I’m Too Old For This $#!% – Moving Forward Means More When You Look Back

“Eight year old me is very disappointed right now,” my friend Andrew said. I had to agree sadly. I had, on a whim, bought Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection, and my friend and I were passing the afternoon working our way through Sonic the Hedgehog 2. We reminisced of the old days, where the games had to be beaten in a single sitting, with just the number of lives you were given (and managed to earn). Aside from not being able to save progress between levels in the old days, the Collection allows you to use a quick save function to save a file to the HD at any point. Considering how often we found ourselves dying, without this feature Andrew and I would have found it impossible getting past the second levels in any of the Sonic games.

Was it that games have simply gotten easier? It seemed that, for only occupying two dimensions, the classics were throwing a lot at us. We had no idea how to reasonably get through the game without relying on the quick save function, far less how we used to survive these games without such functionality. We recalled our younger days, racing through Sonics 1-3 at the top speed the Hedgehog managed, getting Super Sonic in parts 2 and 3 with ease and never having trouble building up my store of rings to activate the Super Saiyan hedgehog. These days, I’m lucky to hold onto enough rings to make it to the emerald bonus stages, far less actually win them all.

So have games begun holding hands more these days? Definitely. Sonic is, by today’s standards, unforgiving. 3 failures and you get a game over? One hit and you lose all your hard earned rings (more or less), one more hit and you’re dead? Compare this to any game you’re played recently: Uncharted? Restart from a checkpoint one episode before where you died. Prince of Persia? No death, just Elika saving you. Fallout 3? reload from the last autosave.

Then again, I’m a founding editor of POWSO. Maybe that doesn’t mean much compared to the bigger dogs out there like IGN and PSM, but I haven’t encountered a game in some time I can’t manage to work my way through on Hard. So what is it about those old games I can’t get these days? My brain is definitely not too old to handle video games. What is it then?

Bear in mind, I have nothing but respect for the games of yore, but everything is all about progress, especially where art is concerned (that should let you know where I stand on the whole “games as art” debate if my previous feature didn’t already). Those classics were fantastic for their time, but where technology and design has progressed, and our minds have kept up with those advances, and we’ve gotten used to a standard of responsiveness and control that modern game technology has afforded us.

Not to say that Sonic was a horrible game that we were too young to realize back in the day, far from. It was as good a game as a game could be. I’m looking forward to a day when Uncharted 2 and God of War become offensively clunky by standards of where the technology moves in years to come. If anything, looking back on that classic collection served not as a means to groan dismissively at a past that should be packed into an attic, but to enjoy nostalgia that shows us how far we’ve come. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get onto some Uncharted 2 multiplayer and appreciate just how far we’ve come.