THE VERY BEST 5 Reasons We Love Retro Gaming

5. Games Were Simpler BACK The Day

Video games have unquestionably are more ambitious and impressive in recent years. When you look at the likes of The Last Of Us, you can't really overstate precisely how far video games attended since people were playing Pong forty-odd years back. But for all of the innovations within the medium, and for all your new fangled ideas and increasingly elaborate control schemes, there's something to be said for how much more self-explanatory things were in the games we played as kids.

Gaming today could be difficult for people minus the muscle memory that originates from years of dedicated gaming. Give your mum or dad a PS4 controller and when they're anything like mine they'll spend half the time playing the overall game looking down, attempting in vain to keep in mind where all the buttons are. Use the left analog stick to walk, hold X to jog, or tap X to sprint. L2 is aim and R2 is shoot, but R1 becomes shoot if you're driving because in an automobile R2 is the accelerator. R3 (that's when you click in the right analog stick) let's you look behind you, and to open the menu it is advisable to hold down the touch pad. And that is just portion of the control scheme for Grand Theft Auto 5, the most effective selling games of all time.

Even for seasoned veterans the increasing complexity of games may become a turn off. Super Mario World continues to be as intuitive as it was back 1990 as the inherently simple design and pick up and play nature of the overall game made it timeless. It is possible to provide a kid who's never played a Mario game the controller and within seconds they'll have worked out how exactly to play. This simplicity is an attractive concept, that is almost certainly area of the reason that retro games like Shovel Knight and Axiom Verge are so popular today. The simpler a game is to play, the more inclusive and immediate the fun. Retro gaming has that in spades, and that's the reason why I'm still playing Super Mario World twenty-six years after release.

#4. Retro Games Have Better Music

As gaming production values have increased over the years, we've seen the medium change in many ways. We made the jump to 3D, we now have voice acting, and elaborate cut-scenes tell complicated stories that rival those observed in television or on the silver screen. Games today feature fully orchestrated scores or soundtracks featuring popular music which are every bit as impressive as what we'd see in other mediums, nonetheless it feels as though we've lost something along the way, too.

I could still hum the theme music to Treasure Island Dizzy on the Commodore 64. I was playing that game nearly thirty years back and I haven't played it since that time (and I've still never beaten it, damn it) but I can still remember the theme music that plays in the background in its entirety. I played games the other day and I couldn't even let you know should they had music at all.

Due to simplicity of early games, and without voice acting to inform a tale, the music had to be good. Other than a few crummy sound effects, the music of the overall game was the only aural stimulation that the games provided. You may still find great game soundtracks today, however they seem few and far between when compared to the games of my youth. Mega Man, Castlevania, the early Final Fantasy games, and iconic titles like Zelda, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog - all of these featured highly memorable tunes that stick to us long following the last time we played them. superwin303 remember how the music for Commodore 64 classic Prince Clumsy changes when you save the princess by the end of the overall game like I was playing it yesterday. We can not really say that about Shadow of Mordor, can we?

#3. Games Used to Work Right Out of your Box

A very important factor that games from yesteryear unquestionably did better than the games of today is they, well, worked. You'd believe it should be a fairly fundamental aspect of any product released to the market, but it's truly staggering just how many games in 2016 ship broken, requiring either days or weeks of server tweaks to have the multiplayer working, or enormous day one patches to repair each of the bugs that managed to get onto the disc. Today, if you don't have a decent Web connection at home, some games are genuinely unplayable, and many more severely hampered.

Street Fighter V released earlier this season, with Capcom promising that the single player Arcade Mode, a staple of the series, will be open to download in July. Imagine if you don't have an Web connection? Well, then you have half a game. That isn't a problem we faced when Street Fighter II released on the SNES in 1991. In the past, we'd no Internet acting as a safety net for developers. Games had to work right from the box.

Going back and playing Global Gladiators today is as simple as popping the cartridge into your Genesis and turning on the power. It works now as it did then; exactly as it should, and without the fuss. This is one of the numerous advantages of retro gaming; if you the game and the hardware you're virtually good to go. You don't have to download drivers, or updates, or patches. You devote the game, and you play. Just like you should.

#2. Games Used to Be More of challenging

Today, anybody who keeps up to date with the latest trends in gaming will probably know of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and the reputation these games have for punishing difficulty. superwin303 flocked to the Souls series in droves, excited to play a title that challenged them and refused to carry their hands. There's no extended tutorial sections. There's little in the form of help. You can't pause. And every enemy could make mincemeat out of you if you don't learn their attack patterns and act accordingly. It's exciting for a casino game to provide us having an uphill struggle like this, but, I'm old enough to keep in mind a time when every game was like this. And worse.

Modern games have a tendency to spell things out to the player, often to an almost insulting degree. Popping a disc right into a PS4 in 2016 means looking forward to the install, then the day one patch, and when you finally get a controller in your hand you may spend the next two hours being walked through the first stages of the game such as a kid on his first day of school. Everybody likes a little bit of help now and again, but there's something to be said for just being thrown in at the deep end and being told to sink or swim.

#1. Nostalgia

Nostalgia might seem such as a cop out answer; after all, looking back on the past with rose tinted spectacles is often what fans of anything retro are criticized with. It's easy to dismiss nostalgia as a means of justifying the opinion that everything was just far better in your day, but the truth is that nostalgia can be an immensely powerful agent and it shouldn't be ignored.

Today, we watch rubbish movies and bemoan the utilization of obvious CGI, but we'll happily sit through Raiders of the Lost Ark and not bother mentioning that the melting Nazi at the conclusion looks like he's crafted from plasticine. We listen to the appalling pop music of our youths with a reflective smile on our faces while turning our noses up at Justin Bieber's latest video. And we'll discuss Final Fantasy VII as if it were second coming of Christ, completely ignoring each of the flaws in the overall game that we'd hang a modern game out to dry for. Nostalgia is really a strong enough influence to make us think that Sonic the Hedgehog was actually ever good. Now, that's serious.