[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.

[surgical_fire]

Ahh ok. My bad, I really misunderstood your point then.

To expand on it, to not let the thread go to waste - I think there is value in nostalgia, we should not ignore our past, it makes who we are. But it is important to recognize when something is good only for nostalgia.

For example, I adore the original Phantasy Star. It was the first RPG I played and to this day I remember my absolute awe in exploring an open world. One of the first things I did there was to walk along a narrow path in between some mountains and the ocean, only to be slaughtered by a group of spiders way too strong for me. It was amazing. Getting out into the world, exploring caves, it felt like an adventure. And later getting into an starship and exploring other worlds. Alis Landale is to this day my spirit animal - When I am given the option to create a character I often make a girl with auburn hair and name her Alis.

I came back to this game twice in the past years - once playing it on Emulator with an improvement patch, another on the Switch re-release. I still had fun printing grid paper and drawing maps on my own, going into a 4 level cave to get to a cake shop, etc. But I recognize it is pure nostalgia. Recommending that game should only be done in a "if you want to see an early stage 8-bit RPG, you can do a lot worse than Phantasy Star". When I play a new RPG I am chasing the same rush my 8 year old self had when playing that for the first time.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I have a lot of trouble nowadays to engage with modern "blockbuster" games, or triple-A if you want to call it that. Even darlings such as Elden Ring or BG3 failed to grab me. In current times, I do find my rush typically on Indies, or at most lower spec games when made by giant publishers. It is no coincidence that I still enjoy Nintendo games, I suppose.

Maybe I am just getting old and jaded lol.

[vlunkr]

I'm pretty similar. AAA games are very similar to modern blockbuster movies. They're playing to the lowest common denominator, and often aren't motivated by any central vision besides making money. But just like Hollywood, sometimes a really creative project makes it through all that machinery. A series that has worked for me are the modern Doom games. Could have been a lame cash grab but they nailed a really interesting formula and continued to tweak it in each game.

[surgical_fire]

I don't disagree. I really enjoyed Ghost of Tsushima years ago. By all accounts it was very much an AAA game. But enjoying those for me is the exception, not the rule.

On the other hand, I have been finding a lot of fun with Indies. Lower spec games mean seem to have a liberating effect, in that they can experiment with gameplay, aesthetics, style, narrative, etc.

It may be some romanticism on my part, but I think that when a project does not cost hundreds of millions to make, there's less anxiety with taking some risks.

Which brings me to those games made in the 90s. Those games were typically short (an RPG like FF6 that took 50+ hour to finish was gargantuan back in the day). Those games did not have obscene costs, a game flopping didn't mean the studio was closing. Things changed, if for better or worse I can't say.