I’ve been seeing it a lot lately: “Christmas 2010 has sucked for video games,” or “all the good games have already come out before the holiday season.” Hell, NBC claims that this year “has not been great for the video game industry in general, so far.” It seems many people are disappointed with 2010; some are even more disappointed that this year won’t deliver the last holiday hurrah of games to wash over the months of mediocrity (of course there are exceptions).
To many gamers, Christmas 2010 has been a banal, lackluster season. And that may be true. But I really don’t care. The funny thing is, December is when I want to play games the most. With all the Christmas-y, eggnog-y, festivity crap going on at this time of year, I become nostalgic. In other words, video games become my resolve. Kinda like the kid below:
Someone like me should be a bereaving mess with the lack of games to seek my teeth into it. But I’m not. Hell, I’m not even hungry.
See, I come from a family of eight brothers. We had no sisters and no time to BS when it came to video games. We had an obsession with them. And each Christmas, half of our lists were video games. Of course, coming from a family of that size meant we were never at technology’s cutting edge. It usually went like this:
3 boys = NES, but SNES is available
6 boys = SNES, but Nintendo 64/PlayStation are available
8 boys = Nintendo 64, but PS2/Xbox are available.
You get the idea. We were always a generation behind. But instead of me and my pile of brothers getting upset about not having the newest system or games available to us, we learned to appreciate what was available. Cheesey as all hell, I know, but it’s true. Each year, we kept replaying the same exhausted titles over and over; not because we didn’t have other things to play, but because those games always meant the most.
That’s why when other gamers are whining that this year hasn’t been the video game culmination that, say, 2007 was, I’ll be completely content with my classics.
Like I said, Christmas is all about nostalgia. It’s about those days when all the other kids were playing Crash Bandicoot or Gex on their PlayStations while me and my country of brothers were gettin’ it done in Donkey Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest. Or, while others were going on and on about Mario Kart 64, me and Planet Sibling were tearing up the original Rainbow Road.
At this time of year, I could go out and buy CoD: Black Ops or Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (which I’m sure are fantastic titles), but instead, I’d rather sit in front of my Mom-Mom’s TV and play some Mega Man X, Street Fighter 2: Turbo, or the SNES Port of Aladdin.
Because to me, nothing sounds more like Christmas than this.
