Shock as cherished childhood game turns out to actually be “a bit shit”

Maybe...maybe old games AREN'T inherently superior to new ones...

Maybe…maybe old games AREN’T inherently superior to new ones…

An unnamed man from Ohio was reeling today after it turned out that his favourite game from his childhood – 1994 Super Nintendo Entertainment System release The Smurfs was actually an absolutely terrible title which, had it been released in 2013 would have been consigned to the Gamestop bargain bin where it would have been made the punchline of many jokes on Reddit for the coming week.

Prepared for a trip down memory lane, the man, understood to be in his mid-20s, posted a picture of his SNES on facebook along with the offending title, captioning it with “found this in the attic – about to take a trip down memory lane – game’s fucking awesome, Zelda got nothing on this”. He quickly discovered, however, that the game which his six-year-old self enjoyed so much was in fact a buggy, unplayable mess of a title, which wasn’t helped by the fact that early-1990s technology does not scale too well on 42″ high definition LCD televisions.

The realisation has had surprisingly far-reaching repercussions, which many gamers now fearful to return to their cherished favourites out of worry that they too might come down with a case of “actually being a bit rubbish”. While games such as Super Mario Land and Ocarina of Time are thought to be safe, despite appearing slightly dated by modern standards, wide swathes of “retro” titles related to movies or other cheap cash-grab tie-ins are thought to be at risk.

Posting on facebook later in the day, the still-unnamed man was seen to comment that “maybe a six-year-old doesn’t actually have better taste than paid, professional video game journalists…”

About Cieran Douglass

Cieran built this website in a cave with a bunch of scraps. Actually no that's not right at all, it was with Wordpress and middling Photoshop and design skills. He often plays video games and his favourites are Paper Mario TTYD, GTA San Andreas, Portal 2 and Minecraft. His display picture is not an accurate portrayal. He currently works for a much bigger website at the University of York, but if you'd like him to write something for you he can be contacted at cieran@pixelgrater.com.