The Exigent Duality
They Bought the Wrong System - 13:16 CST, 7/15/19 (Sniper)
Back around the time I wrote this still-prescient piece I had people arguing with me, "But old games are broken!" I couldn't figure out what they meant, because out of the hundreds of old games I'd recently played, none of them were "broken".

Fast forward to these past couple of weeks, where I've been trying lots of NES games via Nintendo's "Switch Online" app, and lo and behold: almost every game I've tried has been garbage! For example, I've been trying to force my way through the heralded "StarTropics", and it was so frustratingly designed I finally just had to give up.

I've had the same experience with a lot of Atari ST games I've tried over the past couple of years: some of them run too fast, or too slow, or the controls don't work right, or they run at seven frames per second, or they simply have terrible designs, and so forth.

So it turns out those people sort of had a point, in the sense that they were just playing the wrong systems; outside of just a handful of games-- Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 3, River City Ransom-- the NES is the most overrated video game platform ever! I don't think the 80s computers-- Commodore 64, Atari ST, and Amiga to name a few-- have aged very well either.

To play some good old games, you need to pick up a Sega Genesis. I've played hundreds of games on it over the decades, some of which are on my favorite games list, and I can't think of even one that's on the same level of "bad" as the supposedly "good" NES games; just compare something like "Golden Axe" to "Double Dragon II", and you'll get what I mean.