Like many people in my generation, I can remember the first time I saw Super Mario Brothers on the NES. At the time it was like nothing I had ever seen (the Atari 2600 and its counterparts were before my time.) I told my dad how awesome it was and within a week we had an NES in our house. I remember going to Sears with him to get it. It was so cool. We played SMB/Duck Hunt for hours upon hours.
"I wish I could shoot that effing dog!!!"
While the NES was quite a family affair for a short while, I particularly enjoyed the Super Nintendo when it was released. Unlike the NES, I felt like the SNES was 'mine' alone. Afterall, my family's interest in gaming had died out and the SNES was my Christmas present from Santa the year it came out.
My love for gaming continued on through each generation, and in 2000 I got both a Sega Dreamcast and an eBay account and so the cycle of buying/selling/collecting had begun. From then until about the time I started hanging out with Eileen I would buy a system and some games for it off of eBay, play it for a few months, and sell it back on eBay later to get something else.
Nowadays I pretty much have a no selling rule. I have found myself revisiting older games that I liked in the past more and more often so I've just decided to hold on to everything.
Until this summer I wasnt really concerned with retro-gaming or collecting. For my birthday however, one of my co-workers gave me a Sega Genesis (Model 1) with a Power Base Converter (an attachment which plays SMS games on Genesis) and a very nice array of complete Genesis and SMS games. It was such a nice assortment of goodies in that box that I was sucked right back into old-school gaming again.
Rather than trying to pile up games like trading cards regardless of my interest in playing them (something I have been guilty of in the past), I have really been actually playing most everything I have been adding to the shelves lately. Here are some of my observations.
1. You can still love a TERRIBLE game because of sentimental value.
Such is the case with Hard Drivin' and its sequel Race Drivin. I can't remember where I ever played this in the arcade (the Rockaway Mall or Wheels in Motion) but I recently got a copy for Genesis and it brought back some great memories. This game is one of many polygonal drving 'simulators' from the early 90s but with one awesome addition: the instant replay of every crash. The music is priceless, and once you realize the gameplay is essentially broken you'll realize it is more fun to slam your brakes at the top of the loop-dee-loop.
Look at this shit.
2. I can't believe what they got away with back then.
Today gamers are blessed with something called the internet. We can read reviews and view screens and even play demos of a game before buying it. In the 80s and early 90s we did not have this luxury.
Recently EB/Gamestop stores have begun liquidating Gameboy and Gamboy Color games, so I stocked up on quite a few, most for less than a buck each. Here's something funny I discovered. One of the screens below is from Baseball, the other is from Bases Loaded. Which is which? It doesn't matter. The gameplay is identical. Now, I could care less because I payed about fifty cents each for them, but what about the sports fan who payed twenty to thirty bucks for them back in the day? I think that would have sucked. You may ask "what do you need with more than one baseball game?" Well some people do like sports games.
Oh now I see, in one game you get the players' first names and in the other you get their last names.
Well this has been fun. More to come on this topic, hopefully very soon.
1 comment:
As I've said a million times, older games have a certain simplicity about them. In general they focus on fun rather than complicated controls and storylines. You can jump in and just have a good time without feeling like you're being sucked into some movie that lasts 10 hours. Newer games have their merits, but most of the time I'm perfectly content rocking old school stuff like the SNES Tetris Attack.
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