As exciting as the new release cycle can be, there are plenty of days where I really want to take my SNES, a copy of Yoshi’s Island and a few other choice carts, and seal myself away in a cave for a few years. I’m not necessarily antisocial mind you, there are just periods where I’m incredibly tired of getting excited for titles on the horizon, only to have the final release dash my hopes that there can still be games that make my fingers tingle with excitement the way I remember.
It always seems like an easier option to crawl back into my childhood memories, which probably skews the truth plenty to make the games of yesterday seem so much better than what we have now.
Over the last week I’ve been watching my girl play a game I missed the first time around though, Rare’s 2006 release of Viva Piñata. The result so far is that I’m absolutely stunned at how refreshed I feel, even from passively experiencing the game, which also comes from a company I’d almost entirely written off.