Revisiting Old Games

This weekend I had a lot of down time and although Halo Reach is still the highlight game going on for Xbox Live players, my friend population playing the game was down on Saturday night.  I decided to stay within the Halo Universe though and pop in Halo Wars to chase down some missing achievements.  

Its been well over a year since I last played this game, so it took me a while to figure things out again.  The controls came back pretty quickly but some game features did not and I struggled to figure out how to use in game objects for building, attacking and defending. Once I felt re-established I started blazing through enemies and the achievements.   Even though I am backtracking quite a bit in my gaming history I really enjoyed reliving the Halo Wars real-time strategy gaming.  

There are a few games I have my eyes on to go back and finish up achievements or replay the games.  I'm currently looking finish out the original Gears of War story on Insane difficulty in coop, I've got Halo Wars, and then a few arcade game titles I never finished out.  

All these games are only a few years old each.  You can probably find them on the market used or new for $20 or less.   The games still have their appeal and give a great amount of entertainment value even with the current line up of titles.   Again this just puts me back to my thinking about lack of time and too many games to play.  Maybe it relates to all things.  There is just too much to do in life and so little free time get it done.  

The only really hard part about going back to play old games is that my mentality is set up for the current versions of the game on the market or whatever I played last.   An example of what I mean is when playing Gears of War 1, if you are downed by an opponent you cannot crawl to your teammates for help.   You're just stuck there waiting, but at least you can't bleed out like you can in Gears of War 2.   Small things like that can be upsetting along with going back to old weapons and weapon balancing, but if you're determined to achieve you goal you can bare through it.

Are there any old games you've got your eyes on that you never finished, or perhaps never even played, but it was a game of interest?  For example, its only been a year now, but I still have not played Bioshock 2.  It got good reviews, but I just never got around to picking it up.  The third game is on the way now and a movie is in the works, so there should be more motivation for me to get it.   Another interesting thought would be around more games being re-released in HD graphics.   Normally I've seen these come back as arcade titles, which works just fine to me since it is direct to download and usually much cheaper than a disc release.  I wonder if anyone would ever upgrade Halo CE and Halo 2, or if its even worthwhile.  Both games are still great to relive, but again, after so many years out on the market, it can be rough playing the old design and features.