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silveradept[This is Part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. If you have suggestions about where to take the series, please do say so in the comments. We have a lot of spaces to fill for this month.]
The Atari 2600 was the last console that came into the house from the parents while I was there. (It would not be the last console purchased for my household by my parents, but it would be the last one that they bought into their own.) As a small child, however, I have the benefit of having avoided the Crash (although I have played E.T. for the 2600) and instead was able to witness the return of the home console system to prominence starting with the venerable workhorse of the Nintendo Entertainment System. This began a certain amount of jealousy on my part that others were existing with game systems and I did not have them. I could play them while elsewhere (and did, to limited degrees), but I didn't start getting them for myself until I started scouring garage sales. This had the added benefit of getting me a system with a significant portion of games, and also making it easier for me to get games for inexpensively. But I also bought them with money that I had earned through things like a paper route.
I must also note that I lived through Nintendo-character-themed breakfast cereal advertisements.
Anyway, so I was almost always a system behind when it came to the classics, but I usually acquired them very inexpensively and got a lot of good playtime out of them when I did. First an NES, than a Super NES. I did not end up with the Sega Genesis system at any point, perhaps because I had friends who had that, and because the Genesis was the system in which there was a lot of playing of the home ports of various Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter, and Street Fighter games, beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage, and a shooter-type game called Lethal Enforcers, which was probably not a thing that the parents were fond of. (I did get Mortal Kombat II for the SNES, and it went into regular rotation of games played, but for the most part, the games were much more benign, like the Super Mario series and other games that were much less violent.) Fighting games were difficult on the Genesis platform because the Genesis controller only had three buttons on it. Fighting games wanted three buttons for punch and three for kick, so you could either purchase or rent the six-button controller, which would have all the inputs available at once, or you had to use the start button to switch back and forht between the punch and kick buttons. If you had a character whose special attacks focused solely on one or the other set, you could do okay with three buttons, but you were definitely at a disadvantage against the person with the six-button controller. The SNES never had this problem, because it started with four face buttons and two shoulder buttons, so it could easily make up the six buttons needed for fighting games. Even if those games didn't have a secret code to unlock red blood spatters instead of some other color.
Since going over to a friend's house often meant renting a single cartridge from a Blockbuster video store, choosing wisely what game you wanted to play was paramount. That did mean I got to play the X-Men game where the solution to a puzzle was to tap the reset button on the console, although we weren't good enough that we actually were able to get that far in the game. On one of those weekends, I discovered something very interesting about the Sega Genesis console - it was compatible with Atari 2600 joysticks. the plugs and pins were identical, although the joysticks only had one button, that mapped to the A button on a Genesis controller. For many games, this wasn't actually useful, but if you were playing, say, the Sonic the Hedgehog series, where only one button is needed to play the entire game, then you were solid. And so I experienced getting to play a game of a much newer generation using a controller of a significantly older one. This might be one of the inciting incidents to my lifelong fascination with trying to get older technology to stick around and work for newer things than it might have initially been designed for. (Another is probably the experience of building my own computers, but that comes later.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is that I didn't usually get a new system when it was new, unless I got it as a gift, and even then, I usually got the revised, revamped model of what it was. At least, not until the most recent purchases and gifts. So I have developed a healthy enjoyment of games long after they were the hottest and newest ones on the market, and I really appreciate the efforts made by coders and others, like the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) project and others of its like, trying to keep alive old system and recreate them on newer ones so that the games we remember so fondly from earlier on in life aren't lost to time. Because someone, somewhere, holds the record for speedrunning the entire set of console Mario games (Lost Levels / Super Mario 2 in JP excluded, perhaps, because that one locks you out of the correct ending and several of the stages if you use a warp pipe at any point) and they have to be able to have all of them available to actually do it. Super Mario Brothers can be cleared in less than ten minutes if you're trying, and the world record for it is in less than five. Super Mario 2 and 3 have warp tricks you can use to skip much of the game. Super Mario World has a very short path to the end if you know what you're doing. 64 can be beaten well before the requisite star count if you use the right glitches. It's totally doable. But it requires preserving and keeping available the cartridges, and systems that can play the cartridges, and controllers that behave like the originals, both for people who want to play the games of their youth, but also to introduce new generations to what games were like in earlier eras. (So they understand what the fascination is with "retro," at the very least.)
And, of course, to earworm them properly.
The Atari 2600 was the last console that came into the house from the parents while I was there. (It would not be the last console purchased for my household by my parents, but it would be the last one that they bought into their own.) As a small child, however, I have the benefit of having avoided the Crash (although I have played E.T. for the 2600) and instead was able to witness the return of the home console system to prominence starting with the venerable workhorse of the Nintendo Entertainment System. This began a certain amount of jealousy on my part that others were existing with game systems and I did not have them. I could play them while elsewhere (and did, to limited degrees), but I didn't start getting them for myself until I started scouring garage sales. This had the added benefit of getting me a system with a significant portion of games, and also making it easier for me to get games for inexpensively. But I also bought them with money that I had earned through things like a paper route.
I must also note that I lived through Nintendo-character-themed breakfast cereal advertisements.
Anyway, so I was almost always a system behind when it came to the classics, but I usually acquired them very inexpensively and got a lot of good playtime out of them when I did. First an NES, than a Super NES. I did not end up with the Sega Genesis system at any point, perhaps because I had friends who had that, and because the Genesis was the system in which there was a lot of playing of the home ports of various Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter, and Street Fighter games, beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage, and a shooter-type game called Lethal Enforcers, which was probably not a thing that the parents were fond of. (I did get Mortal Kombat II for the SNES, and it went into regular rotation of games played, but for the most part, the games were much more benign, like the Super Mario series and other games that were much less violent.) Fighting games were difficult on the Genesis platform because the Genesis controller only had three buttons on it. Fighting games wanted three buttons for punch and three for kick, so you could either purchase or rent the six-button controller, which would have all the inputs available at once, or you had to use the start button to switch back and forht between the punch and kick buttons. If you had a character whose special attacks focused solely on one or the other set, you could do okay with three buttons, but you were definitely at a disadvantage against the person with the six-button controller. The SNES never had this problem, because it started with four face buttons and two shoulder buttons, so it could easily make up the six buttons needed for fighting games. Even if those games didn't have a secret code to unlock red blood spatters instead of some other color.
Since going over to a friend's house often meant renting a single cartridge from a Blockbuster video store, choosing wisely what game you wanted to play was paramount. That did mean I got to play the X-Men game where the solution to a puzzle was to tap the reset button on the console, although we weren't good enough that we actually were able to get that far in the game. On one of those weekends, I discovered something very interesting about the Sega Genesis console - it was compatible with Atari 2600 joysticks. the plugs and pins were identical, although the joysticks only had one button, that mapped to the A button on a Genesis controller. For many games, this wasn't actually useful, but if you were playing, say, the Sonic the Hedgehog series, where only one button is needed to play the entire game, then you were solid. And so I experienced getting to play a game of a much newer generation using a controller of a significantly older one. This might be one of the inciting incidents to my lifelong fascination with trying to get older technology to stick around and work for newer things than it might have initially been designed for. (Another is probably the experience of building my own computers, but that comes later.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is that I didn't usually get a new system when it was new, unless I got it as a gift, and even then, I usually got the revised, revamped model of what it was. At least, not until the most recent purchases and gifts. So I have developed a healthy enjoyment of games long after they were the hottest and newest ones on the market, and I really appreciate the efforts made by coders and others, like the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) project and others of its like, trying to keep alive old system and recreate them on newer ones so that the games we remember so fondly from earlier on in life aren't lost to time. Because someone, somewhere, holds the record for speedrunning the entire set of console Mario games (Lost Levels / Super Mario 2 in JP excluded, perhaps, because that one locks you out of the correct ending and several of the stages if you use a warp pipe at any point) and they have to be able to have all of them available to actually do it. Super Mario Brothers can be cleared in less than ten minutes if you're trying, and the world record for it is in less than five. Super Mario 2 and 3 have warp tricks you can use to skip much of the game. Super Mario World has a very short path to the end if you know what you're doing. 64 can be beaten well before the requisite star count if you use the right glitches. It's totally doable. But it requires preserving and keeping available the cartridges, and systems that can play the cartridges, and controllers that behave like the originals, both for people who want to play the games of their youth, but also to introduce new generations to what games were like in earlier eras. (So they understand what the fascination is with "retro," at the very least.)
And, of course, to earworm them properly.
no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 07:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-12-04 03:27 pm (UTC)Between that one and Super Mario World is where I think a lot of the classic earworms come from.