No matter who you ask, if they grew up in ‘90s or early 2000s they will be more than likely to have a favorite video game from their childhood. Chances are this game will be nowhere near as good as they remember. As someone who has several family members who played video games during this time, I have noticed that they consider the games they grew up with the pinnacle of gaming.
While it’s okay to have nostalgia for something, this idea that Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda are the best that could be offered is just plain wrong. Not counting graphics, due to technology not being advanced enough, these games are heaps of messes. There’s a reason they are so loved by speed runners. The games are full of exploitable bugs that should have been ironed out before the games were released. This is something that has completely changed in modern gaming, and while there still can be bugs and glitches in games, they’re nowhere near the level of game-braking as the level-skipping glitches in Super Mario 64.
Another game people like to look at through rose-colored glasses is Final Fantasy VII for the original Playstation. The fact that this game is so highly revered is insane. While the story itself is good, everything else feels archaic when playing it now, from awful polygons to tedious grinding in order to make sure your party doesn’t die in one shot. This is another game that just feels like a stepping stone used to get video game design where it is today.
I can appreciate this experimentation in older games and how it helped push gaming to where it is, but there are still so many people who haven’t accepted the direction video games have headed and still feel that they lived in the “greatest” time to play video games. This is where people need to either attempt to play modern games or at least go back and try to play the games they grew up with, because once they do, they’ll finally see how far the video game industry has come and will be able to appreciate the products being put out today.
These games and many others, while they may have been top-of-the-line when they were introduced, are nothing when compared to the likes of the new God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2. Because of all the experimentation and boundary-pushing done by games that people love to look back on, gaming has reached such a high that it has become more than just a past time for few, and moved into the mainstream with popular success. One day, those who grew up playing the games that are new today will almost certainly harbor the same nostalgia that those who grew up along with video games did, nostalgia is just a fact of life that we must continuously check ourselves on, in order to make sure we keep pushing forward as a society.
Logan Carr is a freshman studying political science at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Do you agree? Let Logan know by emailing him at lc300918@ohio.edu.
