An oft-had discussion in gaming is what constitutes the “golden age” of gaming, or indeed if there has even been one.

For some, it’s the age of the arcade, when games were designed for pure fun and nothing else—besides emptying your pocket of quarters/local equivalents, of course. For others, it’s the home consoles of the NES era; others still, the 16-bit wonderment of the SNES and Genesis/Mega Drive. For yet others… You get where this is going, I’m sure.

For me, the golden age will forever be the PS2 era. I didn’t always think this was going to be the case; I remember playing PS2 games for the first time and thinking they were graphically impressive, but somehow lacking the “magic” of my favourite PS1-era games, particularly when it came to JRPGs. It took time, but the PS2 gradually proved itself as a force to be reckoned with, with a gigantic library of excellent titles (and an even bigger library of fucking awful ones) and the kind of backing from the public that Microsoft and Nintendo could only have dreamed of in those days. Funny how things change.

The thing is, being unemployed and skint as I am at the moment, I’m finally getting around to attempting to beat some of the PS2 titles that have sat, under-loved, on my shelf for years now. Final Fantasy XII is my current project: I’m now over 60 hours into it and still loving every minute. It’s struck me while playing FFXII that it seems to be a much more infrequent occurrence that a current-gen (360, PS3 or Wii) game will grab me in quite the same way as numerous titles from the PS2 era did… and indeed still are.

I wonder how much of this is down to graphics. Naughty Dog aren’t far from the truth with their jokey “next-gen filter” option in Uncharted; an increasing number of games in the current generation are looking increasingly interchangeable, with “gritty”, “realistic” graphics often winning out over vibrant colours. There are exceptions, of course, and I discussed a number of these the other day.

I don’t think it’s just visual character, though; I think the way games are designed and consumed has changed considerably since the PS2 days, too. Look at the number of people who Achievement-whore these days. More often than not, this takes place not through a desire to see everything the game has to offer, but instead to line up their shiny virtual trophies on their virtual shelf and brag to their friends. The social side of gaming is cool, sure, but what happened to gaming just purely for the sake of fun?

There’s no reason for these people to want to 100% Final Fantasy XII, for example. There’s no public way of recognising your achievement besides actually telling people. But I think that’s kind of a good thing, personally—if you want to be a hardcore insane idiot and complete every insanely difficult hunt, clear out every unnecessarily difficult area just for the satisfaction of knowing you have, that’s great. But there’s no feeling of “obligation” to do so—the person who storms straight through FFXII‘s main quest without exploring the side content is getting their money’s worth just as much as the hardcore insane idiot.

But in games with Achievements these days, many people feel that they haven’t got their money’s worth unless they 1000G/Platinum Trophy the game. And in many cases, some of those Achievements and Trophies are enormously tedious collectathons (Assassin’s Creed), forced replays of lengthy games (Mass Effect, Dragon Age) or encouragement to completely remove any “meaning” and sense of consequence from moral choices in games (any game that has separate Achievements for completing quests/levels in multiple different ways, thereby encouraging saving before “important” bits, then reloading and replaying just to get said Achievements).

Screw that; I’m just as guilty as the next man or woman of Achievement-whoring at times. But spending such a protracted period of time in the company of a last-gen game without all that bollocks to think about is giving me pause for thought. Are things really moving in the right direction?

It makes me a little sad to think that there’s a generation of gamers now who have no idea what gaming life pre-Achievements was like—and with Sony’s ditching of PS2 support on the PS3 and Microsoft’s woeful “backward compatibility” (I use the term loosely) on the Xbox 360, it’s becoming more and more unlikely that newer gamers will have the opportunity to explore that side of gaming—and then even if they do, they’ll probably be put off by “ugly” SD graphics. Look at how much snobbery people have towards the Wii’s graphics now.

Do I have rose-tinted specs when it comes to looking at last-gen gaming? Perhaps. But I’m more than happy to live in the past, if so.