Robowarrior got more playtime from me since release than all of the Mario games combined. I know I am an outlier with that as Mario is obviously so much bigger but for me, I got Robowarrior at that right time, that small window in our gaming lives where it would be impossible for others to feel the same about it.

Like people that defend the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man as not being a bad game, or E.T., those gamers got those games at that small point in life that they are definitely core memories for them.

Things like that is why I do my best to not think negatively of the choices of games others value. For them, it is a deep connection that I simply don't share.

Modern games also lose out on platform differences. The hardware is so close anymore that you almost have to pause the game and whip out a magnifying glass and compare side by side to find any differences. Others require third party software to tell you the differences that are simply not visible to the average person. I cannot tell a difference between 45 to 60 FPS and a solid 60 FPS but so many complain the game is ruined over a slight slow down. Or the people complaining about better anti aliasing on this game on this platform absolutely destroying the same game on a competitor console.

Just play the damn games. It is not hard.

During the 16-Bit days, it was not too hard to pick out a Super Nintendo port of a game over the Genesis and vice versa depending on what mattered to you. That mattered little to most of us as we could not afford both SNES and Genesis AND games for them. We had a genuine interest in how a cross platform port looked because odds are, it was going to be different somehow.

The differences today are almost null.

There is a charm that has been lost. Those little changes developers had to make to accommodate the limitations of the hardware are lost today as there are no real differences between the consoles, at least Xbox and PlayStation.

A gamers imagination will always trump what a computer can display. Sadly, as those computers can display more, gamers need to use their imagination less and less.