So on that score Gradius Collection is only 'retro' in that the five games collected (Gradius I - IV plus the lesser know PlayStation-only Gradius Gaiden - for five times the freelance fee right?) were birthed a while back.
If it was genuinely good for that then, it will be genuinely good at that now. Whether you're playing Pac-Man or Halo all you are essentially doing is moving your thumbs fractions of inches to push beams of lights around a screen in the quest for entertainment. And so we end up with mixed messages, an unhealthy disregard for videogames past and a devaluation of good gameplay - whichever era in which it was born.īut great gameplay remains great gameplay in the same way good music remains good music - even as tastes move on and technology allows music to be recorded and executed in ever more unimaginable ways. In other words, he wants to sell you the future or the past depending on how it suits him.
Whenever you hear a marketing man use the word 'retro' it's for one of two reasons: either he wants to lend his product an inferred modern frisson by classing everything that has gone before as superseded, or he wants to play on your maturing male sentimentality. Essentially it also classifies everything older than right now as obsolete - were you to apply it to films and music, you'd be comprehensively regarded as a clueless cultureless retard. Other than perhaps functioning as a blanket label for all those games you can't buy in Tesco right this minute. Space Invaders and Ikaruga, Monkey Island and Super Monkey Ball, Donkey Kong and Super Mario 64, Game & Watch and Neo-Geo Pocket Color, 19, Pong and Virtua Tennis, Centipede and Final Fantasy VII.