“i love the girls and the money and the shame of life / my shallow mind is just a sign of your game”

[larryhammer]

I grew up without video games. Not computer games, which I played on mainframes and personal computers, and even programmed a couple on my ZX81. I especially liked Rogue and Colossal Cave, and eventually Nethack once I got a PC. But I never had a console. A couple friends had Ataris or Colecovisions, and a couple more had single-game handhelds, all of which I got to play on a couple times, but that was it.

The third generation NES, Master System, and the like didn’t come out till I was at university. Game Boy and Game Gear, grad school. PlayStation, Xbox, GameCube passed me by as a young professional scraping by. I sometimes played on my PC, mostly puzzle games or text adventures, and later my phone, a bit more.

Until Eaglet.

They started young, on a kiddy tablet—first lots of children’s games, then through those on to Roblox and Minecraft. And I followed—on my phone, then on a tablet, playing together and separately. I’ve not followed them onto a gaming PC,* but when they got a Switch, a couple years ago, I’ve been able to borrow it sometimes and heartily enjoyed it. Though, okay, only long enough to play through exactly one game, Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

But through that, I’ve gotten into retro gaming, especially old Nintendo games, especially from the Game Boy Advance era.

This was facilitated by Delta being released in the App Store. Great fun, but using a d-pad or especially a thumb-stick on a touch-screen is … sub optimal. So two weeks ago, I bought myself a cheap handheld, the PowKiddy RPG30. Handles GBA games beautifully, as well as PS1, plus many N64.

I’ve almost finished the main story of Pokémon LeafGreen—the colorized version of the first game, Pokémon Blue. And I’m looking forward to playing through the rest of the Pokémon main-line games, in order. Maybe not both of the paired games, nor both an original and a remake, but one from each iteration.

So yeah, a new hobby.


* Speaking of which, they just purchased and installed its first major upgrade, a better GPU. Used, but still quite usable.

---L.

Subject quote from The Shame of Life, Butthole Surfers.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Because I'm a few years younger, things were more ambient, but I didn't play anything on a console for more than a few minutes until I dated someone who owned a PS2. It's been interesting to approach as an adult what most folks who care about this stuff have been doing since fairly young, and (for some of it) to have very different reflexes and sense of how visual depth is modeled.

[larryhammer]

That last is interesting.

[thistleingrey]

I think it works the same way as for people who learn to drive later than their teens.

[larryhammer]

I'm one of those. Well, sort of. I technically learned at 17, but not well enough to take the test with any confidence, and relearned/tested at 25.

[thistleingrey]

*nods* A few years ago, I worked with someone who'd grown up in Queens and learned to drive a car only upon the arrival of her second child, in her thirties (in the 1980s in a suburb). That's when it clicked for me.

[adore]

Fun!

[larryhammer]

It is!

[marjorie1170]

I love my Switch! And I came to it old. I enjoyed Kirby too.

[larryhammer]

He's so squishy!

[harvestar]

Very cool!

My older brothers had the Atari 2600 with a nice suite of games. I was the annoying little sister so would get a turn but mostly watched them. When Nintendo came out, I half heartedly asked for one, only to be told I had an Atari. By then my brothers were playing games on our computer and I largely had the Atari to myself but played only occasionally. I loved the paddle that turned like a knob and Kaboom was my favorite.

I rarely played with Nintendo at others’ houses but we had some fun computer games over the years. There was a great Rube Goldberg game called the Amazing Machine. (You typed tam to run it) And one that was the Winter Olympics that I adored. And math games.

I’ve been interested in things like Stardew Valley, but haven’t invested in a Switch or such. I play enough phone games.

[larryhammer]

I am interested in Stardew Valley. I've been playing a lot of its spiritual predecessor, Harvest Moon aka Story of Seasons (name changed for copyright reasons after a localization contract ended), in one of its older iterations.