Destructoid Changelog: Nostalgia kills gradually and then suddenly.

As a Xennial, which means the type of person who doesn’t want to be considered to be Gen X or a Millenial, I am about the age where a mid-life crisis feels like an appropriate way to spend some time. The bad news is that I don’t have the funds to buy a convertible, and Ireland doesn’t have the weather to warrant doing so, even if I did. 

Like many folks my age, I predict a hellish trip into my own life, staring back at days already lived and the years that have slipped by, almost without me realizing it. Nostalgia is the order of the day for my generation, and its signs are everywhere. The algorithmic-based internet is already well aware of this, feeding me retrospectives of the movies, shows, books, and games of my youth. Bands from my younger years are pillaging the pockets of my chronological peers as they go on tours to sing their best hits from the mid-nineties to the mid-naughties.

The very young will have missed the years when we used that term unabashedly and unashamedly. The sun was still bright, the idea of a true market crash was something that lived only in the memory of dot com losers, and we were all too young to give a damn about anything. We had a very strange disconnection from just about everything, the type that allowed us to set fire to Woodstock when they tried to run it back.

We didn’t realize that relentless borrowing from banks was going to sink everything in 2008 and that the rules would change and suddenly money wouldn’t be a thing that other people just made up. We were young and carefree, and we hadn’t destroyed the world just yet. 

It was fun, let me tell you.

So, why the navel-gazing? That’s easy. It’s FATE.

Reawakening

This week saw the release of FATE: Reawakened, which includes four classic titles getting a bit of modern polish and easy access on Steam. It's not a bad thing to have this land in your inbox 20 years after you first played it, I should say. 

Fate was an odd fish of a game back then, akin to Diablo, but with some pretty colors and fun fishing. Okay, that is actually massively dismissive of just how much fun this game was, as you had the option to retire your heroes and play as their descendants, keeping some of their stuff.

It’s fun to see it come back, and it appears to have been what has kicked off this entire nightmare of odd introspection that has caused me to commandeer this newsletter. I’d suggest you go and play it, however.

The real lesson, of course, is that it doesn’t take much to tip you off the ledge and into a plummeting freefall of self-evaluation when you hit a certain age. If you think whatever existentialism you suffer from now is a fun time, wait until you rack up a couple of more decades of practice. You’re going to get exceptionally good at it. Of course, you can also channel that energy into getting exceptionally good at other things—just about anything, in fact. 

Food for thought. 

The Matrix is hurtling toward a 30th anniversary

If the horror of a game you likely played before you had a persistent back injury being re-released on Steam after 20 years isn’t enough for you, the Matrix will soon be 30 years old. This might be Boomer talk, but it feels like movies just don’t hit like The Matrix did anymore. 

Back in the day, a cultural phenomenon had to really work for the status; you couldn’t just go viral on social media and be the brightest star in the sky for the 13 days it took to earn a gazillion dollars before doing a Crypto rug pull and then retiring to whatever island the Hawk Tuah girl is hanging out on now.

Things took time. People in America could have seen movies weeks or even months before little old me in Ireland, and you were looking at a gap of years before something came out of VHS or the new-fangled DVDs that were doing the rounds. 

This all worked in The Matrix’s favor, as the idea of easily sourced information by the average citizen, rapidly disseminated over enormous communication networks, was nascent. Daily life hinted at it, but we hadn’t yet built something wondrous and then lost control of it. The internet was still so young, and it hadn’t betrayed us because we stopped paying attention to who was trying to own it. It really did hint at a potential of escape from whatever it was that was holding you back.

The Matrix was also released within the final decade where it was likely that people were going to be exposed to things for the first time through iteration rather than the origin. There wasn’t a Crunchyroll where you could see every anime ever; YouTube didn’t exist to show you all the scenes that inspired your favorite director to perform some classic, Picasso-approved artistic thievery. You couldn’t download every manga in PDF format. 

With limits to how much media a single person could conceivably be exposed to, these cultural moments became very important. Most kids in 1994 were never gonna have seen the noir, pulp, and western movies that inspired Tarintino for Pulp Fiction, the same way that most kids in 1999 were never going to have seen the cyberpunk and anime movies or read the philosophy books that inspired the Wachowskis to make The Matrix. 

The impact of The Matrix, especially on gaming and game developers, who were primed to be its audience, was huge. Bullet time was suddenly everywhere, and quotes would pop up in games like Mass Effect 2 and Starcraft 2. Many of the visual effects would go on to push the rest of gaming and cinema to new heights.

The Matrix was made for $63 million in 1999, which adjusts to about $150 million in modern America-bucks. That money has given us a movie with enormous cultural impact, both good and bad. Granted, much of the bad is from elements and themes being co-opted by dorks, but that’s the problem with cultural influence: it is hard to control who you are culturally influencing and how.

Meanwhile, Netflix just released Electric State at a cost of $320 million. I have no idea where that money went, but it wasn’t on anything good. A vehicle for Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, it lacks anything that could be deemed revolutionary or interesting or even particularly entertaining, and it’s such a dismissal, grey, garbage soup that you can’t even tell what is supposed to have inspired it. 

The closest thing I can liken it to is the abysmal turd-pile that was Ready Player One. Book or movie form, take your pick, both are just absolutely rotten to the core. At least with Ready Player One, the source material itself was bad; Electric State completely misses the point of Simon Stålenhag’s graphic novel to such a degree it feels almost willful. 

I guess we should finally get to the point. Nostalgia can be a good thing, it’s nice to look back at the way you felt, the way you thought, the way you were, and the way that art touched you at a certain time in your life, but it can also be a trap if you allow it to exercise too much influence on your life.

It’s really not that short a journey from The Matrix to Electric State, sadly. I mean, we’ve already done it once. 

Elsewhere on Destructoid

Grand Theft Auto

Because revisiting the past is on our minds, Damiano has explored which of the Grand Theft Auto games are worth playing in the modern era. It might surprise you as to what is holding up and what isn’t, but it’s certainly an interesting look back at the culture at the time. 

Rockstar was always looking to lampoon social mores, which means things can often be mocked into immortality in their tremendously successful series. They also produced an absolute mountain of games, and it's easy to forget how many additional titles outsized of the numbered series are worth investing time in.

Every Frame a Painting

The best thing about being young was that you knew, 20 years later, games were gonna look amazing. And guess what, they do. The funny thing is that many people don’t really seem to think that.

A visual fidelity vs performance schism has occurred, and it’s convoluted and scary to old folks like me. Never shy of expressing himself, Filip has done what he always does, which is wade in with an opinion, god bless him.

What does good performance actually even mean? Go and find out.