Nostalgia is a Wicked Beast

Are you a bad enough dude to battle the Flood?

The past twenty years has seen video games and the oft referred “geek culture” rise to a prominence that back in 1992 would never have been imagined, not even by the most fanatical zealot of electronic entertainment. Humble were the formative years of my gaming fascination, playing Super Mario Bros. at my friend’s house, whose parents spoiled him like milk in the sun. And then there were the many Sunday afternoons endlessly slaving over the greasy NES controller battling awful controls and hideous game mechanics for a measly 8 bit food pellet at the games completion. I’m sure I’m not the only one with fond memories of wasted weekends in willing servitude of these simple plastic game machines, and I bet none of us would change a thing. I can still remember playing Streets Of Rage 2 well into the night on my friends Megadrive, then swapping it over for my Super Nintendo to play the centipede boss in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past; all the while munching on popcorn and coffee beans (yes, we were strange).

I remember the magical awe I felt after we spent way too much money hiring a Japanese copy of Street Fighter 2 for SNES, playing against Balrog… or was it Vega? Who can remember, with the names being arbitrarily changed for the western market? Back in my hometown of Perth there was a store called Discount Video Games; I remember it was run by a middle aged super nerd in the front room of his house. The retailer specialised in imports, and rare and expensive games and consoles (Neo Geo anyone?). There was a demand from the obsessive; an unending desire for parity between arcade and the home console arena. Neo Geo was SNK’s answer; game cartridges the size of an ancient tome of knowledge with large digits identifying the (by the standards of the time) massive amount of memory in the plastic case, which as we all know reflects with pristine clarity the quality of the game. The carts were absurdly priced, as if by a madman with the crazy idea that there was a dollar per megabit system in place.

Those were the days, when the hardware required to play a game was taller than the TV you played it on

It was all so exotic. I felt like I was dealing in black market wares, making illegal foreign trade agreements with seedy purveyors of silicone chips and 16 bit sweeties. I found a strange pleasure in mashing the converter into my SNES, clicking a PAL game into the rear slot and then forcing the square robot American cartridge copy of Super Empire Strikes Back into the top. The towering skyscraper of international border circumvention sticking out of my Super Nintendo captivated me. That’s not even mentioning the insane Japanese marketing logic imparted to the American Market that dictated the creation of that filthy beast of an American Super NES cart!

After my kiddie console days I discovered computers and PC gaming. The graphical fidelity, the versatility, and the reality of a burgeoning anarchic internet wild-west, the PC was like pure uncut gaming, melted and ready for the vein. I still played consoles, I was a Nintendo kid and that meant Nintendo 64: Super Mario 64, Goldeneye and the rest. I think it’s safe to say that Goldeneye took over me and my friends lives for probably two years; even Playstation fan boys flocked to play the blurry, five frames per second, four player split-screen madness.

It was this love of friendly death-matching on Nintendo’s struggling black box that led to the true chasm of my nerd-dom, PC LAN gaming sessions. Six mates in a hot room, sweating and greasy, hemmed in by computer monitors and PC towers. We would gather, connect our “beasts” and compete through long sessions of Red Alert 2, StarCraft, Quake 2, Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, Half-Life, and the list goes on. We weren’t just nerding it up, it was a social occasion, a chance to laugh, poke fun and be as crass as we dared with language and notions that I won’t repeat here. This was the true extension of two player Mario Bros., and the four player shenanigans experienced in the 64’s Goldeneyes and Turoks. Six, ten, thirty two players and in some cases more, everyone had their own screen, the frame rate wasn’t dependant on the measly 94mhz CPU that churned out the pixels on every N64 game – PC gaming was my new home.

Bond must have to be careful when changing to daylight savings time

These early console ditties and PC verses tell the tale of my gaming “good old days,” a time that for better or worse no longer exists… let’s be honest though, it’s for the better. While I may pine for the glory days, and wistfully ogle through my mind’s eye the simple pleasures of my youth, the gaming landscape has been irrevocably enriched. Modern consoles at a fundamental level are basically just PC’s. Yes they have custom CPU’s and/or GPU’s and they run their own proprietary operating systems, but if you open up a an Xbox 360 or a PS3 and then do a side by side with an open PC case, all the pieces are there.

As far as I’m concerned this is my favourite thing about modern consoles; their similarity to PC’s. They’re networked and online, USB ready and extremely powerful. Probably the most notable standard feature of consoles and PC’s today is the online digital distribution of software. Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Store, and Valve’s Steam service turn a simple closed gaming device into a worldwide marketplace, providing convenience and in the case of Steam, the democratisation of gaming releases and prices internationally.

As a sub-culture we are sufficiently supplied with nostalgia and rose tinted glasses. In an industry that’s always changing and growing through technological refinement, the heyday is now. I don’t wish to discount the classic games of previous console generations, they have their own charm, and artful approach, and in many cases these games are just as good today as the day of their release. Nevertheless we are now in an era wealthy in its riches of creativity and vision. Would we have such stellar games like Mass Effect (1&2), Fallout 3, Gears of War or Uncharted in the previous generations? Clearly the answer is a resounding no. A renaissance of inspiration that started with Half-life and continued with Halo, birthed high concept narratives with interesting and believable characters brought to life by the player in a way that is only possible in the video game medium. Lessons learned then benefit us now, and the same will be true in the next generation.

Despite what whinging message board trolls may believe, there has never been a better time to play games.

This article is a guest editorial created by Australian writer, Miles Philip.  If you’ve enjoyed his writing, you can read more of his work over at his music review site MilesCosmo Music or say hello to him on Twitter.