It's all just an old videogame

Well, they keep remastering the old shows, and the makers of the processed foods are perpetually tweaking their recipes. So there's that.

castlvania. I could consistently get to Frankenstein, but always struggled with Igor. 25ish years later, I still feel the same frustration.

But, uh, yeah. I can't really think of a "fun" example.

To me, it happens when the game was graphically mind-blowing at the time. If, I remember it for that and not the gameplay, yeah, I get that feeling.

> Since it’s kind of buried

(somehow you teased out what I could not)

> Weirdly, I’ve replayed most of the video games from my youth (and beyond) and I’m hard-pressed to come up with any memories of ever experiencing that feeling.

As to old movies, they have bad hair, yes, but they also have horrendous pacing which sometimes makes them unwatchable.

But some old games get a better go of things since you ditch old hardware.

Modern hardware eliminates the significant delays from booting, level loading, graphics rendering and the rest.

Even some of the largely text-based adventure games could use synthesizers like the Roland MT-32 to make nice music available that wasn't there in the (my) past.

The only thing that seems to reliably clobber old games is sketchy game mechanics. That is a hard one to overcome.

FPS title on first-gen 3D consoles.

Had lots of fun with Turok 2 back in the days. Replayed it recently. Felt like rewatching Transformers.

The disappointment of old games for me is usually the controls. Newer games have polished controls so well that movement almost feels like a direct extension of thought. But when I go back and play my old favorites from decades ago, movement feels so clunky! I spend so much time fighting the controls rather than getting into the groove of playing. I didn't see it the first time around, because there was nothing better to compare against.

I spent so much time in Fo3 and remember the graphics vividly. But then replaying it years later, yeah not as good. Bioshock still holds a feeling of awe though the initial descent.

Partly puzzle-based games like Zelda have lost a lot of the magic for me, as they became more obvious and started to feel more like turning the crank instead of creativity & discovery.

I definitely can relate to it. The games I fondly remembered from old times were mostly meh later on.

The phrase "doesn't seem as amazing as it did" is distracting in the context of videogames.

Almost every response is talking about how games graphics have gotten better, or whether gameplay has improved or gotten worse. That's not the subject.

The subject is the loss of innocence and wonder, and how the author misses being the person who could play a mediocre game like Gothic III and be entranced by it.

You can put practically any videogame in front of a kid and they'll play it for hours and add to the story.

I wandered around the world of Ultima VIII for months. This was a terrible game if you play it straight.

But if you used the hackmover cheat you could move any item in the world anywhere you wanted, like an early 2-D version of the Sims or Minecraft. You could take parts of other people's houses and build yourself a castle. It was a game construction set. You could put poisons in an NPC's inventory and they might drink it.

I was in love with the weird mushrooms and the eerie music and the plot that didn't make a bit of sense. I was cheating so hard that every NPC was just a strange person I was visiting for a bit, with scattered bits of scripting firing off events I didn't understand. It seemed like an unlimited open-world playground.

I'm not that person anymore. I can't enjoy a bad game that way. I have nostalgia for the version of me who could love that terrible, terrible game, and for the lost half-imagined better version of that game that I'd filled into the gaps.

I feel like there's a world where Ultima 8 had better management and everybody remembers it fondly, and that I don't live in that world.

When you replay them now the FPS is amazing!

I think his point is precisely that sometimes you have beautiful memories of a bad thing.

Quake 2 and Unreal Tournament are irrelevant because they're masterpieces. The movie "The Shining" holds up too, right? So what?

He does all this explanatory work with a film about a Russian with cherished memories of a shitty cabin and a music video of a couple with warm memories of a cheap and tawdry wedding.

That's not generalizing. It's extremely specific. It sounds like you're just not interested in the feeling he's describing.

He does not mean that everything you used to like is guaranteed to be bad when revisited.

Was a great read. Was surprised by the sudden mention of Tame Impala. I was hooked on "Lost in yesterday" a year ago, and its music video, which I naturally then thought about a lot too. So nice seeing someone else's thoughts on it. However

> as the pregnant bride from the first scene returns, destroys the cake

The cake never gets destroyed, seems he revised his memories over time :-)