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Has our whole perception of a good game changed over time?
Nintendo's Virtual Console service is something I've been backing since I first heard of the concept. The chance to play all of the old classics again was something I could only dream of quietly to myself. You see, a few years ago my family and I went on a summer vacation. When we arrived back we realized that we had been house broken during the two weeks we had been away. Strangely it had taken my brother and I a long time to realize that our entire collection of consoles had been stolen and were probably at this point sitting quite contently in somebody else's living room.
Machines that had been taken from us were a Sega Master System, a Sega Genesis and a Nintendo NES. We couldn't exactly call ourselves distraught; my brother had grown out of them and I was always more of a Game Boy person. It was only years later that I yearned to play all my old games again, and Nintendo gave me that chance.
As you could imagine I have been happily going on shopping sprees through the Wii Shop Channel, browsing even more happily through the golden ages of video gaming. Since I first opened my Wii I have been progressively stocking up on some of the more heartfelt titles I played as a child, yet after each purchase I consistently find myself in the same position.
I start the game and am reminded of the title screen I had long forgotten. I continue to begin the game and nostalgia sets in like wild fire. But that's it nostalgia; I drag myself though the game smiling at old enemies I fought eons ago. Nothing else. Where is the excitement, the exhilaration, the adrenaline rush I once felt? Why is it absent from a game I once wasn't able to put down?
The latest of these subjects is a game I downloaded today. The game is Alien Storm for the Sega Genesis. I can easily picture myself as a 6-year old kid on a couch holding a Genesis controller with this on the screen in front of me. I am laughing and gripping hard at the controller, bashing buttons in a mad flurry. And it wasn't just me either. Luckily Alien Storm has a fantastic cooperative multiplayer mode, a mode which me and a friend utilized all the time as young-uns; he and I played all the time. We played the same levels with the same characters with the same difficulty settings on the same days.
There are of course, a number of explanations which could be offered up towards this. One would be that I was just a young boy with a short attention span and a less-informed opinion of the gaming world. Another would be that the game never changed, but my feelings towards it did. I believe that the answer is something a little different:
Nintendo claim to be bringing back the casual fun and playability of classic games, while innovating with quirky control methods. Yet I have never had trouble getting up and switching off my Wii because of this. In fact this often happens relatively quickly with me being bored after just a few minutes of play. You see it's all well and good by saying that the success behind classic titles was their "pick up and play" factor, but unlike the Wii attempt at replicating these games, these were truly challenging and difficult pieces of work while still remaining reasonably casual.
In this demanding present video games are being run on far more powerful machines with lots of headroom for lifespan, graphics, and innovation. Has this massive leap forward in technology destroyed our opinions of games we once thought as perfect? Opinions and examples as always.
