Living in the past

I own an Xbox360, a Wii, 2 gaming PC's, a gaming laptop and a 106" HD Projector that takes up one entire wall of my appartment. I play guitar hero 2 for more hours a day than I sleep and I enjoy every minute of it. I played WoW and leveled 2 characters all the way through and geared em with hawt epix. This post ins't about how awesome I am or how cool all my electronics are. The truth is, that with all these games, next gen systems and obsurdly large gaming screen, I still find myself connecting my NES and SNES to an old 29" TV with only coax inputs and no RCA jacks.

I can't count how often I've loaded up Link for SNES and just played straight through, non-stop no saves no resets and got that beautiful end screen with straight 0's. I play Super Mario Brothers 3 with my buddies (luigi ftw) just to see how far we can go without dieing or missing a single secret, but no warps, warps are for the weak. My characters in Final Fantasy 3(6) were all 99, and then I deleted the file and started again, but named everyone after a type of food (Celeste was Hotdog) and then deleted the file again and renamed them all spanish names (Locke makes a great Julio).

With all the new games and advanced platforms around its still those games that I played when I was like 6 that can entertain me for hours on end. I guess this explains the success of the virtual console and the Xbox live marketplace, but there's something else about the good ol' days that keeps people coming back. I wonder if its the fact that I played these when I was young and enjoyed them then that I still enjoy them. Do new gamers these days that grew up in the age of PS2 as their first console even care about the 8-64bit consoles and games? I guess with every generation there are defining games, like Halo is the new Bond and Final Fantasy 12 is the new Final Fantasy 3. I'll keep playing these new games as long as they keep producing them and keep buying your new consoles msoft, nintendo and sony so you can keep building your solid gold houses and rocket cars, but I guarantee that in 10 years, a controller with a dpad and four buttons will still seem like the more obvious choice for a little R and R over your mind sensing motion controlled, thought anticipating helmet controllers, although that would be pretty cool.