Greetings lovely reader, and welcome to another edition of Bazzlie Babbles!

Today we’re going to be discussing something that plagues us all as gamers: the war between old and new games. Now this is something that’s been going on as far back as I can remember, and it doesn’t just apply to video games, but seeing as how this is not a website about movies and music and other stuff, you’ll have to stop getting upset and start reading about video games like a normal person.

Often times, you have two camps in this argument, the old game fans, and the modern game fans. They both have their pros and cons, so I’m not going to try to take sides here, I’ve always been more of a neutral-standing person on the subject, so it’s fairly easy to see how each can be right, and also how they can be wrong.

For instance, the older game crowd is usually older themselves, and therefore has deeply rooted nostalgia in these games, along with the desire to keep those games feeling pure to them and to preserve their legacies. On the other hand though, these people are often clouded by rose-tinted nostalgia goggles. These prevent them from seeing the inherent flaws with the games they have so much reverence for.

On the other side of the war though, are the people who will forsake the old the moment something new comes along, even if said new product is comparable to the substance that is spewed from your mouth after a few hours of heavy drinking. Now, new things can be great too. They showcase such things as innovation, improvement, increased visual and audio quality, among other things. Unfortunately though, new games are not immune to being heaping piles of garbage just for being new.

Let’s look at the facts though, shall we? The underlying point that both camps try to make are that their games are more fun. Fun of course is something entirely subjective, just because my friend finds the Talim-less mess that is Soul Calibur V fun, doesn’t mean that I do. So it’s really hard to define what makes a game fun, as its different to everybody. Except of course the lack of Talim, that’s just a tragedy for the ages. Move over Titanic, Hindenburg and the Black Plague.

Frankly though, the main issue with both armies is that they both see each other as being one hundred percent wrong and they’re incapable of seeing the other’s point of view on the issue. As mentioned in a previous article of mine, modern games often follow the trend of having their main (and usually only) selling point being the graphic quality and visual realism, which at the risk of sounding like a broken record, happens to only take a game so far in the way of making it good. Now old games weren’t free of their own issues, they are of course very dated visually, and a lot of them have awkward and clunky control schemes which can make for a frustrating gaming experience.

On top of that, many older games are frightfully difficult and unforgiving, which is off-putting to players who may want to just give it a try for fun, whilst others are so easy it hurts. Newer games can suffer from difficulty issues too though, many being either obnoxiously difficult or pointlessly easy.

Frequently, retro players will say that modern games are stupid, require no thinking, and are ‘soulless’, touting their games as being the ‘golden age’ and everything afterward has been downhill, but while they have a solid lineup of games that are mostly all fun and engaging experiences in their own rights, to dismiss the modern games is to miss out on a lot of really great games. This occurs vice versa, with the modern players saying old games are ugly, repetitive, and lack any real story, and this is simply not true. It’s important to remember though, that the beauty of older games is that they don’t really need convoluted story-lines and constantly shifting game-play, because they had lots of charm, and we hadn’t been spoiled by the games of today where we have those things. There just simply wasn’t enough room for that in the games, so people didn’t really care.

All in all though, the most important thing both camps need to realize is that we are a community, and while it’s great to have a preference as to what you play, there’s so much that each other’s games have to offer, and if we all just gave something new a chance, we might be pleasantly surprised. So put on your big girl panties, shake hands and let’s all just play games together!

That’s all for now kiddos, talk you you all later! Toodles!

2883 Views // May 18, 2015