by PubZombie on Sun Feb 19, 2012 1:51 pm
simes wrote:PubZombie wrote:I think most of us miss the point when it comes to these old debates and journalism.
I think the article was a great bit of journalism and does what it should - it gets its readership thinking and debating. Even old issues like our playground flame wars change as we change and the world around us changes. That's because journalism and debates are theory and opinion based around a simple set of minute factoids - like memory size, or tape loading methods etc etc. The article was meant to colour debate and get us thinking - and it has.
Looking back on the old days I was a C64 owner-fanboy. But I would be worried if i still held the same opinions as i did when i was 12. The C64 was great but my fave ever game was on a zx48. I own several Amigas but my favourite machine to emulate is the Atari ST.
The OP is probably off somewhere talking in Klingon now.
Absolutely! I was a massive Amiga fanboy back in the 90s and loved the Pinball Dreams / Fantasties / Illusions series and wasn't too impressed with anything else, but even though I still play them (albeit mainly the conversion on the PSP) my favourite home pinball game now has got to be Marvel Pinball on the PS3 and even though I have got a soft spot for the Amiga still, I know there are games out there that I'd rather play on other machines. When I got my first Playstation at the same time as buying the Amiga Technologies edition of the Amiga 1200, my gaming habits moved more over to consoles because the Amiga just didn't cut it any more.
Exactly our tastes and preferences should change. Retro has the power to do strange things to us and if we aren't careful we can easily say things that cause arguments and offend others - I think that is because we are very much coloured in our opinions by that strange thing called nostalgia; the past was not often what we remember it to be, but what we think it should be to us now. I can't remember if it was the historian EH Car or A Marwick who said oral reminiscents is "old men drooling about their youth." He was trying to be controversial, but has a point - nostalgia blinds us to our own reasoning. When I think of retro and modern games now I try to but things in a different perspective. I try to imagine what the me back in the playground would have thought of the games of today. I remember my mates and I wishing we had more realistic looking games and imagining how brilliant games could be in 25 years time. Largely that has happened the games we have are fantastically advanced; design sensibilities have moved on to create games as a major hobby and even a sport we can all partake in. Yes we have a cynical AAA publishing scene but even they produce the odd gem; retro is still there for devs to learn and draw on, and they do, and retro is there for those who want to play it.
Progress happens like it or not so we are best embracing it and simply enjoying our forays into the halcyon days of gaming past for what it should be - fun.
The Truth is but a Construct; empowering creator and subjugating consumer... "War is the continuation of 'politik' with the admixture of other means."
binatone; spectrum 48k; vic20; C64; Amiga; Sega MS; N64; GP2X, OpenPandora, IPad 3.
