At some point, electronic gaming matured to the state where a sub-culture of gamers known as retro-gamers could appear. It's hard to say when this happened exactly, as I'm sure there were a ton of people kicking it old school and consistently jamming through NES Marble Madness playthroughs during all subsequent hardware generations. It's also hard to say how old a game needs to be to qualify, since recently we saw the release of an updated Golden Eye on the Wii and during the lead-up to its release whole pages of commentary recalling the good old days of playing the original on N64 sprang into existence. Clearly, games from that era (1997) hold some kind of retro-cachet, but it's only more recently that brand new titles have been delivered to us with deliberate retro qualities. Throw in the huge number of straight up ports that are available, especially on handhelds (ahem, 3DS first party ports), and you could probably make a stack of new-old games to keep you busy indefinitely. Playing these titles now can teach us a lot about games, including how far the medium has come, how sometimes it doesn't need to go very far, and how occasionally you wish it could just go back to the where it came from.
In terms of how far games have traveled from their origins, playing a game like Pacman Championship Edition DX is a real eye opening experience. It's like all bets are off and you can imagine a world where as soon as you think you understand how a franchise works, especially one so rooted in its own conventions, they go and add bullet time, "ghost trains", techno music and bombs. This has been tried before, but Pacman CE DX is the true realization of the potential that can be unlocked when you take something so well understood and ever so gently turn it on its head. It is simultaneously so Pacman and so not Pacman, and I was not surprised to hear it at least mentioned during a variety of game of the year discussions last year.
Sometimes a brand new game can still feel incredibly modern even if it hasn't gone through any significant updates since earlier titles in the franchise, even when those games were released over 15 years ago. Playing Donkey Kong Country Returns for any amount of time will trigger an almost Pavlovian surge of joy deep within you. This is in spite of the fact that not a whole lot of innovation has occured since the orignal Donkey Kong Conutry. It's all mostly the same, except now the fidelity is incredibly high, with sharper looking graphics and crisper sounding tunes. The gameplay consists mostly of the same stuff we were doing on the SNES all those years ago, so you'll spend a lot of time running, jumping, launching out of barrels and riding in mine carts, and all of that is just dandy. There's no shoehorned competitive online multiplayer, no DLC, no pan-media saturation campaign, and that's fine.
Lastly, you sometimes play a 13 year old game and wonder what the hell went wrong since then. Maybe that game is Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions, which you've picked up on the PSP to satiate some ravenous hunger for turn-based strategy RPGs the likes of which are rarely made in modern times, while you await the remake of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together. Realizing that the genre peaked so many years ago can only be torturous for people who have been with Square from the beginning, enough to make them start saying "geez Square Enix really needs to just stop." It might be true SE needs to change how they do things on account of their recent record of mediocrity and rampant franchise milking (2011 will see at least five "Final Fantasy" releases), but what becomes apparent is that SE really needs to do is stop trying to fix things that aren't broken. Stop taking away equipment slots. Stop simplifying the level up and magic systems. Stop making games were all you do is travel between cut scenes featuring ridiculously dressed characters who blather incomprehensibly about having to save the blah by collecting the bleh with the right fighting spirit. It's in rare cases such as these, in this golden age of gaming where there's literally something for everyone, that it doesn't seem dishonest to pine for a past which was arguably worse in almost all other ways.
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