Who hasn't ever reminisced about our childhood and the great games we have played? In these present days of ultra powerful technology, where the games look perfect and short-lived ,those old, stubborn little games like Alex Kidd, California Games, Altered Beast, Mario (the old ones) etc, seem to have been great after all...

After playing Assassin's Creed for PS3 I thought "how much more can the quality of the image improve in the gaming industry". We have always given too much importance to how the games look like... Counting the "bits"... (Nintendo is 8 bits, Snes is 16 bits, PSX is 32 bits, ...) The first time I saw with my poor little eyes the magnificence of FF7's (which today is considered extremely deformed) 2D and 3D graphics and characters, I was in awe... Mario 64 seemed to me heaven on earth... After all, anyone who is in their mid 20's, like me, were used to 2D and extremely poor graphics (Atari was my first videogame).

However, after all these years of gaming, today I realised that graphics are not the most important aspect of a game. After all, a game is a fantasy, thereby why should the graphics remind us of reality always? Whilst playing Assassin's Creed (returning to this point) I realised that the game is so fast-paced that I didn't have time to even appreciate very much the detail of the frames... (which are impressive I must say)... However, lately, rarely a game makes an impression on me... The last one was Tales of Vesperia and before that was Valkyria Chronicles (both don't attempt to reproduce reality with their graphics, instead they beautifully embrace colour and texture to reproduce amazing images, even though not necessarily in 3D, nor realistc). Games like Alex Kidd made me play and replay for months and months... Today I barely stay a month playing one game... Everything nowdays is fast-paced... The gaming industry throws at us dozens of new games every week... We don't have enough time to enjoy a game properly and other, better ones (or not) are already at our door step.

After the aforementioned gaming existential crisis, I have decided to go vintage... I bought on ebay a psone and a snes and I have quite enjoyed them so far. (I could not go as vintage as the 80's... That would have been too hardcore for me) I got all the FF's imaginable, Secret of Manas and so forth... I haven't turned on my XBox360 for a month...

There's someting about the old games that the new ones don't have... A feeling of ingenuousness and 2D that has no comparison. During those times, or may I say, epoch, no politician would talk about games on national television... Now the industry is so big and complex, generating more profits than the film retail sector, the pressure for new games, fast, has, somehow, made the act of playing a game lose its charm and innocence.. And several politicians now talk about gaming (revenue and economy related talks, of course)...

Anyway, politicians and gaming magnates aside, all this babbling was just to say that I am reminiscing my childhood and the 90's games... Oh well... I am becoming an old gizzer after all...