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snownyte @kbin.social

What are some eras of gaming that you've stopped feeling nostalgic for?

As I've gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn't have any good games.

I've just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it's in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it's because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.

But I've grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I've forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.

Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.

I'm more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.

65 comments

  • For me it's the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don't hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.

    • I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for "the system," but in reality they're only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It's not that the N64 has a top ten, it's that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.

      I'm sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef's Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that's the thing: It's always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn't know any better because that's all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.

      • Woodwork dweller here, you seem to have forgotten:

        Majora's Mask

        Star Fox 64

        Jet Force Gemini

        Donkey Kong 64

        Diddy Kong Racing

        Excite Bike 64

        Paper Mario

        Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door

        Pokémon Stadium

        Yoshi's Story

        Pokémon Snap

        Mario Party

        Felt at the time that there was always a high quality "AAA" release on the horizon interspersed with some of the greatest games ever made. Many of the gameplay techniques these games pioneered during the transition from 2D to 3D are still used to this day.

        Obviously a lot of them don't stand the test of time a quarter of a century on but we haven't had a system with the same consistent quality of games for a long time, if ever, IMO.

      • There were more than 10 great games on the N64, but you have to put yourself in the context of the late 90s. You excused the horrible controller designed for humans with 3 hands, because you got to play some amazing games, many designed to be played in four player multiplayer. Even if PS1 supported the feature, it may as well not have, since it was rare and required a peripheral no one had. Tony Hawk may have been butchered in some ways, but it wasn't butchered in the way that every PS1 game without pre-rendered backgrounds was butchered; even at the time, some of us couldn't stand that floating point rounding problem that made every 3D environment on the PS1 look like you were looking at it under water. I probably had 30 N64 games back in the day, and maybe history doesn't make as much note about Bomberman 64, Dr. Mario 64, or Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball, but there was nothing like it at the time.

      • I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64...and that is about it.

        You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren't. Like, "Here's 25 MORE games that should have been on it." and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn't wangle the rights for.

        Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora's Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that's basically it. You'd have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin' USA, and you'd never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or...whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.

        I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn't, it's because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don't all have the same memories.

      • There's a point here. The N64 too had a significantly lower count of games than the PS1. The PS1 had like three times larger the amount of games with 1,278 than N64. So there was a lot more options to pick and choose from. And there were definitely superior versions of some of the games listed.

        But it is sort of like the Genesis vs Super Nintendo comparison. People can list banger after banger off of the SNES library that it easily fills a Top 50 list, whereas people can list maybe 20 good Genesis games? So I do believe that's where a lot of the favoritism stems off from is that, Nintendo had to make their games good for the N64, least the first party titles. Everything else off of it were really more misses than hits, you probably had 10 underrated gems that people now talk about (and pretend they always were that when nobody had a clue back then).

    • Unlikely many of the games of the current gen will hold up in 25-30 years...

      Many of the first party games on those systems broke new ground and much of modern gaming wouldn't exist without them.

  • Growing up I skipped the PS1/Saturn/N64 generation so I've never had nostalgia for that super early low poly 3D era

  • There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.

    Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.

  • I've been fairly nostalgic for 6th gen consoles lately. Not that it was some magic time for video games, but there were certainly genres that were well represented back then that aren't so much today, like stealth games, arcade racing games, and campaign first person shooters with co-op and split-screen deathmatch. These days, every multiplayer game is designed to be played forever or not at all, rather than being designed to be fun with friends a handful of times.

    Games also came out at a rapid clip, with most sequels coming out only a year later. Sure, some of that was due to crunch that we were oblivious to, but even if that cadence were twice as long, it would still be a huge improvement over development cycles today. Most single player games these days are open world by default, as though that's the natural goal for all video games, no matter how many of them it's made worse and no matter how much time and money it takes to make them.

    Edit: I was half-awake enough while typing this that I ended up going almost opposite of the prompt, but so much to say that no era was all sunshine and rainbows, so I'll never be fully nostalgic for any era.

  • Honestly, I pay for top of line parts. I realize I'm limitiing myself on good games, but...

    I paid for this shit, I try to keep top of the line because it is still my hobby (though, my time doesn't allow anymore) and I want to push my hardware.

    Low bit games, however good, don't get a chance because... god damn, I expect better. I'm a 80s baby, and 90s kid. Nickelodeon early nick toons are my jam.

    I paid for it, let me experience it.

    I want to PUSH my hardware, and fine tune for play-ability, as expenses allow.

    That being said, I love MMOs and realize how hard they can be to "upgrade" for all users... but damn, I don't have the time or energy anymore. I wish I could raid EQ bosses like I was 13 on summer break, but I fucking can't.

    At the end of the day, I hope creative minds create new paradigms in gaming with limited resources. At this point, it is the only way we will grow. AAA studios make rehashes of former successes, which fail, and no one wants them. Gameplay has died, its been several years, and as an "old-head" (Quest for Glory 1 was my first PC game, with parser prompts) and I miss games. Even those are simple by today's standard - but they still stand up in a shorter format.

  • Even though I grew up with 8/16bit I've never really had any nostalgia for it apart from a select few games.

  • Most of them, honestly.

    When you look back, it was cool what they were doing at the time, but progress is such that all newer games have iterated on those groundbreaking formulas and improved upon them, making the older games seem less spectacular than they were at launch. I have fond memories of playing PS2, N64 and Dreamcast, but when I go back to play some of those games I enjoyed as a kid, I find that there's always something super sub-optimal like the controls or some arcane mechanic that doesn't make much sense. I find this to be the consistent issue going back to PS2 era and earlier.

    I think the PS3/360 era is the one I have the most nostalgia for all things considered. There were a lot of stellar RPGs like KOTOR and Mass Effect that generation. Stuff like Red Dead Redemption was coming out. Control schemes finally became generally standardized and understandable. Tutorials, saves and decent graphics were really finally all combined properly for the first time.

    I find the same sort of issue with movies. When you go back passed the 80s, you start hitting pacing issues. Same with video games. When you go back passed the mid-2000s, you're going to run into early installment weirdness.

    • This is broadly true, but I think that many older games that were much simpler, with a narrower focus and more fleshed out presentation have a spot on the leaderboards that won’t be knocked off any time soon. One example is the Legend of Zelda series. With Breath of the Wild and its sequel, it did some pretty innovating things. But in the process it sacrificed much of what made the earlier Zelda games great. We figured out how to make a game with “more dungeons” but they were uninspired and they all looked the same. Gone were the huge, sprawling, uniquely thematic dungeons with memorable bosses and iconic music. The overworld got much larger and they crammed more overworld activities into it, but now those activities were just the same four or five things copy pasted to every inch of the world, none of which did much individually besides making one of a few numbers go up by a tiny fraction. New technology allowed them to make huge sprawling worlds to explore, at the expense of the ability to effectively fill those worlds with stuff worth exploring for.

      New games innovate in what is technically possible, but they move backwards in other areas that don’t get the same attention. It’s more than just “These old games were good for their time”. In many cases they are still unsurpassed by modern games because the focus changed.

      • I agree.

        Even using my examples of KOTOR and ME, comparing them to (relatively) modern counterparts, Jedi Survivor and Andromeda, you can see that the storytelling has taken a back seat to the open world. ME 1-3 were all very tight corridor cover shooters, going from fully constructed combat environment to another, while Andromeda tried to shoehorn in survival crafting and exploration. KOTOR has more deep RPG mechanics and overall a better story than Jedi Survivor, and I would agree it's because the focus changed on providing sprawling open worlds over more bespoke environments. I would also say that the combat in Andromeda and Jedi Survivor are superior to their older counterparts, but at the loss of other things.

      • Breath of the Wild's equivalent to dungeons were the beasts, not the shrines. The activities in the overworld were only the same in that they ended in a shrine, but the things you did to unlock them were generally very different. Half of them aren't even visible at first. The people who thought that world was empty just didn't find what was hidden in the negative space.

65 comments