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[23 Sep 2008|03:20am] |
Back when the Playstation was king, and the N64... well, it had Goldeneye, I was getting into RETROGAMES. Which is kind of funny, because I would be totally mortified to think of games as retro nowadays in the same kind of time frame I was looking at with big sparkly doe eyes behind rose-coloured glasses. Bringing together my skepticism towards 3D, my (vindicated!) wariness that games would become confusing and imprecise, and the fact that emulators were coming to maturity and I could play a lot of old games with the only cost being the nagging feeling that I was dooming some poor programmer to destitution, I sort of became a stodgy old conservative about those eight and sixteen-bit era games while still in High School. Of course, in High School, where your every preference would be judged, graded, and branded on your forehead, I was met with some weird stares and occasional derision when talking games with other nerdy-minded peers, enrapt by the flashy 3D worlds of the games of the day. But I knew they'd come back one day. They allllll come back.
I eventually did grow to accept 3D, mostly spurred on because I really liked Final Fantasy in those days. Still, gaming is a two step tango with progress. With every advancement and innovation, something is lost, and then it's rediscovered a generation or two later and is treated like a new revelation from the saints and angels and Ace Ebb. Looking back on the games of that era, I feel I was vindicated - the 3D games tended to look like total dog shit, really, and the 2D games of the era are gorgeous, have a timeless sort of quality, and will inevitably be lazily ported to every device from now until the heat death of the universe. More than that, my prediction that the industry moves in cycles and NES-era design would be king again was... well, totally wrong! But! As we children of the eighties and nineties trudge toward and reluctantly stumble past thirty, a considerable number of we supposed adults are finding ourselves in front of our game consoles, dearly missing summer days with lemonade, a stack of Nintendo Powers, singing nonsense songs, battling some terrible boss to whom we didn't even know the words with which to curse it. Do we really need these trumped-up and self-important, bleak, plodding, overcomplex, and busywork-laden modern games to remind us that our adulthood is trumped-up and self-important, bleak, plodding, overcomplex, busywork-laden, and completely fucking awful?
What I'm saying is that Megaman 9 is out, it's beautiful and wonderful and it's everything I wanted it to be. I hope it sells a million and maybe more, and every company out there crams as much retro-styled material down my gullet as they can crank out until I hate video games forever.
(Oh yeah, and on the topic of the best NES game getting a proper sequel, Bionic Commando Rearmed is pretty good too, and deserves some consideration. What with it also being the co-best NES game and all, and also recently receiving an update.)
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