Lance Garrison

Welcome to the first entry in what I hope will be a recurring series - Nostalgia-Free Classic Gaming. Nostalgia is a powerful force in the video game market and its influence is something I've thought a lot about. While the power of nostalgia has caused a sharpening of classic gameplay elements over the years, it has also locked gaming into something of an arrested development, where we are visited by the same characters year to year. In addition to this, Mario, Mega Man and Sonic have all recently retreated into the nostalgic style of yesterday. While these games may be a blast to play, they certainly aren't doing anything to advance the medium beyond its roots.

While it has given us a strong sense of community, I feel gamers in general are too sentimental about the past. So, I've created Nostalgia-Free Classic Gaming as a slaughter-house for sacred cows. Nostalgia-Free will seek to answer one question: "Does it hold up without the benefit of nostalgia?" Very little slack will be cut for age or innovation. I want to analyze these games from a 2010 player perspective, not a historical perspective. It's a harsh and unfair criteria, but the games that make it through will be seen as truly timeless. To be consistent, I'll be limiting this series to highly acclaimed games that I haven't already played. I'm not going to pretend that I can disregard my own bias and play my old favorites with new eyes. Luckily, I have several gaming blind spots that I think will make for interesting reviews in the future. With introductions out of the way, it's time to roll out the first Nostalgia-Free review.

The Game: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Released in 1997 for the PSX and the Sega Saturn, developed by KCE Tokyo and published by Konami. I'll be playing the re-release available on XBLA.

Let's get one thing out of the way right up front - I have no credentials for reviewing an MMO. This is the first I have ever played. My review is strictly an outsider's perspective that I undertook because of my love for Star Trek.

Make no mistake, I really love Star Trek. On any given day I might sit down and re-watch two or three episodes of Deep Space Nine or The Original Series for no particular reason. DS9 is my favorite trek, and while it's a step-child among the Trek franchises, my love of it prepared me well to judge Star Trek: Online as a fan. No other series spent as much time hanging out with the major powers of the Trek Universe (Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian) as DS9 did. It established an even greater depth to the Star Trek mythos and defined the power struggles between what you might call the core Trek races. Did ST:O manage to recreate the depth and excitement of Star Trek at its best? Read my first impressions after the jump.

One of the first RPGs I ever played was Chrono Trigger. Oh sure, I had played Dragon Warrior when I was but a wee zygote and I'm pretty sure I hit Earthbound on the SNES first, but I was still damn green when it came to RPGs. I know this because after some moaning to my friend about the difficulty of saving in Chrono Trigger, he informed me that I could actually save anywhere on the world map instead of saving only once in a blue moon at the game's very uncommon save points. I give my old friend endless credit for gently informing me of an RPG trope that is only slightly less common than magic swords. Had he chosen to mock me instead, he might have spontaneously invented the modern usage of the word noob in 1995.

Despite such early stumbles, RPGs very quickly became my genre of choice. Needless to say, I had made a terrible decision  that would cost me dearly in time, money, and general social standing for years to come. At least I had friends leveling up along the road to hell with me! Squaresoft was setting the world on fire back then as far as our little gang was concerned, and the feedback loop of our enthusiasm kept us all going and made “gamers” out of the lot of us. As for myself, I would eventually develop an obsession that not even some of my fellow gamers understood.