What is 10 years compared to eternity?

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...

Creating my own nostalgia

Let's get things straight: when it comes to old games, I'm as nostalgic as the next guy. The moment New Super Mario Bros. comes out, I go out of my way to get it as fast as I can. I'm a sucker for all things Mario, I'm a sucker for Pac Man, Space Invaders, all of that jazz. The thing is, I didn't use to play most of those games when I was a kid. You could say that's part of my class B status.

You see, this is Poland we're speaking of. Sure, during summer vacations I did spend considerable amounts of time at the arcade -- but then again not that much, what with the price of tokens (yeah, over here you didn't even use coins back then) being more of an issue than, as I can imagine, the amount of quarters tossed into coin-ops in, say, the US. But what's more, I have never owned a console in my life -- that is until I bought my DS some six months ago or so. Over here consoles were never that popular and most people my age have always had home computers instead. So when you guys might have played on your NES, I owned an Atari 65XE; when you guys might have played on your SNES or Mega Drive, I owned an Amiga 600 (as a matter of fact, I still do). And from there I moved on to PC and that was it.

That is not to say that I'd never held a gamepad in my hands, that I didn't play a good deal of Mario on some kid's original clunky Game Boy, that I didn't spend countless hours playing Micro Machines on the Pegasus (a NES clone that made Nintendo titles popular over here back in the day) during one particular summer camp, or that Asteroids isn't the first game I ever remember playing on what appeared to me a huge looming arcade machine. (Even today I could lead you to the exact spot it used to stand in a cafe quite near here.) Regardless, you could say all those were just "incidents," and that's not where I come from as a gamer, to use some unnecessarily lofty wording. However, nowadays I do feel genuinely nostalgic about those things, despite the fact they aren't a part of my childhood memories per se. And when I play SNES games with my friend on an emulator (and we do that a lot), I feel like I'm returning to something, even though the vast majority of those titles is actually new to me.

So it makes me wonder: how come that's possible? Is it just the vibe of the late 80s and early 90s, universal for all gaming platforms? Is it the legacy of actually remembering playing (however briefly) computer games on a black-and-white TV set? And finally, is that why now, as I kind of finally introduce myself to the world of console gaming, I feel much more drawn to Nintendo rather than any of the other platforms, even though I don't technically remember collecting those super mushrooms? And is that why peeps just a couple of years younger -- young enough to have already grown up with a Playstation -- don't generally share that sentiment? Or am I just raving, really trying to create my own nostalgia?

Let me say this up front

Right then. It's finally happened and I'm now writing this blog. Granted, it's not like I'm losing my blogging virginity in here, but still, a new step is a new step. So, let the writing to a non-existent reader commence!

Who am I and what's up with the blog name and everything? For starters, yes, I do take pride in being a geek, and that is I've been feeling the urge to start writing something like this for some time now. However, unlike most regular, full-fledged geeks I know: I have no background in computer science -- or math, physics, engineering and whatnot -- I don't work nowhere near the IT sector, I've last written any computer code about ten years ago... oh, and I pretty much suck at video games, even though gaming takes up quite a big portion of my spare time. So instead, I studied at the Department of English Studies, I majored in linguistics, and I work as a translator and as a teacher of English in a language school here in Warsaw. See? Not very geeky at all. What more can I say then? I'm a class B geek at best.

The point of the blog? The basic plan is to post my everyday thoughts on what I do, what I come across online, what I play, what movies and TV I see, and so on, and so on. Why should you care about what I think? Oh, you shouldn't! It would be something to tell my grandchildren about if you did. Regardless, it just might be a fun read perhaps. Sounds like a plan?