Nostalgia Sucked!

[elfs]

So, I have UAE, the Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator, up and running on my desktop at home (the laptop is just too slow to play anything) and I've been going through my collection of disks to see what I have that I can copy into the system and play. The list of licensed software that I used to own was quite remarkable: I had both C compilers, the desktop publishing suite, and the CrossDOS subsystem, as well as about a half gazillion games, including the original Lemmings, Gauntlet II, Llamatron, Flood, Nuclear War, Revenge of Defender, Sim City, Space Ace, Tanx, Archipelegos, Populous, Powermonger, and all three Bard's Tales. I've managed to get Lemmings and Full Metal Planet running so far, and I have to say that I'm disappointed: they aren't as fun as I remember.

There is, I suspect, a limit to nostalgia. I've tried running Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator, and that was awful. I'd forgotten just how bad the Atari 2600 really was. Although (and there's that "but", doncha know), Adventure was a really fun and interesting game for its time. I played it for a while, but put it away.

But Full Metal Planet was incomprehensible without the manual, and I'd forgotten just how stupid the AIs really were. (It turns out that it is, for it's time, a relatively strong conversion of a French wargame from the late 1970's.) Lemmings was really slow; it took way too long to get to the actual game. And don't get me started on The Bard's Tale: once I'd played the game obsessively, but now, it's shudderingly poor: no depth, poor graphics, mind-numbing music. I liked this game?

Still, there are other things to experiment with before I chuck it all out the window. And I'd still like to see if I get Marketroids (I used to have the source code to that) and Llamatron running.

Oh! One other piece of weirdness. The only program for manipulating Amiga Disk Files, ADFOpus, is written for Win32. It just feels very odd that I should have to run a Windows™ program under Wine (and it runs great!) on top of Linux in order to format archives for programs I'm going to run under UAE on top of Linux.

Comments

[lucky-otter.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if there was any relation to the FMP board game. I've heard good things about Full Metal Planète over on BoardGameGeek. The game seems to have been released in 1988, according to BGG's page on it. There's also a link there to what is apparently a more modern version of it for Windows.

Llamatron also ran on DOS, I recall, if you despair of getting it running in UAE and would still like to play it.

[talisker.livejournal.com]

Did you rescue the Journal entries and if so, when do we see them? :)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I did not. That still requires that I have an Amiga disk drive, which I can't find. Everything else has come off old CDs. But my personal stuff (stories, saved games, etc.) was on floppies.

[talisker.livejournal.com]

dang :(

[halloranelder.livejournal.com]

I agree with the above: Did you rescue the missing Journal Entries?

Also, I own two Atari 2600's! I am a nerd...

[sierra-nevada.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much of this reaction is similar to the change in tastes one gets with age w.r.t. music, i.e. "I can't believe I used to love that!"

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's that. In fact, I still love most of the music I learned to love in my adolescence: I still listen to Iron Maiden, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, Pat Metheny, and Kitaro. I've added Mozart and Bach to that repetoire, and have picked up modern re-interpreters of those forms, like Ayreon. In some respects I feel like I'm "done"; the Gorillaz don't do anything for me, nor does the new Mariah Carey album, although I'm still out to find the new Steve Reich album.

I think it's something else: these games were pushing the limits of what the machines could do back then, and I'm not longer willing to wait five minutes for a floppy to load (UAE actually emulates the slow loading speed of floppy disks because apparently the Amiga OS using timing off the disk as an error detection mechanism!), I'm no longer impressed with the graphics (which, no doubt, were wonderful back then), and their intellectual vacuity is apparent in the face the the ultra-rich attention to art and detail that is modern gaming.

In contrast to the Amiga games pack, I also have MaME (and legally own the Williams ROMS) and Gens (and legally own most of the Sonic the Hedgehog ROMS). I still like Robotron, Defender, and Sonic Spinball, and when I have a few minutes to fill willfully pull them up. They don't have the limitations of having to run on general-purpose hardware like an Amiga, and so their responsiveness contributes to their gameplay and makes them feel worthwhile.