A lot of people get nostalgic around this time of year, because of Thanksgiving, Christmas, spending time with family, holiday traditions, and all that good stuff. I don’t, though, because I grew up Southeast Asian in an atheist household with no particular affinity for Christmas. To my family, the end-of-year holiday season has always been a time to throw ragers, or whatever passes for a rager to my now sixty-year-old parents. There are always cheese boards, a hearty dinner, and cases of wine. And, really, they’ll take any excuse to throw a classy party – December doesn’t have a monopoly on a good time.
The older I get, though, the more nostalgia I feel in general. I’m not about to represent myself as a geriatric (I haven’t even hit 30, for god’s sake), but I’ve gotten old enough that memories of my childhood are less humiliating and more fond. When I used to think of my childhood, large chunks of which I spent playing video games in my basement like some kind of neckbeard incel stereotype, I’d cringe at the knowledge that that tiny version of myself never really hung out with friends all that much or played outside in the sun. Now, I look back and think – what on earth happened to those games I was playing?
I know what happened, of course. When our Xbox broke, my brother and I convinced my parents to let us upgrade to the newer Xbox 360, on which most of our games weren’t playable. Then, as I entered university and started working part-time, I said I’d buy us a secondhand PS4 and sell our old Xbox and Xbox 360 games to offset some of the cost, since we didn’t have an Xbox console to play on and the games were all outdated anyway. They weren’t worth much, but they helped put a little money back in my pocket.
I regret it now, because none of the games I used to play can be accessed digitally now, apart from Knights of the Old Republic and Skyrim. I was playing some really bizarre stuff back then, too. For some reason, I owned a copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, a game in which you make the female characters in the Dead or Alive series play beach volleyball in skimpy bikinis. There was no reason for me, a child, to be playing a game with jiggle physics and a mature rating, but here we are. I also played through X-Men Legends 2: Rise of Apocalypse quite a few times, which was my real entry into the Marvel Universe – I certainly didn’t watch the X-Men movies with the rapt attention I gave this game.
It’s not like I think these games are particularly good, or particularly bad. But I was thinking back to the games I used to play, and the fight for physical games in a world where digital media can so quickly be rescinded, and I’ve realised that I didn’t appreciate having those games while I did. I didn’t realise that they’d become relics of a time long past, things that I would wish I could play without having to buy an old console and discs off eBay. Now, when discs are becoming all the more precious to me, in a time where I’m seriously considering starting a Blu-Ray collection so I know I’ll never be cut off from my favourite movies on the whim of a streaming service, I’m realising I should have held on to that very age-inappropriate beach volleyball game.
