The 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 gott

The 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.