Philosophical question, is "Retro Nostalgia" a bad thing ?

[gilesgoat]

So ...

we hear it there and there nowadays in various places .. "Oh this is retro nostalgia" .. "Oh it's another nostalgia thing" .. "Oh it's that nostalgia bull .. " ..

But WHAT IS EXACTLY "Retro Nostalgia" and "is it really bad ?"

I mean to me, I fire up MAME, I get some of the games I loved and I still love .. and I still have LOT OF FUN playing them !

Some days ago I was screaming "YES YES YES !" when I managed 445600 on Starforce and I was really happy

I mean ok SOME games "don't stand the test of time" .. BUT SOME OTHERS DO ! And they do it VERY WELL !!

And also BECAUSE they do it SO WELL it's the kind of games that "they are perfect as they are" you ( or least I ) want to see them THAT way and play them THAT way AS THEY ARE.

Sure MAYBE - maybe - some of them "could be re-made in a modern way" but that would make "another thing by its own", the original would remain the same as good as it is.

SOME other games maybe "you did not know them at the time" and you literally re-discover them today and think "hum, how did I miss that ?".

Now there are/has been games "cheaply made" like "let's copy something already done" and maybe they were "trying to appeal some old fans of .." but being poorly made MAYBE that's what you could call "Nostalgia Bull(s**)" ..

But I got the impression that sometime some people, maybe really "too young", they don't really understand "what it meant for certain people playing certain games in certain times", times WERE MUCH different and feelings/situations/emotions were "something different that it's not the same of today".

I mean "you had to be in an Arcade place to know what that meant".

But anyway .. if there are some people that love to revive that, at least in part, is that "so bad" ?

Or after all is maybe all this "Nostalgia Retro" is "so bad" because people saying so are kind envious they cannot understand/feel it ?

So .. it's philosophical .. what do you think ?

[Chontler]

Isn't all nostalgia "retro"?

I have a mame cab, but don't fire it up often, but when I do it's to play specific games from a specific time in my life - when, as a 12 year old, my parents got divorced and I didn't see much of my dad for a while. He'd turn up every other weekend for a couple of hours and take us to the posh arcades in Rhyl and give us a couple of quids worth of 10ps. The games I played then have a way different appeal than many other arcades games I played to death.
As for any other emulation, nowadays I just can't be bothered. Some modern 8/16 bit art style games are really good, but they have to play with a modern gamestyle.
The big pull for me, and it's why I still game a lot, is particularly for games that make me feel like that kid again. It's hard to pull off well. Nintendo are the absolute champions of keeping that alive.
Your games have a different feel to them, but that's more the late teen/older nerd in me. But you definitely still do it "right".

[merman]

There is a real difference between crafting a new Tempest, putting your heart and soul into it - and printing an Atari logo on a hoodie and calling it retro.

Recalling a treasured memory triggers lots of chemical responses in the brain and the receptors lap up all those lovely neuro-transmitters. It's also part of this "neotony" - wanting to remain child-like. There's something comforting about it.

[noodles]

To me, Defender is one of the best games ever made, period.
There is no "retro", I'm still discovering it today on my MAME cab as it's merciless harshness scared me away back when I was a kid
and my pocket had few coins to spare to try to get better at it.
Good gameplay is immortal, above time and place. There cannot be anything negative about recreating it.

Other games, tied to a certain arcade in Ireland where I discovered them, do create nostalgic feelings as they were a time of childhood
freedom from any real worries and summer holidays. It was more than discovery too, it was an experience with interactive art.
I was just blown away by a custom baby Gravitar cab with vector colour monitor modified to play with a spinner. More beautiful
than anything I had ever seen in any museum or art gallery.
On the other hand, if, as a creator, you are incapable of coming up with anything original at all, then maybe you should be worried.

[Jamesac]

Harry Nilsen's Jump Into the Fire will always be a great song. It's not retro nostalgia.

Mark Twain will always be a great writer. No retro nostalgia there.

Terry Pratchett was getting up to speed with Discworld in the 90s and the books still hold up. Completely not retro nostalgia even a little to like them.

Star Wars was 1970s. People still love it and there's nothing retro involved in enjoying it.

Robotron, Tempest, Moon Patrol, Time Pilot, Asteroids, Rolling Thunder, and hundreds more are legitimately fantastic games whether you play them for the first time today or when they came out.

"Retro nostalgia" is bullshit.

[Molloy]

There was a period about 3 years ago when it felt like indie development was leaning too heavily on retro aesthetics where every second game coming out of the US had bad pixel graphics and NES colour palettes or whatever but the quality of 2d graphics has jumped phenomenally in the last few years we're kind of spoilt in terms of pretty looking and sounding games with solid art direction.

Now we're seeing low poly 3D stuff popping back up and some of the games are incredible. I'm playing Dusk and Amid Evil which ape the look of Quake and Unreal respectively and they really, really nail the look and atmosphere of the games and then use that as a jumping off point to do loads of interesting stuff.

I think we reached a point with the large development teams a few years ago that people looking back to look forward became a viable tactic for bringing some diversity back in. Anybody who plays Tempest 4000 for an hour and original Tempest for an hour each could appreciate they're games that start with similar setups but take it in very different directions.

People are a bit obsessed with surface level 'innovation' in anything. It's why every time a rapper throws rock, funk or a high minded social concept on their album all the white critics say "finally someone making REAL music and not just talking about guns and bitches" whereas generally the guns n' bitches rappers are doing most of the heavy lifting of moving the genre in new stylistic directions rather just saying "I'll do some genre fusion to show I'm progressive and ambitious" which seems to happen over and over and rarely goes anywhere in the long run.

[skab]

Just a week ago I took my Atari 800 out of storage to admire it, of course, but also to test the M.U.L.E. cartridge I just got. That's some serious retro and nostalgia there, but I can't see anything that's bad about it.

It's that "don't look back, it's just keeping you from moving forward" crap, I guess. Looking back is important and helps you keep the right direction. Especially at a time like now where actual innovation is scarce and rare.

The hip-hop analogy was pretty off, though. That's basically just a money-making scheme for misogynists and criminals. There.

[buddh4sack]

In my opinion, part of the appeal of retro nostalgia is recapturing that sense of wonder you felt seeing these things for the first time as a kid, but what really draws me is the excellent gameplay some of these early games had, Tempest, Robotron, Blaster, and Marble Madness being great examples. (I really do want to dive into learning how to play Defender properly, especially now that I've got a proper x-arcade controller to do it with a controller layout with some fidelity to the original).

The kind of "retro nostalgia" that annoys me is people who love "8-bit" renditions of their favorite songs; that sort of thing sounds terrible, and that music wouldn't stand up in any way today if it didn't remind someone of their childhood.

I also enjoy "retro" minus the nostalgia; discovering great old arcade games I never even played as a kid. Atari's Quantum is amazing fun if you have a trackball. I, Robot and Off the Wall (which is to Arkanoid what Arkanoid is to Breakout) are others I never had a lot of access to, and they're both great fun.

[Jamesac]

I don't know, it just feels like calling NES-styled games or arcade games "retro" is like calling chocolate retro. It's a flavor, not an age. Platformers like A Hat in Time or Yooka Laylee trade on N64 nostalgia but are solid games in their own right, reviving a genre that fell out of style (even if they're only kind of ok-ish, quality-wise). The nostalgia thing is nice, but a valid genre is good outside of its age and doesn't need fuzzy memories to make worth playing.

[Jonesey]

Isn't all nostalgia "retro"?

...the posh arcades in Rhyl and give us a couple of quids worth of 10ps. The games I played then have a way different appeal than many other arcades games I played to death.

I remember The Golden Goose Arcade on Llandiddlers Pier back in the day. They had some quality machines. I think I remember Firefox being 50p a go - poshest game in the place but still a steep price to play in the mid 80s!

[Flojomojo]

There is a real difference between crafting a new Tempest, putting your heart and soul into it - and printing an Atari logo on a hoodie and calling it retro.

Yes, this exactly. I am experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance waiting for Llamasoft's latest, while knowing it will have the "Atari" logo on it, published by demonstrated shitheels.

Tempest 4000 is good.

"Atari VCS" and "Atari SpeakerHat" are not good.

[Kelloggs]

I remember The Golden Goose Arcade on Llandiddlers Pier back in the day. They had some quality machines. I think I remember Firefox being 50p a go - poshest game in the place but still a steep price to play in the mid 80s!

Was that in the slot near the window that eventually became home to Atari's Hard Drivin'? It's certainly been a while...

I was in there, briefly, about fifteen years ago, desperately trying to find something worthy of sticking 10p* into. Gave up - I never had the love for fruit machines, and there was bugger all else.

*adjust for inflation

[Chontler]

I remember The Golden Goose Arcade on Llandiddlers Pier back in the day. They had some quality machines. I think I remember Firefox being 50p a go - poshest game in the place but still a steep price to play in the mid 80s!

Was that in the slot near the window that eventually became home to Atari's Hard Drivin'? It's certainly been a while...

I was in there, briefly, about fifteen years ago, desperately trying to find something worthy of sticking 10p* into. Gave up - I never had the love for fruit machines, and there was bugger all else.

*adjust for inflation

That’s definitely been a while. It’s not been called the Goose for ages. It’s Leisure Island now. It’s pretty much the only arcade in Llandudno, and it’s full of shite. It seems arcades now just have large scale android phones in the cabs, and you can play only Angry Birds and Crossy Road. But it still be 95% gambling things. The days of dilemmas of which machine to put your last 10ps in are long gone.

Rhyl is an absolute hell-hole these days. You could probably find some old cabs in the derelict beach front there, but you risk having your face smashed into saliva stained crt while playing as some chav robs you of your phone.

There’s a nice beach in between the 2 in Abergele. I was there a couple of days ago. Only 1 arcade, and yup 95% gambling.
Of the 5% however...

Yeah, tucked behind the Sonic Air Hockey is Mario Kart 2! Alas I had a hungry 3 year old to get home who isn’t quite into such games. Well, fortunately for her I had no cash either, else I’d have filed a missing child report an hour later.

[Jonesey]

Is there anything in Towyn these days? I think I may have heard or read or just made up that some of the cabs from the tiny arcade at the end of Bangor pier in the early 90s might have ended up somewhere in Towyn?