New Years is the Time For Gaming Nostalgia – So Why Is It So Hard to Enjoy?

It’s around this time each year that I start to think back on Christmases past, and how wonderful it’d be to start pulling out old consoles again. The excitement of December 25 has gone, but the holiday spirit remains, and the Dreamcast or N64 is calling to me from the closet.

Inevitably, I play a few games for 20 minutes, die repeatedly because of the crazy camera and then go back to some hand-holding modern title for comfort. You know the kind: 99 per cent tutorial and a boss fight. That’s about all I’m good for these days.

But listen, you don’t need me to tell you about how bad I am at old games. If you want rants by people who are intimately invested in gaming but can’t hold a controller, go visit Neogaf. My problem isn’t that I’m bad, but that it has to feel like a special occasion when I dig out these old consoles. It’s a huge effort to connect everything up, and inevitably they don’t hold up to my memory of them.

The race to modern gaming didn’t feel quite as quick living it as it does looking back at it. Mario 64 shouldn’t feel as old as it does. Great, but old.

Compare that to the recent Lord of the Rings 4K release, which effectively pretends the last 20 years didn’t happen. You like modern looking films with awesome CGI? Bang. Lord of the Rings.

It is vitally important to save old games from being completely forgotten and, for New Years, I thought I’d issue a plea to platform holders. Stop being stingy: it’s time to step up with your IP.

Remakes, remasters and (r)emulators – oh my

G-police. That was an awesome game, and if you were born after about 1991, chances are you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.

No, this isn’t a screenshot of Cyberpunk running on the original Xbox One. It’s one of the best Blade Runner influenced games I remember from my youth.

Does it stand up to modern standards? I’m going to say no, but considering that I’ve had no legal way of playing it since its PS3 Classics release in 2007, you’re going to have to excuse the uncertainty.

Now, I’m not saying it’s easy to get this game running on PS5. I’m no tech expert. What I can say is this: I can get it running on my Xbox Series X. I grabbed the retail version of Retroarch while it was available. While I haven’t played around it with it beyond booting something suitably hardcore to test it with (Harry Potter Quidditch, if you’re wondering), what I’ve seen has impressed me.

Clever tech people, fans of gaming, have got this working on a Microsoft console unofficially with no outside help and no official backing. Imagine that. Passionate people, doing things just for the good of keeping older video games accessible.

Where’s that kind of passion from Nintendo and Sony? Microsoft have their backwards compatibility program, and it’s great, but more is sorely needed.

For Nintendo, preservation is a task worth £50. For Sony, it’s not even worth talking about, unless you’re turning it around into an admittedly awesome remake. When the best you can hope for is “pretty awesome actually”, something somewhere is going wrong.

Beyond Dad’s Army

In the 1970s, the BBC decided it was a good idea to destroy its entire history. That’s a slight exaggeration, but as someone who feels bitter about it I reserve the right to describe it in Mordor-level terms.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus exists today by coincidence. Hancock’s Half Hour is missing episodes. One of the nation’s favourite sit-coms – Dad’s Army – has three episodes missing of its second series. They only found what exists because someone dived into a dumpster to take the film (and only admitted to it in the early 2000s, when the Beeb apologetically asked if anybody had recordings).

This interesting bit of trivia is a terrifying look at what happens when companies take their history for granted. It’s a problem that is all too obvious in gaming right now.

Now, naturally, nobody is diving into dumpsters to save Mario 64. Nintendo clearly have a ripped master copy on a hard drive which they’re going to sell a few more times before adding a texture pack or something.

But the idea that these games should be held ransom because some executive sees too much value in them (or not enough) is laughable. It’s horrific. It makes me understand why people are turning to PC and emulation.

It’s like asking the Bank of England to feed the homeless, I know, but I wish gaming company execs cared as much about games as the people who buy them. What an awesome difference that would make in the industry.

I Have a Dream…

In the grand scheme of things, games preservation might not seem very important. Easy access via current consoles may be a benefit, rather than a must-have feature. That sort of opinion is short-sighted though.

By limiting classic content by “those that will sell” and “those that are best forgotten”, we’re locking ourselves into a kind of Hollywood-esque cycle of remakes, remasters and copies. Men in suits can’t just tell me I don’t want to play old Gran Turismo games.

And I shouldn’t have to wait until New Years to get the itch to drag out the Dreamcast. Powerstone, Skies of Arcadia, Jet Set Radio Future – these are titles that I should be able to play all year round if I want. It shouldn’t require a slightly dodgy emulator, hidden in the back of my brand new Xbox.