Gazoinks: In some ways, I feel slightly jealous of people who get to be nostalgic about stuff like Fallout, Grim Fandango, and Arcanum. x]
I know what you mean. I have grown up a gamer who has had contact with pretty much every single genre early on (except the ones born before me, of course) and many old games automatically and subconsciously get some sort of bonus from me - and it's incredible for me how hard it sometimes is to convince someone else (who has become a gamer much later) of an old game's qualities. In another thread I mentioned a female gamer friend of mine who grew up with SNES games and became a hardcore PC gamer rather recently - she has a surprisingly good taste in case of newer games (for example she beat Far Cry and STALKER recently) but I die a little inside each time she says that she won't play Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or even Duke Nukem 3D because of the crappy graphics (while she has no hard time playing SNES style games). Sometimes that makes me cry.
jefequeso: I much prefer being able to play them without nostalgia. Nostalgia to me is just sadness. It's missing the feelings that you had while playing a game when you were younger, and replaying the game doesn't get those feelings back--it just makes you miss them more, and makes it harder to enjoy the game. But then, the passage of time (and the subsequent losses) has always been far more bitter to me than I think it is to most people.
This. Some of the games I had contact with in my earliest childhood such as Turrican, Shadow of the Beast or North & South give me weird unsettling feelings. I enjoy them but the joy is always accompanied by some sort of sadness. I must add that I generally get weird feelings when being reminded of certain times in my life, especially the earliest ones (for example I watched some very old Simpsons episodes recently and it was also uncanny in a weird way).