If anyone has seen Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation episodes they'll know that he is largely polemic. Here's a good example of what I mean:

"Nostalgia is a mouthful of balls, children will like anything; the stupid diminuiative cunts and you weren't any different. Games, or should i say "the potential for games" has only gotten better as technology advances in indirect proportion to the worsening of your memory."

He goes on to say that when the gaming kids of today grow up they will all say that halo 3 is better than the games of their time and they will be wrong. He then continues his argument saying,

"I played both Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Sunshine before I played Ocarina of Time and Super Mario 64 and I thought the first two were better in every buggering way."

So do you guys agree? Are the games of today better than the games of yesterday? Are we all blinded by nostalgia?

Depends. UT2004 is still the best MP shooter and Diablo II still the best hack-and-slash. However I think that's more because no one has been able to actually copy them well enough rather than the actual nostalgia behind it.

i think ocarina was better. it pushed zelda into a better storyline, game structure and epic boss fights.

twinlight princess trying to emulate that, but i found the last boss fight the same as ocarina mixed with windwaker boss fight, which is actually the same boss.

it have nothing to with notalgia but the game was overall better, aside graphics.

Big call from a guy who very recently created this game

Damn, I don't think the image worked. Go here

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/content/games/yahtzee/artoftheft

Anyway, it seemed weird that he said this, because he spends most of his articles bitching about modern games sacrificing good gameplay so that more budget can go into the graphics, and then criticises people who are ignoring graphics and buying old games with awesome gameplay

At the time they were better because they raised the standard that other games then had to match or try and beat. I'd be a little concerned if everything wasn't better by now.

Yeah, his position has always been known. It rings of a much more scientific approach, however his position, like all his positions, are vast generalizations, boiled down into a broad ranging brushstroke designed to antagonize. No game is actually "better" than another game, only opinions can claim such. However, saying that all new games are better than all old games, or that all games made 20 years ago are undeserving of our praise is vastly ignorant, and Yhatzee himself knows that better than anyone.

Yhatzee couples of balls of Planescape: Torment, a game I'm sure he hasn't dug out of his closet in ages. Another game, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, might not be as good as he remembers it. Opinion is, those games are and always will be fantastic, nostalga or not. Nothing can be described in detail with a mere generalization. Even the assertion that such a thing is possible, is childish.

That one game is better than another is a subjective statement based on opinions that cannot be proven with facts. Therefore, you cannot prove that one game is better than another.

I haven't played TP or Sunshine.

My kid forced me to play Zelda WW, Starfox Adventures, and Mario World this weekend (My Mario Sunshine disc won't work!). These games are a blast. I didn't want to play them, but I found myself continuing even after she fell asleep.

I've been a victim of nostalgia. My XBLA and Virtual Console libraries are evidence. Still, it's good to know that sometimes memory is accurate.



.....and Zelda OoT isn't as good as you remember.

I'd have to disagree. The technology for making movies has gotten better over the last 20 years, but that doesn't mean today's movies are any better. They make just as many crappy movies now as they did in the '80s. Sure, the movies of today may have better graphics than those made long ago, but that doesn't mean they're more fun to watch.

Nostalgia plays a part for sure, but it's not the only reason people enjoy old games. If a fifty-year-old, who had never so much as touched a video game in his life, played Super Mario Galaxy and Super Mario Bros., and he enjoyed SMB more, it couldn't be nostalgia, right?