NOTE TO MY READERS
I started writing this Blog last year, but I got side-tracked...so here it is, finished now...even if it is abit out of date now.



Well..with another step into Next Gen gaming brought upon the world, I thought I would look back on when it all started for me...

The year was 1980 something..I don't really remember when exactly...but my family and I stepped into a store and went home with an Atari 2600 and a game or two. I think it may have been some weird football game where if you ran off one side of the screen you'd come from the opposite side. In a football...this created obvious advantages and disadvantages...depending on who had the ball,lol And If I'm not mistaken..Pac-Man was the other game. It wasn't really until we borrowed our cousin's big box of games that I really got into it. Frogger, Joust, Combat, Battlezone, Centipede, Demon Attack, Beef Steak Tomatoes, Donkey Kong, Asteroids..those are just the ones that stick out in my mind...do you remember those...I know some of you must...

Those were some good first exposure years...of course sometimes we didn't get to play due to either not cleaning our room or not doing our homework on time..among other sibling stuff I swear..I must have played Donkey Kong over and over and over again, without turning it off, before realizing that there was no end to it. But still..it was lots of fun...we even played that God Awful E.T. Game. Sorry if I brought up some bad memories. Hmm..it was such a different time then...and not just for the rest of the world, but for games. No elaborate 3D Models or almost perfect cartoon sprites....just pixels that barely even resembled what they represented. And we just have a Joy stick..and One button..that's right kids...One button. Oh but that one little button could do anything. It could make a plane shoot at the enemy or..make a frog jump across the road through traffic...though I guess there wasn't much else it did, other than shooting and jumping...but that's all that mattered in those days...if you couldn't shoot or jump in time..it was Game Over....particularly the jumping part when it came to Pitfall. These memories will always be a cherished part of my childhood as they turned me into the huge gammer I am today....and yet..even if I could afford it...still not crazy enough to shell out 600 George Washingtons for a PS3..sorry

A couple of years later, a friend of ours, a kid not much older than me, introduced us to Nintendo's 8-Bit masterpiece, The Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES..also known as the Famicom as it was originally called in Japan. His family were friends of ours for years already and still are to this day in fact, though we don't see each other that often anymore...but any hoo...thanks to him, we were exposed to classics such as Super Mario Bros. 2, California Games, some weird ski game and a weird shooting game. One thing we weren't too fond of was this little tactic...he'd say "Let me help you with this part." and then he'd play the rest of the game..but hey...I suppose I can't be too upset...he was just as into it as we were. Every time we'd go visit him, we'd be playing his NES..that and playing with his Ninja Turtle toys. As you can imagine, we wanted one of our own and by Christmas of 1990 I believe, we got our wish. I wanna say that's also when we got the Ninja Turtles Game for the NES, but I'm just not sure. I know we had played the Arcade TMNT game before we played the NES versions of it..which we rented many many time...our friend also had his own copy of the game.

Now speaking of renting...we rented alot of NES games in those days. Back To The Future, BTTF II & III, which by the way was utterly ridiculous but we couldn't stop playing it.. I remember some obscure Snoopy & Spike game where they competed in some weird Olympic games. The day we rented a Mega Man game changed everything for my youngest brother though. Today he owns almost ever Mega Man game ever released in the US...even a few only released in Japan....and Mega Man action figures. I have very fond and not so fond memories of a game called Dragon Spirit: The New Legend. Imagine a 1942ish game played with a Dragon instead. It was really fun, challenging and could easily #### you off. It was all we played for alittle while there. Which reminds me of another game built from an already existing game. Darkwing Duck...it played very much like Mega Man. I can still remember the day our older brother woke us up early one school morning to show us the ending to the game.

And of course we had SW and TESB for the NES...those were fun times indeed. I beat SW..never did beat TESB. Somewhere during the 8-bit era, we played our NES until it died...so we had to get a new sometime. I remember my mom and sister..or maybe brother...coming home with a new NES and Mario 3! That game was a huge honking hunk of fun! I remember playing it on Thanksgiving one year...I think I was in world 7...sitting there playing as relatives showed up to eat our food. Soon the 8-bit times would come to and end and we would enter the 16-bit era of gaming.

My family first entered the 16-bit gaming world with the Super Nintendo or SNES or Super Famicom. Along with exposure to the SNES, my family with through some other changes, which I suppose were responsible for the SNES entering our lives, but I prefer not to go into that particular part of the story. The games I remember playing first were of course Super Mario World & FZ Racer...that was a game right?..maybe it was FX Zero, FZero....I dunno. I remember one gem in particular was TMNT IV: Turtles In Time, while not really challenging in any way,was however a lot of fun. I think we beat the first or second day of renting it. We still played it alot though, but never did get our own copy...unless you count the emulator version I have now. Yes, the SNES was a great addition to videogames and contributed a lot to my gammer development, but It's time to move on...fear not though, the SNES will return later...now we move on to..The Sega Genesis.

A friend of our's came over and brought his Genesis with him, which of course at the time, we just called "The Sega". While I only recall two games, I suppose it's possible he had more, but I don't really remember. One of his games X-Men. I seem to recall playing the first level,over and over again...and again....and again. It was along time before we ever saw that second level, if I'm remembering correctly. The other game I remember was Mortal Komabt. Yes...the "Genesis", if you will, of my descent into the MK world..though my brother claims we played the Arcade version at some point in the past...I don't remember it...oh well.

It was long until we got our very own Genesis, or to be more precise, my brother got one for his Birthday. The two games he got with it were Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Road Rash II, both of which saw many hours of play time from us. Sonic 2 was a game I became quite fond of...so much in fact that when they came out, I got Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. I played these games until I knew every little secret and bonus this and that there was to find. We eventually did get Sonic 1 as well. RRII was pretty fun. I mean c'mon...back in those days...how could you not have fun on a 16-Bit game where you ride a Motorcycle and make your opponents crash their's?? You could kick em and even hit em with a club or a CHAIN!! We never did finish the game, but I'm still trying on my emulator.

Over the years we acquired more Genesis games to keep ourselves busy through those 16-Bit times....most notably, Mortal Kombat II, WWF Royal Rumble, NBA Jam, Star Trek: The Next Generation & Spider-Man vs The Kingpin, plus tons of rentals over the years..no we didn't keep them, though I would have liked to have...mostly EA's Strike Games. Later on, we were borrowing a SNES (the departure of the first SNES is part of that other story I don't wanna go into) from our mother's BF at the time...who just happened to be an Ex-Husband of her's, but I digress.. With that SNES, along with many people at the time, were introduced to Donkey Kong Country. HOLY *BLEEP*ING *BLEEP* DUDE!!! Never before and never again have I played a game that made me question whether I was still playing the same system I had been. While it may looked dated by today's standards, at the time, this game blew us all away. The quality of the Graphics were so awesome, I just couldn't believe it...and the awesomeness that is DKC didn't stop there. This game provided us with hours upon hours of great fun and cursing!!! I can still play this game now and it'll be just as great now as it was then. A solid side-scrolling game with everything from Cliff-jumping, to vine swinging, to cannon blasting monkeys, to mine-cart riding and some pretty cool mini-games as well. DKC 2 expanded on it's predecessor's style and was just as if not awesomer!! DKC 3 just seemed like more of the same, with a few new features..and with this being the 3rd installment, I felt it was alittle bit of a let down.

Well, that's all for now. Join next time when my family enters the 32-Bit world of gaming.