Memory can be a cruel mistress, leading us to believe we had something so beautiful, only to stare blankly into the cold face of reality upon a wayward return with the hopeful zest everything would be as we left it, and we are both amazingly correct and terrifyingly wrong at the same time.

Not all the glitters is gold

My initial goal today, per my post yesterday, was to binge part of the Gex Trilogy, so I would be able to report back with something favorable to share. While I was able to successfully beat the first game in one (painful) sitting, in all of its janky glory, I did get sidetracked by all types of IRL kinds of issues, further complicating the entire debacle. Now, at the 11th hour, rushing to and fro having to get ready for my actual job, I realized I don’t quite have the needed time I would prefer to write the full review.

I would normally commit myself to a quickie in this instance, and pen up a random news article that would fit the bill, but mood and circumstance are not in topical favor as of late. This is within the consideration of the current headlines at the moment, which are rife with the wreckage and despair involving the destructive fallout following the massive slew of Microsoft layoffs that has left so many in abject misery. My heart goes out to those affected, it really does, but in times of great turmoil, it is important to keep one’s own headspace in a safe place, so I figured I would attempt something slightly lighter in tone before I have to deal with even heavier burdens at work that may take even greater toll of devastation upon me.

With that in mind, I figure I would kind of just wax philosophical for a second about a thought I had when playing through Gex 1, as it was building off of a developing idea I had been kicking around in my head before I even booted up the remastered trilogy. Mostly involving the notion that nostalgia is an inherently bizarre quality for something to possess, as it is a vague essence that could technically be inherent in any given idea, object, moment etc given context and time, but is entirely relative to the individual in question. This concept harkens back to Bertran Russell’s posit of “Being North Of”, as one can not necessarily be imbued with the sense of being north of, as a quality, it is inherently reliant on their temporal place in spacetime that solidifies and quantifies the relation therein.

Though, I regress at this moment to refocus my point on nostalgia with this quality in mind, as this means nostalgia can end up signifying a number of qualities all at the same time, and somehow triggers the idea that one must take the good with the bad, as your return visit is likely to be plagued with age, but all totally relative to you. While nostalgia is certainly divined as “of the past”, everyone’s past is most certainly different, so just mere signifier of being from that type of past is the importance, though technically remaining vague all the time.

Not that age is necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but within the gaming realm, it will usually signify any number of-isms and or lack thereins inherent within the time of release. The absence of quality of life pleasantries will obviously diminish the far enough you go back, at some point even losing music in the process with super old school consoles…some even lacking the ability to display color if we go back to the beginning with the Magnavox Odyssey in mind. Remasters know this of course, and try to mitigate the damage by offering what they can, where they can; for games like Gex, that means a massive weight off the shoulders of the lucky majority by allowing save states anytime, and even a rewind function so that you can correct your mistakes the moment they happen. I figure without this simple little addition, most normies would have no chance of swallowing a nostalgic pill this bitter.

This initial point of this post was my posit that nostalgia is a mad beast, due to the queer nature of its non-tangible existence of varying standard, as the quality therein is totally dependent on the subjectivity of the individual here after. This makes nostalgia a paradox upon itself, as it becomes simultaneously one’s entire world growing up, and yet nothing at all to another person in almost the exact same situation of similar nature. How such a damning quality can be so surface level, yet so valuable, so meaningfully complex, but so vacuously amorphous all the same is a wonderful little bit of philosophic musing deserving of a far greater in-depth deep dive than I have the time to give it at the moment. Nostalgia’s intrinsic qualities are certainly worthy of a far greater investigation contingent on waxing and waning like the moon itself about all that i shines upon, which will have to wait for another night of inquisitive jest to commence, but I wanted to get this notion down for posterity’s sake, and perhaps return to it in a less raw, unrealized way at some point in a more mature future.

That way, it will turn into an endearing moment of nostalgia, and upon my return, I may even rue the day I believed it to ever of had value in the first damn place.

-Pashford