N-Philes

Getting Too Old for Games

Posted March 15th 2009 by Jacob Barnes.

Good news everyone. I'm turning 20 years old this Thursday. I've considered myself a "gamer" since my early teens, when I transitioned from the casual crowd to finding games I personally liked. So why am I still into this gaming stuff? I know that in this day many people play games well into their 20's or 30's, but for others it's only a childhood hobby until they "grow up."

But there are many good reasons for why this happens. For one, it feels like certain series actually punish gamers for getting too attached to it. Take the Resident Evil series for example. If you take a gander at my staff bio to the left you'll see the gamecube version of Resident Evil is one of my favorite games of all time. I like it for the atmosphere and story. A big part of that atmosphere comes from the use of beautiful and haunting pre-rendered backgrounds that affect how a characters moves, and not knowing what's around a corner. Baten Kaitos also had some amazing pre-rendered backgrounds, but that's a different story. So in Resident Evil 4 they take the atmosphere and story and change it completely. You now have an over the shoulder camera and the tale of Umbrella is almost nowhere to be found. I admit that it is a great game, and RE5 also seems decent, but it's not what real fans are looking for. God help me if Namco turns Baten Kaitos into an over the shoulder third-person shooter...

Another reason is because people can't accommodate change. I know I won't continue alongside the main Resident Evil series for now because I only own a Wii. In the unlikely case of all things Nintendo cease to exist in the near future I don't know what I'd do. The Dreamcast gives a good example of this but on a smaller scale. People had to convert to a similar console like the gamecube, but then got a double hit of letdown in the remaining years of its life. It's almost like escaping the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001 only to get killed by a hurricane when you move to New Orleans four years later, which coincidentally matches up chronologically with the previous example.

What I fear most though is that one day I will wake up and just hate video games. I don't know why that would happen, but I'm afraid anyway. A lot of people get older, get married and are then so narrow-minded they only stick with games they trust from their younger days Hopefully I can find a balance between both worlds without completely ignoring my social or video game life for as long as I can.

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