#5. Games were simpler in the past

Video games have undoubtedly become more ambitious and impressive in recent years. When you look at the likes of The Last Of Us, it’s impossible to overstate how far video games have come since people were playing Pong forty-odd years ago. But despite all the innovations within the medium, and all the novel ideas and increasingly elaborate control schemes, there’s something to be said for how much easier things were in the games we played as kids.

Gaming today can be difficult for people without the muscle memory that comes from years of dedicated gaming. Give your mom or dad a PS4 controller and if they’re anything like mine, they’ll spend half the time playing the game looking down, trying in vain to remember where all the buttons are. Use the left analog stick to walk, hold X to jog, or tap X to run. L2 is aim and R2 is shoot but R1 becomes shoot if you’re driving because in a car R2 is throttle. R3 (that’s when you click the right analog stick) allows you to look behind you and to bring up the menu you have to hold down the trackpad. And that’s just part of the control scheme for Grand Theft Auto 5, one of the best-selling games of all time.

Even for seasoned veterans, the increasing complexity of the games can become a turn off. Super Mario World is still as intuitive as it was in 1990 because the inherently simple design and nature of the game made it timeless. You can give the controller to a kid who has never played a Mario game and within seconds they will have figured out how to play. This simplicity is an attractive concept, which is almost certainly part of the reason that retro games like Shovel Knight and Axiom Verge are so popular today. The simpler a game is to play, the more inclusive and immediate the fun is. Retro games have that in spades, which is why I’m still playing Super Mario World twenty-six years after release.

#4. Retro games have better music

As game production values ​​have increased over the years, we’ve seen the medium change in many ways. We made the leap to 3D, now we have voice acting and elaborate cutscenes that tell complicated stories that rival those seen on TV or the big screen. Today’s games feature fully orchestrated scores or soundtracks set to popular music that are every bit as impressive as we’d see in other media, but it seems we’ve also lost something along the way.

I can still hum the Treasure Island Dizzy theme song on the Commodore 64. I was playing that game almost thirty years ago and haven’t played it since (and still never won it, dammit) but I can still remember the theme song playing. background in its entirety. I played games last week and I couldn’t even tell you if they had music.

Due to the simplicity of the early games and with no voice acting to tell a story, the music had to be good. Aside from some poor quality sound effects, the game’s music was the only auditory stimulation the games provided. There are still great game soundtracks today, but they seem few and far between compared to the games of my youth. Mega Man, Castlevania, the early Final Fantasy games, and iconic titles like Zelda, Mario, and Sonic the Hedgehog—all of these featured memorable tunes that stick with us long after we last played them. I still remember how the music of the Commodore 64 classic Prince Clumsy changes when you save the princess at the end of the game as if she was playing yesterday. We can’t really say that about Shadow of Mordor, right?

#3. Games that used to work out of the box

One thing that the games of yesteryear certainly did better than the games of today is that, well, they worked. You’d think it would be a pretty fundamental aspect of any product released, but it’s truly amazing how many games in 2016 ship broken, requiring days or weeks of server tweaking to get multiplayer to work, or huge day one. . patches to fix all the bugs that made it to the disk. Nowadays, if you don’t have a decent internet connection at home, some games are genuinely unplayable and many others are severely hampered.

Street Fighter V launched earlier this year, and Capcom promised that the single-player arcade mode, a series staple, would be available to download in July. What if you don’t have an internet connection? Well, then you have a half game. That’s not a problem we faced when Street Fighter II released on the SNES in 1991. Back then, we didn’t have the internet acting as a safety net for developers. Games had to work right out of the box.

Getting back and playing Global Gladiators today is as simple as popping the cartridge into your Genesis and turning it on. It works now as then; exactly as it should, and without any problems. This is one of the many great things about retro gaming; if you have the game and the hardware, you are good to go. You don’t need to download drivers, updates or patches. You put the game on and then you play. as you should

#two. Games used to be more of a challenge

Today, anyone who keeps up with the latest gaming trends is probably familiar with Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and the reputation these games have for punishing difficulty. Gamers flocked to the Souls series, excited to play a title that challenged them and refused to hold their hands. There are no extended tutorial sections. There is little in the way of help. You can’t pause. And all enemies can make you into mincemeat unless you learn their attack patterns and act accordingly. It’s exciting for a game to give us an uphill struggle like this, but I’m old enough to remember a time when all games were like this. And worst

Modern games tend to spell things out for the player, often to an almost insulting degree. Inserting a disc into a PS4 in 2016 means waiting for the installation, then the day one patch, and then when you finally have a controller in hand, you spend the next two hours going through the early stages of the game like a kid on his first day. of classes. Everyone likes a little help once in a while, but there’s something to be said for simply being thrown in the bottom and being told to sink or swim.

#1. Nostalgia

Nostalgia can seem like an escape response; after all, looking back at the past through rose-tinted glasses is often what fans of anything retro are criticized for. It’s easy to dismiss nostalgia as a way to justify the view that everything was much better in its day, but the truth is that nostalgia is an immensely powerful agent and shouldn’t be ignored.

Today, we watch crap movies and lament the obvious use of CGI, but we’ll happily sit through Raiders of the Lost Ark and not bother to mention that the melting Nazi at the end looks like he’s made of clay. We listen to the awful pop music of our youth with thoughtful smiles on our faces as we sneer at the latest Justin Bieber video. And we’ll talk about Final Fantasy VII as if it were the second coming of Christ, completely ignoring all the gameplay flaws we’d hang a modern game for. Nostalgia is a strong enough influence to make us believe that Sonic the Hedgehog was really good. Now that’s serious.

The reason why many of us like to play old games is simply because of the feeling we get from playing them. I have played hundreds if not thousands of games in my time as a gamer. And I’m smart enough to know that in that time video games have improved in almost every way. But that doesn’t change the fact that if I load Street Fighter II I remember the days when I played it during the school summer holidays with all my friends. I remember the day I completed Toejam and Earl with my brother every time I hear the first few bars of their ridiculously funky theme song. And I remember the giddy emotions we felt when we first got the kills working on Mortal Kombat II.

Playing old games, just like watching old movies or listening to old records, takes us back to a time in the past that we like to remember. Whether it’s memories of old friends, loved ones, people we can see every day or with whom we’ve lost touch, every old game we load up is a window into the past and that’s special. The latest Call of Duty will never compete with that.