So I assume many of us have played some games for the first time long after their release date. Like, maybe you didn’t have a specific console growing up so we didn’t play the “classics” on it, or something.

I’m just wondering how many of you have played an older game and thought “wow, I wish I grew up with this game”?

For example, for me, many years ago I played Super Metroid for the first time and fell in love with the idea of just wandering aimlessly around the game world, occasionally stumbling into new areas. I would have loved to have played it as a kid with childlike wonder without worrying about finishing the game or making progress.

  • GlennMagusHarvey@mander.xyzEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think there’s something to be said that there’s a certain level of intellectual maturity that’s needed to truly enjoy these games.

    I grew up with NES Metroid, and despite having read the manual many times over, as a kid I never made sense of the game. I could play it, I could insert the Justin Bailey code, I could move around and do stuff, but I never truly understood what I was meant to do. I stumbled into Tourian one day and promptly got pwned by metroids, and then I never found my way back until I was an adult.

    The second metroidvania game I played was Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Maybe it’s an easier game – it’s certainly less confusingly open-ended than Metroid 1 – but I absolutely loved the experience. I deeply appreciated the narrative journey of being trapped in this castle, full of weirdness and twisty passages that were slightly off from each other, having the mid-game bombshell dropped on me, and piecing together a mystery until I was able to find out what was going on. I played it all night, and in a story I like to tell people, the morning after I beat it (and finally got the best ending), as the sun came out, I put on the Aloha de Chocobo music from Final Fantasy IX and it was the most glorious feeling. But this depended on me understanding that I was immersed in a maze, and understanding what I needed to do to find my way out of the maze.

    And I’ve been enjoying this genre since.