growing up gaming

The excellent blogs of my colleagues (see links at right!) have reminded me that I never properly introduced myself or gave any summary of my gaming history.  Lemme take a crack at that.

As the URL of this blog indicates, I'm an NES person.  I've played the console since I can remember, growing up in a household with a hand-drawn map of the Zelda world (Mom's), an excitement for Galaga finally making the move from arcade to cartridge (Dad's), a healthy appetite for beating her little sister through any medium (my sister's), and this book:

This was fished out of the entertainment center solely for that memory card game in Mario 3.

At some point, I'll have to post a complete list of the games of my childhood.  It will be easy to do come parental visiting time this Christmas--the cartridges are still neatly stacked in Mom and Dad's basement next to the original console and controllers (including a Duck Hunt gun!) that we all played fifteen+ years ago, many still in the original boxes.  But I digress.

I won't spend too much time here detailing NES gaming experiences; I'm envisioning that topic to be the focus of most of the posts of this blog, so I'll get to that later.  Instead, I'll fast-forward to post-NES days in my childhood home.

We skipped the Super NES, so I was always jealous of the kids who got to play Kirby and MarioKart on that console.  We skipped the Nintendo 64 too, so Mario Party envy came next.  (A friend of mine had every new console the minute it came out, so I beelined my way to her parents' game room anytime I was invited over.)

The next console in our living room wasn't Nintendo brand at all, in fact--we went from an NES to a PlayStation 2, probably convincing Dad it was a worthwhile purchase thanks to the DVD player function.  I'm almost sorry to say that the primary motivation for my part in that persuasion was the Dance Dance Revolution craze.  *Almost* sorry.  Let's memorialize my near-shame with a photo, shall we?

I don't actually know these people, but they're cool by me.

Dad got his game for the PS2 (Gran Turismo 3), and Mom got hers:  Escape from Monkey Island--a King's Quest-like adventure game, so right up her alley.  We all marveled over the graphics for a while, but soon enough, a bargain bin game with some forgettable name like "Greatest Arcade Hits" found its way into my parents' Best Buy shopping cart.  They quickly tired of my mocking them for using the (then) top of the line graphics of the PS2 to play PacMan.  Not surprisingly, when I visit home now, I usually find a thick layer of dust on their PS2, while their NES is loaded and ready for play.  Their gaming preference is firmly established, and I don't see them bothering with another upgrade anytime soon.

As for my sister and me, I found a second willing competitor in her boyfriend at the time of our PS2 purchase, and the three of us would compete at Red Faction, SSX 3, and Crash Team Racing.  Sis and I also entertained our two practically live-in guy friends with hours of Gauntlet Legends, Simpsons Road Rage, and Crazy Taxi spars.  DDR was pretty much just the two of us--I don't remember too many male friends willing to join for more than a round or two of jumping around on square mats.

Gaming was definitely a social thing for us, a means to an end much more than an end in itself.  To this day, I've never bothered completing the actual storyline of Red Faction, as many hours as I've spent playing that game.  The multi-player mode was the only feature we really needed.

Red Faction--the game with a gun so big, it takes up half of your screen.

High school ended; Sister married; friends moved away; and none of those games particularly stuck.  I still played Red Faction now and then when I saw one of my friends who remembered how, but SSX 3 got boring once I got good; Crazy Taxi got boring after twenty minutes; and I'm not sure we ever actually owned any other games, so they didn't have the chance to get boring.  No family member had any particular desire to buy new games for a console on its way out.

College didn't hold much gaming for me.  It was an easy way to hang out with folks I didn't know very well or hadn't seen for a long time every once in a while--throw in a Star Wars game and have instant conversation fodder for the next two hours.  I never bothered investing in a console when I first ventured out on my own, though.

It wasn't until post-college that my gaming somewhat resumed, and I found that my trajectory stopped moving forward, and (like my parents) I suddenly found myself more interested in games that came out twenty years ago than I was in trying a PS3 or a Wii.

To be continued in the next post--this thing has gotten lengthy enough!