The same thing happens to me with video games on a regular basis. Younger me simply had much lower expectations and poorer taste, back when a NES controller (with all of four buttons and a D-Pad) sufficed.
I sympathize a lot with what was written. I grew up on the Nintendo consoles (my father got an NES from my mom for their first anniversary, which was less than a year before I was born). I really enjoyed playing games straight through my N64 I had as a young teen. But games after that lost a lot of appeal.
At the time I thought it was because I was growing up and just wasn't into it any more. Sure, I used to think spending hours playing Super Mario RPG, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo Kazooie, or Megaman X was a fun afternoon. Maybe I just grew up.
But there have been a few games that have come out since that I have really, truly enjoyed. Games like Psychonauts, Portal, Pikmin, and maybe a few other non-P games (e.g., Twilight Princess which is a half-P). Increasingly I have begun to feel like I didn't stop loving games, the games I loved just didn't exist anymore or were too hard to find.
I like using a controller. I like playing something I laugh at. I like playing something that stitches together a few basic motions/controls in complex ways to challenge me. I like playing games that are fun with friends or fun for friends to watch you play.
So for now, I mostly try and keep an eye on indie games that are cheap on Steam that work well with an Xbox 360 controller (which is really quite nice) on my Mac Mini. Occasionally I come across something fun and well done. But whereas I could rattle off 50 games I would love to play with my kids one day that I consider "classic", almost none of them were created post-Xbox. That's a shame.
I'm in pretty close to the same boat. But one thing I've noticed looking back - the games we played in our childhood and early teens were very different than the games my brother-in-law grew up on, and he's only 8 years younger than me.
For example, I had no problem setting my Atari games down as a child; there's only so many rounds of Pac-Man I could stand even then. Had I been inducted into gaming with Super Mario World and Final Fantasy II instead, well, my parents would have had a much harder time of it.
I must be the only one disappointed with old-school games. I was super excited to set up a retropie, after 20 minutes playing the nostalgia wore off quickly. Anyone else find the same?
To be honest, it wasn't that much fun at the time (assuming I'm remembering my game consoles correctly). I got one as a kid (presumably Christmas). Played with it for a few weeks until one of the controller connectors became flaky. By then I was getting pretty bored of it, so my parents just returned it for a refund.
The part about not being able to just jump into games really spoke to me. It had been a while since I picked up a new game, but my wife got a switch and over Christmas I was playing some new games.
I got super frustrated clicking through to get to the "good part" of actually playing. I just wanted to play! Maybe that was because my first games were all Atari games.
But my kids felt the same way. They were 4 and 7 at the time, and they just wanted to play too and didn't want all the intro crap either.
I got a Game Gear when I was a kid. It was a thrift store find, otherwise my parents would never spend that kind of money on a toy.
I played it for literally a half hour before the batteries ran out. It didn't come with a power cord and batteries were very strictly rationed in my house growing up, so I was never able to play it again. I was heartbroken.
Again, I got only a half hour of play out of a video game console. Parents sold it several months later when they realized how useless it was.
I don't know how a product like that could even be released on the market. It's been nearly three decades and I'm still heartbroken by it.
I (35 years old, grew up playing PC and GameBoy games since the late 80s) had no trouble accepting that the games I can play are either the once per year birthday presents or whatever pirated floppy my friends at school gave me that worked on a PC XT clone with a monochrome monitor (and lot of those that worked played way too slow on my computer).
I definitely felt left out not having an N64 or Playstation growing up, but in hindsight I didn't actually miss much. What stings at the time is the feeling that you're missing out.
Anecdote: When I was a kid in the ’90s in Germany, I once went to a mega store to buy a NES game on discount. My final choice was between Defender of the Crown and, if I remember correctly, Wizards & Warriors 3, and I picked Defender based on the box art. Bad choice. In all my childhood years, I was never able to figure out how to play this game well.
Sure. Closing in on my 50s too. I generally don't have patience for most games of that era either. I think quite a few of those games still stand up but when I play them now it's more of a historical engineering thing where I am understanding and figuring out how they pulled off certain effects, etc.
I recently grabbed a NES emulator and a knock-off USB NES
gamepad and played through a bunch of old games from my
childhood. It hits real different now that I have a life
and time is precious.
Getting back to the point of the linked article, there were some special things about how these games looked and played on real hardware on real CRTs. One was the look. Two was a true zero-latency experience. While we may have "nostalgia" about the CRT look, there are also objective differences there.
And all the while, I'm watching the clock, thinking about how
otherwise productive I could be being right now...
I feel this too. But I also feel this way about reading books at this point in my life, I'm ashamed to say. I hardly read any more. But I don't blame the games, or the books. It's clearly me that has changed.
When I was introduced to computers at the age of 14 at high school under MS-DOS, we kids were made to play "Hangman" which I never liked. Then at the age of 15 we graduated to "Pac-man" which I liked somewhat, but not enough to want to continue engaging with it like the rest of the kids.
As an adult after college when I migrated to UNIX, I was introduced to "XSoldier" and kind-a liked it, but again, not enough to get hooked beyond a week of regular play.
I have never played any of the console-based games and have never even touched a gamepad.
Does all of the above make me an outlier? Or, is it normal?
This is a fair point and probably a big reason for how I feel. Another factor may be that I never played Atari games socially; I didn’t really have play dates at that age (~7-8), or if I did we pretty much strictly played outside. Also, I was an only child. I did however play NES and then SNES with cousins and school friends.
Well it took me borrowing one video game to learn that lesson. "No, you must've borrowed it to someone else" when I asked.
First game I bought for my own pocket money, which at time, in Poland, was a lot for a kid as it was full price title, Baldur's Gate 1 in nice box with manual and a map, and dubbed gloriously with then-radio/TV stars, hell, the narrator voice was better than original. Needless to say I was pretty salty.
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