The player

It's worth indulging your nostalgia for Duck Hunt and Mario, writes CIARA O'BRIEN

IT’S UNDENIABLE that games have progressed hugely in the past few years.

Better hardware means better graphics and improved gameplay. Different ways to interact with games have led to interesting developments, particularly in recent months. Now you can play games with touch and gesture controls just as easily as you can pick up a controller.

It’s exciting stuff. But despite all the advances in gaming technology, there are times when I find myself turning back to old games, on old systems that have long been discontinued – the games graveyard from where something occasionally gets resurrected and brought back into use.

A few weeks ago, we finally retired an old CRT television. Nothing major, just a portable TV that had only one function these days: playing Duck Hunton the NES. Duck Hunt's gun won't work on a flat screen TV, you see. And why would it? The NES was replaced in Europe by the SNES in 1992.

The NES was the home to some of my favourite games from my childhood: Donkey Kong, Super Mario Brosand, of course, Duck Hunt. They can try to "improve" Mario as much as they like by developing games that put him in a 3D world, but the sidescrolling platformer will always be my favourite version.

But it’s impossible to keep all the consoles indefinitely, regardless of how much certain games still appeal. You start to quickly run out of space, especially when you take into account the different accessories they need and the games that you have to hang on to.

Which is why I’m a big fan of two things: porting old games on to newer devices, whether it’s mobile, like the iPad or Sony Ericsson Xperia Play, or console; and emulators that allow you to play games from systems long defunct on your PC.

At the last count, I had four different emulators on my laptop. Tracking down the Amstrad emulator was something of a victory; it meant I could finally finish the games I'd started years ago but didn't have the skills, or possibly the attention span, to finish. Monty on the Run, Operation Wolf, a number of Dizzytitles – they're all there, although this time in colour instead of the green screen we had back then. And the Mega Drive emulator gave me my Sonic fix when I needed it.

There are some things that flashy graphics and gameplay twists can’t compete with. In my case, it’s a healthy dose of nostalgia.