Games of Old

My very first gaming console was Master System II. Check out that huge D-Pad, and the pause button on the console itself. Classy. I can still remember it. When it first came to my home, it only had two games: Alex Kidd and Sonic the Hedgehog, both spawns of SEGA. I was six years old and games were pretty new: this was 1991, the console had been out for a year worldwide but was new to Europe, along with the NES. The console became the most cherished appliance we had at home. I played, my Mum played, even my Dad managed to do a few levels from time to time.

Then we got a few more games for it (I recall there was a Michael Jackson game, and one called Psycho Fox which we all thought was awesome), and eventually got a hold of a Genesis. That was one of the golden ages of gaming in this household. There were games everyone could play: the folks especially liked Mega Bomberman and most platformers. We owned a Saturn for a while, although we didn't have many games for it, and eventually went into the PSX, Gamecube and Playstation 2 realms. The Playstation 2 is, after the Genesis, the console with a greater lifespan in the house. Before we sold a good deal of our games, we owned over sixty different titles, half were my brother's, half were mine, and a few were also picked up by my Mum. She found she was particularly fond of Final Fantasy titles and general RPG then, with the tenth game of the franchise coming out. It was also on PSX and Playstation 2 my love for horror and survival games bloomed, as well as stealth. Kid Bro became the great fighting game moolah mogul he is today on Playstation 2, mainly.

On portable consoles, we owned a Game Gear for a while, but it was bullshit. The best thing I ever bough on handheld consoles was my Gameboy Color: eight years afterwards, it's still up and running. I doubt any other handheld will have my appreciation as much as it. I also did quite a bit of playing elder games from SNES on emulators on my PC later on. Although I never owned them, I did play several games on NES, Dreamcast and even a Wii and Playstation 3, recently.

Why am I typing all this for you? Quite simple. To prove I've seen a good deal of the gaming evolution from the old days until now. And let me tell you something: there are no such things as master gamers nowadays. That is a title belonging to the past. Here's why.

Back in the day we didn't have as much luxury in gaming as we have nowadays. Most games didn't have a save system. You had a number of lives, maybe a number of continues, and if the lights went out for some reason, your game was lost and you'd be starting from the beginning. In one of my old neighborhoods we sometimes had blackouts, and you don't know how frustrating it is to be at the level before the last in a game and have to start at the beginning because lights went out. Nowadays, if you wanna take a little break, you save and turn off the console - back then, that was murder. I never did it myself because my parents would've killed me, but I had friends who started to play in the early morning and left the game on while they were in class, to continue when they came back home. You literally had to sit in front of the TV for hours unend to finish a game. And if you lost all your lives and/or continues, you'd go back to the beginning of the game. Not to your last save.

And even things like Pause buttons were not as common as you think. It's a true relief to be able to pause for a bathroom break once in a while these days. The Master System II had a Pause button on the console itself. The problem is, it didn't work with all games. For example, you could pause Alex Kidd, but good luck getting a break in Psycho Fox. The NES didn't have a Pause button. In fact, before the Genesis and SNES age, it was rare to get a gaming console with a Pause button. I look at controllers for Gamecube and Xbox, and I'm amazed: how did we get to this? I'm from a time when it was as simple as D-Pad, A button and B button. You had three buttons, canon: figure it out. Characters in games never had more than a couple moves: walk, run, jump, crouch. Whatever else you needed to do, you'd have to combine buttons to. Does anyone still know what up-up-down-down-left-right-left-righ-B-A is? Because if there's a code to remember, this is it.

But that's not all. Games were also harder. I know guys who can dominate everyone in Lineage, Halo, World of Warcraft, the works... and they can't get through the first level of Super Mario Bros. without taking damage somehow. I recently played a few levels of Sonic the Hedgehog, and it surprised me how much I sucked. See nowadays you have all sorts of games, but back then, it was platformers, RPGs, fighting, shooter, sports and puzzles. I mostly recall platformers, perhaps because that's what we played more at my place. You got an action or adventure game, chances were that they were platformers, and something that doesn't exist anymore called sidescroller. Yeah, start at the left, and the end of the level is at the right. Levels are apparently also gone: now you have chapters, arcs, even hours and nights, but "levels" seems to be gone.

It took skill back then. You had to memorize sets of buttons, or even worse: go real old school and mash them at random. It was simpler, yes, but harder. Nowadays, your job is to try to level up characters and weapons, but back then, unless you were playing for instance Mega Man, the guy you began with was the one you had to take with you til the end. Power-ups, yes, but leveling-up like we do today, we never had to do. Crow, someone who could make it halfway through Contra was a hero. I truly think games were harder, maybe because they were simpler. There are no more master gamers, nobody dedicated enough to a game to play it without fucking up or goofing off at some point, someone who will spend hours just practicing and having fun. And games are easier these days, so it doesn't take the same level of mastery. Hell I recall owning Genesis games I was never able to complete halfway try as I might (Contra, I'm looking at you again), and I hardly owned a PS2 game I didn't finish or near-finish. The title "master gamer" is lost with time, folks.

Not that I'm complaining about the newer generation of games. In fact, most of my favorite games came out in the past ten years. I'm just saying that when you hear that douchebag speak of how he owned ass at Unreal Tournament, maybe you should give him some Contra to play.