Nostalgia: A good or bad thing?

A look at remakes, sequels and reinventions
By Jyggalag

Now I don’t know about some of you, but I certainly remember my first gaming experience. It was on the megadrive and it was one of those very popular and very common vehicle games where you took control of some type of flying vehicle and went through various top-to-bottom scrolling levels whilst shooting the crap out of everything that moved. You know the sort of games that you can get now on mobile phones. I’ve got one such game on my current phone, which might as well be a brick that needs charging every now and then. I think the only reason I still play the game on my phone is because I remember the similar games I used to play and enjoy when I was younger. Still, it’s weird to think how the once pinnacle of gaming technology is now replicated on small hand-held devices, which aren’t even supposed to be used as gaming platforms to begin with. But I digress.

It’s this nostalgia that I think is really important in modern gaming. I doubt I’m the only one, but whenever I play a game I’m always comparing it to something I’ve already played and how it reminds me of this and that. Developers are also well aware of this sense of nostalgia, which is probably why there has been an increase in game remakes over the years.

Like film remakes, these have not always gone down well. One only has to look at the piss-poor attempt to remake Space Invaders to see how badly remakes can be done. Some of these remakes however have been received well, Tomb Raider: Anniversary and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes being two prime examples. The games were praised by critics and they introduced many new fans to both series’. But for some traditionalists (like myself) something about them wasn’t quite right. Now don’t get me wrong, it was nice playing the first game again with visual improvement. In the Twin Snakes Snake actually had eyes instead of lines and in Anniversary I could happily oggle at Lara’s perfectly rounded assets because I no longer had to question if it was weird to perve on a woman with triangular tits. But still, something about them both didn’t sit quite well with me. I think it was because, to me, the first Metal Gear Solid and the first Tomb Raider were such perfect games. I wasted away hours of my life sat at the tv screen playing them over and over again. And then these remakes came along, as if stating that the first games weren’t good enough and they needed improvement. Perhaps I thought it was insulting. That something I felt was perfect others were saying needed changing and making better. In truth though I think my xenophobia attributed to my disliking on Anniversary. After all, it wasn’t a British company that was now at Lara’s helm, but an American one.

One of the first games I purchased for my PS3 was Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. I am an absolute Metal Gear fanboy and this game was a must-have for me. During the fourth chapter of MGS4 you (as Old Snake) return to Shadow Moses Island (the setting of the first game) now on the verge of sinking because of global warming and the base that you used to spend hours trying to infiltrate stealthily is now derelict and abandoned. For me, this was far more exciting than playing The Twin Snakes ever was. In the remake I’m just playing the game again and any nostalgic feelings I may have are virtually unnoticeable. But with MGS4, I was revisiting the old game, rather than simply replaying it. The character was older, I was older and things had changed. During this chapter there are chances to show “flashbacks” if the player presses a certain button at a certain time. When viewing these flashbacks and traversing through the abandoned Shadow Moses facility I didn’t remember my more recent play through of The Twin Snakes. Instead I remember being nine years old (yes I was that young, but that’s a WHOLE other issue) and playing the original game for the first time. This is true video game nostalgia and I think more developers would be wise to follow in Kojima’s footsteps and incorporate similar themes in their games.

Another game I want to discuss is Final Fantasy XIII. Now this game has been praised by numerous critics receiving awards of 9/10, 39/40 and 10/10 by Official Playstation Magazine (UK), Famitsu and GamesRadar respectively. However many fans of the old games criticized the game quite heavily and I myself will admit to being sceptical about it. All I heard from other fans was that it no longer felt like a Final Fantasy game and that there had been too many changes. I was told the game felt linear, the AI of the new battle system took away player freedom and there weren’t even any blue text boxes! Not only that, the trailer for the game had proven quite controversial amongst fans. I didn’t like it. For me, the music of Final Fantasy was always a mix of opera, melodies and various heavy rock and experimental metal tracks. Instead we were presented with a western song sung by a western pop star whose voice often drowned out what the characters were saying in the trailer. It just didn’t feel right to me. It wasn’t Final Fantasy. A close friend of mine however loved the trailer and thought that the Leona Lewis song was just right. And he has been a Final Fantasy fan just as long as I have. Combining all this, I was put off from buying the game and avoided FFXIII with earnest. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered it was truly a good game and that despite the changes, it was still Final Fantasy at the core and it has so far proven to be just as much of an emotional rollercoaster as the previous games. My love and nostalgic feelings for what (I thought) made a true Final Fantasy game caused me to miss out.

Our nostalgic feelings for the good games of old may be the only reason that those games are considered good. If we went back to an old game and started playing it again now, would it still be as good? Now, whenever I go back to an old game I still find it fun. I recently cracked out my copy of Tales of Symphonia for the Nintendo Gamecube. The last time I played this game I was fifteen and had an unhealthy obsession with anime and JRPGs. I’m now more inclined to western, “grown-up” RPGs such as The Elder Scrolls and Dragon Age but I still found myself enjoying ToS. The humour was immature, the storyline not all that original and even though there was character development it was far from brilliant, with almost all of them fitting the JRPG stereotype. But I still loved it and I can safely say that Tales of Symphonia is still my favourite game. However, despite the gaming industry only just finding its feet, Tales of Symphonia is still a fairly recent game and if we’re talking nostalgia for the old classics we’ll have to go back further.

We haven’t had an official “Golden Age” of gaming yet. There seems to have been one for almost everything else. Detective Fiction, Hollywood, Comics, Cartoons and even Porn! To me the “Golden Age” of gaming is before my time. Arcade games like Pacman, Space Invaders and Grand Prix were what “set the standard”. Everyone knows what Pacman and Space Invaders are and I can guarantee (go out and ask if you don’t believe me) almost everyone will describe them as “classics”. Some might say the same of Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario, but seen as how those game franchises are still going strong I’m not going to talk about them. Plus those two games bring up the whole issue of “selling-out” which isn’t what I’m discussing here.

Looking back at Pacman and Space Invaders with a modern viewpoint, what was so special about them really? A gluttonous, fat, yellow ball that spent its entire life (which varied depending on monetary issues) gobbling up pixilated dots and “ghosts”. And Space Invaders was nothing but “pew pew” shooting of weird-shaped, extra-terrestrial invaders. But you can still find them in arcades to this day, and they still bring in players. Also original arcade machines for these games sell for thousands over the internet. I still can have hours of fun playing Space Invaders and Pac Man and so do many others. But is it because the games are genuinely good or is it because these games are “classics” and there’s this collective nostalgia associated with them? Do we convince ourselves that they’re good because of their status as “classics”? You see it all the time with films and books. The Catcher in the Rye is considered a classic (despite controversy, which in truth it’s not even bad) and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve read or heard it described as brilliant. Yet I found it incredibly boring.

What I’m trying to say is that perhaps nostalgia isn’t always a good thing. In sequels for example I believe it works well (as in MGS4) and fuels enjoyment of the player experience. But it can also ruin a player’s experience and leave their opinion rather skewed. Try to think of it as a big cake. It’s nice to have a little piece, but too much is bad for you.

But of course, the cake is a lie...

Jyggalag