Oh look, it’s Monday. When on earth did that happen? I don’t think I saw this one coming. Right, better think of a topic for the Monday music hadn’t I? Hmmmm. What to do, what to do, what to do?

Right, I’ve thought of something. How retro is too retro? One of the things that the App Store has perpetrated is an increase in games with one eye looking back to the perceived glory days of gaming.

But there have been games recently that have been trawling the back catalogues in ways that aren’t ever going to manage to spark the same sort of interest as they did when they first landed.

Old times

You see, the thing with old games is that quite a lot of them weren’t very good. They were tough, they weren’t very responsive, and quite frankly a lot of us only liked them because we didn’t know any better.

And when we go back, we find that there’s not really all that much to them. Because games iterate, because games change as the technology around them changes. And what we’re sometimes looking at is a sort of patchwork.

Games with a retro flair to them do need to get a few things right. And one of the main things they need to get right is realising that the past wasn’t really that great. And that the modern times are pretty damn good.

Especially when it comes to mobile gaming. Because mobile inputs are, quite frankly, nowhere near as complex as the ones we used to use in the arcades. Or on our Spectrums. Or Amigas. You get the idea.

They have a potential for complexity, yes, but it’s of a different sort. Trying to directly transpose things onto a touchscreen is never going to work, because, well, it’s just not.

And if you’re changing the controls, you need to change the game underneath it. Because otherwise you end up with a game that doesn’t click together in the right way.

So, the question is, how retro is too retro? And I guess the answer that any amount of retro is too retro. Because we’re not really bringing old games back from the dead, we’re tapping into a vein of nostalgia.

And those are two very different things. Because nostalgia is almost always wrong. Nostalgia is thinking about a place you’ve been and then, when you get back there, finding out you remembered it all wrong.

To be honest though, it’s not the facts that matter. It’s the memory, however misguided. So retro isn’t really retro. Except when it is. And then it’s not really very good.