Today’s games are enhanced with high-tech graphics, sounds, and orchestral music, but we wouldn’t have come to love such things without having a base. It also turns out that maybe the games that formed this base are still loved, and they very well are…
Remember when you played your NES, SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, or N64? You remember how you enjoyed playing those older games, or even make your humor of their abomination? Those were fun days, eh? These days, for most people, the games may be enhanced with graphics, and multiplayer gameplay doesn’t need your friends beside you, but it can be lonely, and you may get tired of all these enhancements. I know a lot of people who enjoyed playing GoldenEye, Mario Kart 64, and taking turns on Final Fantasy VII together, because we had fun with our friends, and we could enjoy laughing and playing the game, and making humor out of your death in the game, because with a friend, who cared?
To answer that, it’s obviously no one. If you are normal, and not seriously Emo, then you enjoyed an experience with your friends. These days, a lot of people don’t really find today’s games as fun as the older games, and it’s not just the multiplayer, but the thing overall. Why? Have we gotten used to these advancements? Are the new games missing something? What is missing? What’s missing can be many things: the challenge, the game, the story, the characters. Basically every aspect can be covered like this. Don’t we like the better graphics? Don’t we like the enhanced fun? In fact, we love it, but we love the older stuff as well. The factor of change is what makes us feel this way, or how so my survey tells.
I did find it common in my friends that older story and gameplay material just seem to be better than what we have now. I find that to be very reasonable, and more so, I agree. Take a look at Mario. Simple: Ugly beast kidnaps the pretty maiden, and a hero rises to the challenge of many obstacles in order to go into the evil lair and save her. Cheesy and classic, but it works. We used to love that kind of story, because it was fun and entertaining to know how it starts, and how it ends, even if we know how, you feel like seeing it. Nowadays, Mario games have a little more complicated stories, and they’re better, but we never felt that it ought to be in a game. Why? Because we got enough of it in the movies, or most of us did, and we miss the classics, cheesy as they may be.
Another thing I mentioned that makes classic games more appealing is the fact that the gameplay is now priceless. We loved it. If we didn’t, we’d hate games even today, but we don’t, because those games are the foundation of all games. We loved them, how they played, and especially how short they were, or at least the really old ones. I found myself getting better and better at Mario and Zelda all the time, and I could blow through each one in a matter of hours altogether, so it was like watching a movie about a story that we have come to love. It’s rather odd, that whole phenomenon.
While the gameplay and short length of older games may be appealing, we have also found the older RPG element to be appealing. A great example would be Final Fantasy VII, which almost everyone knows. We love such a game, not because of its basis: a long RPG, but because it created an original story of its own: epic, compelling, and one that could not be hated; unless, of course, you are evil. It was overwhelming to know that the game stretched even more than two whole discs, but once you get playing, you are hooked into the story and that doesn’t change until you are done and wish for another great story. The next of that we got with Final Fantasy X, which had to be two separate games, and had an amazing story, but something was missing. Believe it or not, it was the look. While some people may complain about Final Fantasy VII’s blocky character texture, it’s still one of the many memories that come from Final Fantasy VII, you will know what I mean if you play it and then play one of the modern Final Fantasies.
So you see, some of us still love and play the classic older games, simply because they formed the idea of today’s games and, in many ways, they surpass them as well. So, the next time you’re going to buy the hot new game that everyone’s playing, and you have at least five of the exact same genre, take a look at the older games in GameStop. Maybe even get the now cheap system to play it, and experience the Golden Age again.
