690

​ Since Christmas or so, I have been messing around with some old games. I say ‘messing around’ because I haven’t really been playing most of them. ​ These are games from the dos and early windows 95 days. The days of the first 3D accelerators. Games where you had to manually configure IRQ assignments. If you know what an IRQ is, you know what era of games I’m talking about. ​ Part of this is research. I like to mine old games for ideas and designs that might have been tried once or twice, but seem to have been abandoned in more recent games. Gameplay strategies, visual development, etc. etc. ​ Part of it is fun. I mean games are fun, and sometimes games that haven’t been played in years are still fun. ​ Another part is gauging nostalgia. Nostalgia is an awful thing. It can bring back good feelings, but it can also trick us into believing that the past was better than the present. I like to test that feeling. ​ I can tell you, most of the time, you can’t go back. ​ There are some amazing games from that era. True stand-outs that are still as fun as ever. They are good because they are good, not because they are of a certain vintage. ​ Most of the time though, these games do not hold up. Things you may have tolerated in the past because there just weren’t that many fast paced dos game, or games rendered in full 3D, just are not tolerable anymore. We have moved past them. ​ Part of me hoped that I would find a whole stack of new Best Games contenders among the early win95 games, but they are fairly thin on the ground in that era. That’s not to say that there are none. There are, and I will likely be writing about them in the future, but the past isn’t a treasure trove, it’s a painstaking excavation. ​ I will still keep playing old, weird games, because that’s the sort of guy I am, but it does make me appreciate the golden era of games we currently find ourselves in.