Those Were the Days...

The holiday season is upon us. It is a time that one is supposed to put the needs and wants of others first (at least when it comes to buying stuff). It is then, with great reluctance, that I sadly admit that I've spent way too much on myself as of late. Most of it being video games (or video juegos for those in Spanish speaking countries).

The shopping spree began in mid-November with the release of Goldeneye for the Wii (I've talked at length about it already, so go check that post if you want my thoughts on the game itself) and continued through last week where I picked up Super Mario Bros. All-Stars (also for the Wii. And a pain in the ass to find, but I'll save that for a different time), Band Hero (it was less than $10 on clearance), and bought Castle Crashers and X-Men: Arcade off the PlayStation Network. That sounds like a lot, but I had gift cards that covered Mario and the two PSN titles, and, well, Band Hero was on the cheap.

Something I noticed about my buying habits there? Three out of five purchases were motivated by nostalgia, those feelings of a simpler time and more awesome gaming than yearly installments of Call of Duty (yeah, I know, Goldeneye is a CoD clone). And it's four out of five if you count Castle Crashers and the fact that I bought it because it's an awesome lil homage to the beat 'em ups of a bygone era (such as the era X-Men: Arcade hails from).

Mario All-Stars is a collection of the SNES ports of the NES Mario games and I had been holding out for those versions of the game since I got the Wii. X-Men Arcade is, well, the X-Men arcade game from the early 90's. I remember using coupon vouchers for free arcade tokens and blowing it all in 15 minutes on that sucker back in the day. And now I feel old. And sad. Because I'm old. Goldeneye, I purchased because it was an update/remake of Goldeneye.

So my question is: How much does nostalgia really influence our lives? There's a whole niche industry that thrives on kids and adults buying stuff simply because they remember it. Look at stores like Hot Topic. They have walls dedicated to things like Power Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles, and assorted old Nick Toons. And it's stuff we purchase and wear with pride (even though, at the height of its popularity, most of my classmates wouldn't have been caught did in a Power Rangers shirt).

And I've been guilty of buying this stuff. It wasn't for me, I swear. But I did get a Rocko's Modern Life Tee for the girlfriend.

So why do we do it? With video games and movies, where we can actually go back and play/watch the things we remember, they hardly hold up to our memories. If X-Men wasn't a game that everybody and their grandmas had an emulated version on their PC, I'm sure I would've been disappointed with the PSN release. But I knew exactly what I was getting there. Same with Mario and Goldeneye. But yet, we lay our money down for these products in hopes of capturing those days of our youth (and sometimes these come with spiffy new paint jobs, like the Perfect Dark HD game on XBLA).

There wasn't a huge point to this post. Only waxing intellectual-like. I'd invite others to join in with comments and such, but it annoys me when I read a very well-thought out article on other sites and then having it end with "Why don't you let us know what YOU think, whydontcha?"
Like, thanks guys, didn't know what the text box under the COMMENTS section meant. But that's a different story altogether. I had to beat them to death with their own shoes...