When we praise an older game, the impulse to qualify whatever statement we’re making is often strong. Instead of leaving our assessment to be, it’s tempting to preclude it with “perhaps this is just the nostalgia talking” or follow on with something regarding “rose-tinted specs”. Sometimes, yes, nostalgia can influence and inform our opinions on particular games and mean we hold them in higher regard than we perhaps would if released today. Would you pay £30 or $60 for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 2010 like you did over a decade ago? Probably not. Sitting on a shelf next to Bayonetta, Dragon Age and Modern Warfare 2 it’d look positively archaic. Do I still call it my favourite game of all time? Of course.

Recently I dug out the N64 with the intention of playing some Banjo-Tooie and Majora’s Mask as springboards for articles; neither made it into the cartridge slot. Ocarina of Time was in there from the last time I had finished it some two or three years ago. Hooking it all up to the old 14” CRT - which, funnily enough, I had received the same Christmas as the game - I flicked the power switch on and navigated to the appropriate television channel, Banjo still in hand.

“Drrrm-drrrm”.

“Would you pay £30 for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 2010?”That was all it took for me to cast aside the other cartridges; the first half bar of music to the introductory screen. A floaty, ethereal overture accompanies a montage of Link and Epona riding across Hyrule Field at dawn. It remains an immensely powerful and evocative sequence. It’s beautiful. Show it to someone who hadn’t played Ocarina of Time, though, and they wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t understand the significance. They wouldn’t understand the breathtaking journey that particular imagery heralds. They wouldn’t understand how many memories it holds. They wouldn’t understand.

It’s time we stopped letting nostalgia dominate our discourse about older games. Maybe it would appear that I’m advocating some kind of retrospective relativism here, but that’s not quite the case. We needn’t assess yesterday’s games on the technical standards of today - that’s a given if we’re to value the very notion of nostalgia. Neither, though, is it necessary to cheapen their achievements by calling them “good for the time”. Some age better than others, but if a title once had the ability to amuse, enthral or move you in a certain way then that deserves to be recognised. If that scabby old cartridge had the capacity to inspire you, then it incontrovertibly still can.

The emotions that arise from our nostalgia give whatever we’re discussing an inherent meaning, and playing down powerful experiences because we feel the need to accommodate others or justify ourselves to an online message board or comments section seems ludicrous when you afford it a moment’s thought. If there’s a connection between this game and that real-life event, even better, because the work in question is bound to have held some significance to you already that is been amplified by whatever other event of note occurred back then.

“It’s time we stopped letting nostalgia dominate our discourse about older games”There’s no point in pretending otherwise, I’m a very experiential gamer. I value what our medium can do in terms of narrative, atmosphere and immersion and I prefer to look at the bigger picture before breaking something of this nature down. Mechanics or other particularly ludic elements aren’t necessarily what I’m looking for all the time, and maybe this predisposes me to appreciating the virtues of nostalgia and the emotional journey and how whatever I’m playing is designed to take me down that route is what interests me. Don’t get me wrong, I adore game games; Lumines, Peggle, Marble Blast and most recently Torchlight are titles that I love which exemplify this ethic of design, and it’s one to which I respond just as readily. It seems to be the less mechanically focused games, however, that bear the brunt of those “good for the time” non-statements.

Maybe this isn’t surprising. There’s a reluctance from some quarters to pay any credence to what players got out of a game other than “it was fun to shoot a guy”, and this attitude can foster a related inclination to avoid discussing any and all experiential value, which is what the core of nostalgia is. In turn, we become disheartened when we talk about our favourite old games, chalking what we loved about them - be it part of the authored content, an outside influence or something that sparked our own imaginations - up to lack of clarity in hindsight.

If you boot up an old favourite and get that warm, fuzzy feeling inside from every element of its aesthetic, go out and expound its brilliance. Ocarina of Time in particular touched a nerve with me - I feel like crying every time I play it because it reminds me of everything. My childhood, the magical sense of captivation and wonder, daydreaming about it in school, pondering what lay beyond Hyrule, watching Ed, Edd n’ Eddy, staring at the box and manual illustrations for hours, the in-game map, the landscape, breaking the big sword, discussing it with friends, the dungeons, those little icons in the inventory, the characters, the weapons, the bottled milk, the music, the journey, the adventure. So bust out your NES or PlayStation or Dreamcast and pop that game in the cartridge slot or disc tray. Relive it; lap up every last ounce of what you see, feel and hear. Savour every last second, pretend you’re still ten and, above all, don’t be scared to tell the world why you love it.