Topic: The good old days

Does anyone else out there long for the good old days of gaming? The 8 bit and 16 bit eras? Maybe its just because om getting on a bit now, a while 30 years of age, but i would love to go back to the days when games consoles were just that! Ive got a 360 and ps3 as well as the wii, but i really cant be arsed with the whole "use them as the centre of your media centre rubbish", dont get me wrong, its amazing what they can do nowdays. But i dont really want a console that does everything apart from satisfy you when your horny! As i said maybe its just cos im older now that i want to relive my childhood a bit. So does anyone else out there want to go back to the days of mario v sonic?

Not really.

Most of those games have dated badly, we can still play those games if we like and there's lots of exciting new developments all the time. The golden age of gaming is always 'next year'.

You say 'go back to the days of Mario Vs Sonic' as if those days aren't still with us anyway on the latest consoles.

Play NSMBW, or download Sonic or Sonic II on Xbox Live.

Those days are all packed up neatly in a box for you, waiting for you to play...

I'll take some more 8 and 16 bit games myself. I agree that the 8 bit games are dated a bit, but the 16 bit games are still....can I call them playworthy? Yes, playworthy they are, and playworthy they will always be.(IMO) The 8 bit has aged, but come on? The old toaster had some pretty great games.

kinda but i love killing online not just on the hardest mode in doom

You still can go back, my Virtual Console collection is massive and I buy nearly every arcade game collection that comes out. Heck the only reason Arcade Zone got a review is because I happened to look at the box art on Amazon and couldn't believe they put remixed versions of 8-bit Activision games on it so I simply had to buy it!

I do agree though, that the idea of playing videos off my games console has little appeal, but the BBC iPlayer Channel is actually really cool when there's nothing on the telly. Great quality and I can pause and rewind it. I never rent movies any more, so if Nintendo started selling movies for download of similar quality I'd be interested. Playing films on discs, though, nah. I don't care about Blu-Ray and I've got two DVD players -- I wouldn't use my computer to watch DVDs, so why would I use my games console for it?

When I was eleven, 3D was all the rage. It was amazing seeing all those seemingly endless worlds in full 3D. It blew the old 2D games out of the water.

Nowadays, it's all about whether you can play online while downloading six music videos and still checking up on your stocks every five minutes. Can't we just do that on a PC?

I grew up in the 3D age, but get my start with the Gameboy Color/Advance and Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, so I've always had a fondness for the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, and now with emulators and the VC, I get to relive those years all over again.(or rather, live them for the first time in their true form)

There's just something about this generation in particular that just doesn't seem to have the...spark(?) that the previous generations had. I have a Wii and 360, but in the end I just find myself playing all the old retro games, rather than the new ones, and when I do play the new ones, it's rare that they ever manage to hold my interest...granted, the portable games are still pretty good. Like having the 32-bit generation all over again.

I remember the first game I ever played might of been super mario world. To this day, mario brings back great nostalgia, especially the old super mario world artworks. I aslo remember playing donkey kong country, which was a masterpiece IMO. Gaming was great back then, masterpieces were more common back then they are now. Now, gaming is about how many people you can fit on online multiplayer, or if the game's graphics look like a mirror image of real life. I miss what gaming used to be.

Are you saying you want it to do that, too? I'm not sure even I want to imagine how that would work.

Well, theres the good old days for differant people. Some before and after the 8bit/16bit eras. I wasn't alive during the snes vs genesis days, and then there was my early years of life, where I missed out on the N64. So the good old days for me was during the cube's time (which was awesome!). But thanks to the Wii and its Virtual Console service, I am able to play some of the classic titles I missed. And today, some of those classics quickly became favorites.

I was born in 1988 when the NES was still selling and I was a 90s kid who loved Nickelodeon back when it was actually good and who could forget the SNES Vs. Genesis days. When I was 10, I got a lime green Game Boy Color with Pokemon Red and Blue, got the N64 later that Christmas with Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Boy, were things simpler back then, epically back in the 90s when cartoons didn't suck.

I own almost every game system ever released, so I can alway go back and play the older games (which I do quite often) if I want to enjoy "the good old days" Hell if they ever invent a time machine, I'm going back to the 16-bit era where I will remain. But I do enjoy modern games as well, so it's all good.

OP, I think you can find the good old days here:
http://www.ebay.com

Of course one can assume that you mean you wish companies were still pumping out new 8-bit and 16-bit games, which would certainly be awesome.
But wait - for the first time in several generations, a lot of companies are making old school games.
We have Mega Man 9 which looks and sounds like an 8-bit game.
Then we have other games with retro gameplay (but not retro graphics or sound): Boy and His Blob, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, all the Rebirth games, Contra 4, ...

This is a very cool era of video games imo

when i was very young my baby sitter introduced me to the super nintendo! sense they did not make games for it anymore because the N64 was the next big thing i still liked it and i loved super mario world and a link to the past. my uncle had a N64 and i got to play it when i was at his house. the first game i inserted was banjo kozoie and was actually the first game i beat-ed later that year my uncle let me have the N64 for a few years until my cousins wanted it back. i completed super mario 64/oceriana of time/banjo kozoie/and many more. a few years down the road i had asked my parents for a gamecube and my parents gave it to me when i got back from summer camp. i got 1 year of free rentals from Hollywood video i used most of them on rayman 3 :3 i was a very big pokemon fan when i was in cub scouts one day my friend was holding a gameboy advanced artic infront of us. we started doing pokemon tournaments with the gameboy advanced link cables. finaly i joined in on the party by buying the new gameboy advanced sp's unfortunately in 2004 a kid came into the meeting with a shiny new fat DS playing some metriod prime hunters and he let us see what it was like. i moved around alot and in Texas a new friend of mine introduced me to the wii. this was in 2006. i finally got my first DS lite in 2007 with my first game being pokemon pearl. i moved again and finally got a wii for Christmas of 2007. my dad made some of the funniest mii's i have seen and he owned me in wii sports bowling. this year i got the DSI and i love it! i also got a few new games latter on like clubhouse games and some dsiware titles.

wow time flies when your a TEENAGER :3

Right there with you, LoveChild, wanna go halves on a flying DeLorean?

I bypassed the Japanese 8-bit/16-bit eras (I had friends with NES, TG-16, SMS, Genny, SNES so I didn't miss out completely), but I understand the sentiment. I do watch the odd bit of iPlayer on the Wii and I would like some kind of media streaming/rental app, but I agree the whole "media centre" concept doesn't work for me. I have my music on my computer and I can see that because it's convenient for uploading to my iPod and can be played for background, but ripping my DVDs? No, it's really not worth it since they're in the same room and I don't need instant access to them.

I'm hoping the next gen will be all about game downloads and we'll be back to a little box without moving parts that plays games. I like games on disc and the CD/DVD mediums have enabled some great things, but there is something to be said for a console design that's just a brick with a slot (in this case it will be an SD slot). WiiWare is what really reminds me of "the good old days" thanks to the space and budget constraints we're seeing lots of small outfits coming up with some interesting stuff which is what I remember enjoying the most about the Atari VCS.

Go to ebay and by the old systems. That is what I did. There is a guy on ebay who mods top loading NES's with RCA outputs, improving picture quality. Definitely worth the little bit of extra money.

And you knew who you were, then / Girls were girls and men were men.

I don't want to go back to Mario vs. Sonic, I want to go back to seeing noted writers and journalists doing commercials comparing one little block character to a slightly bigger little block character.

I was there, man. I seen things during the Intellevision/Atari wars that man shouldn't see. SNES/Genesis was N*gage/anything compared to that. When you bring in George Plimpton, you know s**t is gonna go down.