Board 8 > Gaming Nostalgia Chat Topic

(+) Yeah! (+)

Morning, friends! In this holiday season full of remembering past times, traditions, families, and gifts, I felt like making a conversation topic to just chat about games you've been nostalgic for recently or that come to mind to share with others or search out others who may have played some obscure titles.

While I initially got to making this topic thinking about older shareware titles, like Gladiator and Exile; or defunct browser games, like Dragon Court and Marvel Avengers Alliance, writing the intro got me super nostalgic for the earliest Christmas video game memories I have.

When I was six or seven, I unwrapped the big box housing the gray and purple Super NES. The colors were incredibly new and vibrant compared to the drab grays of the NES and Game Boy, and the controller... going from the two-button rectangle to the smooth and rounded light and dark purple four button, SHOULDER buttons, controller was mind-blowing in simple design change.

The games were great, too, with Super Mario World, Illusion of Gaia, and two others I can no longer determine (ALttP? DKC? Mario Paint? Something I returned to Funcoland and have no memory of?). Illusion of Gaia gets my full nostalgia. The boxart was different than anything I'd seen, the gameplay was frenetic, the music stellar, simple animations like wind ruffling through hair or clothes rippling from jumping off a ledge... the game has had a larger hold on me for almost three decades and moreso than any NES game I played before or since.

The nostalgia's been so much from this game lately that I've even considered DMing my first ever D&D campaign for my friends homebrewing something with this world. Not from the perspective of Will and his friends, mind you, but on the outskirts of their journey like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Must Die. There are more than enough happenings just outside of Will's journey yet informing it (you can't leave the town in the beginning of the game because demons have been sighted; the king has hired an assassin to trail the hero; Riverson; and even more ways the coming end of the world affects those around), and there's plenty of extra room (and illegible notations in certain places) to develop more dungeons, towns, and areas for the players to venture and stray from an established point-to-point journey. Hell, why not just hop a ship and go to Freejia right off? You've got a princess kidnapped by a dark paladin, a missing flute-playing child popping up in unexpected places, tons of lore about the comet and the history of global-changing events, rumors of great lost ruins and the Tower of Babel... Illusion of Gaia is just such a good setting.

Just checking in with Board 8 friends, to chill and remember, with maybe months or years worth of posting at length

Yoshi's Island has some amazing music.