[vlunkr]

I love retro consoles as much as the next middle aged software developer, but realistically, the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children. Every console generation is that special generation for one group of kids.

I do agree that sometimes limitations breed creativity, but that’s not the only thing that can make the magic work.

[anonymous908213]

I know it's easy to trot out "nostalgia", but do you not think it's possible that older games can genuinely be better than newer games? I very much think it is common to find such games, even games I had never played in my youth. There were bad games then too, of course, and good games now, but I think the ratio of hits was higher. Particularly now that modern game development is so sloppy. Microtransaction-infested games rule the world, and while the indie scene does still produce excellent gems, most of them tend to be significantly less polished and rougher around the edges.

[vlunkr]

Yeah I think that individual retro games can be incredible and stand the test of time. For me Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night are timeless. As a whole though, it’s hard to measure. Today we have microtransactions, in the past we had games that threw in one bullshit level so you couldn’t beat it during a rental. (Lookin at you battletoads) and bad movie tie-ins, lazy arcade ports, etc. There’s always going to be trash.

One thing retro games obviously don’t have is hindsight. Shovel Knight feels like the best NES games, but lacks crap like lives and continues, because it learned from later games like Dark Souls that you can make death punishing without making it un-fun. Hollow knight builds on my favorite games with a couple of decades of lessons on how to make platformers more interesting and less frustrating.

[pjerem]

I do feel like you miss the point if you compare retro games with today AAA games.

The good video games of today are 100% indie.

I love Super Mario Bros as much as the other guy, but a game like Celeste is objectively better in each and every aspect.

I’m a 90’s kid and I had a blast with my N64, gamecube, Wii …

But I’m also having a blast nowadays with :

- Outer Wilds (it’s forbidden to say what it is)

- RimWorld (colony builder)

- Satisfactory (time vacuum)

- Factorio (factory builder)

- A Hat In Time (3d platformer with a lot of love for the n64/gc but with its own character)

- Poi (same)

- Vampire Survivors (dopamine fountain)

- Tinykin (looks like Pikmin but actually the chilliest platformer I played : smooth, calm, beautiful, good design, good music)

- Pizza Tower (Wario Land with a pizza twist and a lot of love)

- Kathy Rain (point and click)

- Stanley Parable (idk what it is but it was fun)

- Evoland

- The Touryist (chill adventure)

- Super Meat Boy (hard platformer)

- Celeste (hard platformer but that loves you and encourages you)

- Hell Pie (3d platformer, ode to Conker Bad Fur Day)

- Stardew Valley

Etc …

There are a lot more but I can already say that each and every game of this list gave me at least as much pleasure as my childhood games.

[GoblinSlayer]

I played Yoshi's island as an adult and think it's the best platformer game. I wonder if it counts as nostalgia.

[youngtaff]

IMV Super Monkey Ball on the GameCube is way better than any of it's successors

[Barrin92]

>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children

if you spend some time on youtube and look at people too young to even have been around play through those games it just becomes evident very quickly how wrong that assessment is. There's an energy even among young audiences when they're playing games like Metal Gear Solid 1&2 for the first time that you hardly see for anything coming out today.

There was a level of artistic talent in that generation, also in animation of the time, that simply doesn't really have a parallel today and brushing it off as nostalgia has a lot to do with he inability of people to recognize that there's no linear progress in art. Talent can be lost, some periods are better than others, just having more cpu and gpu cycles available does not produce better art.

The fact that almost 30 years after games like MGS it's still Kojima and a lot of Japanese guys now with increasingly gray hair who end up getting a lot of awards and pushing the envelope that should tell you something.

[sapphicsnail]

I think people forget there were a ton of shit SNES/PSX/whatever games. I personally have a soft spot for the 16 bit era but there are plenty of indie games coming out that are just as beautiful and creative. There's also way more exploration with narrative structure now then there was back then.

[vlunkr]

I can name 2 games too. Look at games like animal well or balatro. They’re wildly original and not made by old Japanese dudes.

[surgical_fire]

I disagree.

I routinely revisit old games with a critical mind. It is an interesting thing to do.

I find that quite a few games I really loved as a kid are special because I played during a formative age, yes. Some are better left in the past.

But I find some that still manage to impress me to this day. They are not good only as a memory, they are just really good.

And a second counter is that my all-time favorite consoles are the SNES and the Switch. I have been gaming ever since the Atari 2600 days. The Switch was released well into my 30s. I have no nostalgia for it.

[vlunkr]

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough because I agree with everything you said lol. What I take issue with is the parent comment trying to assert that the SNES (or any console) is the greatest of all time. There’s too much subjectivity in art to make a statement like that. I’m trying to say that it’s nostalgia informing their opinion, even if they’re disguising it with technical arguments.

[mistercheph]

Will people ever be nostalgic for the xbox one? For the iphone 14?

I doubt it. These products might even be good, but they are not like their early ancestors in several significant ways that will have them relegated to the footnotes of history. Most importantly, they are difficult to distinguish from both their immediate predecessors and their immediate successors. I don't mean to say that people won't have treasured experiences from this time that they long for in 20 years, just that I doubt the console will play as significant of a role in the memory.

[mlrtime]

Maybe not xbox one, but I was talking to younger folks about how I'd play mario kart for hours and hours...

They didn't associate but then told me their own anecdotes with the Dreamcast. So my experience matches OPs, its the time/place more than the console.

[abustamam]

I got an Xbox One in college. One thing that it had that I'm surprised my PS5 doesn't have was split screen functionality. You could play a game and watch TV (or do whatever else) at the same time. I never touched an XSX so I can't attest if it has something similar, but the concept was pretty neat.

I wouldn't say I'm nostalgic for the X1, but it was a good piece of hardware.

[pjerem]

Just for the joke, I own the og Xbox One and it’s the only console I hated from day one.

I clearly remember plugging it to my TV with excitement and being greeted with gigabytes of mandatory updates. And then I discovered that you weren’t able to play the game from the disk and that you need to install it on the fucking hard drive !! And then I discovered that the disc reader was actually slower than my fiber connection which means it was faster to play a game from the online store than installing it from a real disk.

I think I had to wait for at least a full hour just to play my first game.

And on top of that the performance was actually not that good. 30fps everywhere, it was worse than the Nintendo games on Wii / GameCube which usually ran at 50/60fps.

I still own this shit but I never liked it. At least it was useful some month ago when I had to update my Xbox controller firmware (but since I didn’t power it on for years , I also had to wait for updates :) ).

[pjmlp]

I belong to the 8 and 16 bit home computers generation, which grew along those consoles, yet for those on my circle consoles weren't special, home computers were.

Hence why I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing, for my crowd it was always there since the 1990's.

[wing-_-nuts]

>I find funny the remarks of "PC gaming" is growing

If anything, with current prices, it's dying. I don't say this as a 'pc v console' flame. I'm saying that if you want your hobby to be widespread, sustainable and growing it needs to be accessible to a broke highschooler. PC gaming might be affordable to us tech workers, but it isn't to them, and that's a problem. Hell even console gaming has become very expensive in the last couple years. A ps5 is $500, which is reasonable for what you get, but the $70 games and $80 / yr PSN sub adds up.

[pezezin]

I am a bit younger (my first PC was a 486), but much like you I and most of my friends grew up with PCs. My happiest memories are endless evenings playing Counter Strike and Diablo 2 at Internet cafés.

So yeah, PC gaming is growing... back home in Europe it has always been the number one platform!

[PetitPrince]

I join my voice in disgreeing with this. While some games can indeed be rose-tinted (I have fond memory of that Game Boy Spiderman game, and it's a terrible shoverware game), many of them are traiblazer (like, invented a genre) or are still standing on their own very well.

[leni536]

Some? There are tons of horrible old games, vastly outnumbering the good ones. It's just by now it's fairly established what the good games are and the bad ones are mostly forgotten my most.

We simply don't have the same luxury with new games, they can be hit and miss, and reviews are untrustworthy.

[wing-_-nuts]

>the reason those consoles are so iconic is because we were children.

If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with. I stayed at an air bnb that had a ps2. I sat down and played ace air combat; a game I'd never touched on a console I'd never had as a child, and I had a blast.

I also recently picked up fallout 1/2 for a couple bucks on steam, and while the controls and graphics weren't great, I still enjoyed the game even though I never touched it in childhood.

Realistically, there are a few games for the xbox / ps2 era where the graphics really have not aged well, but for the most part I am not a pixel snob, at all.

[drdeca]

> If that were the case, we would only really love the games we grew up with.

I’m not sure that’s true? Like, perhaps the preference might generalize from the several games one did play as a child to other games which are similar to the ones one played as a child, with the preference still being a result of which games one played as a child.

[vlunkr]

Sure, I didn’t say all old games are bad, we just have to be aware of nostalgia as a factor. It’s difficult for a game to match the ocarina of time for me, because I had simply never experienced something like that. As an adult I recognize that it is a good game, but also that someone who wasn’t there at the time isn’t going to see what I see in it.