Nostalgia

I don't like Nostalgia Gamers. At Idle Thumbs and elsewhere, I was exposed to a lot of them. They're the type that obsess over the games that came out when they were 13 years old (with this generation, that's ususally SNES games and adventure games from LucasArts) to the exclusion of contemporary titles. They play emulators and name-drop 12-year-old games on message boards. The only modern games they have any love for are:

1) Psychonauts
2) Rez
3) Katamari Damacy
4) ICO/Shadow of the Colossus
5) Beyond Good & Evil

Almost anything else is "boring." "Games aren't good anymore, like they used to be." "Why can I play Day of the Tentacle for hours and hours at a time, but quit out of FEAR after 10 minutes?"

These people bother me. Incredible games come out basically a few times a month across all the different platforms. The amount of worthwhile games that have been released since Grim Fandango is just astounding. But these guys will come onto message boards and ask "oh why aren't games good anymore?!" They are; in fact they're better than ever, having a few decades of gameplay refinement to build from. But game nostalgists are extremely myopic, and can only appreciate the outdated games that they love, and compare any new game to that standard. But since hardly any games coming out today relate to games from 1993, gameplay-wise, game nostalgists don't have much to draw from. When they try to play a current game that's gotten hype, like FEAR, their reaction is that it's not like the old games they're used to, and they can't get into it. Monkey Island was better. It's like someone who only listens to the music that came out when they were in high school. Music just isn't as good as it used to be anymore.

It's fine, I guess, to only like games you play on emulators. But you're not into games. You're into nostalgia. And my dad still listens to Jefferson Aeroplane.