I was born in 1984. Around 88 my Dad bought an Atari for my brother and me to play. We had several games that we played on an old black and white tube T.V. that wasn't more than 10 inches. The games we had were Pole Position, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Pittfall, Mario Bros., and Combat. The game we liked the most was Combat, since it had multiplayer tank battles. You could go invisible with your tank, richochet shots, and hide behind cover. The game was a blast and IMO it still is. We knew the NES existed at this time, but my Dad didn't want to spend the money on it. We often played Mario, and Duck Hunt at friend's houses. I sucked at Mario.
When I was seven years old my brother got a Sega Genesis for his birthday. Sonic the Hedgehog was a pack-in title for the system. Even back then, I thought Sonic was kind of a short game. This was because my neighbors had an SNES and Super Mario World was at least three times as long, with save files. My true love at the time was Street Fighter II, and later Mortal Kombat II. These fighting games were so easy to get into compared to modern fighters. Special moves took a lot of precedence over combos. As a result, I'm a zoning type of special move spamming player to this day in fighting games. In MK9 I was able to easy outzone Sub-Zero players with Reptile, because his moveset was so similar to MKII's Reptile. The Sega Genesis introduced me to my first JRPG, Phantasy Star II. I loved the game to death, but I just couldn't beat it due to the insanely confusing dungeons. We also played Earthworm Jim, Sonic 2, Sonic 3, UMK3, Jurrasic Park, Warlock, Kid Chameleon, Spiderman Maximum Carnage, and about twenty other games. I knew the SNES existed, and secretly knew it was better than anything Sega put out.
For my 12th birthday I was given the choice to get either a Playstation or an N64. By this time I had figured out what Square RPGs were, and I picked N64 since I thought Nintendo would get the same games they had since the NES. I was dead wrong. To my surprise Castlevania, Square RPGs, Megaman, and Konami all jumped ship to Sony. I really can't put an emphasis on how shocking and surprising this was at the time. Sega was basically dead in the states with the Saturn, and Nintendo had half it's good games stolen by a competitor. Imagine if Microsoft died off, and then suddenly Sony lost half it's exclusive games to some *other* console. Now to add insult to injury, imagine that the PC is as expensive as it was in the 90's. Anyway I resented Sony for a long time for this, since I was too young to see the bussiness side of things.
I enjoyed the N64 a lot. Goldeneye introduced me to the FPS genre. I borrowed Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time from friends, and at first I didn't see what the big deal was. I kept telling my friend's in art class that there was no way Ocarina of Time was as good as Turok 2. Months later I was still playing both of Nintendo's games. I think that was the time where I stopped judging a game by it's cover. IMO at the time the N64 was a much better system than the PS1. It had true analog from the start (a lot of PS1 games don't even use the analog sticks as anything more than glorified D-Pad inupts). It had 4 controller ports for multiplayer awesomeness. It had revolutionary games like Goldeneye, SM64, and OoT.
In high school I had a Gamecube, and my brother had an Xbox. I really thought he Gamecube was a huge dissapointment at the time. The Mario game used wierd cleaning mechanics. The Zelda game only had 6 dungeons. Rare was nowhere to be seen. Looking back I really like the Gamecube for entirely different reasons though. Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4 are classics. I prefer the Gamecube for ports of multiplatform games, since Original Xboxes don't really offer much for a collector these days. The game that I truly fell in love with during my later high school years was Morrowwind on the Xbox. Sure it plays pretty badly today, but at the time it was revolutionary.
Around 2005 I was long out of high school and I picked up a 360 since Sony completely botched the PS3. It was at about this time that I discovered a Mom n' Pop used game store and started growing my retro collection. It's also around this time that I started paying attention to reviewers. Gamespot's Greg Kasavin just seemed to nail every review he wrote. Finally this was the time where I became the type of gamer that plays on anything and everything.I bought a PS2, a DS, a PS3, etc. I even delved into PC with Civ IV (and loved it). This was a few years before the PC Gaming Master Race meme started taking off, and I just wanted to play good games. This was also back when you could still buy a PHYSICAL version of a PC game.
Eventually I ditched my 360 collection of around 20 games and combined my PS3/360 library into a PS3 library for the sake of having it all on one system. I loved Microsoft's gaming division from 2001 to 2011, and I could go on about how much they did to improve the gaming landscape, but that's for another thread.
I got a 3DS XL in 2013 as soon as the price dropped to $200. At this time, I was very skeptical of games rated below 85 on Metacritic. Despite this, the cover of Etrian Odyssey IV called out to me, and I decided to make a rare exception. EOIV blew my mind, and completely changed what I considered a good game. Sure, I had bought, played, and enjoyed other games rated below 85, such as Tales of Vesperia, Chromehounds, etc. But this was the first game rated so low, that immediately wound up on my personal list of Greatest Games of All Time. I went out and started buying other games rated in the 80 to 84 range, that were from genres that I liked.
I bought a Wii U shortly before Pikmin 3 launched, and it was a good system for the time. But by mid 2018, I was regretting it. Out of my initial 15 game Wii U collection, all but 5 games got ported over to Switch. I started double-dipping on ports, in order to merge the Switch and Wii U collections into one Switch Collection. Owning a Wii U in 2018 felt like owning a Saturn or Dreamcast.
I also, bought a PS4 in 2015, and a PS4 Pro in 2018. Xbox failed to attract my interest during the 8th generation, and I doubt they will ever get it back.
From 2011 to 2017, I resented the PC Gaming Master Race for pushing graphics over gameplay, embracing digital distribution (which I consider to be a ripp off), and claiming that the platform you play on makes you superior, and not the number of, or quality of games that you've enjoyed. But in the latter half of 2018, I got over it, and reverted to my old habits of simply buying games I like, no matter the platform. These days I still play on pretty much everything except phones. I'm currently building a new PC just to play the RTS and Strategy titles that are exclusive to the platform.
Last edited by Cerebralbore101 - on 08 September 2018
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