New Consoles are Cool, Old Ones are Just a Bit Better

With all this excitement surrounding the recent releases of the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I felt like I should take some time to talk about why people such as myself stay interested in the older consoles and, more importantly, why we don't jump on the early adopter bandwagon.

To preface, I am very much an early adopter when it comes to technology. I was one of the few people who jumped on the SSD high-horse during their infancy phase (remember when a 60GB was near $300?) and I bought five of them to run in RAID. I'm always running the latest and greatest versions of Linux and Fedora thus stability on my computers is not a guaranteed thing. It's chaos but it's functional chaos.

However I'm the exact polar opposite when it comes to gaming. Even to this day, I'm more than content to pull out my Super Nintendo and fire up some Chrono Trigger (yes I own a physical cartridge) or Donkey Kong Country 2 (which quite possibly has one of the greatest soundtracks for any game ever made). When I first heard news about the Playstation 4 and Xbox One, I really wasn't all that excited about the two. And it wasn't for the obvious reason of simply propagating the flagship Sony and Microsoft consumer products into a new generation. It wasn't because the tech loaded into these devices made my nerd senses go on uber-overdrive. And it certainly wasn't because I didn't and still don't want either one of them.

I really feel like it's because there's no real way to truly appreciate a console until it's aged. The maturity of the software released for it will ripen (for the most part) not to mention that there will always be games that are released that will get sucked into the wake of triple-A titles. Frankly Sony's consoles are notorious for this which is why I love my PSP. If I feel like I haven't truly fulfilled my experience with a console, I won't move on from it.

But we don't ever really move on from a console, do we? After all, Joe is still toting a C64 in his studio and fires it up occasionally. These consoles endure as we do. A lot of us that really appreciate gaming and its history come to appreciate these older consoles as a wine connoisseur appreciates legacy vintages. We know what ages well about these things and what doesn't but are still able to appreciate everything they have to offer with an unparalleled respect.

This call out goes more to our younger generation of gamers. Don't be afraid to reach out and try to discover the roots of gaming to see for yourself where this all started at. It won't look as pretty as 1080P and it won't respond as well as an analog thumbstick and it certainly won't be as easy to setup and keep running as simply plugging in two cables and popping a disc into your console, but it will help you appreciate more what it is you play today and why us "gaming greybeards" act the way we do.