Ok, the title is a little provocative, but this post might not be as outrageous as you might think. This week I’ve been re-reading Earnest Cline’s Ready Player One with one of my classes and it has really made me nostalgic for the games of my youth. I spent a lot of time in arcades in the 80s and if you’ve read the book I’ll confess that in 2044 I’ll be about the same age as the crazy cat lady in the stacks, Mrs. Gilmore. Along with reading the book in class we spent a day playing through a lot of the games that are a part of the story. Cline weaves a tale that makes you long for the days of feeding quarters into arcade machines at the corner arcade/ice cream shop. I could almost smell the sweet mixture of the scent of ice cream and smoke wafting in the back door from illicit cigarettes. And as if they knew exactly where my head was this week Sony released Q*Bert Rebooted for the Vita and PS4 for less than the cost of a trip to the arcade (with ice cream and illicit cigarettes 30 years ago). There was only one thing to do: buy it as fast as I could.
I have a strange relationship with my handheld consoles. It really is a nostalgia machine. In the true sense of the word nostalgia, they harken me back to a past that never was. My Nintendo 
handhelds have been used almost exclusively for playing old, new, and rebooted versions of platformers I never played as a child because they were brutally hard and I was just bad at them. I much preferred RPGs and fighting games, but somehow just seeing these games in their blocky glory has made me long for a childhood spent in front of a NES or SNES hopping over barrels or swinging a sword at mythical monsters in places where it really was “dangerous to go alone.” But truth be told, I didn’t play my first Zelda game until the 3DS. I bought Skyward Sword for the Wii, but there was something about playing it on the big screen that just didn’t feel right and the same has gone for all of the single player Mario games. These games (and platformers in general) just feel like too much of a personal experience to share with anyone else. And the best way to keep them to myself has been to play them up close and personal (literally like 8 inches away from my face). Playing the games like this allows me the opportunity to (re)live a childhood that never was. On a small screen (albeit smaller than the arcade machine and tv screen that I had in my room) and in a world of my own.
This week Q*Bert gave me a sharp dose of reality. While waiting for its release felt like waiting for the arcade to open on a school day (it was closed until 4 to make sure kids didn’t hang out there when they were supposed to be in school), the reality of playing the game was much less sweet. After playing the game for about 30 minutes I remembered what my actual Q*Bert experience had been like in the arcade. I fed quarter after quarter in that machine just trying to get to the point that I could get somewhere respectably close to my friends’ high scores. But it was not to happen. While playing some games reveal their secrets to you after playing them repeatedly (think about the zen of jumping from platform to platform in Tomb Raider or the rhythmic movement of the joystick as you crossed the screen in Frogger), Q*Bert refused to disclose his secret to me 30 years ago and again 30 minutes ago. If Q*Bert and I were lucky enough to avoid the bouncing eggs then we were sure to fall prey to the springy snake, which made both of us swear. And to be perfectly honest the changing colors of the 2D blocky triangle always made me a little dizzy which I’m sure didn’t help the fact that I just sucked at the game overall.
So for now I think that it’s time for Q*Bert to go back where he came from. Deep in the recesses of my memory where I was good at the game and where I actually enjoyed it and we’ll stick to his more straightforward (or sideways) arcade comrades who allow me to go back and (re)live the years with them that I never had. After all that’s one of the things video games are good for right, living out a fantasy? I’m going to play some Majora’s Mask.
