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alt title(s): Nostalgia Goggles "Nostalgia is a seductive liar."
— George Ball, American politician
There is a tendency for adults to see newer material in a medium (be it music, film, animation, or comic books) as inferior to the older 'classics' that they knew in their youth.
There are three levels of this. The first involves a person enjoying modern material, but preferring older classics instead. People subject to the first level are perfectly willing to accept newer material, possibly even admitting certain material to be better than a classic. The second level involves a person believing that most material produced during modern times is greatly inferior, however, they are more than willing to admit that there are exceptions. The third level is a full on despisal for all modern works (which may or may not be limited to a single medium) and the absolute refusal to believe that anything could be even close to the level of the classics they used to enjoy.
There are several causes for this. First, people's tastes are generally based on the art they knew as they grew up and they continue to inform themselves on this basis. Second, tastes refine as one matures; what may have seemed brilliant to a child or teen would seem crude or laughable to most adults, but the memories of how great something from one's youth seemed linger long afterward, making the familiar examples seem better than more or less equivalent modern ones in comparison. Third, change in most art forms comes in waves, rather than developing continuously, and the transition from one wave to another can be jarring and unfamiliar - while the periods between waves tend to be uninspired across the board.
However, it is likely that the most important cause of this nostalgia is a consequence of Sturgeons Law combined with the passage of time: As new material is released, the vast majority will be of mediocre or worse quality, but over time, a powerful selection pressure causes all but the best material (and in some infamous cases, the worst) to be rapidly forgotten, leaving an increasingly inaccurate impression of the overall quality of the genre over time. This is known as "the nostalgia filter", and can be easily demonstrated by a careful review of the period works that are not remembered today.
The distance of time also compresses the memories of past eras, causing the best work to seem more continuous than it was, whereas "new" is a continually moving frontier: Not only is the whole of the current period's work being compared to the best of the past, it is being compared to the body of work produced over years or even decades; comparing the finest vintages of the past with both the quality material and absolute rubbish being produced today is hardly a fair comparison, as the past is always going to look better.
Another reason, possibly slightly justifying this belief, may be that most developers/authors/artists/musicians/etc. create whatever is popular at that day and age. This can sometimes cause a certain genre to be greatly overproduced and another genre which was popular in previous years to be greatly underproduced (for example, there are about 10 FPS games for every platformer these days, while in older years there weren't FPS games and platformers were arguably the most popular of all genres). If the person at hand greatly enjoys the currently underproduced genre while not caring quite as much for the currently popular genre, this can grow. While this may slightly justify the belief that most games made after time period X suck, the belief that ALL games made after the given period isn't nearly as justifiable.
Sam Viviano, art director of MAD Magazine, has a saying which defines the Nostalgia Filter: " Mad was at its best whenever you first started reading it." A corollary to that is that, if you didn't like Mad, it was at its best shortly before you started reading it.
See also Nothing But Hits and Nostalgia Aint Like It Used To Be . Another reason for this trope is that True Art Is Ancient. Contrast Deader Than Disco.
Uruguay has a holiday entirely dedicated to this. And it is more important than Christmas. (The linked article is in Spanish)
Examples:
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Anime
- As a whole, any Gateway Series (Dubbed or not) such as Samurai Pizza Cats will be protected by the Nostalgia Filter while people are very quick to trash more recent animes. The funny thing about that...There was actually just as much "Bad anime" in the 80s and 90s as there are now. There was just less of a Fandom and Fan Dumb for it (partly due to the Animation Age Ghetto and common changes in dubs) in the 80s, and less interest in marketing series outside of Japan. There are also just as many "Bad voice actors" in Japan as there are/were elsewhere in the world. Many serious animes that emphasize story and characters also weren't considered marketable in the U.S. until Akira came along. (And even then, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas said Akira was unmarketable in the states) Even to the people who hate the art, the animation has definitely improved, of course this is partly due to the big jump in quality from VHS to DVD. So the point? There were plenty of bad animes in the 80s...you just didn't know of them.
- The dubs also have not "gotten worse" over the years...if anything as a whole most of them have gotten better, especially since a lot don't really change names or cut a lot of content. And namely, they don't reuse content.
- While people are bickering about Subbing Vs Dubbing today, nobody will demean whatever dubbed anime series that got them into anime.
- Contrast that with the fact that anyone who watches the Japanese version (either legit or Fan Sub) of a series first, will automatically hate the series' dub track. Applies not only to popular shows with notoriously bad dubs, but also to obscure ones that received a proper release. Regarding any specific series, your pick in the Dub vs Sub debate is often whichever version you watched first.
- That would explain why Cowboy Bebop is one of the few dubs that everyone seems to agree is good.
- Gundam. Many UC fans hate everything that is not UC because, eh, emm, it isn't UC.
- The first season of the Pokémon anime was always the best and it all went downhill from there. God have mercy on your soul if you disagree.
- An example of the Nostalgia Filter at work can be seen in the forum answers made in response to this review of ''Voltron''. The reviewer absolutely loathed the show, and many nostalgic fans responded as if he had just curbstomped their childhoods and spit all over them. (Many others acknowledged the Nostalgia Filter influencing their opinions of the show, but recognized the reviewer's right to have an opinion and resolved to not let it affect their enjoyment of the show.)
- Akira's old dub failed to impress streamline, Otomo, and Macek. And yet when it was redubbed in 2001, fans actually considered the new dub inferior, and how "Kaneda" should have been pronounced "Kah-Nay-Dah", despite how they will show no objection to them doing this in the Japanese version.
Comic Books
- This, combined with Running The Asylum and backlash against the excesses of the Dark Age, has brought back most of the Silver-Age status quo to DC Comics. Of course, most of the ridiculous stuff has been updated substantially, so it might be more like an Adaptation Distillation of the Silver Age.
- In spite of all the Asylum Running the comic industry goes through, there's still a large cry against almost every new launch of a comic book title, comparing it unfavorably to whatever version came before, sometimes due to major and dramatic shifts in the status quo or a new hero or team line-up. And among these are a large group of people who hate everything that isn't the Silver Age or at least nostalgic for the Silver Age, praising it as the greatest comic age ever where everything was better then the stuff around today. These people have clearly never been to Superdickery.com.
- There are fans who have declared most of DC's Modern Age to be noncanon, starting with the cancellation of Young Justice. These fans have stated that they don't like the way DC has been going and, while there have been some really shitty stories and horrible decisions via Executive Meddling, want the characterizations of the characters to be what they used to be. As in, the Dark Age / extremely early Modern Age. And these fans deride the writers at DC for "trying to set back everything to the Silver Age", despite the fact that those same fans would gladly do the same, except for being the Dark Age / extremely early Modern Age. Is it hypocrisy? Yes, yes it is. Combine this with the above nostalgia for the Silver Age, and, well... it ain't pretty.
- As a fan of the resurrected Silver Age being fair to the Dark Age fans, at least the Dark Agers can claim that the choices were being consistent versus indulging nostalgia and the editors and writers chose the latter. What they fail to notice is that the Dark Age and Sliver Age are actually being blended. For example, Barry and Hal returning to their roles has not displaced Wally and Kyle.
- Having read through many arguments of what alienates said fans, I doubt many of them actually miss the Grim and gritty years. But the 1990s introduced a generation of younger heroes in titles such as "Impulse", "Young Justice", "Batgirl", etc. Heroes generally well-liked by most fans. Since the resurrection of the Silver Age, the fates of said heroes are rather sad. Some are dead (Impulse, Superboy), others depowered or otherwise retired (Secret, Arrowette), or even worst depicted as villains or mentally unstable (Batgirl, Wonder Girl). Guess how these fans view said developments.
- Dear God, Marvel Comics fanboys. Ask them about everything that was done with Avengers since 2004 and they will say that Brian Bendis raped everything that was good in Avengers, even if the didn't read it. Similarly, many Daredevil fans will flame the whole of vol.2 for taking the show in a new direction. And all those who hate's Grant Morrison's X-Men run for killing Jean Grey. And if that wasn't enough, Joe Quesada's Nostalgia Filter was responsible for One More Day.
- Actually, if you notice fan letters and discussions from the 1990s, you will note the fanboys have questioned or detested changes attempted by several older creators. Even "classicist" Kurt Busiek has been equally praised for restoring 1960s and 1970s characters back into the spotlight and criticised for often regressing characterisations while mostly ignoring newer characters. (1980s and 1990s Avengers mainstays such as Sersi, Crystal and Deathcry were hardly used or mentioned). A decade later, these once controversial works are compared favorably to what has followed them in Marvel's production. The works of Bendis, Morrison and their contemporaries may also share the same praise in a decade or so. Particularly from fans with no emotional attachments to the Scarlet Witch or Jean Grey.
Film
- Dear God, the Star Wars prequels. The "fans" tend to exaggerate their flaws and bring them up
a fifteen notches, despite the 64% "Fresh" rating Episode 1, the lowest-rated of the prequels, holds on Rotten Tomatoes.
- While we're on the subject, the original series wasn't without problems of its own.
- The entire Star Wars saga in fact. Is Jar-Jar really that much more annoying than the Ewoks? Or even Chewbacca and his endless nails on chalkboard screeching? Is Hayden Christiansen really a worse actor than Harrison Ford was at the time? (No! That's not it!) Really?
- When he appeared on The Daily Show, George Lucas actually made a point to address how Nostalgia causes people to view the new parts of the mythos more harshly. Many fans of the original series hate everything that came after, younger ones who started with the prequels quite enjoy them more (some even saying A New Hope is boring), and still others (who he admits are very young), can't get enough of The Clone Wars. In his words, "We now have three generations of Star Wars fans," and does nothing to condemn any one group, saying everyone had their own favorites.
- The 1930s and '40s are considered by many to be the Golden Age Of Hollywood. While many timeless films were produced during that era, anyone who thinks it was all gold has never flipped to Turner Classic Movies late morning on Tuesday. On top of that, it overlooks the studio behavior that ran rampant in the Golden Age. Actors and directors locked into ironbound contracts, studios holding ownership stakes in theater chains (which allowed them to become lazy with the quality of their films, since they had a monopoly on distribution), formulaic plots, the Hays Code... yeah, those were the days. It was everything that is wrong with modern Hollywood, cranked Up To Eleven. The situation was so bad that the studios were afraid — and rightfully so! — of the competition presented to them by... television.
- YMMV: some folks out there argue that it was in fact the studio system that made the Golden Age golden, and that it was the anti-trust laws used against the studios that led to a decline in quality in The Fifties.
Literature
- Lampshaded in the opening passage of A Tale Of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness."
- The Warrior Cats fandom is very much affected by this, since the first series is regarded as the best by most of the older fans, whereas some slightly younger fans think of the second series as equal to or better than the first series, and even younger fans like the third series as well. In most cases, it seems people's opinions on when the series was Ruined Forever is directly related to how old they are, or which point in the series they entered the fandom at.
- In general, a lot of literature is affected by this. Well, okay, within the past 150 years or so, especially in the 20th century in which literacy became a requirement and short-story magazines were widespread. Even Tolkien wasn't without his inspirations at the time he wrote Lord Of The Rings. There were plenty of "bad Sci-Fi" and "stock fantasy" stories way back then...you just don't have the magazine they were printed in, or the book that was originally published. (Lord Of The Rings is being kept around in bookstores not just because it's an Influential work...it's because people still buy copies of it for reasons other that schools requiring it to be read for class, which is why many "classic literature" books get reprinted. If nobody read Lord Of The Rings, you wouldn't find it on shelves.)
- Meme in the Science Fiction community, attributed to Peter Graham: "The Golden Age of science fiction is twelve." For those who don't get it, whatever era of science fiction someone likes tends to be whatever era they were twelve years old in, and any later works are subject to They Changed It Now It Sucks.
Live Action TV
- Many Classic Doctor Who fans love to tell New Who fans that they hate the romance in New Who, they hate Rose (you know, the Expy of Classic Series companion Ace), and pretty much everything about New Who. There are people who like both, but the purist Classic Who fans and the New Who fangirls are the most vocal and thus the Doctor Who fandom has a reputation for being completely insane.
- In Who fandom, this trope is described by the phrase, "The memory cheats," a quote from long-term producer John-Nathan Turner when asked by a group of acid fans why the series had sucked so much under his tenure, as opposed to its former brilliance that they remembered from when they were small children. More cynical readers will note that this claim was facilitated by the fact that, given how much of early Who is now lost, no one was in a position to call him on it. Or call the fans on it.
- The Nostalgia Filter finally kicked in on the JNT era when New Who started...
- The Completely Useless Doctor Who Encyclopedia acidly notes that there is no mechanism for demoting a Classic Story From The Old Days, which is why when "Tomb of the Cybermen" was found, fandom suddently went very quiet.
- Thanks to Follow The Leader syndrome and the infamous 1970s purge of the BBC television archives, it can be at times quite easy to identify a fan who suffers from this (and a tendency to parrot the opinions of others) purely from a list of favourite episodes; look for those titles which, owing to age and the episode being missing, he's unlikely to have ever actually seen. Although since all of the missing episodes still exist as soundtracks, and have been issued with either production stills as illustrations or audio descriptions of what happened visually, such opinions aren't necessarily baseless.
- You'll be hard pressed to find a Power Rangers fan who doesn't claim that the Mighty Morphin' saga was the best period of the show. However, while the costumes and music were some of the best, you have to admit the acting, dialogue, running gags and even just the basic editing leave a great deal to be desired. However, there may be a slight justification for this: Mighty Morhpin' kept the same setting and cast from year to year, unlike Super Sentai and the more modern Power Rangers series, so the audience could become more involved with the stories and characters.
- Many fans of the original Star Trek reacted this way when Star Trek: The Next Generation was released. Most of them changed their minds when the new series turned out to be awesome. In fairness, the first few seasons were, shall we say, somewhat lacking.
- Extended in some of the more rabid fans of TOS and Next Generation who will call out any and all flaws of Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and especially Enterprise while ignoring all high points, then go histrionic and insist you are an idiotic fanbrat who "doesn't appreciate what's really good" if you point out any flaws of TOS or Next Gen.
- Saturday Night Live was always better when you were younger.
- Some fans of British comedy are quick to cite the 1960s and 1970s as being a flawless "golden age" of near-uniform quality, asserting that later generations have not and will not ever produce anything to rival Fawlty Towers, Dads Army, Monty Python, etc. Things like Mind Your Language tend to be forgotten quickly.
- There's also the fact that intervening decades have produced lots of comedy that's given the ultimate compliment of being nearly on par with those old shows... and yet somehow this never means that comedy is doing okay. The Office? Extras? Peep Show? Pfff.
- Fans of the American version of Big Brother will tell you that "The game was much better back in 2001 with Chilltown, or 2002 with Danielle and Jason; it was a much more complex game back then". Lies. The game actually grew more complex as it went on. Season 2 had head of household, and various food or luxury competitions...there was no "Power of Veto" that majorly changes the outcome of the game, and there wasn't that much of a need for strategizing. Once you were on the block, you'd best pack your bags because it's pretty much guaranteed that you have a 50/50 shot at going home...Nowadays there's a chance you get an extra week by getting Vetoed. The challenges also became more elaborate and oftentimes more intense than the challenges in Big Brother 2. (An endurance challenge in Big Brother 2 simply consisted of Will, Monica, and Nicole laying on a waterbed holding onto their keys on a table. Compare a more recent challenge, which had Kevin, Jordan, and Natalie standing in what looked like a jungle, holding onto their keys, walking on top of a mechanized rolling log, all while getting rained on, snowed on, and/or blown on by electric fans.) Big Brother three meanwhile had some more strategizing than the second, but the power of Veto couldn't remove yourself from the block so what was the point in using it, or even wanting to win it, for the most part? (Except for the part where Marcellas won the one veto he COULD have used on himself but didn't use it.) Meanwhile the other seasons put in other twists (Double Elimination weeks, some houseguests know each other, team play) and the players came up with new plans (Cruelty, Back-dooring, the secret two-man alliances) But of coruse, the fans still insist the game was "more complex" back then.
- Survivor often gets this treatment...and like the Big Brother example, they still say the game was more complex in the first two. Oh no it wasn't...the first two seasons had No tribal swaps, no exile island or Kidnapping, No hidden immunities, No Final Three, 8-man teams only, Final Destination. This kind of stuff is pretty much commonplace now and changes the way people play the game and think their strategies. (In the first two seasons, you could float to the end by hiding behind a strong player or chain-win immunities.)
- Another big example was "Oh I liked when it was a final two better". Even Jeff Probst has stated the Final Three was a good idea for Survivor for the exact reason of "People taking a dislikable person to the finals", which they did numerous times, even going so far as to plan it in the Final 8.) Two seasons also had a Jury of 9 but they removed this, due to a potential three-way tie.
- But two recent seasons actually have had a "Final two", for very explainable reasons. The most recent, Tocantins, had evacuated a player who had a very serious infection evacuated, thus not making him able to serve in the jury. And Micronesia had originally intended for a Final 3&Jury of 7, but the producers had seen a lot of Blindsides engineered by the final three and decided to blindside them. (Thus, there was a Jury of 8)
- Speaking of CBS reality shows, The Amazing Race gets this as well. Specifically, the first four courses were "tougher" than later seasons because clues were more than mere directions telling teams how to get to the next task, despite the fact that those courses, as a whole, were much easier than modern courses, and Detours, instead of being a choice between two equally tough tasks, were usually a choice between something short and scary or long and time consuming (only once did a team take the long and time consuming). With the modern Metagame most teams would just blaze through those first four courses with little to no trouble, leaving fans to complain about the lack of challenge.
- Season 1's course was so badly designed that three teams were essentially eliminated on leg 9, as it was impossible for the two teams that did survive to ever catch back up to the lead pack.
- This was a story element in one episode of The Twilight Zone, where a toy designer keeps lapsing into daydreams of his idyllic childhood while ignoring his slowly collapsing present. In the end, it turns out he was repressing the memory of the day the other kids beat him up because they weren't invited to his birthday party, and he's forced to come to grips with the brutal truth that his childhood wasn't nearly the fairyland he wanted to believe it was.
Music
- The first rule of music is this: If a band changes its sound, then they're "not as good as they used to be". If they don't change, they're "derivative and unoriginal".
- The second rule: Pretty much everyone thinks that the '90s and prior are immensely better than the current mainstream.
- Bob Seger basically built his career on nostalgia with songs like "Old Time Rock and Roll" and "Night Moves".
- Hip-hop from the '80s and '90s is considered far beyond current mainstream hip-hop by many older fans and even some younger fans. Of course, the Filter definitely applies here, as those who reminisce about the "Golden Age" will cherry-pick examples of the more exceptional rappers of the time, and conveniently ignore the more pop-friendly new jack swing sound that actually ruled the airwaves back then. Also, the genre's origins as lyrically simple, technology-driven party music seem to have been forgotten, as those attributes are ironically cited as the main criticisms of 21st century hip-hop.
- Except new jack swing never solely "ruled" the airwaves. Most of the radio stations' playlists at the time were much wider and more diverse. Hell, there wasn't even a playlist to begin with in certain areas. Now it's completely different. And quite frankly, the reason a lot of pop-rap artists from the last two decades are overlooked could possibly be because nobody remembers them.
- "Overlooked because nobody remembers them"? Well thank you Captain Obvious!
- Accept you don't have to be forgotten in order to be overlooked, or it's totally possible that those artists just didn't leave a lasting impression.
- Some metal fans will tell you that all the best metal came from The Eighties and that the scene was a shadow of its former self after 1991. In turn, other metal fans will tell you that '80s metal was trash, and that The Nineties was the best decade for metal. This is perhaps due to the fact that most of the major metal bands of the '80s — Slayer, Judas Priest, Metallica, Iron Maiden, etc. — are widely considered to have had lackluster '90s output. On the other hand, many death metal bands had their peaks in the '90s. You could probably figure out who listens to what based on their opinions of various decades.
- Many vicious arguments have occurred between older and younger rock fans as to whether modern rock is good at all, let alone as good as the classics.
- This culminated in the Rolling Stone magazine article: "The 500 Greatest Songs of All-Time." Written in 2004, it included only 3 songs from the 2000's and a truly massive number from the 1960's and early '70's, roughly coinciding with the rise of the Magazine itself.
- Same could be said about the hip-hop albums they listed. As most of the albums were from the 80's and 90's. A lot of critically acclaimed rap albums were released those 2 decades.
- Older Than Steam: In the late Renaissance, Roman Catholic church leaders were angry that music in the church had become so complex (with lyrics that were harder to sing and instruments often drowning out the voices) and tried to force composers to return to the plainsong chants of the Middle Ages, taking such extreme measures as banning any and all instruments from church music. Modern classical music fans owe a huge debt to Palestrina for writing music that made the newer styles palatable to church authorities, and thus kept them from halting the wheels of progress.
Newspaper Comics
- Boy, these get this a lot. Yes, some have been going a tad too long, and if you ask any person who read comics, they'll always tell you how everything after Calvin And Hobbes, Bloom County, or Foxtrot (for younger ones) was unreadable crud. (With a few free passes, like Get Fuzzy and Mutts) Shame that comics like Frazz, Candorville Baby Blues and Zits tend to get overlooked when one thinks of the "Realism" and/or "Exaggerated Realism" seen in their favourite comics. (Many happenings in those comics are exaggerated for the sake of humour but aren't that far from the truth) Once again, nevermind that Calvin And Hobbes was about as much about the title characters' animation and imaginary relationship as it was about "Realism" or "Exaggerated Realism"
- A very good example is how many people will deride Garfield as being "Repetitive" since the 90s, or how "It's all jokes about gluttony". Yeah, you know Garfield was like that in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, right?
- People who like Serious comic strips also love to trash the ones running right now as "You never get to see what happens next, it's too long!". Well do you have any idea how long it took for Dick Tracy to run a story arc back then? About as long as it takes for Prince Valiant to get somewhere.
Tabletop Games
- The last edition of Warhammer 40000 was always better.
- With the exception of the current Chaos codex, Warhammer 40000 tends to afford this once the book is released (goes double for 5th edition Imperial Guard Codex which is the best thing ever)
- Subverted with the current 7th edition rules of Warhammer Fantasy, which are generally accepted as being better than 6th edition rules. However, played straight with the army book supplements, which many consider to be hideously powerhiked.
- Dungeons And Dragons has this with just about of edition that is released. Several people pointed out that the edition the player first started playing at gets this treatment, similar to the Elder Scrolls fandom (See the Video Games section below). Fans of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons are very quick to ignore the Chaos Incarnate rulebooks and the lack of variety. Fans of 2nd edition are also quick to ignore how hard it can be for players to pick-up-and-play without having to run a couple "Practice Campaigns" to get used to the limiting amounts of rules. Fans of 3rd edition also will not acknowledge how "Simplified" it is compared to Advanced D&D or how new players can be absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of rulebooks compared to other editions (Not to mention the infamous Co Dzilla), and you can bet your bottom the vocal fans of 4th edition (If they haven't been hunted to extinction by Fan Haters) will find one flaw to ignore when 5th edition finally comes out.
- And many fans of the first three eds will say that 4e is an MMO, but will also ignore how "MMO-like" pen-and-paper games already are. (Doesn't help that the first MMORPG was based directly off of Dungeons and Dragons and was actually made to be an online Dungeons and Dragons.)
- Fans of previous Dungeons and Dragons edition are very quick to disregard Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards as a "problem"; nevermind that it also not only lead to Co Dzilla but dozens of Min-maxers who tried to make the best build possible and how unbalanced most classes were, especially with Fake Balance. They will also ignore how a DM can utterly screw the game over by not putting any upgrades for gear-dependent classes like Fighters. This also leads to the editions suffering from Hype Backlash.
- There's also a small contingent of "Old School" players who declare that D&D was much better in the original "white box" days, before modern perversions like the Thief class (a staple of the Basic and Advanced rulesets).
Video Games
- In general, video games tend to age even worse than most other media. Most people will not accept this.
- The best video games were always the ones you liked when you were younger or first started playing games.
- Some people will say that the games of the past were more complex. Can you spot the fallacy of that statement? I can...People who say that just aren't paying attention. Games of today are actually more complex than back then. You can just pick up most games (Even PC Games) and play them, with few exceptions (Eg the Text-based games). Being able to pick-it-up-and-play is now considered "Dumbing down", "A Casual trait", and "Holding your hand", as a result, Tutorial levels were implemented because not everyone is going to read that Door Stopper manual that shipped with The Witcher..or may even have it for that matter. (Used games may often not contain the manual. Finding the manual for a Cartridge-based game, for example, is incredibly rare. And don't get me started on Pirated games...)
- A possible reason for newer games actually being in general (NOT in all cases) worse than older games without the Nostalgia Filter's effects is that the focus has now become largely on graphics, and some game developers will prioritize graphics over gameplay, whereas in the arcade and early console ages graphics were very basic, even after evolving from 8-bit for a while, so in order for a game to become widely loved back in earlier days, it actually had to be a good game rather than just a good looking game. This does not, however, justify a complete belief that all modern games are horrible, as this is tendency is avoided a lot of the time.
- The "They only care about graphics nowadays" is completely irrelevant anyways - video game developers for the SNES and Genesis cared just as much about graphics as people who joined at the PS 3 nad 360. There just wasn't a whole lot of room to look different, even on P Cs since they didn't always have expensive video cards. (There was once a time when all you needed to play a PC game was just a working PC with the right Operating System)
- The internet is largely at fault for the strong Nostalgia Filter people have for video games, especially on such vehemently picky places like /v/. These days, news of a new game gets leaked the second it goes into development, giving people anywhere from months to years to build up such unrealistically high expectations of the game that they are completely and utterly let down by the final product. Back in the nostalgia days when you were seven years old, flipping through a month-old copy of Nintendo Power at Wal-Mart, you didn't have time to build up such high hopes for a game that was coming out next week, so you just played it and enjoyed it for what it was.
- Games were always much harder back in the 8-bit and lower era, no doubts. Nevermind that arcade games were specifically designed to be hard so one would keep on putting quarters in the machines, bugs that made the game harder than it should be weren't removed in testing, games weren't tested for bugs at all, one could make the game unwinnable by accident, cause stuff to be Lost Forever, Fake Difficulty ruled, Arcade games were often shoveled onto home systems with only a code for more lives, and when the stiff controls and design would lead to all sorts of unfair deaths. (Illustrated in the Angry Video Game Nerd's Castlevania videos - 100% of the death sequences are now considered "cheap" if they were done in a video game today) Nowadays, at least half that stuff are commonly bashed in games because "they should have tested it better!"
- Many gamers also don't acknowledge age, experience, practice, or genre savvyness and Genre Blindness. Their little brother who has never played a Mario game in his life will have just as much troulbe playing Super Mario Galaxy as you did trying to pass World 8-3 of Super Mario Brothers back when you were his age. For that matter, try getting most adults who've never played video games since the arcade-dominant era of The Eighties to play video games...they'll probably have just as much trouble as you do.
- Time also blurs a lotta things. Many people will admit they had difficulty with Castlevania, yet oddly enough a couple years ago, you were called a "noob" for admitting to having difficulty with Castlevania. Or MegaMan. You were not allowed to say you had a hard time on any stage back then but nowadays people proudly admit they had difficulty with Mega Man...back in the day.
- The first generation of Pokémon (1996) was the very best. The second generation (1999) was pretty cool too, almost as good as the first, if not equal. The third generation (2002) was decent, though definitely not as great as the first. The fourth generation (2006) sucks, and the only thing that will get them to appreciate it would be the announcement of the fifth generation. Or so say the many, many old-school Pokémon fans affected by the Nostalgia Filter. A minority in the fandom, but a very vocal one.
- There's another school of though that goes that the second generation was the best, followed by the first, fourth, and third, in that order. According to this theory, the third generation sucked because it came out when you were "too old" for Pokémon, and the fourth was good because it came out when you were in college and therefore old enough to like it for nostalgia reasons.
- There's also plenty that put Gen IV above Gen I because it was so buggy and unbalanced. Also, Gen III gets a lot of genuine criticism for removing lots of features people like from Gen II, inability to trade with previous games, and overuse of sea routes (which is something that Gen IV went out of the way to avoid).
- However, each of those criticisms can be justified. The only real thing that Gen III took away from Gen II was Night/Day aspect (However, It did have time. So you could evolve your Eevee into Espeon or Umbreon anyway.). The hardware and software differences between the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance, as well as the Link Cables, made it impossible to connect the GBC games and the GBA games and that was not Game Freak’s fault. Yeah, there were a lot of sea routes (It’s an Island region, whaddya expect?) but the ability to dive underwater and explore the ocean depths made it enjoyable. Still, people unfairly call it the worse region because they couldn’t trade over their war weary, grizzled Level 100 Shiny Charizard over from Kanto.
- Keep in mind that the third generation was the first where a significant number of Pokémon wasn't available in a sole pair of games. In Ruby and Sapphire, it wasn't even possible to catch Pokémon outside of those of the Regional Dex (200 out of 382, not including special event Pokémon).
- The original generation definitely hasn't aged that well...People spoiled by even playing Gold, Silver, and Crystal will probably play the original version (Not the remake, the unaltered version!) and find it a bit tedious, to say the least. No berries, no female trainer avatar, (which was really demanded) no dark or steel types allowing Ice and Psychic to run rampant, no half-way decent Bug or Ghost types also allowing Psychic to run unchecked, having to select pokemon to use HM moves manually every time you have to use Cut, bugs, sudden difficulty spikes, no held items, no moves based off of stuff like Affection, very few decent dragon types, moves being based off of stats that don't make sense, having to switch boxes manually, no running shoes, no Day/Night at all, and all items sharing the exact same inventory... So Yeah.
- The remakes of Gold and Silver HeartGold and SoulSilver are getting a mixed reaction from nostalgic fans. On the one hand, this is the remake we all had hoped and prayed for ever since FireRed] and LeafGreen (to Red, Green and Blue) came out. On the other hand, a lot of changes have been made, many of which didn't go over well simply because they were changes. Each and every little thing that varies from the original has come under fire, and Kotone has already gotten bashed into the ground simply for having an outfit the fandom doesn't like.
- It's worth noting, though, that the complaints about Celebi are actually well thought out, valid, rational, and based on over a decade of annoyance at not being able to get the little bugger legitimately: they put a useless (more so than before) Pichu in Celebi's place. It's still a nostalgia issue, but it's more along the lines 'we thought you weren't going to screw us over this time like you did in our childhood' rather than 'the past was awesome'.
- Any time a game gets a remake, this happens.
- While it is not as numerous as other games, (Due to most Star Ocean fans being displayed as a trophy on Fan Haters' walls) this has actually happened to Star Ocean: The Second Evolution. In fact, this can show how powerful the Nostalgia Filter can be. The original version on the Playstation was known for having a story some people found interesting, but had a terrible translation and the voice acting was just plain awful. not only was it full of awkwardly-translated dialogue but the hardware for recording the voice was poor, you could barely tell what some characters were even saying. So then there was the announcement that, with the fourth game in the series on its way, the first and second Star Ocean games were going to be released...on the Playstation Portable. Everyone's reaction? "Maybe they'll fix the voice acting on the second story! And redo the translation too!" So the game is remade...trashed by critics because of the cliches (that weren't very cliche when the game was originally released, geez ever thought of that?) and guess what some of the fans did? They actually liked the PSX translation and the voice acting better!! This really shows you one thing...do NOT try and combat the Nostalgia Filter.
- Wall Banger points go to Square-enix because if they directly-ported the PSX version to the PSP and didn't try to improve it, those exact fans (and new people) would mock the rush-job translation and voice acting that They Just Did Not Care to make sound decent.
- The older members of the Sonic The Hedgehog fandom won't ever, ever allow any Sonic game made after 1998 to be called good. Any implication that the Genesis games weren't the Holy Grail of gaming, that Sonic Team isn't too incompetent to listen to the fans, or that the 4Kids voice actors aren't a horrible blasphemy to the older ones will result in the poor fool being burnt at the stake by the Fan Dumb.
- They also tend to be nostalgic for the Console Wars, put it that way.
- JRPGs are subject to this. Many older gamers who grew up with the "golden age" of RP Gs on the Super NES era are quick to bash the newer games and go on about how much better the older games were. Generally, they forget some of the truly execrable examples of the genre that were released then. However, they were very slightly justified in that North America really did receive fewer Japanese RP Gs during that time, as they were still a niche genre and most of the shovelware never made it to our shores. Now that there's a larger American fanbase and a higher chance of getting decent sales even for shovelware, we are seeing more of it. However, it doesn't mean the crappy games didn't exist, just that they weren't translated or that they didn't know about them.
- Also, the tendency to make the graphics a main selling point (disregarding, among others, the story) can most likely be pinpointed towards the PlayStation, which came after the SNES. Which is, of course, also an example in itself as the older fans grew up without pretty graphics and thus are more likely to shun games that concentrate on them.
- The whole "they only care about graphics nowadays!" argument is completely invalid. Developers always cared about both graphics and gameplay, ever since the first steps of video game developing - they just do the better they can with the system they have. People fail to see that developers of SNES games were just as worried about graphics as any PS 3-game developer is nowadays. But the whole "Sprites" or "Primitive 3D" was commonplace at the time...and praised. (Even the first Alone In The Dark had rather stunning graphics for its time.) And even "Sprites" are yelled at on "next-gen" technologies when they're not used by Indie-Gaming developers, who get a free pass on this.
- If game developers really cared as much as the Gaming Methuselahs claim they did in their generation(s), that is, not at all, then they wouldn't even use stuff like video cards&Drivers, graphics processing, and other such technologies used to display graphics or even enhance it. It's incredible how, outside of the gaming industry, only about ten or eleven of us actually acknowledge this.
- Your Mileage May Vary. Why do a lot of (not all) modern games look so unnecessarily drab and dull compared to the low-polygon/pixel stuff from the early 90s?
- A simple browsing of the official forums for World of Warcraft will usually find at least one thread asking for servers that are limited to the original World of Warcraft limits before the Burning Crusade expansion (Level 60 Limit, Naxxramas toughest raid). This is a classic Nostalgia effect, as there are many players from that era who will tell you how boring and stupid much of it was (grinding for the High Warlord/Grand Marshall titles, how the game required one to install and regularly update a dozen and a half Game Mods, or having to run all of Molten Core just for the last boss' loot being prime examples).
- However, this may also be in reaction to the current way Blizzard is running the game, since many of those posts are often filled with accusations of "dumbing the game down" and "catering to the casuals". (Despite that people were whining about this during the "vanilla World Of Warcraft" days) Add Nostalgia Filter for when the game was harder (read: more time-consuming, worse class balance, extreme amounts of gear dependency, Pv E gear steamrolling Pv P gear in Pv P, Zillions of mods being required, and more exploits and bugs, imbalanced racial traits), and you get the rise in those posts. You can bet your bottom that when people are whining about "Dumbing down" the game; they won't mention how you don't have to download a dozen and a half mods to even raid entry-level dungeons because the UI didn't originally include half a dozen action bars, Warnings against bosses doing specific attacks, Gear Managers, or even quest-progress tracking. And do not mention the twisted and heavily convulted attunement quest-lines of Onyxia or Burning Crusade - Everyone crying for them back has probably blocked out how many players were running dungeons over and over again on standard difficulty to get heroics, how human characters could get it done faster simply because of a passive racial skill, and how many players and characters were stuck trying to find groups to run step one of attunement quests and having to pay players to run them.
- Of course, there is the semi-valid point that people who don't buy the expansions cannot go past 60 anyway, and servers that don't include expansion materials would help those people find groups for the old raids...or even the pre-60 instances but nobody ran those anyways after a certain point.
- A somewhat more recent example was removing attunements in Burning Crusade. Sure it may not have been a problem on some servers, but if you were on one of the dozens of Wasteland EST Pv P servers (of which there are still many) that people abandoned for higher-population servers where there were more players running entry-level stuff, then if you missed the "Attunement Rush", good luck because you're on your own. After attuning a dozen guildmates and alt characters, people in guilds would absolutely refuse to help get new members and the Johnny-Come-Latelies through attunement quests because they were sick of it. This of course left people to finding people who haven't done them yet, and finding people on the same stage as you was incredibly rare, and one would probably find instances run on regular mode for Reputation Grinding's sake to happen once every month or so. (Because once most people had their heroic keys, they vowed never to enter the instance on normal again because to them, Its Easy So It Sucks or they just get no upgrades) this made getting the simple key to Karazhan (The entry-level raiding dungeon) incredibly hard for all the wrong reasons, what with the "Fuck you - I got mine so bugger off!", "I've got mine...I won't benefit so why should I help you when I got Dailies to complete?", and "Ugggggh not Key fragments AGAIN!" -mentalities that filled the raiding guilds and people who had already finished them. this of course meant that people who couldn't catch up simply abandoned the server and went back to higher-population servers where there may actually be people who still run the attunement stuff and normal instances. Do you think it's any wonder that even the hardcore raiders running Sunwell Plateau were popping Champagne for their alts sitting in Shattrah when they finally removed the Cant Catch Up-ness from the game?
- Similar events also happened during "Vanilla World Of Warcraft", but it wasn't as much since there weren't actually that many attunement stuff for the raiding most people would do - In order to get to Molten Core, one simply had to complete a quest that could be completed in a 10-man raid and groups would just plow through Blackrock Depths to get everyone attuned. Then in order to get to Blackwing Lair, one had to do an attunement quest that pretty much went through another easy-to-run and easy-to-find-a-group-for dungeon called Upper Blackrock Spire, and one could even find guilds that'd run them because that's a good way to gear Alt characters up for Molten Core or Pv P. Sure that wasn't bad, but let's talk about the Onyxia attunement quest and the utter mess that was. That was the perfect precursor to the Burning Crusade attunement quests because it was a large multistep quest chain similar to the Burning Crusade quest lines and everyone was pretty much tired of doing it. The horde insisted that 5-manning Lower blackrock Spire was the hard part but the Alliance version had to deal with the "Fuck you - I got mine, I'm not doing Jailbreak again when I won't get any gear upgrades!"-mentality that made it incredibly hard to find a group outside of pick-up-groups. (It also didn't help that in order to get to jailbreak you had to pretty much spend the entire day running back and forth and in and out of Blackrock Depths anyways.) Ahn'Qiraj simply had a serverwide event and Naxxramas...well if you managed to make it to Naxxramas during Vanilla World Of Warcraft, you should consider yourself lucky because less than 10% of the game's playerbase even made it there, and people pretty much thought "But Burning Crusade is coming out so why should I bother getting Tier 3?" after Naxx's release. (because so little people saw it, it was recycled for Wrath of the Lich King.)
- Probably the most egregious case of Nostalgia Filter is people complaining how the previous expansion was better because affliction or demonology was the tops spec and now everybody plays as destruction and just spams 3 buttons. Here's what's wrong with that sentance: a) the top dps tree for locks in endgame is, was, and always will be (unless Blizzard makes massive changes) destruction, as it scales the best. In the previous expansion it too destro longer to outdps the other trees (the 3rd tier of raid content instead of the b), but once it did it was several thousand dps above them. b) the top dps spec back then consisted of literally spamming a button, so spamming 3 buttons is big improvement. c) it's not 3 buttons you use, but at least 5 (aside from lifetap and such).
- I got a better one....there are people who think Druids should be the way they were in 2005 because they don't like the idea of them tanking or DP Sing. Now wait a minute...Druids in 2005 were rare. Nobody played them for a very good reason...they had only one build that worked, their talents were fubar, their DPS was the lowest in the game, cat form was broken (having the same DPS as bear form, meant to take damage rather than give it), they were incredibly gear-dependent and had very little gear for any other specs, were pretty much useless beyond flag-running in Pv P, and they were just a terrible class to level as a result. So to make a long story short, broken talents, broken abilities, imbalances up the wazoo, and absolutely no gear if at all for other specs, on an extremely gear-dependent class. You want to go back to that?!
- EverQuest received the same criticism that World of Warcraft is now getting, though it was equally often characters who wanted to return to their previous levels of desirableness during periods when you just didn't associate with certain classes because they were worthless as pure "the game was better" sentiment.
- One rather odd case was how people think they should go back to removing experience upon death and how you should delevel of you die enough....and yet the number one complaint about MMORPGs, primarily Ever Quest? Deleveling or removing experience upon death.
- Pretty much all MMORPG fanbases combine this with They Changed It Now It Sucks. City Of Heroes players often complain about how they 'don't feel super any more' because the game is no longer ridiculously unbalanced. Although the masochistic streak of MMO players seems to be absent, the game has been praised for wisely doing away with the
classic MMO features poor design choices endemic to the genre.
- Guild Wars receives a similar treatment from a certain fraction of the fanbase - there has even been a call on a forum recently for A Net to make a "vanilla Prophecies" server, and many such players point at the rise of various "overpowered gimmick" builds as evidence that balance has been ruined while decrying all professions that have been introduced in following chapters as not just unbalanced but inherently unbalanaceable. Nevermind that such builds have been possible since release - there's a reason the name of pretty much every powerful team build tends to be a single syllable with the "way" suffix (it dates back from the vanilla-Prophecies-era skill "I Will Avenge You", shortform Iway, which was a key part of a build that dominated the Pv P meta for long enough that the company made an AI team using that build in a training mode to teach new players how to fight it). If there was ever a time in which there wasn't at least one overpowered gimmick team build floating around, it was only because it hadn't been discovered yet.
- Guild Wars players, especially fans of prophecies are also very quick to ignore just how absolutely slow it took to level up characters in Prophecies, especially ones who've been spoiled by Factions awarding thousands of experience points whereas quests in Prophecies would award 500.
- The Legend Of Zelda games are always affected by this. It doesn't matter how many vast improvements the newer games make over the older ones, and it doesn't matter how many glaringly obvious flaws there are in the older games. According to the fanboys, the old games will always be better.
- Many Tetris fans fall under this, preferring to stick to NES and Game Boy incarnations as opposed to more modern versions that pack more features such as multiplayer for 4-10 players, a more fair piece randomizer, and flexible game mechanics (as opposed to the stiffness of older Tetris games).
- You can bet your bottom that the first Persona game on the PSP (A remake of the first) will get the "I liked the inconsistent blotches of voice acting, awkward dialogue, and terrible localization better"-treatment. Sure, Masao looked less dorky in the localization, but still, it was famous for a terrible localization because it was Atlus's early days.
- When Persona 3 came out, people whined about how you had to select dialogue options over the school day and interact with civilians to befriend them and "That took up too much time" and "Wasn't role-playing" (Actual role-payers can't read the latter comment with a straight face). The Nostalgia Filter seems to have made them forget that in the previous games in the series...you had to do just that, but replace "Classmates and random civilians around the town" with "Demons", and you still had the joy of experimenting with the same kind of demon zillions of times before you finally got it right and learned how to get items from the demons.
- Fans of the Elder Scrolls video games who have played Daggerfall seem to prize it above newer installments, citing its larger world and deeper lore while ignoring its heavily pixelated graphics, the numerous bugs, Fatigue not regenerating, and repetitive locations full of blank space.
- Morrowind fans hate Oblivion, no matter what. Nevermind the fact that the rather stiff NPC AI in the latter was an improvement over the literally lifeless AI of the former, or that it had less Game Breaking Bugs, or that it was far easier to pick up and play than Morrowind's overly complex tutorially mess (Which is what Bethseda intended), having some more interesting characters, or that, while there was less dialogue in Oblivion, it was far easier to follow than what is potentially tens of thousands of Walls Of Text with barely any voice acting to keep it interesting, that the combat was even more monotonous than even Daggerfall and Arena's where you got to specify how your character attacked as opposed to simply clicking the mouse button over and over again until your finger cramped and your character finally made contact, or that the former had blocky, outdated graphics (in its time) coupled with lots of brown...But keep in mind that Morrowind is a game that you are not allowed to dislike unless you have the "Yahtzee" free pass.
- If a map from the original Gears Of War is able to be voted on in the sequel, expect it to win, even though they've all been Ruined FOREVER with the addition of the weapon cycle. Especially War Machine, and it's not even out yet.
- For those curious, Epic made the terribly grave mistake of revealing that War Machine, the only map that could have come close to seeing as much action in Gears 1 as Gridlock did, was going to get a Boomshot cycled in every couple of rounds. A large part of the community took this as an atrocity on par with the Holocaust and petitions sprung up from every...*ahem*... dark corner of the forums, smothering any decent topic that gets posted. Too bad it's not Valve, we'd see Boomshots carpeting the place come July.
- Epic seems to have a good business strategy going for them: With the return of Fuel Depot in the Snowblind Map Pack, as well as the upcoming return of War Machine in July's Dark Corners DLC, Epic seems to be releasing one Gears 1 map in every new map pack, because they know that people will buy it just for that map, even if they loathe the other maps (hell, they'd probably pay more for the option to not download the other maps).
- Of course, all this only applies to Gears 2 players, and not the large number of players who simply could not deal with or adapt to the changes and went back to Gears 1 on the very first DAY of Gears 2's release. The two biggest changes that have caused this are the added concussive blast to the smoke grenades, and, of course, the shotgun being demoted from its godlike status. However, petitions have sprung up about every "problem" such as wall tags, certain power weapons being more powerful than before, certain power weapons being less powerful than before, the weapon cycle, the weapon cycle on Flashback Maps, and about how the speed of Gears 2 is "soooo slooooowww" compared to Gears 1. Basically, everyone just seems to have wanted Gears 1 DLC with a new campaign, new maps, new weapons (which wouldn't matter because everyone would still be using nothing but the shotgun), and new achievements.
- Whenever Square-Enix remakes an older Final Fantasy game, they usually update the translation. Many fans are quite... insistent on how good an idea this is. Worse, they tend to exaggerate the impact. For instance, in Final Fantasy VI, Woolsey gave Kefka a number of silly one-liners that, to many English-speaking fans, defined the character. In the Game Boy Advance Enhanced Remake, with an updated translation, exactly two of Woolsey's one-liners were altered in the slightest. Two. Out of a couple of dozen. More were added than removed. Yet ask certain members of the Fan Dumb, and they'll claim that the remake made Kefka into a serious character, an outright lie.
- Related to Final Fantasy, the Nostalgia Filter has managed to block many haters of Tetsuya Nomura's artwork from noticing that their beloved Yoshitaka Amano actually DOES have his own trends like the other artist. No one seems to notice that Amano loves to draw willowy men with white hair, pale skin, blue lipstick, and an effeminate looking face lined with eyeshadow. The only character where this actually seems to apply is Kuja... who no one seems to admit looks more masculine when drawn by Nomura.
- And just like how Nomura loves his belts and zippers inspired by Japanese fashion trends (although he seems to have an eye towards American urban fashion nowadays,) all male Amano characters have spiked armor with giant capes (When the capes can be put on, Locke for example has no cape but Edgar and Setzer have his trademark cape), and all of the girls wear catsuits or bikinis. (Don't forget the lipstick and incredibly pale skin!) And let's not forget Akihiko Yoshida's predilection towards bondage gear or tight pants on men.
- The Mario games run this trope. When Super Mario 64 came out, Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World was just better because 3D sucked. Then Super Mario 64 was the better game once Super Mario Sunshine came out and again when Super Mario Galaxy was released. No matter what Mario platforming game is made and all the new and cool things that go in them, the die hard fans would rather have Mario 3, Mario World, or Mario 64 again and again.
- To be fair, Sunshine wasn't a necessarily good platformer when compared to either Mario 3 or Mario Galaxy.
- The Metroid fans began to show its nostalgia after the Metroid Prime trilogy was introduced, mainly because they believed (like the old school Mario fans) that 3D ruined the Metroid experience. Of course, Metroid Fusion and ''Metroid: Zero Mission'' went back to 2D, but the die hard fans won't accept them because they're not like Super Metroid. (Most fans of both seem to act like Metroid Fusion doesn't even exist, even in a negative fashion. They're so fixated on either Super Metroid or Metroid Prime)
- A developer for Monkey Island once noted (back when the fourth game was newest... ahh yes, the 2000s, now ''those'' were the days) that the game generally held to be “best” in the series seemed to be the one previous to the latest installment. Starting with the release of the second game, of course, though that was only a year after the first. Nostalgia Filter applies when comparing the third (1997) to the second (1991), the fourth (2000) to the third, and if the nostalgia is strong enough, the fourth might get elevated now that there’s a newly eligible target (......Butt Monkey Island?) in the series lineup.
- One could say that the exact same rule of thumb applies to the 3D Zelda installments, ever since the release of Majora's Mask. Ocarina of Time was the best starting in 2000, then Majora's Mask ascended to that spot as of the release of The Wind Waker. And of course, wouldn't you know it, people now have a newfound appreciation for The Wind Waker now that Twilight Princess is out. Anyone wanna venture a guess as to when Twilight Princess stops sucking?
- Nintendo has fallen under the nostalgia goggles of many a Nintendo fan. While it was always the case for each new console release, it became more exposed when the Wii was launched. Many people will tell others how much better Nintendo was in the old days and how getting owned in sales again would bring better games.
- This is the entire reason as to why Spyro The Dragon has it's Broken Base in the first place. Everything after Insomniac's first three games warrants nothing but complaints no matter how much the series veers away from the mascot with attitude trait that has allowed the franchise to get better recognition and be played by more than just kids.
- Likewise, by the time the Legend of Spyro was in full swing, Sierra was roughly three times as old as the whole Spyro franchise itself, which only began in the late 90s. Also, upon Insomniac's loss of the franchise, although they really seemed happy about it, it seems that almost every game made by them is "bad" because it's a shooter-based platformer, not a wacky platformer.
- Just about any 90s game is always going to be considered better than any modern game because of "gimmicky graphics" and "quirky gameplay" and who knows what else.
- Isn't it ironic how many games like Dr Mario and Tetris are excused from the "Any game that is not gritty or has some point to it are casual games and are not games!"-statement made by many hardcore gamers today? Of course, a lot of this is because they will not trash any of the original incarnations of Tetris, probably because that kind of simplistic (yet addictive) type of puzzle game was around for years.
- Never ask a fan of the original PSX version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night what they think of the voice acting and retranslation in the PSP remake. Apparently, the hilarity of the original's generous helping of ham and cheese is more important than good writing and competent voice acting.
- See the section about Star Ocean 2.
- A portion of Gaia Online's Unpleasable Fanbase have fixated themselves on the concept of "Old Gaia", primarily due to the fact that "They Changed It Now It Sucks". The concept of "Old Gaia" is viewed as an internet utopia, free of the Noobs, Gaia Cash, and Product Placement that has taken hold of Gaia in recent years. Of course, while Old Gaia did have it's charms and advantages, people seem to forget that it was basically a buggy anime forum with Paper Doll Avatars and a comic that crashed constantly, where features that exist now were announced but had yet to manifest, and 90% of the features they take for granted were incredibly awkward to use or didn't even exist. Nostalgia Filter indeed...
- Fans who complain about Halo 3 having generic environments are obviously ignorant of the fact that it was a significant improvement over the horrible Cut And Paste Environments the former two games had.
- Doom fans complained when they played Doom 3, claiming that it "lost the atmosphere" the former Doom games had, that it relied on horror cliches to try and scare the player, or that the guns looked cartoony, plastic, and toylike. To put it straight, the older Doom levels had about as much atmosphere as the peak of Mount Everest, the series had relied on the exact same horror cliches (and were coupled with cheesy-looking monster sprites, especially by 2004, to boot), and that while three or so of the weapons (Fist, Pistol, Chainsaw) were genuine, the rest of the guns were either toys or drawn.
- Being a fan of both the classic and new DOOM, I can explain exactly why we feel that the atmosphere was lost. DOOM 3 heavily relied on horror cliches, yes, but, unlike classic DOOM, that's all they used. Classic DOOM also had the benefit of fully-lighted areas where you could actually see the monsters. Even on the Martian landscape or in Hell, the sky had an eerie red tint to it, and you could feel intensely lonely. DOOM 3 is almost always in the dark, and when there is light, it's heavily shadowed. Sometimes being able to see what's coming at you is scarier than being surprised.
- Completely turned on its head with the Backyard Sports series. Most critics, including those on IGN, G4, and 1UP, only know the games published after 2004 (which are often So Bad Its Horrible), and begin to dislike older games in the series because they are different from the newer ones. IGN's case is especially hilarious because IGN's favorite games (through their Nostalgia Filter) were released around the same time as the original Backyard Baseball and Backyard Soccer.
- Point and Click adventure games were always good no matter how many of them were unwinnable or featured unintuitive puzzle designs. (Even in games where one does not die.) We'll also ignore when you were told You Cant Get Ye Flask.
- Some people also watch cutscenes of Lunar: Silver star Story on Sega CD or the Kings Quest V and nowadays just laugh at how "Cheesy" they are, ignoring how back in the early nineties, that kind of stuff was actually new and impressive. (And how quickly the animated cutscenes improved over King's Quest V and Lunar's rather paper-doll-animated cutscenes; there's even more improvement in Eternal blue) Some even say "games should just be left in the past to truly appreciate them".
- Ditto Final Fantasy (PSX-era, mainly), especially Final Fantasy VII, one of the first games to use fully-rendered CGI FM Vs. They were phenomenal back at the time, but they are just silly by today's standards (VIII and IX too, since they are in the Uncanny Valley to a certain extent).
- Don't also forget many games that featured Full Motion Videos period, not just the pre-rendered ones. A lot of people are very fond of Dragons Lair, but it took the Angry Video Game Nerd to point out that there wasn't really that much to the gameplay, most of the appeal was how much it stuck out from other Arcade games, and how like all other arcade games, was designed to make you want to put quarters after quarters to get past that stage - you always knew just how to get past those obstacles after you saw them. (Although they'll laugh when they remember what Don Bluth used as a reference for Daphne.)
- Counter Strike, Full-stop. There's even a Broken Base about which patch version it's appropriate to be nostalgic for.
- 4chan's /v/ is completely powered by nostalgia, and it's one of the few reasons most /v/irgins will actually play a video game. Naturally, the ones who tell everyone else to stop being blinded by nostalgia are accused of being 12 years old and liking Halo. Only someone too young to have ever played old games would even cosider the possiblility that all these casual new games could ever come close to even being on par with beloved classics.
- Following the Symphony of the Night and Star Ocean examples, Shadow Of Destiny latest PSP release got hate from old fans of the game because the voice cast was changed from an obscure and utterly bored-sounding cast to the horrible one of famous and talented voice actors, including Yuri Lowenthal and Brian Beacock. I mean, despite the Dull Surprise faces, who wants to play Shadow of Destiny now that the characters show some emotion on their voices, right?
- The music from old games can get the Nostalgia Filter, too. Some people go and make remixes of music from old games using modern equipment or real instruments, then you hear people complaining that the more realistic sound sucks.
Western Animation
- No matter what people may say, '80s cartoons were usually either So Bad Its Good or just So Bad Its Horrible. This usually comes up when some studio revives an '80s cartoon and fans who grew up with the show complain about how the new version is automatically inferior to the old one, even if the new version has the benefits of a better animation team, script writers, directors, and whatnot. (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being the ur-example of this - although the change of style in the new series helps divide the base even further).
- For that matter, the 2003 remake of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles got this treatment from people who said They Changed It Now It Sucks and "It's not faithful to the 80s series". Interesting...because the 80s series was an In Name Only Animated Adaptation of the original comic books that spawned the series in the first place. (With added toy commercials) So if anything, you should be complaining about the 80s version for "not being faithful".
- The Transformers franchise gets a lot of this, as there are some fans who regard anything other than the original generation as having ruined the franchise FOREVER.
- The 90's Spider-Man cartoon is often heralded by many a 90's kid as being downright amazing, ignoring the Conspicuous CG, supernatural plots that went on forever, horrible censorship and generally poor animation quality. However, they'll be the first to decry The Spectacular Spider-Man show, which features tight, cohesive plots, deep characterization, smooth animation, great voice-acting, snappy dialog and loads of Spidey easter eggs because the art is "too simple". And most of those people praise the '90s Batman cartoon, despite it featuring a very streamlined and simple art-style that was rather unorthodox at the time.
- You'll always find people who say "Cartoons today suck. What do kids have now... Dora The Explorer?" The key problem with that reasoning is that when it comes to what is today you forget that we have to sift through a bunch of crap to find those good shows, cartoons or not. You have a tendency to forget and/or ignore the bad shows you watched when you were younger because you want to remember the good shows. Each generation has their own slew of good cartoons, and whatever you watched when you're a kid stays with you. The 80's had He Man And The Masters Of The Universe, Thundercats, Robotech and others. The 90's had Batman The Animated Series, Mighty Max, Beast Wars, ReBoot and others. The 2000's has Justice League, Avatar The Last Airbender, Samurai Jack, Star Wars Clone Wars (And The Clone Wars) and others. It's all about learning to find them.
- And, of course, there's the phenomenon whereby someone who praises the cartoons they used to watch as a kid over modern fare actually sits down and watches it, only to discover that it's nowhere near as good as they used to think and is in fact closer in quality to the modern material they deride than they'd care to admit; when they were a kid it was the bestest thing ever, but now that they're an adult their tastes have simply changed. Some kids shows don't translate well for adults.
- Which is why '90's kids will be some of the most vocal critics of current cartoons, as they grew up in a supposed 'golden age' of animation with cartoons like Animaniacs, Pinkyandthe Brain, Tiny Toon Adventures, Rockos Modern Life, Renand Stimpy, The Tick, and many other shows whose humor can be enjoyed and appreciated by most age groups. Current cartoons are targeted specifically to young children, and are closely monitored by Moral Guardians. Some of the most popular cartoons nowadays though are 'edgier', like Futurama and Family Guy and old holdouts from previous decades like The Simpsons and South Park.
- The reason those cartoons are "edgier" is because they're designed for adults. Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures et al. may have had a lot of Parental Bonus, but they were still primarily aimed at kids. They had to be subtle with their more adult jokes. Family Guy doesn't - it's not supposed to be "family-friendly," so it doesn't have to pretend it is. If anything, the fact that we have an explosion of so many strictly-"adult" cartoons is the result of the Moral Guardians making it impossible to sneak anything subliminal into kids' shows anymore. (And the fact that they do this in the name of "family values" is ironic - shows like Animaniacs were probably the most "family-friendly" shows ever because both parents and kids could enjoy them. Now, cartoons are either too saccharine/inane for adults, or too blatantly sexual/violent for kids.)
- Unfortunately, a lot of people will complain about educational TV like Dora The Explorer - ignoring that there was actually plenty of it back in the day - stuff like Magic School Bus and School House Rock just seem to be given a free pass as the only ones that people admit existed. And this phenomena certainly isn't limited to just the animated ones.
- Disney fans have a tendency to bash the tween-oriented direction the company seems to have taken, and long for the days of good ol' 2D-animated cartoons. Problem is, no one can actually agree when this age ended. The Lion King? Tarzan? Lilo And Stitch? When The Princess And The Frog came out people praised a) the Disney Princess story, b) the partially hand-drawn animation and c) the beautiful setting. Sadly, said fans' many, many squeals of joy were instantly drowned out by people coming out of nowhere to very vocally complain about everything. There's also the many live-action films Disney made and continues to make. The new ones all, apparently, suck, with one exception: the first Pirates of the Caribbean
- The problem here is that critics tend to agree with the haters. The classic Disney movies were generally far better received by contemporary critics than modern Disney movies are by modern critics (Not counting the 50s), so you have to wonder if there isn't some truth to the matter. Although maybe the modern critics have nostalgia goggles preventing them from liking modern works and the older critics didn't.
- Related to the above, this trope is played with in Recess, when Vince apparently does not notice that his brother (who was revered by Vince's peers around his age) was a stereotypical nerd, remember how "cool" he used to be.
Other
- Every time Facebook gets overhauled, people scream and complain and make massive groups petitioning against the change. This lasts about a month, at which point everyone gets used to the new version, and the process starts all over again.
- The blog Celeblols loves to bash the stick-thin celebrities of today and laud the old-fashioned, "classy" women... like Bettie Page. Yeah, lots of meat on her.
- This even goes beyond popular culture: social conservatives tend to be nostalgic for The Fifties, which they feel were the last decade of "normalcy" (i.e. the last decade of white Protestant male dominance) before the social changes of the 1960s violently stripped it all away. Meanwhile, liberals tend to have a much rosier view of The Sixties, feeling that the "peaceful" social revolution (ignoring, of course, the race riots, the Weathermen, and the entirety of 1968) was betrayed and snuffed out by conservative backlash.
- Must have come from hippie WASP's, as most minorities have a less idealistic and much darker cynical view of The Sixties then their liberal white counterparts. Even The Seventies, and The Eighties are kinda dicey.
- Hell, every decade falls into this. As people get older, they will always look back on their youth as having been a simpler time with less problems, conveniently forgetting whatever problems actually existed back then. Anybody who has known at least one of their grandparents will know this all too well.
- Another example of fifties nostalgia, not only does it glance over race issues, but apparently having the right to whip your kid is a good thing, [1]
- Fifties nostalgia was deconstructed by the film Pleasantville, which initially presented its idyllic '50s sitcom world through the nostalgia filter, then slowly stripped it away and highlighted the racism and sexual repression of the era.
- It doesn't matter what sport you're talking about. To some writers, the players today are not nearly as tough or selfless as the players from [insert era of writer's youth]. Never mind that people were complaining about selfish, overpaid athletes back in Babe Ruth's day. (Famously, when asked why he should make more than the President, he replied "I had a better year.")
- This is quite possibly why the original Paul Heyman ECW has no entries on WrestleCrap.
- Paleontologists often consider modern CGI documentaries like Walking With Dinosaurs to be complete and utter crap, have a grudging apprecitation for Jurassic Park (though the third movie falls into So Bad Its Horrible territory), and consider stop-motion animation movies from The Eighties and other bygone times to be the best thing since sliced bread.
- There is Truth In Television here. People frequently reminise about their childhood, or specifically High School. It's even lampshaded in a comic strip of Zits when Walt takes his son on a trip to cabin which Jeremy hates but Walt for some reason has all these pleasant memories of. Yet Jeremy finds a tree into which Walt had carved, "I hate this %^@&% Dump!!" and Walt mentions, "Wow, time has a way of blurring things, does it?"
- Ruben Bolling's comic strip Tom The Dancing Bug advanced a theory that popular culture was at its height when you, the reader, were ten years old. This seems to hold true regardless of the reader's age. It may extend to the world at large that the Golden Age was when you were old enough to get access to a larger world, but young enough to have few or no responsibilities.
Exceptions and parodies:
- People who grew up in the 1970s are well aware that they were subjected to the crappiest cartoons of all time, and that the cartoons that both preceded and followed that era were superior.
- Every decade that gets lauded for its amazing music usually had some pretty crappy music on the airwaves as well. The 1970s is one of the best examples: some of the best rock music ever came out of that decade, and it saw the advent of punk and hip-hop. But the '70s also produced a lot of very forgettable pop music. And as for disco, Your Mileage May Vary. Though young people who get into classic rock often mourn the fact that they weren't there to experience their favorite bands in concert, in many ways they're more fortunate than those who were, because they can experience the best of those bands' output without having to put up with the dreck that often accompanied it on the radio.
- On the gaming site Sporcle, every quiz involving music of the 2000s (such as "Top Selling on iTunes and Amazon") attracts many comments complaining on the quality of the artists. In one, an user/editor of the site decided to list some #1 hits from the 60's and 70's to prove the whiners had a severe Nostalgia Filter.
- Inversion: The 1950s are remembered for producing a lot of Narm, mainly cheapo sci-fi/horror flicks and idyllic sitcoms. The decade also gave us the likes of 12 Angry Men, The Young and the Damned, Sunset Blvd., Rear Window, Vertigo, The Seventh Seal, The Wages Of Fear, A Streetcar Named Desire, Rashomon, Seven Samurai, North By Northwest, Paths Of Glory, All About Eve ... but they aren't associated with the time period. (It helps that bad 1950s movies tend to be remembered because they're So Bad Its Good.)
- The Nostalgia Critic's job is showing the world that the '80s and early '90s had their fair share of So Bad Its Horrible shows and movies, as you can guess by his name. The Nostalgia Filter attitude was also mocked in the end of his Pokémon: The First Movie review, where after spending a good portion of the review complaining about the ridiculousness of the premise, comes to the realization that popular eighties cartoons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Alvin And The Chipmunks and The Care Bears had pretty stupid premises themselves before shouting "THOSE WERE THE DAYS!".
- Similiarly, the Angry Video Game Nerd has the questionable honor of showing the world how bad some games on the "classic" consoles were, and has not only showed The Problem With Licensed Games, but that many of those extremely hard games were hard for all the wrong reasons... sadly, this cannot help the Nostalgia Filter from making people realize how much bugs affected the game and often made them unplayable or gave unfair challenges.
- And it's not just bad games where he points out Fake Difficulty or difficulty due to bugs, too. His reviews of Castlevania and the original Ninja Gaiden emphasize the unfair challenges, and during his death montage in the former, most (if not all of them) were due to stuff that are not a result of the player messing up. (Such as being knocked right into the water and dying at full health, or the final battle of Castlevania: Dracula X where you have to jump in between platforms and one hit kills you.)
- Perhaps his most direct subversion of this attitude came when he compared old school Godzilla games to newer ones. He blurts out "I was born too fuckin' early!"
- Internet celebrity Seanbaby has an affinity for cheesy stuff from the 80s, but for the most part, he's honest about how stupid it all is and relentlessly tears it to pieces. He even directly made fun of Mr. T.
- Although Yahtzee has implied to have enjoyed Dizzy games on the Commodore 64 very much, he admits that they weren't the best games in the world, given the limited color pallet and egg shaped protagonist.
- Mocked in The Onion, where a cantankerous old man writes the editorial: "The [Base]ballplayers in my day were for shit!"
- The Sim City fandom mocks itself half of the time when it comes to nostalgia, mostly for only having 5 game installments over 20 years. Of course, do something completely stupid when you're playing the game and bring up on a forum and you'll be told you'll get ''Sim City Societies'' for Christmas.
- Fashion itself is an exception for the most part, unless a trend happens to cycle back.
- Every tenth topic of the /co/ board of 4chan is whining that children's television (both animated and live-action) was infinitely better when they were young than it is today, and almost everyone agrees. Granted, this is 4chan, so plenty of the topic starters and repliers are probably just screwing around.
- Stand By Me is somewhat nostalgic, but presents gritty truths as well. After all, the kids are out to find a stranger's dead body. Oh, and the main character's parents ignore him, not to mention his older brother had been recently killed.
- Oh, and all four boys smoke. At age twelve.
- Viz has a running joke about how it "isn't as funny as it used to be".
- Sent up in the paintball domain by The Whiteboard, starting here.
- This attitude is called out in one episode of The Real Ghostbusters, where Ray is talking about how the fifties were a much simpler time. Egon points out that there's no inherent proof of that, as each decade has it's own individual challenges.
- The movie Pleasantville is designed to mock '50s nostalgia, by revealing the Unfortunate Implications of claims that life "was better" before all the social changes of the 1960s, and how the "ideal" that people desire to return to a) wasn't really there in the first place and b) isn't such an "ideal" after all.
- The show Mad Men does a lot to show how with all the awesome music and fashions of the '60s came rampant sexism, racism, and homophobia, and how the values of the previous decade held over and were difficult to dismantle. Considering how saturated the culture was (and still is) with '60s nostalgia when the show first debuted, it was exactly what the doctor ordered.
- A lot of people who were kids in the mid- to late '90s remember the music of the era as mainly boy bands and Britney Spears imitators (since, as kids, that's what was marketed to them), and conclude that The Nineties were a bad decade for music. It's quite a shock when these people come back and discover all the great '90s rock and hip-hop they missed out on because they were too young for it at the time. (It's likely the children of the '00s who think music now is all about Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers will make a similar discovery in a few years.)
Besides, The Nineties were way better.
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