The Nostalgia Factor

As the fifth game in my 360 collection died on me today I can't help but to miss the days of the cartridge. Thinking about it took me down nostalgia lane and in no time I was digging through my closet looking for my old SNES . My heart started to race as i found the dusty old box marked "Nintendo" in faded black sharpie. I ripped the box open to find all my favorite old games and rushed towards the TV to anxiously give them another go. Of course after I had to preform CPR on most of them everything still worked. The games. The console. Everything. The feeling of the old controller in my hand took me right back to when I was little and fighting with my brother over the pizza boxes in the Ninja Turtle games.

This got me thinking. Is my X-Box 360 really going to hold up long enough for me to find it in a dusty old box and actually play it again? I'm already on my second 360 and more games have died on me with this console then any others combined. Obviously the 360 is a much more complex and delicate system then the SNES so I wouldn't expect it to have the same life span, but does this mean the nostalgia factor dies with the 360?

I'm sure Microsoft's future consoles will offer some sort of service to download games from the 360 but there's always something lost in translation. Would Perfect Dark be as fun if you couldn't play with the awkwardness of the N64 controller, trying to play Contra without blowing in the bottom of the cartridge till you turn blue, or Duck Hunt without the light gun? Is this charge in to new and better technology worth the loss of the reliability and replayability of our consoles?

All I'm suggesting is that we slow down a bit till we can create these next gen consoles with a nice strong healthy life span. I fear that if we lose the nostalgia factor we will lose a little of the heart of the video game industry.