Thursday, September 13, 2007

Enter the Retro

So I've been playing Megaman X Collection these last few days.

It's weird, I know. Playing SNES and PS1 games on a PS2. In this day and age. When I've got Overlord and GRAW2 sitting in their cases looking at me accusingly. When the most intensive use my new Razer Diamondback (no, not the 3G one, yes, I know I'm behind) has seen is clicking between worksheets in my CSE111 tutorials. And yet...

Nostalgia seems to have a greater hold on me than I would have thought. After I happened across some Megaman X Youtubes (don't ask me why, I'm not entirely sure how it happened either), I got the itch. ...No, not that kind of itch. Old game itch. You know, you're reading old PSMs or you read a comic strip about old games, and suddenly you're like 'Damn, man... those were good days. Now where'd I leave that CD...?' Yeah. And it helps that instead of the dinky little 15" I have in my room, I played on the 32" LCD in the living room. X and Zero never looked so detailed before.

...Then things kinda got crazy. I actually dug up my old Dreamcast and lo and behold, the damn thing still works. Granted I kinda had to bang on the lid a bit to get it to recognise that yes, that IS a game disc in there. And I had to clean the controller port to get it working. But after about 20 minutes of cleaning and dusting and swearing, Sonic Adventure appears onscreen. Would you believe Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure was waaaaaaaaaay back in 1998? Gosh. Where did that 9 years go?

The point to all this? I'm not sure, really. But maybe you're like me, and you still have every console you ever bought instead of throwing it away. Why not dig it out and give it a whirl? I'm sure they'll be happy to see you. You'll get to show your kids/friends/significant other the stuff that devoured so much of your life way back when. And if you've kinda given up on gaming lately, maybe this'll be where you take it up again. Get reacquainted with your first love and all that. Yeah. You know, I think I'm gonna go play SA a little more now. Maybe see if I can find my Shenmue discs too.