My Retro Addction

When I was younger I went through a period where I traded a lot of my old games to get newer stuff. As you do. The most extreme moment during this period was when I traded my Mega Drive and 114 games for an N64 with Super Mario 64. Now that's dedication.

However, recently I've been going through a bit of a retro addiction, and buying a lot of old Nintendo games. I recently bought a Game Boy Advance SP, and bought the Game Boy Color classic Super Mario Bros Deluxe to play on it. I've been playing it solid for the past four days.

I bought a Virtual Boy about eight months ago and only just started buying games for it but each game holds my attention for hours at a time. It's bizarre: considering my job and everything that it makes available to me, these old games shouldn't be the ones taking over my free time.

But I think it's actually because of my job that I'm drawn to these games. When you get to play every new game for free, of course it's a fantastic thing, and when I review them I obviously bear in mind that people have to pay £29.99 or £39.99 for them so I factor its potential value for money into the review. But at the end of the day, I don't have to pay for them, so that "value for money" feeling never comes into play.

So I think this is why I've gotten into the older games again. I'm paying money for them (usually through eBay), and since they're great games (I've mostly been buying first-party Nintendo stuff like the WarioWare games and the like) I find myself getting that warm "this was money well spent" feeling that I haven't had in the past two and a half years since I moved to London.

I suppose it's pretty bizarre that at the moment I thrive more on buying old games than playing new ones for free (and that includes 360 and PS3, it's not an anti-new-Nintendo thing).