Honestly, I don't get nostalgic for gaming of any era. I do miss some games, and I get nostalgic over playing with people at the age I was then, but gaming as a pastime, or as an era with similar design styles or whatever, I don't really feel that.

When it comes to the games in general, and gaming as a hobby, I've always enjoyed each generation's improvements in graphics and overall improved hardware.

For me, the NES era as an example, it has nothing to do with the games or the console, it's feeling that sense of longing for being young and in my cousin's room with the group of us kids having fun together. There's also that sense of wonder at this new kind of play at home, instead of at an arcade. But I don't particularly feel anything about duck hunt, even though we played that a lot.

It's not about the systems, it's about the shared experiences.

Even when MMOs got big and I was playing alone, my nostalgia is about the online people I played with (some of whom I still talk to), having that magic experience of playing a game in a team with a guy from Scotland, some German guy that couldn't speak English worth a damn except cursing, a lady and her husband from Nebraska, and a kid from California. It was so fucking cool that you could end up playing with Russians, Koreans, damn near anyone in the world, and have a real human connection.

But the games? They were meh at best, and can't match the immersive graphics of stuff that came just a few years later.

Mind you, I'd still play those games if I had people to play with and the games were live, but it isn't the same as nostalgia, of missing the era in that longing way.