One of my favorite things about this last generation of consoles is the increased interest in curation. Used to be there were no downloadable re-releases or HD remasters. If you wanted to be able to replay your old favorites, you had to keep your consoles of yesteryear in good shape, or go hunt one down on e-bay and hope it actually worked when it arrived. But now with our magical internet-enabled boxes we can pull the old classics out of the ether and play them on our new machines. Often, this is a good, even great thing. Having four friends over to punch their way through the classic X-Men arcade game from the comfort of your couch with infinite virtual quarters is just as awesome as my ten year-old self imagined it would be. But other times, thankfully few and far between, nostalgia can be a most cruel mistress. A lesson hard-learned when I downloaded what was once one of my all-time favorite video games: Jet Grind Radio.

In case you’re not familiar with the title, JGR was a weird little skater originally released for the Sega Dreamcast. You play as a menagerie of colorful characters fighting an oppressive police force and rival gangs for control of the futuristic metropolis Tokyo-to. Taking back the streets is accomplished by spraying over other gangs’ graffiti while trying to avoid swarms of cops, aided by your magnetic rollerblades that allow you to jump and grind off pretty much everything. JGR was one of the first games to utilize the revolutionary rendering technique known as cel-shading, which made the whole game look like a vibrant Saturday-morning cartoon. The style is heavily influenced by electronic music and hip-hop culture, and it shows in everything from the soundtrack to the customizable graffiti tags. You actually take your orders from enigmatic pirate radio broadcaster Professor K, who drops knowledge on you with mad flow, but never really makes any sense. I was a hardcore raver kid and an up-and-coming DJ when Jet Grind Radio was released in 2000, and when I saw the commercial I remember thinking someone had made this video game just for me. But it also made me kind of sad, because I didn’t think I would get to play it.

I have some weird gaps in my gaming history. I’m old enough that unwrapping an NES on Christmas morning is one of my fondest memories, but I missed pretty much every generation between that one and the Xbox 360. My parents thought my sisters and I loved our gray box just a little too much, and after it finally died video games were outlawed in the house. Of course I would play anytime I was over at a friend’s house, but I never had any of my own. As a result, for almost a decade I sucked at all the games my friends liked to play. It’s really hard to get good at Halo when you’re playing for maybe the third time against a squad of elite killers who have poured hours into it. I was often assigned to a team as a handicap, and that’s honestly not a great way to play any game.

Even after I went off to college, it never occurred to me to buy myself a console because I was spending all my extra money on DJ equipment and music. Then one of my roommates got himself a Dreamcast to play Soul Calibur, and he was bewildered by my glee that the system had come bundled with Jet Grind Radio. When they weren’t trying to kill each other with swords, I was grinding across the Tokyo skyline. All of our roommates and friends took a crack at it, but I was the only one who really seemed to enjoy it. And I did, like a lot. I didn’t just beat that game; I mastered it. Everything unlocked, 100% with every character. My friends would actually watch in amazement as I chained an endless number of tricks together on a never-ending grind around the level.

I hadn’t played a game that much for that long since the original Metroid, and I don’t think I’ve ever been that good at a game since. So of course more than a decade later, when I saw there was an HD version available on the Xbox 360 I had received as a gift, I immediately downloaded it and shattered my delusions. While I had expected to be rusty, I spent over eight hours trying to get any semblance of my groove back before admitting this game was simply an unplayable mess. The entire traversal mechanism relies upon the building of momentum, but your skater moves at the most glacial of speeds even when using a boost, so the only way to reach a lot of objectives is by executing perfect, extended grinds, which is almost impossible thanks to the broken physics that govern the game. The camera floats all over the place and often sticks in the least helpful angles. You can never predict which direction or how far your character will jump when the button is pushed, and there’s no guarantee a grind will land unless your skates hit it in exactly the right way. The levels all seemed designed to bleed momentum, either with rails spaced too few and far apart, or jamming them into tight corridors where it’s difficult to build up speed. I spent most of those eight hours struggling to chain a grind together, falling because a crucial jump went sideways, and then going back to the beginning to start over. Even if I got lucky, I could be undone by the excessive number of circumstances that cause you to lose all control of your character, or the punishing time limit. None of the play mechanics seem to function all that well, and I’m inclined to wonder how I ever achieved my previous level of proficiency with these garbage controls. Perhaps something was lost in the HD translation, or maybe I just loved the art and attitude so much I was willing to overlook its myriad flaws. Either way, Jet Grind Radio HD made me sad that I was never going to be able to play that great game I remembered again.

The soundtrack is still awesome. They couldn’t mess that up.