember it for that and not the gameplay, yeah, I get that feeling.
- m463 4y ago> Since it’s kind of buried (somehow you teased out what I could not) > Weirdly, I’ve replayed most of the video games from my youth (and beyond) and I’m hard-pressed to come up with any memories of ever experiencing that feeling. As to old movies, they have bad hair, yes, but they also have horrendous pacing which sometimes makes them unwatchable. But some old games get a better go of things since you ditch old hardware. Modern hardware eliminates the significant delays from booting, level loading, graphics rendering and the rest. Even some of the largely text-based adventure games could use synthesizers like the Roland MT-32 to make nice music available that wasn't there in the (my) past. The only thing that seems to reliably clobber old games is sketchy game mechanics. That is a hard one to overcome.
- Legogris 4y agoFPS title on first-gen 3D consoles. Had lots of fun with Turok 2 back in the days. Replayed it recently. Felt like rewatching Transformers.
- tvanantwerp 4y agoThe disappointment of old games for me is usually the controls. Newer games have polished controls so well that movement almost feels like a direct extension of thought. But when I go back and play my old favorites from decades ago, movement feels so clunky! I spend so much time fighting the controls rather than getting into the groove of playing. I didn't see it the first time around, because there was nothing better to compare against.
- jgalt212 4y agoI hear you on the 3-D stuff. But for 2-D games, I'm not sure if there's been any measurable progress in them for 25 years. Have you played Donkey Kong Country recently? It still holds up. The hockey games on Sega Genesis do as well.
- cableshaft 4y agoYeah, DKC was super smooth. Also the Mario games in general, but I'm especially partial to Yoshi's Island. I replay that one almost every year. Also Zelda games, especially SNES/GB.
- mike_hock 4y agoYeah, controls. RTS: No build queues, no multiple commands. FPS: Really old ones before the WASD+mouse standard. But I'm not oblivious to any of this before I replay the game, and might choose not to replay because of it. It's not the game that's gone bad, it's me. I'll never replay a game not giving a shit about time passing, not bothering to save, or even choosing to start from the beginning the next time I play even if I'd saved the last time. I used to play for the sake of playing. Now I play to win. That's a hugely different way of playing and you spend much less time in the game that way.
- rufus_foreman 4y agoWhen I think of old games, I think of arcade games not consoles, so it is the opposite for me. The controls were designed specifically for that game and they were industrial strength. Once you had the controls for a specific game wired they became an extension of you, it was zen.
- ge96 4y agoI spent so much time in Fo3 and remember the graphics vividly. But then replaying it years later, yeah not as good. Bioshock still holds a feeling of awe though the initial descent.
- ip26 4y agoPartly puzzle-based games like Zelda have lost a lot of the magic for me, as they became more obvious and started to feel more like turning the crank instead of creativity & discovery.
- watwut 4y agoI definitely can relate to it. The games I fondly remembered from old times were mostly meh later on.
- StrictDabbler 4y agoThe phrase "doesn't seem as amazing as it did" is distracting in the context of videogames. Almost every response is talking about how games graphics have gotten better, or whether gameplay has improved or gotten worse. That's not the subject. The subject is the loss of innocence and wonder, and how the author misses being the person who could play a mediocre game like Gothic III and be entranced by it. You can put practically any videogame in front of a kid and they'll play it for hours and add to the story. I wandered around the world of Ultima VIII for months. This was a terrible game if you play it straight. But if you used the hackmover cheat you could move any item in the world anywhere you wanted, like an early 2-D version of the Sims or Minecraft. You could take parts of other people's houses and build yourself a castle. It was a game construction set. You could put poisons in an NPC's inventory and they might drink it. I was in love with the weird mushrooms and the eerie music and the plot that didn't make a bit of sense. I was cheating so hard that every NPC was just a strange person I was visiting for a bit, with scattered bits of scripting firing off events I didn't understand. It seemed like an unlimited open-world playground. I'm not that person anymore. I can't enjoy a bad game that way. I have nostalgia for the version of me who could love that terrible, terrible game, and for the lost half-imagined better version of that game that I'd filled into the gaps. I feel like there's a world where Ultima 8 had better management and everybody remembers it fondly, and that I don't live in that world.
- antiverse 4y agoI needed this today, and I'm sure I'm not the only one on HN. A sort of a lament for innocence and nostalgia. Thank you for sharing.
- iforgotpassword 4y agoWas a great read. Was surprised by the sudden mention of Tame Impala. I was hooked on "Lost in yesterday" a year ago, and its music video, which I naturally then thought about a lot too. So nice seeing someone else's thoughts on it. However > as the pregnant bride from the first scene returns, destroys the cake The cake never gets destroyed, seems he revised his memories over time :-)
- tresqotheq 4y agoI have replayed Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament. And these felt as amazing as they were back then. If you fall in love with a fad, then you are going to look back and wonder why you loved it. But not everyone falls in love with fads all the time. Sad that this dude generalises so.
- jessaustin 4y agoWhen you replay them now the FPS is amazing!
- StrictDabbler 4y agoI think his point is precisely that sometimes you have beautiful memories of a bad thing. Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament are irrelevant because they're masterpieces. The movie "The Shining" holds up too, right? So what? He does all this explanatory work with a film about a Russian with cherished memories of a shitty cabin and a music video of a couple with warm memories of a cheap and tawdry wedding. That's not generalizing. It's extremely specific. It sounds like you're just not interested in the feeling he's describing. He does not mean that everything you used to like is guaranteed to be bad when revisited.
- mordae 4y agoActually, I've just watched Vox Machina series and found out there were (and still are) playing DnD on an online stream. I think I want to start playing a bit again. :-)