Hey guys, I thank you before hand if you actually spent the time to read this - I was bored and had nothing else to do so I thought I would write a blog about video games in my life and just felt like sharing it with you lot! This is just an early draft and it is by no means finished!
My problem with video gaming...
I think I may have a small problem with video gaming, an addiction if you like. It started back when I had a PlayStation which was in actual fact my first games console - No 2D shit graphics from my hide. Prior to the release of the PlayStation I was more interested in, well I don’t really know to be honest. If I was pushed to take a guess then I’d probably say reading or some other educational activity... Anyways 1996 swung around like an electron orbiting a proton and pretty soon I had decided that enough was enough and I was going to get a games console. Being an ungrateful little shit at the time I really wanted a N64 and was somewhat disappointed when I received a PlayStation. My first games console and it wasn’t even a SNES or a MegaDrive! The first game I played was Fifa 97 – at a time when it was cool to abbreviate to the last two digits of the current year. It was great; the players looked shit, the ball was triangle but it didn’t matter because it was kind of 3D and slide tackling the keeper was allowed even when he was in his own area with the ball safely in his hands. Footballs aside and one of my all time favourite games - Crash Bandicoot; which after playing a demo I decided that I really wanted this game, purely after discovering that the mask in the box was not there to kill you. I mean I could go forwards, backwards and side to side, yeah that’s right Sonic – life does have another dimension. Crash Bandicoot was purchased from my very own hard earned cash... Well hardly I was 6 at the time and can remember forking out the £40 which I had somehow obtained. At the time I thought it was the most challenging thing that life could throw at me, I mean getting stuck at the third level? Life simply cannot get any more difficult than this I thought to myself. That was of course until I reached the ninth level and looking back at my first assumption that the third level was difficult; how naive and stupid of me - this was much more difficult and it had flame pits... I remember at a time before the technology of memory cards, having to write down the passwords on seemingly un-important scraps of paper; who’d have thought that storing the position of what level you were on could possibly prove beneficial. I also remember getting pissed off when looking at the small scraps of paper I couldn’t tell whether it was a triangle or a crude looking square.
My first handheld was a yellow GameBoy Pocket with its unlit monochromatic poor contrast screen. This was the pinnacle of technology at the time and kicked off a trend for Nintendo of constantly making current consoles smaller with extra features. This was an original GameBoy but it had been squashed, painted, plus it was no longer mandatory to have shares in Duracell – the device only took 2 AAAs. I thought this thing was the shit, it was exactly the same as the original one, except it was yellow and a bit smaller – but the most important thing, it was yellow. Jurassic Park was the first game I owned for it, and apart from not being able to get past the second level I wondered why it was impossible to kill the huge T-Rex with just a few normal bullets. The following year and to my disappointment Nintendo released a colour version of the console – no it couldn’t be possible could it? Well yes it was, and a fad that they didn’t even start, with earlier consoles like the Sega Game Gear piping them to it. Apart from the improved graphics and a rather dashing purple colour, the console was in essence another GameBoy redraft - a redraft which I had to get my hands on may I add. It was at about this time that a prominent disease had begun to spread across many children in the UK. It was called Pokémon and unfortunately I caught it bad. I wanted Pokémon Red Version, red was my favourite colour, it had a cool looking lizard thing on the front, and it was way more epic looking than bl... I got Blue – piss, shit, fuck I thought - yes even at the age of 7/ 8, piss, shit, fuck were exactly the colourful words that flowed through my mind... What the hell is this turtle looking thing with cannons on its back? Can this creature breathe fire? No, so by default it had lost the battle to the lizard looking creature on the front of Red Version. Soon after turning it on I was ready to get my first Pokémon; great I thought – I am going to get that lizard on the front of Red! Either by pure laziness, eagerness to get on with the game, or by my sheer inability to walk two steps further to the right I ended up picking Bulbasaur. Quite soon on in the game I realised that this thing was brilliant – vine whipping my way through Brock’s Onyx and then vine whipping my way through Misty’s Staru. I was feeling good about myself, that was until I walked North and bumped into your rival which being the sad bastard I was at the time had opted out of the mandatory swear word and had simply called him ‘Gary’. “Gary would like to battle” – woah woah woah hold on here, I haven’t been to the Pokémon Centre yet and you would like to battle? An Ivysaur with half health and a poorly trained Pidgey was all I had in my arsenal against him. What the fuck is this I thought as his Pidgeotto absolutely decked my Ivysaur with a gust attack, and was quick to finish off my Pidgey. Fuck! No! You bastard! I blacked out and assumed the worse – that it was game over, thinking up a barrage of profanities to scream at the console - blaming it for my inability to go to a Pokémon Centre. After all how the hell was I supposed to know that Mother Fucking Gary Oak was to appear around the corner with Pokémon that were clearly on steroids.
Thanks again if you spent time reading this...
PSN: Gippon
