As someone who was born in the 80s, I’ve been through a lot of consoles. I had my share of them (Atari 2600, Master System, SNES, and PS1), and spent quite some time with most of the ones I didn’t have (NES, Genesis, Saturn, N64, GBA, Dreamcast, and, to a lesser extent, PS2). By the time the PS2 was reigning, I was a full PC gamer already and barely touched most consoles from that era onward. In fact, I think that the only time I played/saw a GameCube was in a museum. And I don’t remember ever playing the original Xbox. I did have brief moments of interaction with later consoles, though.

Of course, over the years, emulators played a huge part of my life as well. Sometimes to play classics from my past, others to play games I had heard about and never had the opportunity to play.

All this is good and fine, I know a lot of you guys had similar experiences. The thing is, I’m getting the feeling that a lot of the old stuff is losing appeal to me, replaced by newer stuff that, very often (but not always), is tailored to itch that nostalgia scratch right on the spot.

I don’t think it’s a problem, but it is something about me that I noticed in recent times and wanted to share here, since nostalgia is gog.com’s original mojo.

For example, I spent ages dreaming about Saturn and Dreamcast emulators. A few years ago, I found Mednafen and played some Saturn games I always wanted to play/replay and… that was about it. I didn’t really spend a lot of time with it. I’ve recently discovered Redream, the first decent Dreamcast emulator I ever saw, and, similarly, spent very little time with a few games only. I even watched some top games and hidden gems videos for both consoles trying to find new things to try and very little, if anything, caught my attention. I don’t think I ever spent a lot of time with a PS2 emulator either, which is another console I spent a lot of time wanting to emulate and play.

Upon reflection, a lot of the games that were important to me on these consoles, I had experienced already through other emulators (either arcade or other consoles) or I had official PC ports of them. Some of them, I have PC ports of more recent games in the same series (like Dead or Alive 2, and Soul Calibur) and they play similarly enough that they satisfy me.

On a similar note, playing MK11, I kept thinking how awesome it would be to have an MK Trilogy remake with those graphics and, at least, some of that gameplay, but at the same time, felt it to be completely unnecessary and probably not a game that I would spend as much time as I’d think I’d like. The last three MK games are actually the best in the entire franchise, MK9 is a literal remake of Trilogy (though the character art aged very poorly) and both MKX and 11 thrive in references, characters and “klassic” skins and fatalities from the original quadrilogy (MKX IS a reimagined MK4 after all) era.

Doom 2016 is another game that managed a very similar effect, astounding gameplay and graphics, itching all those classic doom spots and Doom Eternal is already shaping up to be even more referencial to the classic with weapon and monster designs changed to look more like high resolution versions of the old ones than before.

I also have a Raspberry Pi 3, loaded with Retropie and a lot of games, that I haven’t really played with in a while, but at the same time, I’m actively fighting the urge to get a Pi 4 (and Retropie isn’t even available to it yet). All mini consoles released so far (to ridiculous overprices here in Brazil) have caused some desire as well, though way less than what I believed they would.

Finally, while not directly related, I’ve recently noticed that ever since I’ve put my laptop under my TV, and started playing games from my sofa, I have been instinctively more interested in games I can play with a controller and avoiding strategy games, adventures, and, to a lesser extent, FPSs. And this is so sad. :(

EDIT: This isn't a question to have something marked as solution. Dumb me clicked the question check when creating the topic without paying attention, thinking about the "This is my favorite topic" check normally seen on top of threads.

This is an interesting essay, but what's your question?

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? :P

Honestly, I think "nostalgia factor" is somewhat overrated. Yes, there is a lot of talk about nostalgia, but I see that as mostly an excuse for poorly made modern games.

In fact, the success of recent MK, Doom, Shadow Warrior, Cities: Skylines and some other remakes/sequels/spiritual successors that combine old school ideas with modern ideas just proves that if gamers don't pick up on some new title it's because it's simply not as good as classics.

I personally enjoyed original Sonic 2D games and Sonic Adventure around 2010-s, despite not playing it in 90-s at all. And I'm enjoining Heroes 3, despite not playing them much when they were released. I also started to play Final Fantasy games in order. Right now I'm at FF5 and also like it.

I feel nostalgia for the PSOne, even though I never had one. I feel nostalgia for the NES and the SNES... and for old PC games, obviously (hi, GOG!). But ultimately I prefer to play newer games. I like the idea of HAVING old games, like a collection, but in reality I'll never play them so there is no point really having them other than being on a virtual shelf.

It all comes down to one thing and one thing only: do you still enjoy playing the game itself, or is it just a "memory refresher" of better times"? Depending on what you answer, is alright to leave the past in the past. I have some wallpapers and soundtrack for old games I liked but will never play again.

Planescape Torment is a game that blew my mind when I played it for the first time, and read the behemoth of a fan novel that it has (over 3000 pages). Between that, and after 20 years still remembering the character's voices, I just used the soundtrack in the background to completely move over to Sigil. Man, I enjoyed it better than the game and was actually remembering the game and enjoying playing it... then I watched some gameplay videos and thought "yup, that did not age well" (mechanically speaking, visually still is marvelous). And so I live, between memories and reality, looking for newer games that make me remember the older ones, but not the older ones per se.

Another use of emulators is to play around with old computer systems. For example, my family owned an Apple 2GS growing up, but not a Commodore 64 or an MSX (and an MSX would have been hard to find in the US anyway). Thanks to emulators, I can easily get a virtual Commodore 64 or MSX and play around with it, including writing code in BASIC and assembly language.

Even with modern systems, emulation can sometimes be useful for development purposes. For example, if a Raspberry Pi is not booting or not connecting to the internet, just stick the SD card in a computer and use qemu-arm to emulate the CPU, and then you can run software like apt as though you had the Pi up and running. (On debian, I believe you need qemu-arm-static and binfmt-misc installed, then you put a copy of qemu-arm-static on the SD card (or a dummy file + a bind mount), and just chroot into that directory.)

There's another interesting use of emulation. Shortly before Stephen Hawking's death, it was decided that they needed to move his voice to a newer device, and they ended up emulating the voice software on a Raspberry Pi. The resulting system even used code from the emuiator Higan!

So yes, sometimes emulation can be fun, and sometimes it can be quite practical, even if it's not game that you're interested in.

Thanks for the input, guys. Sorry it took me so long to get back here, but life has been busy lately.

You guys are right, and the overload of games we have access to nowadays also make it harder to go back to classics.

I think part of the appeal to me is also setting things up. I've never been that much of a hardware assembler, but I like trying these things out occasionally, even if they are very simplistic projects, like setting up the Raspberry Pi, and, more recently, changing the HD of an old notebook for an SSD. And now I'm already thinking of installing Launchbox on it just to see how it goes. :)

Also, sometimes, all that we really need is a modern port of an old game, to remove designs that aged poorly and improve the parts that really matter on a game.

eh, I kind of think that a lot of not being motivated to play games on emulator is more that there's more distractions and the internet is a giant time suck and you think that oh I'll start playing a game on my pc after I check my email or watch that video on youtube it will only take five minutes and then the next thing you know six hours have passed.

that sort of thing also gets in the way of me trying to play pc games too lol.

if it wasn't for having a cfw psp so I could play at work or while watching reruns, I probably wouldn't get anywhere near as many games done.

Well, I often feel emotionally drained for a variety of reasons, and this gets me unwilling to commit and watch movies/series, since it feels like making an emotional investment on the story.

I do know this affects me as well with games, sometimes.

I have a lot of NES and SNES nostalgia especially. I even bought a Wii at one point for the "virtual console" because I'm a legally minded chap, and I buy a lot of retro stuff like Shovel Knight on nostalgic impulses. That said... I never play any of it. I think about it, I might load it up and play a level or two, but that's it. I moved on to PC gaming in 1994, and I don't think I ever really looked back. It is what it is.

EXCEPT for Zelda games, which are still awesome. Probably because I love RPGs and they're somewhat close.

That's why it's sometimes nice to have games that don't require much of an investment. Columns on the Sega Genesis is a good example; you can enjoy the game for short periods (there's even a mode with a 3 minute (IIRC) time limit), yet you don't need to worry about your progress between sessions, as there's no save feature.

Columns 3, unfortunately isn't so nice; there's story, the game is a lot longer, and it consists entirely of matches versus the computer, which can be more stressful than solo play.

My low investment games are usually fighters. Funny thing is that I was never any good at fighting games, despite loving them since I first saw the original Street Fighter in an arcade.

I have a lot of them, though I've noticed in recent years that I tend to play Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat way more then the other fighters I have. DB Fighrerz, for example, I couldn't finish the story mode and only unlocked Goku and Vegeta Blue because the game seems to give me a lot of it's virtual currency randomly when I log into it.

Recently I've been playing a lot of KoF14 and loving it. The game looks a bit like a budget title but plays very well and I think it's the first I've actually loved since KoF98.

I just set up a series of versus fights against the computer and have some fun.

Also, "Rise from your grave. thread!" :)

For low investment gaming, I think this works best if you can do just a single match at a time and don't have to play a story mode or something.

Also, sometimes even one human player is more than you can handle; there are some games, like Tetris Attack, that allow you to start a game with zero human players.

I'm not sure, but I don't think it is a matter of emulation so much as it is a matter of older game design and UX/interface (and maybe graphics, but that is way less of an issue for me).

An old game might scratch that nostalgia itch, but after a few hours of playing it, the clunkiness associated with game design and interfaces at that time come to the surface. Not to say that those games were bad from the start, but with the benefit of X number of years of improvements to the industry and to how we interact with games, that old style just doesn't sit as comfortably.

Compare that to a nostalgia-inspired game, it would still slightly scratch that nostalgia itch, but also come with more modern design decisions and interfaces, making the game a whole lot more comfortable to play.

For example, back in the day, I played through all the Streets of Rage games (even 3, yes) and enjoyed them. Enjoyed reaching each new stage, progressing, feeling excited, etc. I recently tried playing it again on an emulator pack I got on Steam, and I completed 1 stage and I felt that I had gotten a sufficient experience of the game. I'm not sure if it was:
the fidelity of the emulator (I tried copying over the ROMs to a couple different emulators to see if I got a better experience, and I didn't)
or that the feel of playing it on my Sega Megadrive was just a necessary part of the experience
or (this is the theory I'm going with), the game's design and progression and interface is just too aged now to be appreciated the same way.

It was a much clearer situation with Dragon Age: Origins. I played it way back in the day as well (although in the case of this game, I never got past the Dwarven undergrounds), and when I tried it recently, the weird and clunky navigational interface just didn't let me get very far. I had a similar experience with Gothic, a game I had not played when it came out originally, but when I tried it out recently, the navigation and interface system was just too weird for me.

I've had to rethink my philosophy of "Yeah, I am in no hurry to play that game, I can wait even a decade to get a good deal on a game (or maybe even get it for free), before I have to try it". More so than graphics, game design and interface philosophies age very badly.

So... rise from your grave, thread! XD

I've recently been spending a bit more of my time with emulators again, my mental approach being that of "Let's pretend I'm getting into an old fashioned rental store and paying to play a couple of hours with whatever games they have available."

I have also taken a bit of time to play/replay a few fighting series that I liked or just had a general appreciation of the idea of them but hadn't properly paid as much attention over the years as I liked.

So on one side, I played a bit of the first three Toshinden games (I still own a copy of 2) and their Saturn versions which I had never seen before. The Saturn versions are terrible (URA, despite of being a bit better, is visibly a watered down version of 2, with what seems to be the most visually complex chars replaced by simpler ones). On the PS1 side, I think 2 is still reasonably good, with 3 pretty close, but it occurred to me that they kept trying to improve the games by changing the wrong stuff (adding more and more easily accessible super moves) instead of giving us better controls and more agility in the fights.

On the other side, and more recently, due to SEGA's teaser of a new Virtua Fighter, I've spent some time playing/emulating all the games in the series. I had never managed to get much into it before, but I actually started to really enjoy it. What I found weird, and probably one of the reasons it died (and "lost to Tekken") is how little it changes from game to game. By VF5, the series has just 20 fighters (of which, only one ever got removed due to technical/time constraints, and later got put back into it), the arcade mode has no ending and the final/bonus boss is still the same, and you still only get a single chance at beating her, no continues allowed. Chars still use most of the same screams and taunts, use the same clothes (or use slightly enhanced versions of the older ones), play largely the same, even if they got more moves (Though, I could be wrong, I haven't played the whole cast). And, finally, even though it's not that important, there's no semblance of a story in game, everything is in the manual. It's a weird series, but I like it. Notably, the arcade versions of 1 and 2 still look really good (due to how great and visually complex the art is, despite the obvious hardware limitations of the time). 3 is the one that aged worst, even though I remember thinking it very impressive when it first released, but I like that it tried to shake things up a bit with uneven rings.

So, back to the thread subject, I think that, for me, a bit of old games every now and then, is the trick. And I shouldn't spend a lot of time lamenting that things aren't holding my attention all that much. :)