What Could Have Been
NO RAGRETS
These past few weeks I've been thinking about some of the video games I used to play as a kid, which led to me thinking about all the games I missed out on, too. Growing up, I only ever owned Nintendo consoles, and I really only was old enough to fully appreciate gaming by time the N64 rolled around, so there are a lot of cool experiences I totally ignored growing up because I was just enamored enough with Starfox 64 be a Nintendo fanboy but, fortunately, not enamored enough to become a furry. Granted, I'm thankful for those experiences I did have, but it does lead to me looking back wistfully on a past that never was.
Of course, the neat thing about old games is that you can just emulate them. It's easy and free, and it's always morally correct to do. In fact, if you're reading this, you should go download some old ROMs right now and play them with an emulator like RetroArch. Anwyway, since emulators are now available on iOS, I've been adding some old games to my iPad that I can play on trains and airplanes, or when I'm out and about and bored. This little development has allowed me to indulge in the sort of bizarro-nostalgia I've been having recently, and it's been fun!
Just today, I started playing Oddworld: Abe's Odysee and I'm really surprised at how charming it is. The art and sound direction are top notch, and something that feels like it could only come out of the 1990s. There's definitely an obvious, on-the-nose critique of capitalism, but there's a sort of directionless and eclectic quality to it all—the kind of mix of hope and hopelessness that comes from a newly post-Soviet world where, nevertheless, it seemed like maybe easy alternatives could be found or compromises could be made to reign in ruling class's worst impulses. It's naive, sure, but we all were at some point, weren't we?
It's a fun game, and I know for a fact that there are countless more like it; twenty-or-thirty-year-old pieces of history just waiting to be picked up again and brought back to life. Kind of like with music, it puts me in a dilemma: with how much good stuff is out there, how do I make time for new art? I don't really have a good answer to that just yet; I'm kind of just farting around on Steam and Bandcamp to try and find new games and musical artists, but I still feel a little behind the times when I talk to my younger friends and acquaintances. I guess that's just the price I pay for getting older and, I guess, wiser? Who knows.
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