Blog / Next gen jitters

As much as I’m supposed to revile Gamestop’s trade-in policy, being able to turn an unwanted 3DS XL into 25% of my Xbox One preorder is pretty sweet. While in the store I also got to watch a few minutes of Octodad on a PS4. It’s impossible to describe. Even the videos don’t do it justice. Just watching someone trying to pilot a rubber dad impersonator around a room is a hoot. It makes me think of Chicken Boo from Animaniacs. What would a video game for that joke look like? A stealth game where you avoid the one person who realizes you’re a chicken?

But trading in my 3DS made me look more critically at my current game collection. I promised myself when I got my Xbox 360 that I would stop trading in games unless they turned out to be terrible. I wanted to build up a library of games where polygonal characters didn’t look like paper dolls.

Guess I’ve succeeded. Now what? Neither the Xbox One nor the PS4 will play these games. I have to hang on to the original hardware, especially my launch PS3 that still plays my handful of PS2 games.

I certainly don’t play them anymore. Um, with the exception of Halo 4’s campaign every once in a while. And they don’t take up much space in my apartment. I’ve trashed the original game boxes and keep the discs in a binder.

If I have kids, will they want to play dad’s 20 year-old games that don’t automatically connect to the Digitron Hypernet? Or will this archive suffer the usual fate?