As I’ve gotten older as a player, I have found myself dropping some eras of gaming that I used to be nostalgic for. One of them is the 8-bit era, the NES days. I have played some of the best that system had to offer and I will never say that system didn’t have any good games.
I’ve just fallen out of fashion with it because maybe it’s in part that nearly all of the video game-based content I watch and find, tend to orbit a little around 8-bit too much. Most of the time it’s because content creators were born in that era and no arguments can be made.
But I’ve grown exhausted from the oversaturation and sometimes over-glorified favoritism of 8-bit that I just have difficulty revisiting again. I’ve forgotten to mention how many indie games lean hard on the 8-bit aesthetic.
Another era of gaming that I am also finding myself falling out of favor for is 16 bit. This applies to consoles more than anything that was made in 16 bit. Having a hard time revisiting that era for some of the same reasons.
I’m more of a 6th Gen/Arcade player type.
There was a time in my life when my friends and I played a whole lot of Halo, particularly Halo 2 and 3. I never played online but we would have essentially LAN parties where multiple people lugged over their TVs and consoles and play for hours. It was a blast. In college Halo was the de facto way to spend Friday night if nothing else was going on.
Strangely enough though I feel no desire to go back to that.
Halo 1 was the first game I ever played online. I played a lot of it.
But I was a very different person then, and replaying it now reminds me of how stupid I was (because I got into a clan that was very based on that kind of person) and the internal ick just his a fever pitch and ruined the game for me.
I never played 2 since that was on Vista and I never went back to it after finally getting Win 7.
After that the series just felt tainted to me. When I first tried it on a console it was really weird with the control setup. I was very used to hundreds of hours on Perfect Dark with the default controls. Having a second stick and rearranging what hand controlled what bent my mind in knots for a while. But it ended up making more sense that way (as you can easily tell by how much it caught on- not saying Halo pioneered it, but it was my first experience with it).