hey! no insulting 2d
and please don't try and tell me music or literature don't age
How much do you enjoy 50s music? <_<
Quite a lot, assuming it's good one. Elvis had some good stuff, Bob Dylan (ok, he's mostly 60s), and I admit I don't know a lot of names. Was a big fan of the Fallout OST, which contains music anywhere between the 30s to the 60s best I can tell.
Even further back too. Bach? Johan Pachelbel? Mozart? All for it.
More recent? 80s? Fuck, 80's were the golden age of music man... From Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, to The Who, Dead or Alive, Public Enemy, Queen, Men at Work.... Throw a dart, odds are you'll hit something good.
Contemporary? Well, nowadays you got the music market flooded with shit, but pick a genre and there's good stuff out there. Metal? Ishiwatara Daisuke. Will. Blow. Your. Mind. Techno? A little more electric? Benni Benassi or Benassi Bros.. Quality. You prefer something more classic? More instrumental? Yann Tiersen. Or go to the good'ol electric guitar and you got names like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Impelliteri, Gonçalo Pereira (a.k.a. Tricot)... It goes on.
I don't listen to years, I listen to musics. When Bob Dylan sings about "times changing" back in 1964 he sings about change now, in 2009. And 30 years from now, in 2039. Because the motions are all the same. When Ishiwatara Daisuke delivers Sheep Will Sleep, you feel it. You feel it now, you feel it tomorrow, you feel it 145 years from now. When a good opera singer gives you a great rendition of Ave Maria, or Der Freichutz, or any other good opera, it's as good today as it was centuries ago.
The same goes for literature.
However, when I play Frogger, or Super Mario Bros, or the original Doom, I undoubtedly recognize they were an important historical landmark in gaming culture... But I also recognize they look like crap, that since then we've discovered we can do stuff in the third dimension (cool stuff), that we're not stuck to 16 colours or whatever the fuck it was... Overall, that we can just do better. See, old games were mostly constricted by our own technical limitations. We did 2D because till John Carmack rolled around with Wolfenstein 3D and later with Doom, 3D was a gamer's wet dream. We did huge boring speech bubbles with static NPCs because we were fucking lucky to have functional NPCs at ALL! Gameplay was linear because we were still stumbling around the concept of making things jump properly.
There are, however, some classics... Games that have never aged and most likely never will. Mostly adventure games though. Things like Beneath a Steel Sky and The Secret of Monkey Island. See, unlike Mario or Frogger, You could fit Beneath a Steel Sky with the Cry Engine 3, pump it with a 50 million budget, and you'd make it prettier... But you wouldn't make it any better. But that's about a handful of titles. Most of which, not to say all, can be emulated for free on your PC... Or cellphone these days...
