Is Your Nostalgia Wrong?

I was watching a video on YouTube recently in which someone visits the last Blockbuster located in Bend, Oregon. This nostalgia overdose left me with oddly mixed emotions. As a card carrying 90s kid, I should have been glowing with joy as I did when Ecto Cooler was briefly brought back in 2016. You rarely, if ever, get to relive the past in such a genuine way—after all, Ecto Cooler wasn't just the same flavor under a different name and lacking the Ghostbusters branding; it was the real deal. Similarly, the last Blockbuster revels in its retro-ness, right down to letting you buy merchandise such as Blockbuster cards and fannypacks. However I think it's become clear that as nostalgia has become more and more of a mainstream phenomenon, sometimes people get lost in their memories and can't step back enough to separate the good nostalgia from the bad. Perhaps I should say, to evaluate whether the thing they're pining for is the thing itself or their fuzzy memories of the thing itself. Ecto Cooler still tasted great decades later, but does going to a video store really hold up?


First, though, let's talk about Blockbuster as a company. They deserved to go out of business and we all seem to have forgotten this in the wave of post-Captain Marvel 90s worship. Remember how Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix because they couldn't see where technology was heading? Remember how Blockbuster, at their height, were one of those pseudo-monopolies that edged out mom-and-pop video rental stores? Let's also think about how their strategy was to overwhelmingly focus on new releases and the most popular movies, so that their selection was always very limited and tailored to mainstream tastes, thus eliminating the ability to explore the history of film and the variety it offers.

Now, let's talk about the movie rental experience. Have we all forgotten and taken for granted how superior the online streaming model is? Have we all forgotten going to Blockbuster and they either didn't have the movie you wanted to see or they were out of copies to rent? Only 90s kids remember how rad limited availability was, bro! s clearly superior to pay like $5 to rent one movie for a couple days instead of paying like $15 a month for unlimited access to hundreds of TV shows and movies. In all seriousness, even with Netflix's increasingly sparse selection compared to its height in the early 2010s, it's still a much better value than Blockbuster or other video rental stores could ever match. In the aforementioned YouTube video, they didn't even like the movie they rented, so that's $5 wasted. Sure there's a lot of garbage on Netflix, too, but you're not paying $5 a pop to try your luck on crap like Tall Girl or Zumbo's Just Desserts.

All of this brings me to the important point I want to make about nostalgia: ask yourself if you really miss the thing in and of itself. Do you really miss going to a physical location to rent a movie, or do you miss the warm safety of childhood that surrounded this experience? I, personally, used to have a huge amount of nostalgia for the NES and its games, yet with a handful of exceptions, all of those games have aged poorly and are frustrating, badly designed, time wasting pieces of shit. By and large when it comes to my nostalgia for the NES, its really longing to relive my childhood, the experience of discovering what videogames were for the first time. Sometimes I long to return to Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast because of what a new and revolutionary experience it was, yet if I think about the game itself I'd much rather play something that isn't so clunky, slow, and grindy. All of this said, obviously I do miss certain games because they do hold up today and are still great experiences, such as Chrono Trigger or Streets Of Rage 2. They're nostalgic and actually worth being nostalgic about.

Blockbuster? Not so much. True, I prefer books over reading on computers/phones/tablets, and I prefer vinyl records over digital music...but I do utilize all of these things to some extent. They aren't either/or propositions; they complement each other and offer unique upsides and downsides. This isn't so with going to Blockbuster vs. streaming online. Other than physically seeing the boxes, there is no upside to videostores, and actually you can do this at Best Buy or used game/video stores, so...what's the point, other than misplaced nostalgia? While I will concede that not every movie/TV show is available online, somewhere, to stream, the vast majority of them are available, even if it's video on demand or buying the physical release on Amazon. True there is the immediacy argument, that you can go to a video store and have it in your hands right then and there, but this is also assuming they carry the title(s) you want and that they have copies available.


The point of all of this isn't to rain cynicism down on someone else's nostalgia parade. People are allowed to be nostalgic for whatever they want, and maybe some people do have genuine love for Blockbuster, for whatever reason. I just think that sometimes we allow nostalgia to blind us to the obvious faults in things from the past, as if everything that doesn't exist anymore somehow automatically transubstantiates into a valued brand or item. What's next, will people be nostalgic for Best Buy when that great lumbering beast finally goes belly-up in the murky waters of modern retail? People are dumb, so probably, yeah.

The Videogame Solipsist: Dragon Quest IV

Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen (DS)

While the rest of the world is going crazy in anticipation of election results, I thought I would spend today's update escaping into the simple, charming fantasy world of Dragon Quest IV. Because to me, that's what good RPGs have always been: pure, escapist delight.

Games journalism has bloomed to include genuine critical discourse, and so a lot of it has had to do with history and context to help us understand how we've gotten here. Through venues like 1UP's Retronauts podcast and the exhaustive work of Hardcore Gaming 101, we've reached a better understand of videogames as both an entertainment medium and an artform. As a nerd who grew up loving RPGs even before they were popularized in 1997 by Final Fantasy VII, it's been fascinating to see the retro/critical collective fill in the gaps on the two biggest console RPG series's going: Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy.

Though things were even more sparse in Europe, America got both series in an odd fashion and missed several key titles in both. It was only in 2006 that we finally, officially, got every numbered entry in the main Final Fantasy series, while we've still yet to see Dragon Quest V and VI in the U.S. Thankfully, they are coming via the Nintendo DS in the next year or two.

The story of the Dragon Quest franchise, especially as it pertains to the U.S., has been better told elsewhere. Mainly I want to focus on the gap in America's view of the series. Growing up, I did play the first Dragon Quest game (released here as Dragon Warrior) and despite its age I thought it was an interesting game. I wasn't savvy enough to realize it had taken several years to be released here so I assumed its archaic-look and fool was purposeful. Besides, I didn't get around to playing it until I was currently obsessed with the Shining Force games on Genesis, so...

Like many people, then, I ignored the series, missing the American releases of II, III, and IV. Technically I suppose I didn't even know they existed since I didn't play the first one until around 1994, but...whatever. Sadly, Enix closed up shop in the U.S. after releasing a handful of terrible RPGs on the SNES and deciding Americans didn't like the genre. The next Dragon Quest we got would be VII, but I think it bears dwelling on the fact that the majority of this country never played DQ II, III, and IV so we didn't exactly know we were missing V and VI. VII, of course, did little to change our mind about the series: it was a SLOOOOWWW, archaic, and boring-ly translated jRPG. I think Shane Bettenhausen said it best on the Retronauts episode about the Dragon Quest series, that it was a mechanics heavy RPG with visuals that were an "abortion."

It's depressing that we re-entered the series with VII since it is, arguably, one of the weakest entries in the series. It would be like judging the Final Fantasy series by Final Fantasy II. The remainder of the Dragon Quest series was much more focused and had far better balance, pacing, and scenario writing. This is what I discovered with Dragon Quest VIII, along with most of the people who were interested in the series but passed on VII. And the more I've played of Dragon Quest IV, the more I understand why the Japanese are so crazy for this series. It's got nothing to do with ambitious (some would say, pretentious) storylines, bleeding-edge graphics, or ever changing gameplay systems like the Final Fantasy series and everything to do with sheer charisma and old fashioned story telling.

Dragon Quest IV is an incredible achievement, both in its original NES incarnation and now on the DS. The way you play the various 'chapters' before controlling the main hero character of the game is a fascinating concept that I wish more RPGs would have borrowed. In the game's most infamous and unique chapter, you play as a merchant trying to make money, flipping the tables on the entire RPG genre convention of shopkeepers. Now you play the normally anonymous shopkeeper while a succession of heroes (and maybe even some villains) comes in, makes their transaction, and leaves. At the same time, the chapters have little ties to the other characters therein, as well as overlapping areas of the game. In the second chapter, you visit some of the same areas you will, later, as the merchant, for instance, and when playing as the merchant you hear about the fighting tournament you participated in during the previous chapter. The only thing that comes close, as far as I remember, is the 'Trinity Sight' scenario system of Suikoden III (which is secretly one of the best PS2 RPGs). But that was played on a much larger and more ambitious scale. And it had duck-people. Aaaanyway...

Really, I love Dragon Quest IV (and by extension, VIII) for the aforementioned charm and old fashioned story telling. There's just something about the feel of the game, from the gorgeous 2D graphics to the animated-with-plenty-of-personality sprites to the phenomenal soundtrack and wonderfully retro sound effects to the imaginative and clever new translation...all of it works for me, plain and simple. The gameplay may not be ambitious, the battle system may not have as much depth as certain Final Fantasy titles, but that's OK. Nothing about Dragon Quest IV, in this day and age, is attempting to be revolutionary even if, for the time, it was an amazing game. The story line may be simplistic and cliched by today's standards, but you can boil almost anything down to the same few stories. Hero save the world, the end. The important thing it that it's told well, and Dragon Quest IV manages to do that.

I will confess that I was more excited to play Dragon Quest V and VI than IV mainly because they were the contemporaries of Final Fantasies IV, V, and VI, which are the console RPGs I most associate with moving the genre forward during the 16 bit era. From what I've read, they're just as charming as Dragon Quest IV but have deeper gameplay/character building systems, too. Yet in playing Dragon Quest IV, I've really come to appreciate it as its own entity as well as an important touchstone in the jRPG genre. I feel as though history has been re-written again. Final Fantasy IV is often touted as the point where story began to be emphasized in console RPGs while also being the first true "next gen" RPG...but Dragon Quest IV would be an even earlier example. It's not the story that it tells so much as how it's told; the characters and the scenario writing are miles beyond the characters and scenario writing of its then-contemporary Final Fantasy III. I suppose if we really wanted to split hairs, Phantasy Star I, which pre-dates both, had an ambitious story and characters even earlier...but whatever.

Dragon Quest IV is a really great game, and anyone interested in retconning the history of console RPGs as they think it happened should check it out.

The Videogame Solipsist: NES Halloween edition

(Note: I'm not going over every NES horror/monster game, just the ones I've played, in keeping with the theme of The Videogame Solipsist series)

Monster Party

This game bears the distinction of being probably the most bloody and horror-saturated NES game released in the U.S. The boxart has a group of classic movie monsters staring you down, albeit a bit more cartoony looking versions of them; the game itself doesn't have much to do with them so I suspect it was an attempt to American-ize the game. Actually, to tell you the truth I remember very little about this game except that the translation was appropriately bad and your baseball bat wielding character would sometimes turn into an ass kicking gargoyle. As seen above, halfway through the first level the scenery suddenly becomes more hell-ish and creepy. Which, now that I think about it, is kind of like a Silent Hill game. Here is a classic Flash Tub recreation of the awkward opening scene.

Castlevania (I, II, and III)

Castlevania I could be considered one of the first 'adult' games for the NES in that it wasn't edited or kiddied up for the American market. It was one of those games that, as a kid, you wanted to play because the older guys talked about it and it had vampires, mummies, demons, and other horror enemies in it. Sorta like how the first Mortal Kombat was considered 'cool' in its day for being 'mature' and bloody. Castlevania II is notorious for being badly designed and impossible to finish without a FAQ, but its problems have been covered better elsewhere. Meanwhile, Castlevania III is considered one of the best games in the series for its branching paths, multiple characters, and awesome music (though it's said the Japanese version has better music). I played the second Castlevania the most which probably explains why I didn't love the series until Symphony of the Night.

Rampage

Before I had a proper Godzilla game, I rented Rampage every so often and got out my frustrations on the buildings and humans therein. If I recall correctly, the NES version gave you infinite continues, though I also seem to recall that the game went on forever (or was just so long that it was too much to finish in one sitting). This series is forgettable because future entries were pretty much the same thing. While this mindless shallow gameplay worked in the 8 bit era, it didn't so much later on. Rampage holds the distinction of being one of the few NES games where you are, effectively, playing the bad guys and killing people instead of saving them.

Godzilla: Monster of Monsters/Godzilla 2: War of the Monsters

Oddly enough, the first Godzilla for NES was released at a time when the Godzilla series was mostly dormant in the U.S., coming out in the five year span between Godzilla 1985 and Godzilla Vs. Biolante. Not that the Godzilla series was ever a big deal in the States after the 70s, but whatever. The first Godzilla game was pretty unique: you moved Godzilla and Mothra around a hexagonal map, going through sidescrolling stages reminiscent of shoot-em-ups of the day when you landed on certain hexes. Eventually you had to contend with Godzilla film villains like Gigan and Mechagodzilla who were also moving around the map. Each 'map' represented a different planet and subsequently added more giant monsters to fight until you got to Planet X and had to fight through all the monsters to win. The game even had light RPG elements insofar as Godzilla and Mothra sometimes got stronger after battles with giant monsters. I played the crap out of this game and loved it at the time, though if I played it today I'm sure I would be frustrated due to the constant repetition of levels and bosses.

Meanwhile, the second Godzilla game for NES is a mess. It follows the NES rule of "second game in a series must be nothing like the first" as established by such sequels as Super Mario Brothers 2, Castlevania II, Final Fantasy II, Zelda 2, etc. In this case, the game is a turn based strategy affair in which you play as the military trying to fight off the giant monsters. Anyone who watches Godzilla movies knows that the military can't touch giant monsters and the game's difficulty is best described as appropriately-but-completely-un-fun. I only rented this game twice before giving up; it has that problem that some NES games do where it's too complicated for its own good and doesn't do a good enough job explaining its mechanics to the player. Especially if you're a little kid from the Midwest who just wants to see monsters destroy crap and fight each other.

Maniac Mansion

Admittedly, I never got more than 15 minutes into this game before turning it off or losing. However, it was the sort of thing one of your random neighbors or friends happened to own and it was unlike any other NES game you had ever played. A few years after playing Maniac Mansion my sister and I would get heavily into adventure games on the PC, a genre that arguably got its start with this game. I don't remember how the game played on the NES, given the lack of a mouse and limited set of buttons, but the infamous scene where you could microwave a hamster made up for it to my childish psyche. Of the games I've talked about in this post, it came the closest to establishing a creepy atmosphere. It felt a bit eerie and you never thought you were "safe", as if at any moment a creature might run into the room and eviscerate you.

How Impossible Art Thou, Bubble Bobble End Boss??

I was visiting a friend in Cleveland over the weekend, and his roommate ended up downloading Bubble Bobble on the Wii's Virtual Console. We both used to play the game like crazy as younglings, and proceeded to power through most of it without any trouble. Some of the stages are a bitch, but with persistence, we got to the boss. I vaguely remember fighting the boss as a kid, but what I didn't remember is that--like so many other NES games--the end boss is bitch hard.


Though there are better known bitch hard NES bosses, I'm surprised nobody brings up the dude from Bubble Bobble. Here's the set up: you have to get to the top of the stage to get those lightning bottles. They allow you to blow bubbles that, when popped, shoot lightning. The "80" you see at the top is how many hits it takes to bubble the last boss so you can then pop him.

As the boss cuts through the room in his 90 degree patterns, he throws out waves of bottles. GameFAQs informs me that the boss is known as "Super Drunk" which is kind of funny now that I think about it.

Not so funny is the way I can't beat this boss. Keep in mind I'm playing this on an emulator and a keyboard is hardly the ideal way to play the game, but I didn't fair much better with a partner.
You'll see this a lot. After 20 minutes of trying, the lowest I got him down to was 64.
The reason this boss is impossibly hard is a combination of the mechanics of the game and the unfairness of the fight. Quite often you'll find yourself cornered by the boss and wave of bottles, and the bubble blowing and popping is shaky at best best. You never feel like you have enough time or control to set up your attack as you'd like, so it's left up to luck how well you come out each attempt. Other than this boss, the game is about bubbling enemies, popping them, and trying not to get killed. There are also various items you can get to help you, and that experience is a lot of fun. The game's mechanics weren't really designed for a boss fight like this--at least, they don't feel like they were--so that might be a lot of it. Of course the fact it takes 80 hits to kill him--and then you can still screw it up if you don't get to him to pop his ballooned self in time--is just the cherry on top.

As children, we had all the time and bloody mindedness necessary to conquer challenges like this. However, nowadays I have neither time nor bloody mindedness for unfair, rigged crap like this. For its time, Super Drunk was par for the course, but seen through modern eyes he is an antiquated game design element that is both difficult and difficult for bad reasons.

The Videogame Solipsist: Playstation

If the NES made strides toward turning videogames into a mainstream form of entertainment, and the Genesis tried to make videogames cool, then the Playstation was the system that combined these goals and succeeded at doing both. This success was due as much to the actions of Sony as it was the botched handling of the Saturn and the failure of Nintendo to see the future (or, given their continued reticence in the online arena, a failure to do anything about the future).

It's easy to forget that the dominance of the Playstation was neither assured nor rapid. Launched in the fall of 1995, the system really didn't start to see any great games until 1997, by which point it was more than a bit sobering to compare its game lists and upcoming releases to the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn. However, I don't think anyone was really 100% sure about the Playstation until that time. Though it had the massive Sony corporation backing it, almost everyone assumed that Nintendo would clean up in that generation just as they had before. As kids and/or young adults, we didn't have any idea of the background to what was happening: the expense of producing carts vs. the inexpensive Playstation CD format; the arrogance and unfriendliness of Nintendo to third party developers vs. Sony's open arms; the generally crap N64 hardware vs. the easy to program for and great design of the Playstation. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think we could be forgiven for blindly believing Nintendo's promises and being suspicious of Sony. As some have pointed out, this was the era of failed CD systems like 3DO and Sega CD, and the Playstation felt like more of the same.

By 1997, though, we all knew that the N64 was going to be Nintendo's ballgame and the Playstation had everything else you could possibly want. Everyone kept their N64 around for those--admittedly--brilliant first party Nintendo titles twice a year and spent the rest of the time focused on the Playstation. Which, as I just said, had everything else you could possibly want, including 'cool' mature titles like Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy VII. It even had things you never knew you wanted, like the cult classic Parappa the Rapper, a rhythm game that, one could argue, helped pave the way for the success of Guitar Hero in the U.S. Of course, the Playstation also had all the best racing games, sports games, action games, practically every RPG of that generation (if you didn't import Saturn titles, anyway), fighting games, stealth action (Metal Gear Solid, hello), and even some shoot-em-ups.

Bizarrely enough, all of my friends continued to drink the Nintendo cult Kool Aid during this era. I guess their own biological clock interest in videogames coincided with Nintendo, so they only needed two or three games a year. As for me, I jumped unto the Sony ship in the winter of 1998. After being unable to obtain a copy of Zelda: Ocarina of Time--the one and only game that I felt could satisfy what I wanted on the N64--I wandered over to the Playstation case in Target and I couldn't lie to myself anymore. I wanted a Playstation. Funnily enough, I didn't end up playing through Ocarina of Time until just before the release of Wind Waker on Gamecube, and I know that if I had managed to get a copy of Ocarina of Time, it would only have delayed my Playstation purchase for so long.

There are a handful of factors that made me want a Playstation--the cool factor, the relatively cheap(er) game prices, the variety of titles, the novelty of new gameplay experiences like Parappa or Metal Gear Solid--but the main one was RPGs. Though it runs neck and neck in my heart with the SNES for having both the most and best RPGs, there's no denying how much the Playstation did for popularizing and expanding the RPG market in the U.S. This is largely due to the success of Final Fantasy VII, but since the install base of the Playstation grew so large, companies like Atlus and Working Designs were willing to risk bringing obscure RPGs over because they could probably turn a profit. I know that I bought at least a few RPGs for each year the Playstation was active, and not all of those were Square titles. So it became a positive Catch 22: more people were buying RPGs because more RPGs were being released, and more RPGs were being released because more people were buying them.

Life during the Playstation era was good, but we all still had eyes out for the next batch of consoles. During 1998, we began to hear about Sega's next console, the Dreamcast, which would be released in the U.S. on Sept. 9, 1999. A little over a year later, the Playstation 2 was released, and about a year after that, the Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Gamecube would both hit shelves. Though the Playstation 1 era wasn't officially over until 2003, when Final Fantasy Origins (the last significant release by my reckoning) was released in the U.S., it only truly had us for a full 4 years (I'm counting 1997-2001 as the height of the PS1 era) before we started to move on. I kept buying and playing Playstation games, but in the holiday season of 2000 I got a Dreamcast, and a bit over a year later, I got a Playstation 2, at which point I traded in my Playstation due to the PS2's backwards compatibility.

In the end, one could just as easily make the argument that the original Playstation was the most significant console ever released as they could that the NES was. I still tend to bow to the NES, but I do have a lot of nostalgia and rose tinted memories of the Playstation. Though history has been continually less kind to the Nintendo 64 and its games (and the less said of Saturn in the U.S., the better), I would argue that the majority of PS1 games still hold up, and that's saying quite a lot in an industry that moves as fast as videogames.

The Videogame Solipsist: NES

Oh my my, oh hell yes (image taken from VGmuseum.com)

I must have gotten the NES in '88. It was for my 4th birthday, and I'll always remember this because while my parents had gotten me the NES my grandparents on my Mom's side had gotten me an electric racecar track. While I played with the latter for 15 minutes or so while my Dad set up the NES, it would--obviously--never become a fixture for me. It was as if my entire future were set up then and there as a choice of toys: become the cool kid racing cars or become the Nintendo nerd.

My first memory of the NES was simply trying to get past the first enemy in Mario. Certainly we messed around with Duck Hunt but Mario held us transfixed. The coordination it took to somehow defeat the relentless Goomba seemed like a mountain I could never hope to climb; this also marked the last time my Dad would ever play a videogame, let alone be better at it than me. Only he could get to the end of the level at first, and my sister and I were jealous.

Still, it was an amazing new toy. A game you played on the TV--yet it wasn't just a game. You could put other game cartridges into it, too, not unlike tapes in a VCR. I honestly don't remember when I began to get other games, or what those were, but it seemed like everyone you knew had a Nintendo back then and different games to try. Eventually you rented scores of them from videostores--in the end I probably only owned a dozen or so games, but must have played a hundred or so more.

Actually, that was the big thing about the NES: its ubiquity. There were so many games for the damn thing that I eventually played something from every genre even before I began to use genre distinctions. Dragon Warrior was baffling until years later when I played Shining Force on the Genesis and learned about "levels" in terms of character power and not what stage you were on. Anyway, all my friends and neighbors had it and we would help each other on games. I'll always remember how my older neighbor Adam got really far into the first Zelda and during one summer used to come over every day and help me through it. Funnily enough, when his sister had a birthday party once, I spent most of it playing a gift for her: Rad Racer. Even then, I liked doing things alone--please, resist the urge to make the obvious joke here.

As for the games I played...well, this would be a really long post if I went through them all. Suffice it to say that the obvious ones--Zeldas, Marios, whatnot--were all amazing and mindblowing. Oddly, even back then I found Metroid obtuse and frustrating, though one of my friends insisted it was the best game ever. I remember playing games competitively and co-operatively for the first time on the NES, too, which was just as fun as playing them alone--if not more so. This was also during the era when you didn't scour websites every few hours to see if the Smash Brothers date had slipped; you pretty much heard about games from Nintendo Power or clerks at the store or video rental place and that was it. I recall the first Turtles game being a total bitch to find, both because of its popularity and the fact you couldn't find it to buy anywhere because nobody knew if it was out or not. Of course this was before everyone realized that the game was harder than a pair of diamond testicles and controlled like utter shit.

The end of the NES was particularly interesting to me because people weren't really sure what to do. The assumption amongst adults seemed to be "hey, this thing was supposed to be like a VHS tape player!! You're just supposed to get new games, not new systems!!" Sometime in 1992 or 1993 I got a Sega Genesis because most of my friends had it and the games looked so much better than the NES. For some reason, the SNES didn't interest us. About this time the NES began to start into the era of "blow into the end of it, blow into the machine itself, cut yourself and swear a blood oath to Yamauchi" in order to get the damn thing to work. But with time, the NES became a very fondly remembered piece of hardware which we would all dig out from time to time for nostalgia's sake. The majority of the games don't hold up as well anymore, partially because as kids we had no critical faculties, but enough of them do to make the system still worth playing.

Except that my grandma sold my NES and 5 games for like $15 at a garage sale in the mid 90s. I think it was revenge for ignoring the electric racecars.

It's fun to watch other people play hard videogames (click this, you idiot)

I didn't have time to write much today because I recently discovered the stuff that the Goons at Something Awful sometimes post in their Let's Play threads. http://www.letsplayarchive.com

Anyway, the first Turtles game is fucking hard as hell, and it's fun to watch somebody else get past the stupid dam level. But this video is of the player failing the final level over and over, with hilarious results. Enjoy.