As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
Multiplayer games in general don’t do it for me like they used to. These days I just want to get on and play a few missions in single player then hop off.
For me it’s the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don’t hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.
I agree on the N64, and the problem with it is that everyone is nostalgic for “the system,” but in reality they’re only nostalgic for Mario 64, Goldeneye, Conker, Mario Kart, Ocarina of Time, Banjo-Kazooie, Smash Bros., and Perfect Dark. It’s not that the N64 has a top ten, it’s that it basically only had ten good games total. And bangers though they may have been, everything else on it was crap.
I’m sure two or three people will pop out of the woodwork now to argue with me and insist that no, back in the day they really did love WCW Mayhem or 1080 Snowboarding or the butchered piece of shit version of THPS or Chef’s Luv Shack or whatever the fuck, but that’s the thing: It’s always back in the day, when you were a kid and only owned four cartridges, and you didn’t know any better because that’s all you had. Nobody goes back to play any of the remaining 378 games now.
I think I could name 20 legitimately great games that came out for the N64…and that is about it.
You know the NES and SNES minis they released that were basically ARM-powered emulator boxes in nostalgic shells with actually pretty good replica controllers? There was a lot of discussion around what games should have been included that weren’t. Like, “Here’s 25 MORE games that should have been on it.” and a lot of them were third party titles from Squaresoft, Enix, Quintet, Capcom etc. that people think of as iconic to the platform but Nintendo couldn’t wangle the rights for.
Those same discussions often drifted to a hypothetical N64 mini and what list of 25 games it should include and a lot of people struggled to finish that list. Especially if you rule out a lot of the third party publishers and basically go with Nintendo and Rare, which I would add Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Tooie, Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64 to your list there and that’s basically it. You’d have to start putting things like Pilot Wings 64 on it. No Extreme-G, no 1080 Snowboarding, no Cruisin’ USA, and you’d never get the license for Shadows of the Empire or…whichever Mortal Kombat the system got.
I did once hear a theory as to why the N64 is publicly beloved in a way the Playstation isn’t, it’s because the kids who had an N64 all basically had the same library of games, we can ALL hum the song in Dire Dire Docks or Kokiri Forest. There was a huge library for the Playstation so the kids who had that system don’t all have the same memories.
I couldn’t care less for anything made before 2016. It’s all aged horribly. Every time I hear play shadow of the Colossus I vomit in my mouth. Ground breaking at the time, but an otherwise garbage game with okay story in a modern context.
And while not an era I’m going to stay on my soap box. Open world games without strong narrative and massive amounts of backtracking. Every open world game on the planet minus God of war(s), the first hzd (and this was pushing it), rdr2( pushing it), and cyberpunk has way to much shit spread out with little drive to finish narrative. You shouldn’t be backtracking into previous areas or sections in areas without some clever ass level design.
