Too old for old-school?

Can you really go back? To retro games, I mean. After playing your way through the digital timeline and going from sprites to polygons, from cartridges to digital downloads, can you really go back to old-school classics and enjoy them in the same way now as you once did?

Let me set the scene for you. I’m a gamer from way back, and I spent a good chunk of my youthful days in front of my Sega Mega Drive. Although money was an issue when it came to financing my games collection, time wasn’t, and I was happy to spend as much of it as I deemed necessary in order to beat high scores, final bosses and lap times. Being stumped by a game wasn’t an option, and if I couldn’t do it under my own steam, I looked up strategies and tips, and integrated them into my own tactics. I played the heck out of every single game I owned, and made sure I saw the end of every single one. Once that was done, I’d play them again.

Obsessive? Perhaps. But if you asked me then, “passionate” would probably be the word I’d use.

I remember a couple of my pet projects. Sonic the Hedgehog saw me staying up until the wee hours of a weekend morning collecting rings and beating Robotnik’s ever-ridiculous contraptions. I’d know exactly how to approach those moving platforms and when to launch myself in a spinball at a conga line of enemies. And that third-person bit where you have to collect the blue spheres? I’d ace it every time.

Phantasy Star IV was another — the first turn-based RPG I played, and it remains my favourite to this day. I’d talk to every character — literally, every single one — and explore every corner of every dungeon. I’d spend hours working out the best attack/spell combinations for each party member, and hours more grinding up my levels by killing giant sandworms. Some sections of the game were maze-like in their build, but even so, I didn’t need to draw a map on a piece of paper to help me — I’d played it so many times that I knew every path by heart.

Obsessive? Perhaps, but… well, okay, maybe it was obsessive.

Something like this, only younger. And without the beard.

But the thing is, I enjoyed it. Learning the ins and outs of every game was satisfying to me, and as a result — and I hope you’ll forgive me if I sound pompous — I was damn good at these games. I might not have been able to play them with my eyes closed, but I’m sure if you asked me to squint really tightly, until I see things through blurry eyelashes, I would have done a decent job.

Nowadays, however? Not so much.

The thing about nostalgia is that there are always people who will pay for it, and for a generation of 16-bit gamers who have grown up, bundles of classic 16-bit games have been re-released. As you’ve probably guessed, I’m the owner of one of them: the SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection, home to, among many others, the aforementioned Sonic the Hedgehog and Phantasy Star IV. There they are, pixel for pixel as they were back in the day, albeit on a console that’s far shiny and more powerful than my Mega Drive could ever hope to be.

Recently I got the urge to get back into these old-school games. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was sick of bump-mapped, self-shadowed polygons, and I wanted to go back to a time when things were simple. Maybe, on some level, these games are my comfort food, or a pair of old slippers that I can easily slip back into. Or maybe I just wanted to prove to myself that I’m still good at playing them.

It doesn’t matter. What I quickly found is that, no, I’m not.

She's more of a gamer than I'll ever be.

Where Sonic once presented a wonderful obstacle course of rings and robot-clad rodents, now it presents an exercise in pixel-perfect frustration. I mistimed jumps, ran head-first into enemies, and you can forget the hell about scoring a perfect run in the blue sphere mini-game. Whatever magic I once worked with that game was long gone.

Phantasy Star IV presented a similar problem. The game itself still holds up and I love it to bits, but I confess that I’m not playing it the way it was intended. See, the game won’t let you use its rudimentary save system when you’re in a dungeon — you can only save when you’re in a town, exploring the landscape, or are otherwise away from battle. If you’re navigating your way to a boss and your team gets whittled down by miscellaneous baddies, too bad — that’s the way it rolls, and you’ve got no choice but to make sure your party arrives at each goal with enough health potions and XP points to see you though.

But the re-release is another story. The re-release comes with its own purpose-built save system that’s separate from that of the game you’re playing. With it, you’re able to save at any stage — even during a cut-scene, if you want to – and load it just as easy. In Phantasy Star, I’m using this save system to sidestep the roadblocks that the game’s random battles will throw up. I’ll save after every corner, at every turn, and if a chance encounter reduces my party to dust mere inches from a dungeon’s exit, I’ll just reload the last save and continue on my way.

Yes, it’s a shameless exploit. No, it’s not how the game is meant to be played. But, honestly, I have no freaking idea how I completed the game all those years ago without it.

Crap. Dead. Reload!

What I discovered, you see, is that despite my love for these games, I just can’t play them the same way. And what I’m trying to work out, by writing this blog post, is why.

On the surface, it could all be as simple as the difference between a kid with too much spare time, and a twentysomething guy with a full time job and imminent marriage. Young Me had the time and, by extension, the skills to learn and conquer those games. Old Me doesn’t. Young Me saw those games as a way of life; Old Me approaches them as a way to relax after work.

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Game design and technology has changed dramatically over the last 15 years, and it could be that some aspects of a 16-bit game were not born from artistic reasons, but from technological limitations. Maybe there just wasn’t enough RAM to go towards making more checkpoints, for instance. There certainly wasn’t the tech to offer on-the-fly save files — remember, this was a time when password save systems were the norm, and battery-powered storage was still being slowly explored. Games had their limits, and gamers — myself included — had no choice but to step up and adapt.

Nowadays, of course, things are different. We have console hard drives that are measured in gigabytes, and mid-level checkpoints that relive the tedium of having to play though a particular section time and again. And maybe it’s because of these aspects that my gaming abilities have become, shall I say, a little doughy. Today’s games have softened me up, as I’d wager they’ve softened a lot of us up, and where we now have checkpoints and a “save anywhere” mentality, the games of yesteryear would force us to chug some concrete and get through it. And maybe the re-release bundle has recognised this — maybe the save system of SEGA Mega Drive Ultimate Collection has been offered to compliment its games rather than undermine them; to make them more palatable for the gamer of today who’s used to such luxuries.

So, I ask again: can you really go back? Can you play old-school games the same way now as you once did?

I couldn’t. But considering the role these games played in my past, and the contributions they made to the history of gaming, maybe I should try.

Advertisement