Well here's a new look at the whole nostalgia issue. Apparently there are two kinds of gaming nostalgia: "classic" and "modern," if you will. Might sound weird, but bear with me. Here's how I found out.
The last two nights I played Quake co-op with my friend. Neither of us had played it in oh-so-long, and let me tell you, it was quite a surprise to look at the game again after all this time. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the overall gaming experience, and clearing the levels together on Nightmare was a blast. (Yes, I know, a really lousy pun...) However -- fun factor and level design aside -- it was nothing like I remembered it to be. The Quake I used to play was stunning, cutting-edge, and also omigod how scary. It will hardly be a surprise that there's virtually nothing of that left in the Quake from last night.
And like I said at the beginning, the fact that wall textures seen up close are composed of finger-thick pixels, flames are a bunch of cube-like polygons, monsters tend to look like piles of running boxes, and good ole Cthlon at the end of Episode I is much more funny than scary (ok, granted, the funny chap did kill me a couple of times) doesn't take away much from the gameplay. However, while the stuff I wrote about last time makes me go all, "Ooh, this is so much like being a kid again," this had me thinking, "Now wait a second, this is different."
This brings me back to the distinction I came up with at the start of this post: "classic nostalgia" versus "modern nostalgia." I guess ten years -- especially for a PC game (and a breakthrough one at that) -- just isn't enough to get that perspective. Or maybe it's just the fact that Quake saw me in high school already. So I'd still like to believe it was "just a couple of years ago," hehe...
The last two nights I played Quake co-op with my friend. Neither of us had played it in oh-so-long, and let me tell you, it was quite a surprise to look at the game again after all this time. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the overall gaming experience, and clearing the levels together on Nightmare was a blast. (Yes, I know, a really lousy pun...) However -- fun factor and level design aside -- it was nothing like I remembered it to be. The Quake I used to play was stunning, cutting-edge, and also omigod how scary. It will hardly be a surprise that there's virtually nothing of that left in the Quake from last night.
And like I said at the beginning, the fact that wall textures seen up close are composed of finger-thick pixels, flames are a bunch of cube-like polygons, monsters tend to look like piles of running boxes, and good ole Cthlon at the end of Episode I is much more funny than scary (ok, granted, the funny chap did kill me a couple of times) doesn't take away much from the gameplay. However, while the stuff I wrote about last time makes me go all, "Ooh, this is so much like being a kid again," this had me thinking, "Now wait a second, this is different."
This brings me back to the distinction I came up with at the start of this post: "classic nostalgia" versus "modern nostalgia." I guess ten years -- especially for a PC game (and a breakthrough one at that) -- just isn't enough to get that perspective. Or maybe it's just the fact that Quake saw me in high school already. So I'd still like to believe it was "just a couple of years ago," hehe...
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