Ah, well...
My primary nostalgia isn't for 8 or 16 bit games, since I played those to death as a kid. I literally feel no remorse after selling my SNES with all of my RPGs which would be worth a lot of money on eBay today (the big Earthbound pack that came with the strategy guide, FFIII, Chrono Trigger, Mario RPG) in order to buy a Dreamcast because I felt I was done with that era of games. There are still a few games I didn't get to play back then, but I don't feel nostalgia for it.
Instead, my nostalgia currently focuses on the 32/64 bit era, which began roughly a decade ago. I'll never forget the N64, and how some of my friends got it right away. Once they were done with Mario 64, they didn't know what to do with themselves. Shadows of the Empire was pretty good, but it wasn't until the next summer (97) that Star Fox 64 came out and gave us something to be obsessed with. I actually got a N64 just for Star Fox 64, and spent most of my summer doing chores to pay back my parents. That fall Goldeneye came out of nowhere. The very day that I got my newest issue of Gamepro with a glowing review of Goldeneye, I rented it from the local video store. When I returned the game I immediately went out and bought it.
For the next year, everything was fine with the N64 and I. I wasn't buying games every month, but I didn't have that much money anyway, so it felt 'right' somehow to wait months between purchases. My main memories of the first three years of the N64's life are primarily about all the damn racing games and platformers that came out for the thing. My at the time best friend Kevin loved these kind of games, so we'd spend hours upon hours playing them, even if in retrospect they weren't very good. I will say that Banjo Kazooie was extremely good for what it was even if I'd rather right my fingernails off one by one rather than play another "collect a million things!!" Rare game.
Ocarina of Time was on everyone's mind by the fall of '98. The N64 was on its third year (counting '96 and '97 as the first two years) and it was finally getting a huge, grand adventure game. I bought this three action figure set from Target that came with a coupon for the game, but stupidly didn't reserve the game. This was back before reserving games and systems got big, so I just assumed I would be able to find one. Flash forward a month, and it's just before Thanksgiving, and I'm dragging my parents and sister to all the stores in the area trying to find the damn game. I am so pissed off about the whole thing, I finally started to look at all the Playstation games I had been missing out on.
My friends and I were always diehard Nintendo fans, and we never gave the Playstation another thought, putting it in a league with other failed CD systems like 3DO and CDi. But as my fanaticism with Nintendo weakened and the agonizing waits between games got longer, it was hard to deny the Playstation any longer. Zelda was supposed to be the game that kept me from thinking about all the amazing RPGs I was missing out on the Playstation. Hell, I even bought and played through the awful PC port of Final Fantasy VII to keep me full. But missing Zelda was the final blow. That Christmas, I got a Playstation, and it was just an absolute orgy of games from the previous three years of the Playstation's library. I couldn't tell you what it felt like to be absolutely flooded with RPGs and other niche games (as survival horror and rhythm games were in those days): it was like finally growing up, in a lot of ways.
Years later when I pre-ordered The Wind Waker, I got a Gamecube port of Ocarina of Time. That was the first time I had ever played the game. It is indeed truly one of the best games ever made, but I often wonder, if I had managed to find a copy of it that holiday season, would I have been better off for it?? Would I have eventually broke down to the Sony system, or would I have held on against all odds with my Nintendo loving friends and remained in the delusion that Nintendo was faultless??
Other than that, I also remember the Dreamcast fondly. It was as though they improved upon everything the Saturn had failed for, but nobody cared. Most of my friends eventually bought a Dreamcast, and by the time it was dropped in the U.S. it had an amazing library of games, but as many analysts have said, it was too little, too late. As long as I live, however, I will never forget playing Phantasy Star Online and Shen Mue for the first times. PSO was startling because, even though the core gameplay was kind of klunky, it was the first console online RPG, and you could play it over dial-up!! Shen Mue was simply shocking for its complexity and for-its-time realism. There had never been a game experience like Shen Mue before, and it arguably influenced all the 'sand box' and 'emergent gameplay' game design that came after it.
