My Journey through Nostalgia

Burning Crusade Classic launches today as I’m writing this. Will I take my new Blood Elf Paladin to Outland? Probably not. Between my wife, daughter, and job, my video game time has shrunk drastically and is split widely. But I’m loving the remastering of video games! Maybe I’m alone in this, but as a kid I felt like I missed out on a lot of the defining moments of modern video game culture. While those moments may be gone its nice to be able to fire up my modern console or laptop and play something from 20 years ago. Also, now that I’m an adult, I enjoy completing games I once played and coming to a better understanding of the storylines. I find it fascinating that unlike books or movies, video games give us a chance to interact as much or as little with the story as we like.

I will admit, modern games have a lot of quality-of-life improvements over the older games, but sometimes that is not a feature but instead a bug. A perfect example is quests in Burning Crusade Classic vs. Shadowlands. The area to find your quest goal is described (albeit sometimes poorly) in the text. There is no glowing circle on the map. Several times it has made me slow down and reread my objective just to make sure I’m heading the right way. I’ve always been a sucker for stories so being forced to be more fully immersed in the game helps me enjoy it more. Sure, it slows down the journey to max level, but I’ve always found there is plenty to enjoy along the way.

But while Blizzard’s Classic is one of the latest iterations, it’s not alone. I recently returned from a 10-month deployment to the middle east, and for several of those months I had no internet. One of the things I did during that time was work my way through the enhanced editions of Baldur’s Gate One and Two. The last time I played Baldur’s Gate Two was as a child (even though it’s not really a kids game lol). Perhaps the worst thing to happen was that my brother enabled cheat codes and printed off a long list of items. So, I never beat the game legitimately. Probably a decade later I tried to install it on a new computer, but it was incompatible (or I just wasn’t tech savvy enough to make it run). Beating both games without using cheats was a small victory for me. I also worked my way through several of the campaigns on Age of Empires 2. Not having internet meant I couldn’t just look up guides whenever I wanted to. I learned that some of my problem-solving skills had atrophied with Google only being a click or two away.

Is remastering some video games a money grab? Maybe. Does it demonstrate a lack of original ideas for these companies? Maybe. I haven’t been a fly on the wall for these company’s board meetings. But if I’m being honest, I don’t care. They are remastering games I enjoyed or wanted to enjoy, and I’ll happily consume their products for the dual enjoyment of remembering the fun I had and finding new ways to play the games. I refuse to be an elitist with video games or any media, and if something is fun then I’m not going to turn my nose up at it. I will say though that they need to remaster Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer. I was fully present for that, and it was a blast—still my favorite first person multiplayer. Personally, I think they don’t want to remaster it and then watch it blow all their modern titles out of the water. But like I said: I don’t know what they say in those board meetings.