It's kind of pathetic when you think about it.  I was brought up on the NES and SNES, got back into it in '98, and webmastered an NES and a semi-retro site from 2000-2004, yet for the past six months (or longer), I've all but neglected my old cartridges for PC games.  Granted, PC gaming can be extremely enjoyable, but there's just something more intrinsically pleasing to me about having a controller in my hand and MIDI tunes coming from my TV's mono speaker.

When I think about it, I guess I haven't completely neglected my old systems, as there's been a drunken night or two after an abysmally putrid shift at work where I plugged in the NES, kicked the crap out of some Abobos and wrote horrible and cuss-laden free verse about it, but there've been no real urges to just sit down and say, "hey, I want to play some (insert game name here)" without some sort of rancor attached to it.

Until the beginning of this month, of course.

I was sitting at my computer one day before work at a loss for something to do, when all of the sudden, the music for Port Town from F-Zero popped into my head.  I had about 20 minutes before I had to get ready to leave, so I figured I might as well pop in the cartridge and go for it.  As soon as I saw the title screen, it all washed over me again.  The "it" I refer to is all the fun and excitement I experienced as a youth, which I've written about ad nauseum over at the GoGo.  Also, when I checked out the Records screen, I remembered that I had wanted to try remixing the tune in the past.  I figured that since I only had two full-time music projects at the time that I might as well go for it, and thus a new project (DJ WarMECH) was born.

Unfortunately, my retro gaming was short-lived at that time (as I had to go to work), but since then, I've gone through F-Zero, Shadowrun (SNES) and Final Fantasy in the last couple of weeks.  Sure, I've still been playing Mordor (an oldie for me), EverCrack, and The Sims with some regularity on my computer, but the retro is back, and it's been brought back by those classic melodies and rhythms perpetually bouncing through my head.