The Lure of Retro

I should be playing this:

Instead I’m playing this:

I should have bought this:

Instead I’m replaying this:

The lure of the retro console is a strong force for some gamers such as myself even more so in these barren days of the summer games drought and being so early in a new console cycle as we are. Normally this would be sated by a trip to the recent and almost getting too big to ignore backlog of modern games that I somehow never got around to finishing… So why am I playing Super Mario World?

Reason number one is that it’s my personal pick for greatest game ever made and I often treat myself to another run through for any reason I can find (this time was prompted by an accidental save erase).

Reason number two is nostalgia, replaying the games you remember fondly and getting a warm fuzzy feeling when games hold up just as well as you remember (such as Mario World and Goof Troop) and the occasional laugh at games that have aged badly (I swear Street Racer was as good as Mario Kart I’m sure of it!).

I was happy to accept these two reasons especially as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a game I’ve played a hundred times before is sitting on my shelf as the next game to replay, so why then am I playing Max Payne? An older game that I’ve never played before (more on that in a later blog perhaps).

After pondering why I’ve ignored recent games in favour of an older game that I’m not nostalgic for, I’m not quite sure I can answer that fully, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of factors.

DLC: It’s no secret that DLC has gotten out of hand in recent years with pieces of the game sliced off to be sold later and pieces sliced off to be store-specific pre-order bonuses. Not to mention season passes that don’t cover every bit of the DLC. So when starting Max Payne it’s nice to know the whole game is in front of me now I’ll need no more than this.

Simplicity and pureness of its concept: With older machines often came restraints in how the story was told. Take the example of Max Payne. The story is simple and in short doses (there are exceptions like Metal Gear Solid), there is nothing worse than when a game thinks it has a good story and insists on waffling away why you sit there trying to leave your body mentally (like some of the Metal Gear Solid games).

With the older games also comes a level of pureness you don’t really find in modern gaming, again using Max Payne as an example. In it’s gameplay Max Payne is a slow-mo twitch reaction, head on a swivel shooter… That’s it. It has no other desires outside of this, it’s pure in concept. Games today are all homogenising almost into a singular game. If I described an open world setting with a dynamic online world in which you have to get to towers to open more of a map (and collectibles), in which you level up through an rpg-lite perk system I almost could be talking about any number of games such as a FPS like Far Cry, a third-person action game like Assassins Creed (I’ll stop picking on Ubisoft now) or a racing game like the Crew (OK, one more).

Ubisoft aside, plenty of other games fit this mold more or less from GTA to Shadows of Mordor and I know it’s a sweeping generalisation to label all modern games as such I know games exist outside of this formula and there’s not anything inherently bad about that formula. I’ve played and enjoy a lot of games that fit that mold, it’s just refreshing to play something pure.

So next time you are feeling a bit disenchanted by modern gamings triple-A blandness maybe dig out an old console and stick on an old piece of gaming history, or perhaps even buy a new-old game. It might just surprise you.