A few words about gamers, and believe me when I tell you I know whereof I speak: Gamers have a long memory when it comes to the games they play. Gamers can be fickle in nature, and more often than not they tend to be pack rats. Try getting a gamer to relinquish one of their old games or systems -- best of luck with that. I still have every game, and every system, I've ever owned (except for my PS1, which I lent to someone and never saw again).
Given my ongoing series of classic game reviews, it might not shock you to learn that in my free time, I'll sometimes hook up an old console and play some of my favorite games from back in the day. My PlayStation 2 has been plugged into one TV or another, basically continuously, for the last eight years. The old NES also comes out every so often; oddly enough, my pleasure on this is a friendly game of "Duck Hunt." Yeah, I rock that red zapper. Jealous?
This kind of nostalgia, I think most would agree, is pretty much harmless -- if we as a society can condone Civil War reënacters, I think we can find a way to tolerate gaming paleontologists, a group of which I am but a representative. A lot of us have emulators on our computer that let us play the games of old, games we never bought or never beat or maybe never lost. With a little work and a little luck, you can find some great games for your emulator, from both the classic and modern eras; PSP and DS games are sometimes up on the Web the same day they hit the market. Uh, not that I endorse this practice.
Anyway, the industry, in an effort to stop the dollar hemorrhage represented by piracy, has lately fallen into the habit of rereleasing old games for download, maybe with some cosmetic upgrades to sweeten the deal. For the most part I think that’s a load of hot BS. Gamers are usually pretty savvy about when companies are trying to bilk them, but for some reason a lot of us have gone in for these rereleases, when there are products out there much more deserving of our time and maybe money.
Let me break it down for you, so I don’t sound like a complete grouch about it. Take Xbox Live Arcade, for example. Usually they'll release an older game and hit you off with some perks like leaderboards and achievement points. That's cool and all, but the price is almost always higher than any reasonable person would consider fair. Oftentimes, you're spending too much money for a game you may have already owned, played and forgotten about. This time, though, it'll be hanging around taking up space on your console's memory.
This is something of an issue with the Wii, one of the worst offenders when it comes to putting older games in your face at a premium. I was at a friend of a friend's house recently; the guy was a bit younger than me, and he and his buddies were going on and on about all these great old-school Nintendo games on the Wii Shop Channel. I pointed out that you could just download these games for free, or whip out your old system and fire it up. Yes, I was THAT guy.
His reaction was a stupefied, "But I can play them on my Wii now."
To which I responded: "Yeah, you have to pay for them!"
He gave me a dumbfounded look and said, "So I'll just put it on my card."
There are a few things I find surprising about this exchange, but here's what caught me most off-guard: lots of gamers, apparently, really do have this kind of cavalier attitude about paying too much for things they could get for free. To my mind this can only mean they prize convenience over everything else (and have a highly specific idea of what "convenience" means), or they're genuinely unaware that they have other options.
I guess I should take myself down a notch, since I'm kind of guilty of the same thing. I did download "TMNT 1989 Classic Arcade" and "Double Dragon" when they dropped on Xbox Live. They looked great, but in each case, I spent maybe two days playing the game and then quickly forgot about it.
What it comes down to is this: gaming should move forward and not backward. The gaming industry should be more progressive than it is. I realize that for a lot of people, old-school games are a great thing to socialize around, and that for others, they provide an escape that nothing else resembles. I do understand this. But gamers should at least know their options, and not have to go around believing that every rerelease is worth their disposable income. Those download bills add up, often to sums that would net you a newer game, one that would let you appreciate how far gaming has come. If you want to play old games, get an old console on eBay and a bunch of games for cheap.
Another friend of mine and I sat down one day and did the math on how much he spent on downloads for Wii and Xbox. The price was outrageous, like "bail out the auto industry" outrageous. It's your money, I guess, if that's how you want to spend it, but games have to move forward.
