Having grown up in the era when gaming was
still quite young - I remember getting an NES before I even got to preschool - I found it easy to look back at the
games behind me. By that I mean Pac-Man, Galaga, even ET for the Atari 2600 (wish I could still find that
charmer; it's somewhere in my closet…). I couldn't begin to imagine, though, trying to tell a child who grew up
with Halo that Wolfenstein 3D used to be a monumental achievement, and incredibly fun to play at that. And let's
say I could, and the kid enjoyed it, and then played it over and over again…then what? I regard Super Mario World
as a classic, but I can't play it without being bored out of my mind, beating the star road with my eyes closed.
Pixel, a feature from GameSpy, has a write-up on electronic ennui, which is to feel jaded about classic games
simply because you've played them too much to remember why they were so great in the first place. It's a fun,
quick read, but it also has me thinking - how much does multiplayer help in a game's longevity? It seems to me
that Starcraft is still being played en masse online, yet the game is almost a decade old.
What classic games do you have a hard time playing?
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