Bit of a change in plans for this week. I mentioned in last weeks post that I planned on picking up a PlayStation 4 in one of the many upcoming Black Friday sales. I was hoping to be able to get one directly from the store and to have it set up for the weekend but that plan ended up not panning out. I was able to get one online, but since it won't arrive now until Wednesday my planned review won't be up until next weekend. This will probably work out better since I'll have more time to play with it, but until then I thought I'd put up something that's been kicking around in the back of my mind for a while now.
Apart from the occasional anecdote in a “What am I playing?” post I tend not to talk all that much about myself in this blog, and while I don't plan to change that I thought it might be helpful to have a little more context available for my experience with video games in general, for those who might be interested.
The first game console my family owned was – like many others – the Nintendo Entertainment System. The only two games that I distinctly remember playing were Super Mario Bro's 2 (whose cartridge I still have sitting on my shelf) and Duck Hunt, though we must have had more. Barely older than a toddler at the time, I mainly watched my older brother play, and very occasionally would take up the second controller when he was feeling generous. This would have been in the mid-1990's, nearly a decade after the NES was originally released in North America and several years after its successor, the Super NES arrived. The original PlayStation also launched around this time, and though we did eventually own one it wasn’t until much later. At the time my family's NES was just a cool magic box that played games. I had no idea there were other magic boxes like it or that mine was almost a decade out of date, but our NES was more of a novelty for us anyway. My brother played it the most but looking back he and his friends seemed more interested in other things. Gaming wasn’t a phenomenon in our house like it was for other kids in those days, it was just another way to pass the time.
With our family's first PC came a rash of bad children's adventure games for me (Mathquest and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon are two that still stick out in my mind) and a number of much cooler games for my brother. I remember trying and failing over and over to get past the first level of Duke Nukem 2 (which I probably should not have been allowed to play) and racing in Daytona USA (one of the only racing games I ever enjoyed). A few years later on a newer PC my brother and I spent a lot of time in NHL '99, making use of an exploit that allowed you to make any player a free agent and then snatch them up at any time throughout the season to build super teams that dominated the league.
The timeline starts to get blurrier around 2001. I know that I received a Gameboy Colour and Pokemon Yellow for my tenth birthday, and around the same time I had been lent a Nintendo 64 by my sister's boyfriend, but I don't know which came first or how long we kept the N64. I remember playing Goldeneye, though I didn’t realize there was anything special about it at the time. Pokemon Snap and Super Mario 64 were also in there, but my experience with the N64 was less memorable than that of my Gameboy. I missed out on the original Pokemon Red and Blue versions, but more than made up for it with the number of hours I sunk into Yellow and later Silver and Crystal, though looking back I wasn’t especially good at them. I could understand basic tactics like elemental weaknesses and status effects but my main strategy was to load my Pokemon up with the hardest hitting moves I could find and brute force my way through the game. I also owned a party pack of Nintendo minigames for the Gameboy but didn’t pay it much mind. As far as I was concerned my Gameboy was a Pokemon machine, and I wasn’t interested in much else. The Pokemon games were my first open-world RPG's, a genre I would come to love in later years. When the game ran out of story to tell me I would come up with my own, making up adventures and challenges for my character to undertake, something I still do in other games to this day.
Sometime after my sister's boyfriend took his N64 back my parents got us a PlayStation. It was the original model with Dualshock controllers, though both the upgraded PS One redesign and the PlayStation 2 had both been released by then. I assume my parents went for the cheapest version available, but I was hardly about to complain. My time with the PlayStation was when my love of gaming first started to manifest. I believe the first game I played on it was Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage and though it was probably also the first game in which I experienced a controller-slamming rage quit I kept going back. These days I'm no longer one for platformers, but the memories I have of playing it during summer break with my family remain fond ones. My brother's copy of Tomorrow Never Dies would have been my first third-person shooter, and I used to hop into the opening level whenever I felt like blasting something. Strangely, a game I ended up spending a lot of time with was a demo disc that my parents had picked up for me from somewhere. I don't remember what it was called, but it had levels from a Mech game (possibly Armored Core), 101 Dalmatians and most memorably Spider-Man, which I would later own the full version of and adored for its goofy comic book references and fun story. Around the same time, my brother and I played through Driver together, knocking our heads against the wall while trying to beat the final mission. We stayed with the PlayStation until I was around thirteen when my parents got us our first ever current generation console for Christmas when we upgraded to the PlayStation 2.
I think I'll leave it here for now. This was fun to write and I think it was a good idea to organize my thoughts and memories about my history with the games I've played. I hope it was at least somewhat interesting for other people to read as well. I think I'll save the middle and more recent years for another time when I'm hurting for things to post, but next week I'll be giving my thoughts and impressions about my new PS4, and how it compares to my Xbox One and other PlayStation consoles I've owned. As always, thanks for reading!
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