Nostalgia is a weird thing, it makes you feel like the past was great and what’s happening in the present cannot come close.
Playing through these old Playstation (PSX or PS1 for those in the know) of games I have no memories of ever touching weirdly enough makes me think of my childhood spending hours on the Final Fantasy series especially Final Fantasy 8 where I was spending days on end playing cards at the beginning of the game in Galbadia Garden getting cards from this boy walking up and down these specific flight of stairs so I could refine them into items to get high level weapons early on (One of your first Summons have a card mod ability to modify certain types of cards into items), or that first moment you are able to move around the world map with the Balamb Garden I headed straight for the Cactuar Island, getting my AP’s and lastly spending hours near the end game boosting my levels on the islands called Island Closest To Heaven and Island Closest To Hell. It was fun, game breaking experience and I cannot understand where I found the time to do it.
As I grew older I decided that I wanted to try and play every original playstation game I could find record myself playing it and post it on youtube, not really for views but just to have a record that I have played it (though recently I have been lazy, moved to a new place getting things setup <insert more excuses>). I have to say, there are quite a lot out there. Of the games I have played thus far some do not hold up to the test of time, others were still surprisingly fun. I recently played and started streaming myself playing Alundra which for some reason or another never got a copy of when I was younger in my Japanese RPG craze. While the controls were a bit hard to get used to at first, the game progression, story and characters are fun. Arc of the Lad is something I would have never played as it required bit more strategic thinking than I was capable of, but right now I find this game a classic and the writing is pretty darn good.
There will be most likely more games down the line that I will enjoy and still play after recording. But the main reason I started writing this post was to say that sometimes old games do hold up and even though in our head everything looked way better than we thought, the game was or still is pretty darn good and some maybe most modern games might just be a bit too bland or lack the “edge” of originality that games of past did, so we they just don’t make it like they used to.
Maybe get your old PSX out, find some games you never thought about playing when you were younger and see what you enjoy, never know what you might get into.
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