what's old is new again....

I've hit a retro phase in my life. This actually isn't all that new or sudden, it's been growing slowly for about a year. I'm not entirely sure what the cause is. It might be just a simple longing for the joys of my youth (not that i'm all that old). It may be a disenfranchisement with the current state of affairs and technologies. It may just be that a lot of retro stuff is cheap an I'm poor. Whatever the cause, I'm actually kind of enjoying it, so I'm not going to consider it a bad thing.

About a year ago I started picking up arcade emulators off the internet and compiling old school arcade games. And over the weekend I scored myself a dirt cheap copy (read: free) of the classic zelda games reworked for the gamecube. It is beyond awesome, except for the fact that i currently suck at it. There was a point in my life where I rocked the NES. Especially Zelda. But yesterday, i got my ass kicked...repeatedly. I am looking forward to redeveloping my skills. I don't mind the graphics, the music is cool because it is so simple. I had a conversation with the guy I got the game from about how I am a Nintendo hard core. I own an XBOX and I bought a playstation. But the main reason I got the playstation was because of final fantasy. If the revolution goes off like they claim. I'll be camping outside a bestbuy later this year. And i probably won't buy that many new games, I'll spend most of my time downloading the classics. I've even started putting together a list. I hope konami and square play along because this could be a very good thing for my free time. Nintendo has their priorities straight. Great gameplay always trumps great graphics.

I didn't really intend for this to be about my love for oldschool video games. The purpose was discuss how revisiting things that made you happy in the past can remind you of what really makes you happy. It's not just video games for me. It is the challenge of doing something that is hard and becoming the best at it. It is discussing the intricacies of something that only other people who are "in the know" would understand. And it is about how much I enjoy seeing things that should be bad be turned into something really great. NES game were sprite based, only had a few hundred colors and the music could only consist of eight different notes and no more than three note harmonies. Yet it was awesome. The systems today fill hundreds of meg worth of digitally remastered shit and it can't compete. And they seem to not realize that there is a difference between challenging and so fucking hard you get bored of replaying the same 3 minute section for days and just give up and never pick up the game again.

Maybe we should just roll back the world about 15 years and do it over. I'll start. Just let me dig out my hypercolor shirt and a couple of slap bracelets.