It is difficult to not look at my life from the past and not feel diminished in some way. The siren song of nostalgia is a difficult to tune resist, as I find myself feeling more isolated and alone than I have in years. I speak with fewer people on a regular basis these days. I have fewer recent conversations in all of my communication channels. I have no weekly events except the one I have laboriously scraped together every Sunday. I barely have the energy to even think about making any kind of positive changes to my life, let alone actually making any changes. I am in a rough patch and the thought that yesteryear was better is a difficult one to deny when I am watching the sun set while I fill up my water bottle for my final hour of work as the building settles into silence and darkness on a Friday evening. I am not the only one working still, but, like me, we all work in isolation and silence, largely unaware of each other’s presence. I do not know their life situations, but a part of me wonders if they, too, have little waiting for them but a trip home and a quiet weekend doing their own things. Sure, I’ll do some grocery shopping and get my weekly takeout before I settle into my apartment for another weekend, but that’s not much of a social life. The events I have this weekend will hopefully keep me from falling into the silence and isolation I’m increasingly familiar with these days, but it’s little comfort as I feel the building’s heat shut off and the temperature begin to drop while I’ve still got work to do.
Continue readingNostalgia
Modern Game Opinions Poisoned By Rampant Nostalgia
Today, as I took a break from the frenetic pace of my work day and turned my mind toward what I should write for today’s blog post–I landed on writing about my time listening to A More Civilized Age and watching The Clone Wars as a part of my foray into media review and discussion podcasts, a topic I will now be addressing another day–I remembered my first foray into media discussion podcasts and why I not only fell off the train but stayed away from all of them for multiple years. In fact, the only reason I’ve gone back is because the idea behind the current run of Media Club Plus (which I recommend more strongly than I’ve ever recommended anything), of watching Hunter x Hunter with someone who hasn’t watched much anime at all, was so charming that I couldn’t deny myself the opportunity to follow some of my favorite podcasters on this particular journey. It took a lot to overcome the reason I stopped listening, a reason that seems pretty trivial and small when you consider it on its own, but this reason was the final straw of a growing resentment that had been building for a while. You see, the podcast I listened to back then (merely because it cross-polinated with other stuff I listened to) was the video game review podcast “The Besties.”
Continue readingUnpacking The Past
Recently, my younger sibling (the middlest of us middle siblings) brought me the last of my things from my parents’ house. A lot of it was model train stuff that used to belong to my dad and that now belongs to me for reasons I don’t remember (I probably said I’d take it when he mentioned planning to throw it out sometime a decade or so ago), but this delivery also included a bunch of the seasonal decorations that had been given to me in my childhood and all of my “baby books” as my family called them (pretty much anything for kindergardeners and younger). I had a pretty impressive collection (all of us did), but I think I might have held onto mine the best. I was always the kid most interested in building my book collection. I reread things the most. I enjoyed having them since, with one exception, books were never forbidden to me in a household where every other piece of media I ever acquired had to be vetted by my parents to make sure it was appropriate for me. Which is funny, since books wound up being some of the most subversive stuff I ecountered as a kid in a lot of ways, some of which weren’t always terribly constructive or thought-provoking. I mean, I remember tearing pages out of my Dragon Ball manga because some of the art showed a woman’s breasts and I knew I’d lose all access to manga (which had somehow fallen under the blanket approval of books in my parents’ minds) just as well as I remember how Fullmetal Alchemist taught me to be more critical of authority. Or how Tuck Everlasting taught me that maybe endless anything wasn’t actually something I should desire (which laid the groundwork for me questioning the faith I was raised to accept without thought) and how Hatchett taught me how to start fires without matches.
Continue readingMy Return To Kirby’s Dream Land
One of the latest Nintendo Online subscription perks added after the latest Nintendo Direct in February is a collection of Game Boy and Game Boy Color games. As someone who first got their start on a good old Game Boy Pocket, I was looking forward to indulging in a bit of nostalgia, especially because the games are all fairly short and quick to play (by today’s standards, especially). Opening it up after it finished download was like finding my collection of Game Boy games that vanished when I was nine or ten. All of my earliest gaming memories, save Pokémon, were staring back at me from my TV. I had a difficult time picking what to play first but eventually settled on Kirby’s Dream Land. As I launched the game and started playing pretty much immediately, I felt a level of familiarity I hadn’t expected. After all, it has been over two decades since I last played the game.
Continue readingComplicated Recollections of Kirby 64
As a small festive gift for myself, I decided to purchase the expansion pass to my Nintendo Online subscription. I already had the only DLC in the pack for a game I own, thanks to my hefty playtime on Animal Crossing, but I was excited by the idea of playing a bunch of my favorite Nintendo 64 games without needing to do my usual amount of coaxing, constant saving, and sacrificing to the Nintengods required to use my old, dusty, beat-up N64. I haven’t looked at it the same since that time I was playing through Paper Mario, got all the way through a save-less dungeon and boss fight combo, and then had the game crash/N64 shut off AS I WAS OPENING THE SAVE SCREEN TO SELECT A FILE TO SAVE TO. Definitely not still mad about that one. The only classic the expansion pass is missing that I feel a hankering to replay is Donkey Kong 64 and I’m used to ignoring that one since my old copy of the game doesn’t seem to work very well.
Continue readingThis Game was the Very Best
All hyperbole and theme song references aside, Pokemon Blue was my introduction to handheld gaming and set me up for a lifetime of fun. It holds a very special place in my heart and I will always remember standing in my backyard, on the deck my dad had recently built (with the assistance of my uncles) while I powered on my very own copy of the game. I remember seeing the large, turtle-monster with the cannons sticking out of its back and thinking that was the coolest thing ever. I, of course, picked Bulbasaur as my starter Pokemon because a frog-plant monster seemed even cooler. Also, one of my friends said it got this move called solarbeam and, at the time, that was the most badass thing I could think of. Fire blast was pretty standard and hydro pump sounded kinda dull because my dad was a civil engineer and hydro pumps were things that just moved water around, so Bulbasaur was clearly the best option. Thus began my deep and abiding love for the grass type starter. The only Pokemon game since then where I’ve ever picked one of the other options has been Gen II (Silver/Gold/Crystal/HeartGold/SoulSilver) when I picked Cyndaquil because I was watching the anime at the time and Cyndaquil was my favorite of Ash’s Pokemon.
To get the first part of this nostalgia trip under way, I honestly miss the old days. Back before the internet made it possible to nail down the exact appearance percentage of all the Pokemon in every clump of grass, all you had was your friends. You found everyone with a version of the game, red or blue, and compared notes about where you found each Pokemon. Eventually, someone splurged for a walk-through and then everyone passed it around, trying to figure out where to find the best Pokemon. Then someone got a link cable and you all clamored to trade with each other until someone finally captured all 150 Pokemon, earning them the neighborhood crown until someone else revealed the secret to getting Mew. I was never the first to catch them all, for any version or generation of the game, and I’d never gotten a Mew in my life until Pokemon Go came out, but I was one of the best at figuring out where to get all the pokemon or remembering how to use the glitches so you could use Master Balls on Safari Zone Pokemon.
Back in Gen I, and even in Gen II, the games seemed so much simpler and more appealing. There was no meta to care about, no one even knew IVs or EVs existed, and everyone who tried a link battle with their friends inevitably lost to the other person’s team of level 100 Pokemon or their level 100 Mewtwo, specifically in the battles where we agreed no one would us Pokemon trained up using the Rare Candy glitch since they’d always pretend they’d leveled him up honestly and nothing beat a level 100 Mewtwo even with Same Type Attack Bonus boosted moves (Parasect was your best bet, but even that couldn’t hack it with a forty level difference). Back then, the games told a story and we got to watch the world and the people inside it change from one game to the next and even battle our previous player once we beat all of Silver or Gold.
Even setting aside the “crotchety old man” stuff, I miss the wild rumors that would circulate about the games. The wild speculation we all engaged in about Lavender Town and the ghost Pokemon you fought. The first Pokemon games coincided with my friends and I starting to get our first opportunities to access the internet and one of us inevitably came across some of the original “creepypasta” rumors about the first Pokemon game and we’d delightfully terrorize each other with stories about the old man in Lavender town killing all your Pokemon or the horrors of Missingno if you actually capture it. We all learned glitches we could use to duplicate Pokemon and convinced gullible people to do them since they had a tendency to delete all your save data instead.
The thing was, there was a community around the games and it lasted for years. Even as my friends and I get the new games, the feeling just isn’t the same. I’m still the best when it comes to knowing where to find Pokemon and I tend to have the highest Pokedex completion percentage, but the way the games are set up now makes competition pointless because you either cheat, trade your rare Pokemon away, or go to events to get limited legendary Pokemon that aren’t available through normal gameplay. Right now, there’s a “year of legendaries” event going on and my initial plans of taking advantage of it every month quickly fell apart as life intervened. Now I have no way to get those Pokemon unless I trade away something far rarer since everyone who has one knows they can ask for anything they want because it’s easier to restart and replay the entire game than get a specific event Pokemon. Sure, Mew was an event Pokemon and Celebi was as well, so it’s been going on since the beginning, but it’s so incredibly difficult to get them all now that it would take years to get all the event Pokemon and I don’t even want to know how much many in travel expenses.
I definitely enjoy the new games, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like I enjoyed Pokemon as a whole more back when I didn’t know as much and when I had a little less information available to me. When things were simple and I played under the covers of my bed using the plug-in game light I told my parents was for car rides, Pokemon seemed like this amazing world that I would step into and explore. Now, because of the meta, because of Pokemon natures, and because of the ever pressing need to figure out where I need to go each month to get event Pokemon, it’s much less a world for me to explore and much more of a part-time job that doesn’t reimburse your travel expenses. I’ll still play each one as it comes out (though I might take a pass on the “Let’s Go” series coming out soon) because I still get hours and hours of entertainment out of it, not to mention assistance with my insomnia issues, but I miss the days when it felt more real to me.
To once again continue the theme of reflecting on old games, today’s post is about Pokemon! Listen to me wax nostalgic, play the part of a grumpy old main yelling about change, and consider the pitfalls of the more modern games.
I’d Like to Craft a Clever Title, But I Emptied This Mine Years Ago
Like many people in this day and age, I played Minecraft. I got in fairly early, in its second year, and enjoyed it for a long time before the increasing variety of changes took it from a basic building and destruction game to the first of many “block games” that eventually changed to fit the mold of all the games based on it. The path it has taken is a weird one, but I kind of get it from a developer’s perspective. This game spawned a whole style of animation and gameplay and so many people used the low graphic style to create their own games that it wound up becoming the head of a movement it wasn’t a part of. Minecraft was just one more resource collection and building game, though it did eventually become the most popular one.
(Please read the following in your best “crotchety old man who just finished yelling at some kids who kicked their ball into his yard” internal voice.)
Nowadays, the game is full of extra critters, you can get experience points, there’s some kind of story mode that I don’t understand at all and definitely don’t trust, there’s magic and potions and flying now, and the whole point of building giant square buildings out of cobblestone so you’ve had a safe place to hide from the creepers while you waited for the forest fire you accidentally started to finally burn itself out several “chunks” away has been lost! The game doesn’t feel anything like the game I used to love! I used to spend many nights quietly toiling away in my mines so I could build mine cart paths that automatically took me from one mine to another and then to my base with the simple flip of a few switches and now I can’t spend any time in the mines without having to deal with some kind of tall goon that teleports over to me and silently screams as he beats me to death with whatever block he picked up before I made eye contact with him! These are the dying days of building games and I’ll always be angry that we were abandoned by the original creator of the game!
(Thank you for your patience. We now return to being a reasonable adult. Please read the following in whatever internal voice is most natural to you.)
Because Minecraft was a big part of my life for so many years, to the point where I have music I can’t listen to without being transported back to Minecraft worlds that no longer exist, there’s a part of me that feels like the paragraph above. At the same time, I appreciate where Minecraft has gone since then and I think it is doing a great job of serving its target audience. I might not be its target audience anymore, but that’s alright. My youngest sister loves the game and the adaptation its gone through to fit on mobile touchscreen platforms has really opened it up to many people who never would have otherwise played it. It went from being a game enjoyed mostly by hardcore gamers who enjoyed it’s retro feel to being played and enjoyed by millions of different people from all walks of life. I love it when games find a way to bring themselves into popular culture in a big way and I’m glad Minecraft found a way to survive the burnout of its creator. Not a lot of games are that lucky.
The game doesn’t really appeal to me beyond its basic roots. I played through the advent of random villages, temples, and ocelots, but I it became more and more important to maintaining my own projects to have a variety of resources and connections to the local area. I needed to be able to defend myself against enemies that would become more numerous and dangerous the longer I stayed in the area. If I found a village, I needed to defend it constantly from zombie invasion or expand it to the point where it could defend itself. If I wanted to travel the world to take advantage of the resources available in the various biomes, I needed horses which were also only available in certain areas. I had to have farms and herds of animals to provide food for myself, armor if I wanted to survive the constant need to leave my well-defended areas, and ready access to lava if I ever actually wanted to dispose of stuff permanently. It got complicated and they even took away my ability to rapidly clear the land through forest fires by limiting how far fires could spread. As they added more new elements and story to the game, my interest waned and other games took up the time Minecraft once did.
The game I loved is still in there and I keep the game updated in case I ever want to play it again, but I’ve got other things to spend my time on now. I miss the days of simple mining before I couldn’t spend more than an afternoon mining without running into some kind of ridiculous giant cavern filled with long falls, monster spawns, and resources that are more trouble than they’re worth. I’m sure the story modes are fun and there’s still a lot of joy to be had exploring the worlds that spawn whenever you start a new game, but I just don’t have the desire to catch up on a few years of updates so I can figure out how to trim out everything I don’t want and just focus on the basic resource collection and building elements. Maybe there’s a stripped-down game mode or someone has the install files for a previous version of the game I can use, but I haven’t found anything in my google searches. I’m alright with that, though. I’d probably only play for a few evenings or afternoons and then stop again. Nostalgia only gets you so far and I don’t really play many open-ended games without my friends any more. I get too bored and I’m pretty sure I’d wind up setting Minecraft aside to play Destiny 2 with my friends. I just don’t really have the desire to spend five hours building a castle no one is going to see.
I know servers are easier than ever to set up, but I don’t think I could convince my friends to start playing it again. There’s only so much time in a day and, even if we all had two hours a day just for Minecraft, I’m pretty sure my friends would rather use it for something else. It’s difficult to go back to old games these days, when there’s always something new and exciting just around the corner.
Tire Swing
There was a tire swing here once, hanging from a tree on a hill.
The swing was a flying machine, carrying its passengers from the ground into the sky, captained by a laughing child as it flew so high they could touch the clouds. It was a portal to another world, used to pay the entry fee to a land no one but they ever found. It was a seat for eating ice cream on warm summer nights as fireworks exploded above the horizon, cradling its occupant in a world suspended and protected from all the problems of home.
The tree that held it was alone, but stronger for it. It was a stopping point on a speedy descent, providing a place to hide for both children avoiding baths and easter eggs in the spring. A home to birds and squirrels, it stood as a testament to nature’s ability to thrive even in difficult places. It was shade and music on windy summer days.
Now, they are gone. There is nothing left but a bit of moldy rope, a hoop of vulcanized rubber, and the rotting husk of a tree choked by creeping plants and parasites. Long before they fell into disrepair, becoming only their constituent parts, their magic faded. They could no longer be used to hide or to escape and slowly other things took them over. They became only a tire swing hanging from a tree on a hill.
Now, they are that no longer. Now, they are destined for a dumpster as their home is plowed over and prepared for a new life as something else. New seeds are planted and new life is laying its foundations.
There was a tire swing here once, hanging from a tree on a hill. Now, they will become something new.