Now I don't want to sound too self-indulgent when it comes to me writing these blog posts, although committing my thoughts to virtual paper for the masses to read is in itself a self-indulgent act, (irony!) but I figure we'll all get on a lot better if you can at the very minimum see why I come to the conclusions I arrive at if you have at least a familiarity of my background and what makes me tick. This is me trying to be as clear and transparent as I can be in a world where masking one's true intent for fear of offending someone, anyone, has started to become the norm. I mean, no-one wants to be that guy/girl/non-binary do they?! In a world where it is so easy for someone to take offence and in return recompense in a militaristic fashion it pays dividends to keep your cards close to your chest at all times. And with everybody having a virtual presence either from the likes of Facebook or Twitter to even owning a bank account everyone has a vulnerability which can be exposed and taken advantage of for whatever reason... whenever the feeling arises. That is a scary thought! And who can blame anyone for being a lot more secretive when it comes to omitting their own true thoughts and opinions? But I say this; does it not make more sense to be as open as you dare to be in order to quell any suspicions of the contrary? Surely it is better for someone to know where they stand with you, (for ill or good) than to be forever questioning your loyalties and judgement? And in a world where you will always offend someone either by a differing view or from a lack of forethought to a throwaway comment which we are all guilty of from time to time, (It's what you say/type on the internet, never how you say it!) the only person you should be straight up with is yourself. In essence, say what you mean and mean what you say. I quote Elvis Costello, "Don't wear your heart on your sleeve when your remarks are off the cuff." And when you choose to publish anything on the internet, be it a Youtube video or a blog entry your soul is exposed to being poked and prodded by any and all nefarious types which come across it. People who claim to not be bothered on any level by that either don't care enough about their creations in the first place or are full of shit.
So why do I start the second entry to my blog - which is supposed to be about my gaming history, to allow you to peak in to my mindset and, (hopefully) to help you, dear reader understand how I reach the conclusions I arrive at - with a paragraph detailing how saying what you feel is the truth from your viewpoint could be construed as offensive to others? SIMPLE. Console gaming in my humble opinion is one of the most tribal of technological leisure activities you can affordably be a part of today, and that has been the way since the Atari 2600 burst on to the scene along with it's competitors back in 1977. But why? The answer I think is a relatively simple one; It's because of the hardware and the fact you can't modify or upgrade anything within that base unit you purchased from the store. Everybody has the same set-up, with only the different makes of console to differ you from Willy and Billy down the street. Because of this it's very easy to draw big rivalries between owners of the Super Nintendo and the Sega Megadrive or the Playstation 2 and the original Xbox. Now you could say that that was relatively true for my beloved Commodore 64 when being measured up to the Spectrum ZX and although both very popular at around the same time from a hardware perspective they were an ocean apart in a technological sense. Although these days from a similar viewpoint you have tech-fiends arguing about which company manufactures the best graphics cards, CPU's, motherboards etc. etc, there is such a diverse choice out there that no complete PC can be directly compared to another.
And they're so damn accessible! Plug and play and you're away! A product for the masses... but still expensive within themselves. Take in to account the fact that buying the base unit is only the start of what is still an expensive hobby if you want to keep up to date with the latest game releases, along with the yearly online subscription you need to purchase to even be allowed to play with your friends regularly means most people still only end up picking one console from the handful available in any given generation. This breeds a playground rivalry from the owner of said chosen console brand to justify their choice; to feel like they have made the wise decision and the owners of the other brands are complete idiots for choosing their complete potato of a machine. And these rivalries can be fucking vicious, man. I remember being at school and hearing about a guy being bullied incessantly because he had a Atari 7800 when all his peers had a NES. Don't get me wrong, I know kids generally can be vicious little shits at the best of times and in that period of your life all you want to do is fit in, but just look how the rivalries of the latest consoles breed as much contempt as past generations of gaming machines yet the average age of your run-of-the-mill gamer is between 18 and 35. That means there are a lot more adults who should know better throwing their tuppence worth in to the shit storm that is the ever evolving console war. We're not completely to blame however, and as long as the behemoths of the video game industry insist on having console exclusives and getting away with blaming "netcode" and other such bollocks for not allowing cross-platform online play from games produced by independent developers, rivalries will continue at the fever pitch it has been at for last 30 years.
But I digress. Gaming consoles! Console gaming! That's what I said I'd write about and I'll stick to the plan... this time. At 10 years old for Christmas after having my well loved and well used Commodore 64 for five years I was ready for a change. I had grown bored of the wait times for loading games via a cassette, (although in retrospect it was never that long but at that tender age it felt like a eternity) and with myself having just started at middle school the previous September I was very much aware of what other kids were watching/reading/playing and I learnt, very quickly, that console gaming was at the forefront of the playground banter. Friends new and old were pulled in to the exciting world of 16 bit gaming via the Megadrive and SNES becoming more affordable after being on the market for around 18 months and boy! was there a frenzy in that first term at school leading up to Christmas. Obviously you had the cool kids who's rich parents had bought the console within the first 6 months of release and were viewed with starry-eyed wonder due to their veteran status with their chosen machine by their peers but now we, the common folk, could finally enter the gaming clique of our choosing. No longer would we be hovering around the edges of society, (well... the school yard) listening with intrigue about the tall stories of a podgy Italian plumber or a blue hedgehog. Now even I can throw myself headfirst in to the pixel world of whichever gaming mascot I chose to enlist under! The question was though, which one? Both of the popular machines of the time had their merits but it would appear, at least in my friendship circle, that the SNES was the way to go. So on Christmas day in 1993 I awoke to a rather large present which just so happened to be a Super Nintendo Entertainment System complete with a Superscope and Superscope 6 game, (more of a tech demo for the bazooka-shaped light gun but I don't think many developers got the memo on that) F-Zero and Super Mario All-Stars. And that was me set at school; I was welcomed in to the SNES fold as one of their own, a fellow Nintendo enthusiast brought in to the ranks ready to defend the honour of our kind at a drop of a hat. And even today I still think picking that over the Sega Megadrive/Genesis was the way to go... Now was that because of the neater looking graphics? The unique Mode 7 design? The no gore effect in Mortal Kombat? I'd like to say yes, (except for that last one) it was EXACTLY for those reasons, but at 10 years old it boiled down to one key yet shallow reason; it's what all my friends had. A decision made not by good judgement or meticulous research in to the choices I had at the time, but popularity. And although it would seem that at least this time I had chosen the winning side I believe there were no actual losers in this generation, it all just depended on what you found fun. It's true that the Megadrive had the faster paced games and smoother gameplay feel but I was never really in to sports games or action/bullet hell shooters which would take advantage of those aspects on that console. And anyway I had a plethora of interesting adventure games, RPGs, platformers, fighters and racers to occupy my time.
"For fuck's sake Padge! you've been rabbiting on and you've hardly covered any games yet!!" I hear you cry, and I'm just as shocked as you to be honest. As I type this I never really thought I'd go this deep in to the "why's" of console gaming in my past as opposed to the "what's", but I guess that's because I feel I've matured past the minimalist pleasures that a console offers, and which is always on the back foot from a tech perspective compared to the sophistication that a PC can deliver, but that's for another blog entry. (I know... very PC Master Race right?) SO, the games. I played F-Zero to DEATH. I loved it. It was my go-to game for a very long time duly to the futuristic setting, the breakneck speed you travelled at, (over 400 km/h!) and the fact you could be completely destroyed if you didn't pay the attention needed to the car racing at that velocity because of the hazards on the track like the mines... or the other cars low on energy and about to blow up themselves... or the sides of the track which were deadly to the touch! And I also really digged the the instruction manual which doubled as a scene setting comic book! Compared to the Commodore 64 which in itself had a fair few games that felt like they were pushing boundaries of what an entertainment system could offer this game in particular felt like it was on another level completely. It is a classic in every sense of the word and this is shown time and again by the multiple nods it gets in other games, from the likes of Mariokart, (an obvious one) to Animal Crossing: Wild World. The other cartridge I had that Christmas, the aforementioned Super Mario All-Stars was a culmination of enhanced remakes of the first 3 Super Mario games along with the Japan only version of Super Mario 2 labelled as "The Lost Levels". From a relatively sensible child's perspective who would only be getting 2 games to go with his brand new console, (one from Nan, one from Mumsy) this seemed like a cost effective solution to a very real problem for anyone with limited access to funds; value for money. It was 4 games in 1 cartridge damn it! The maths don't lie!! So technically I had 5 games to last me until my birthday and last me they did, and beyond. Now you've probably noticed I haven't mention the Superscope much and that's because no-one else really did anything with it. A gimmicky light gun which Nintendo hoped more developers would support but sadly did not. I guess they were trying to riff off the back of the original light gun idea after the popularity of Duck Hunt but with the thinking of "bigger is better", (it was shaped like a fucking bazooka after all!) but it seems instead of people embracing this mega peripheral and the scope itself becoming a bulwark of gaming it was seen as a one trick pony with too narrow a field of use to be fully seized upon. Sadly this would seems to be a recurring problem with each new console generation, where towards the end of their natural life our living rooms are filled with plastic inessential controllers to games long forgotten about due to the fact it's too much effort to set up compared to picking up a regular controller... but I guess we're the mugs as we keep buying them and buying in to the "unique game design" of using them in the first place... at least until we have a large group of friends or family come round to your house anyway.
So what of later games? Over the next few years I managed to add to my collection through birthdays and Christmases with both physical copies for games I'd asked for and games bought through an accumulation of money from said celebrations to what I like to think is a nice selection of electronic distractions. Within my assortment you could find the likes of Super Smash TV, Super Mario Kart, Disney's Aladdin and The Magical Quest starring Mickey Mouse, Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat II, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, Street Fighter II and WWF Royal Rumble. Although I had a few of the more popular amusements within my collection I never felt the need to get all the classics due to 2 simple reasons, swapping between friends and video game rental. As I've said before, I was blessed with having a large friendship group which meant there were a lot of Super Nintendo's flying around which lead to a lot of different types of games being bought and, like any kids at our age our attention span could be measured in nano-seconds. So when one of you got bored of playing game X we could walk over to our friends house and swap it for game Y for a few weeks which meant (generally) everyone was a winner. Occasionally you would swap a rubbish game for a better one to a friend or as we all started to grow up some people would stop playing with their SNES, (quitters) but were still open to swapping games so the swap at that point was more like insurance than theft - never borrowed, always swapped! The other is a dead concept in the traditional sense these days and that was going to Choices Video in the UK, (a tackier Blockbuster if you're not aware of the brand) and renting a game over the weekend for a couple of quid. I know these days you can stream certain games for a fee or if you subscribe to certain gaming platforms they allow you to play whatever you want for as long as you're subscribed but these are both long-term contractual services, not something you can afford to do on a whim on some cold rainy Saturday afternoon in March. Admittedly, the second hand market is a lot larger at your local Gamestop or CEX nowadays, but you generally have to spend a lot more on a piece of software which you have no knowledge of how it's actually been treated before you acquired it. That makes me uneasy... and with more and more games these days being download only that isn't even an option for 70% of the time. "Games as subscription" is how I believe the business managers refer to it as, more like a subscription to the games you've already paid outright for... but that rant is for another time.
So what am I getting at after all the babbling... and why have I only talked about the SNES? Surely I've had more than just the ONE console in my entire life? Well, yes I have. To cover them quickly I have owned at one point or another a Gameboy, (twice... there was a headbutting incident) a Playstation, a PS2, an XBox 360, a PS3, a Nintendo Wii, a Nintedo WiiU, a PS4, (well I guess you know what side my bread has been buttered in the following generations of the console war!) and an Amstrad GX4000. Apart from the Amstrad which my grandparents bought to keep me quiet whenever I visited, (it worked... for a short while) all of the others played second fiddle to the PC we had either as a family computer, (for "homework" - LOL!) or as my own gaming machine. That means that my time with the Super Nintendo if the only "pure" experience I've had with consoles where nothing other than that machine was my main gaming focus. I feel it would be unfair to talk about the rest on how they made me feel as a teenager or young adult as these other consoles haven't defined me as a gamer since I first launched Settlers 2 on my 486 DX2 66. Of course there have been console exclusives which I've delved in to over the years which are usually the reason why I owned those consoles in the first place but since my early to mid teens the PC is where my heart has been.
To conclude, my first and only dedicated foray in to console gaming as a youngster brought me acceptance, camaraderie and a shared wealth of gaming diversity, and I guess when I slip on those rose-tinted glasses I can kind of see why the latest generation of the console wars have soldiers on either side fighting the good fight as intensely as they do... it's for that feeling of kinship and inclusion.
Thanks once again for taking the time to read this and hopefully I'll see you next time!
Scott.
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