Old-Style Video Games

I watched an interesting documentary on TV last night called My Life in Verse, which featured comedian Robert Webb (one half of the Mitchell and Webb comedy duo and one of the stars of Peep Show) discussing the importance of poetry in his life, with particular emphasis on the work of TS Eliot. It was very interesting and surprisingly emotional at times. I also saw a really fun web movie called Fairy Tale Police which starred Rachael Leigh Cook as one of a pair of human cops ina kind of bizarre fairy-tale world. It was really quite funny and Rachael Leigh Cook is always worth watching.

Today I went out and bought a video game called Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection. It's a compilation of over forty games that were originally released for the Sega Mega Drive console (the Sega Genesis in the US) between about 1989 and 1995. The games are obviously very dated by now, but they're still fun and playable. I really remember when those consoles were out and there was a huge rivalry between Nintendo and Sega. It was actually quite a big thing at the time. I remember my brother, who had a Super Nintendo (we were a Nintendo family back then, we had the Super Nintendo and my brother and I each had a Gameboy console and we were into Super Mario and all that), once drawing a picture of Nintendo's mascot Mario barbecueing Sega's mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, which he would show to his friends who had Segas. Playing those kind of games again really brings me back to the early 1990s. It's really too easy to sentimentalise and get nostalgic for the past particularly because in hindsight you do tend to remember it as being a lot more fun than it actually was. I remember actually at work yesterday I was chatting with my friend Chris, who is a couple of years younger than me, about old games consoles and how they are different to those ones there today and I said "do you realise we are now on the wrong side of a generation gap?" and he was like, "oh, God, yeah we are."

I'm thirty years old now, and I always get depressed about my age. It's like I often think about dating, that if I did start doing it, it just wouldn't really be fun any more (mind you, none of my dating experiences so far could ever in any way be described as fun, more like total nightmares) because I'm probably too old to actually enjoy it. Also, there is so much other stuff that I want to do, like being successful and so on, and life is really short.