Cellophanes

Nostalgia is a hell of a thing. Admittedly, it's a major driving force for this web site. Just being so fucking tired of what's happening in the modern day, longing for a time that, even when attempting to maintain a level head and not live with the delusion that everything was better and nothing was wrong back then, you still inadvertently romanticize things a little bit. But then you are brought back down to reality after encountering something that reminds you that the past is simply another time, with all the good and bad that comes with it.

Now, when I get nostalgic about games specifically, it is always in response to the current trends. In Big 2025, it's pretty easy for me to not want anything to do with eighty dollar pricetags, predatory monetization, endless remakes, servers getting shut down in six months, every new title thrown into the "is it woke!?" discourse hole, Neil Druckmann's rampant zionism, another white guy "fixing the JRPG" by ripping off Paper Mario again, or having to check the credits of a game to see if anyone on staff has either sent me death threats or literally assaulted someone I know. Before that, it was in response to brown and gray ooh-rah Support Our Troops military shooters and the edgelord Post-9/11 open-world games about "the hood" or "the streets" as imagined by someone in middle management that saw a commercial for The Fast and The Furious, and a few too many episodes of the O'Reilly Factor. 

That long ramble leads into me finally talking about Cellophanes. Released for the Playstation in 1997 by NineLives, the same team that brought us the Princess Maker series. This is a game that asks you one question: do you remember how magical it felt as a kid, to walk into a Game Center, and for only 100 yen, lose yourself in simple yet fun arcade games?

Cellophanes (named in reference to Taito placing cellophane over Space Invaders cabinet monitors to create the illusion of color) is a collection of fake arcade games that are all extremely inspired by real arcade classics. A frequent point of comparison online is Game Center CX on the Nintendo DS. The big difference between the two is that Game Center CX is actually good. While GCCX was clearly influenced by Galaga, Star Soldier, Ninja Jajamaru, and Dragon Quest, Cellophanes is instead inspired by games such as Breakout, Breakout, Breakout, and Breakout. Also Breakout. If you are a fan of Breakout, you will love nearly half the games in here.

In a collection of 12 games, 5 of them are Breakout. Notice how I didn't say Arkanoid. There are two takes on Space Invaders, a game that blends Asteroids with Lunar Lander, three gallery shooters made to look like old analog gallery shooters from the 1970s, and one game that's kind of a take on Q-Bert. With one exception, these games all range from borderline unplayable to extremely boring. The one good game is a 1v1 take on Space Invaders where two submarines shoot at each other underwater, while indestructible marine life blocks your shots and will even return fire. That's a pretty unique take on the Invader formula! But everything else? Dull. Lifeless. Struggling with the controls if you aren't using a mouse. The Cellophanes collection is not good.

This brings me back to my opening statement. Sometimes something comes along and reminds you that the past isn't as great as you remember it. For as great as Space Invaders might be, there were also dogshit copycats like Invinco. Trend chasing was just as bad then as it is today. Profits over expression. Loading up Breakout Clone #5 does indeed invoke memories of the arcade: the memory of playing the neglected cabinets in the corner, since the popular games are crowded. The memory of terrible fighting games that tried to ape Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. The sluggish brawlers that failed to catch up to what Capcom and Konami were putting out. The shooters that were still vastly outclassed by R-Type. The failed mascots. The games that didn't even try to have an actual difficulty scale, providing ammunition for that terrible "arcade games were the original pay-to-win" talking point I saw a few years ago. The games that couldn't even be bothered to have style, or any sort of personality. Just follow the leader. Do what the popular kids do. Cellophanes follows the leader. Cellophanes follows the leader from the back of the line, stumbling over its own feet. It's a game about glorifying the past, while presenting a past that sucks.

This leads to something else that's been bothering me about Cellophanes. I talked about nostalgia being a response to too many unwanted changes in modern times. I have to ask, what is Cellophanes responding to? Is it a response to the slow death of the arcade? The proliferation of 3D? Is Cellophanes a statement that simplistic arcade games are better than the increasingly complex games of the time? Is there even a point at all, or at least an intentional one?

What was going on in games to get this response? I took a look at Playstation releases the year before and the year of Cellophanes' release. This is not an exhaustive list, just some notable examples:

• Resident Evil
• Tomb Raider
• Parappa The Rapper
• Tail of the Sun
• Symphony of the Night
• Tobal No. 1
• King's Field II and III
• Bushido Blade
• Kaze no Notam
• Namco Museum
• Final Fantasy VII

This was the creative peak of the Playstation. An era of experimentation and innovation that hadn't been seen in over a decade, as well as Namco Museum, a collection of actual arcade classics to remind you of a different time. It's not like today, where we saw a remake of fucking Oblivion of all things, where the upcoming release schedule is yet another remake of The Last Of Us, where the only bits of creativity this year will be in a Nintendo game that will cost way too much goddamn money. This was a time where developers were casually changing the landscape every month.

So I have to ask again, what is Cellophanes a response to? I hate to say, but Cellophanes comes across as the gaming equivalent of "Old Man Yells At Cloud." Except, given the quality of the game, it feels more like "Unwell Man Picks A Fight With Telephone Pole." I say this, because there is no fucking way a developer, and it doesn't matter if they were still swimming in all that Princess Maker money, they were not going to get meta about nostalgia, making an intentionally boring game on a major platform, just to make a point. That's giving too much credit. This isn't "wow, remember when things were less fucked up?" nostalgia, this is "get off my lawn" nostalgia. The bad kind. The kind that gives crusty old gamers like me a bad name. The kind that, even at my most curmudgeon, I can still keep enough of an open mind for something that's new, something that breaks away from all the mediocrity at the forefront of everyone's attention.

The past is not all it's cracked up to be.