The Little Nostalgia Machine

Wow, what year is it? Because over the course of yesterday I managed to finish Parasite Eve in one long marathon session. I’m pretty sure if it’s not 1998 there may be something the matter with me.

I can’t decide whether or not it bothers me that virtually my entire PSP library is comprised of remakes, ports, or re-releases of old games. On the one hand those old games were good, and the PSX section of my game collection is the only one I’ve ever gutted. Re-acquiring some of these old RPGs and things I swore I would never need to play again has been a pleasant experience I likely wouldn’t  have had otherwise.

On the other hand, sometime definitely seems… wrong about the idea of owning a system on which I only play new releases of old games. It’s like I’m having my developmental years sold back to me, $9.99 at a time over PSN.

I might be overthinking this. Sure, re-experiencing Parasite Eve is probably something I didn’t need a $249 system to do. But I did also pick up The 3rd Birthday, which is a brand new sequel and not a re-anything. I’ve only put a small amount of time into this so far, but it seems to be a kind of strange tactical RPG shooter thing. What struck me as most odd was the shredded, threadbare jeans Aya wears to the battlefield. It didn’t make sense at first, but then I realized that given the Parasite Eve timeline it’s entirely possible those are the same jeans she wore in 1997 during the events of the first game. Perhaps it’s her jeans, and not her genes, that are the source of her magic powers?

…okay, that was bad, even for me.

5 comments to The Little Nostalgia Machine

  • Issun

    “On the other hand, sometime definitely seems… wrong about the idea of owning a system on which I only play new releases of old games.”

    I’ve played maybe five minutes total of actual Wii releases on my Wii. The rest of my time on the system has been VC related. Although I intend to remedy that by getting to Mario Galaxy and especially A Boy and His Blob sometime this year.

  • DragonShadow

    I’ve often felt the same way and have the same dilemma. But I think it’s more my own preference of gaming in this case. On any console, I tend to buy remakes of old games (the FFIV remakes, the DragonQuest remakes, old games released on xbla, etc), or sequels to games I’ve previously liked, which may as well be remakes (megaman 9/10, dragon quest 9, pokemon games, etc).

    In the case of the PSX, those games are too damn flimsy. Anyone who had a younger irresponsible sibling knows the frustration of having your games become so scratched that they’re unplayable. In my case, these remakes/rereleases are for people like me, whose psx doesn’t even work anymore, and wants to play their old games again. I bought a PSP solely so I could play Final Fantasy Tactics again.

  • ShifterChaos

    Want to get this out there, and this is as good a place to say it.
    I just picked up a gamecube for $2.50 at a garage sale, and am about to case mod it into a portable device. Handheld windwaker here I come!

  • Aaron M

    I spent a good chunk of this weekend internally debating whether to go buy a PSP, primarily so that I could download old PSX RPGs and replay them. I ended up not doing so, but I fear I may end up at the store over lunch today…

Leave a Reply to ShifterChaos Cancel reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>