Well I guess I'm doing this, I'm finally starting a blog about Video Games and I thought for my first post I should introduce myself and explain why I care about Video Games the way that I do and I think that the best way to explain that is to tell you my journey with this hobby going back to where it all started. So Why Do I care about Video Games? Video Games have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was born in 1999 during the 5th Generation of gaming, which is when gaming started to become more mainstream, especially with the release of the PS1 and the N64, the two most popular systems of that generation (Sorry Sega Saturn...). My Dad had a PS1 when I was growing up and as I got older the PS1 eventually became me and my brother’s first console. I have very fond memories of this system, I remember the days of going into Xtra-vision (Which was essentially the Irish Version of Blockbuster) with my Dad and my Brother and renting out some games to play on a Sunday afternoon. There was also a brief period where we didn't have a Memory Card so there are several PS1 games like Final Fantasy 7 that I've only ever played the opening scene of. My favourite game from the PS1, and still one of my favourite games was the Original Rayman, which I think is what started my love of platforming games. I then got my first handheld console on the Christmas of 2006, which was a Pink Fat Original Nintendo DS with a copy of Scooby-Doo! Unmasked and my Brother got a Blue DS with Nintendogs (Which I was Quite Jealous of, but I got to borrow it numerous times). The Nintendo DS was an awesome introduction to handhelds, I have so many great memories with the console including being able to play and discover a whole library of Gameboy Advance Games. My cousins had Gameboy Advance SPs and we used to trade games when we'd all be over at my grannies or if I was at my Aunts house. Another great thing about getting a DS was that I had the opportunity to discover Nintendo IP for the first time because I had only ever played Sony Consoles and I was more familiar with the Sony Mascots like Crash Bandicoot. The first Nintendo game's I remember playing were New Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario 64. I later replaced my Original DS with a White DS Lite and I finally got my very own copy of Nintendogs, so I wasn't just babysitting my brother's dogs. A few Christmases later me and my Brother were gifted a Nintendo Wii and we actually got quite a few games with it, obviously the famous Wii Sports was bundled in but we also got Wii Play and Rayman Raving Rabbids 2. My Mum actually liked me and my brother playing the Wii due to it being much more active than our handhelds and it was something that my brother and I could play together. We eventually got the Wii Fit Board for our Wii as well. I have a great memory of me and my brother getting Mario Kart Wii which was our first Mario Kart game, we had both gotten some money for Easter and we put it together to buy the Mario Kart Wii Bundle and an Extra Racing Wheel and we spent the whole of our Easter break eating chocolate and completing all of the Grand Prix's. I also have a horror story about the time that our Wii Broke but I think I'm going to save that for another post. It was around this time as well that we picked up a Black PS2 Slim at a car boot sale with our Dad, (Which is my favourite console of all time, I might do a post on why later). We had originally gone to the car boot to sell off some of our old toys and DVDs but I ended up buying some GameBoy Advance Games and spying this PS2 in box for £25, it was an absolute steal. Sadly that PS2 didn't last very long because my brother and I completely abused that poor system (We basically put things inside the disc tray that shouldn't have been put in the disc tray...) but my Dad's girlfriend at the time had a son and he was getting rid of his Sliver PS2, along with a multi-tap and some games and thankfully my Dad was able to convince him to give it to us and I'm happy to report that this PS2 was not abused by us because we learned our lesson and it is the PS2 that I still have and play today. At this time PS1 and PS2 games were quite cheap due to the PS3 and the Xbox 360 being out and I remember us heading to GameStop with our Dad on a Sunday and buying a haul of cheap games and then going to get Mc Donald's (Honestly, even as an adult that sounds like a pretty great day out). Around 2008 I remember me and my brother wanted to get PSPs so that we could play PlayStation IP on the go, we saved up our money and with some help from Mum we got a PSP Slim each, My Brother got a Piano Black PSP and I got a Ceramic White one. We didn't end up getting very many games for our PSPs from what I can remember and I think it's because for the first few months of owning the system we weren't able to save our games as we weren't able to find memory cards for them anywhere. We eventually did get memory cards when my granny found some when she was out shopping, but for the first little while I remember me and my brother trying to play our PSP games for as long as possible before the battery died just so that we could try getting further into the games (I guess that was sort of an early version of speedrunning). One of my favourite games I played on the PSP was Crash Team Tag Racing, which I also ended up getting on the PS2 as well later but I still remember the intro of that game like the back of my hand because of the sheer amount of times I had to play it on the PSP. This is where things get a little more interesting, up until this point my brother and I had always gotten consoles together and had sort of grown up with the same games and consoles. However, as we got older our gaming preferences became very different and now that we had more disposable income of our own (from getting a bit more pocket money) we were able to buy our own games and new consoles (Usually with the help of our parents still). My Brother got an Xbox 360 Slim so that he could play Call Of Duty with his friends on Xbox Live. Me and my Brother did still play some games together when he wasn't playing online and this is where I was introduced to some new games like Halo: Reach and all of the newest Call of Duty games (Although we did have one on the Wii, it was terrible). I was surprisingly pretty good at Zombies and me and my brother would sometimes play that online together, however, I was still more of a single-player gamer and I always went back to playing my other consoles, like the Wii and my DS. I was 11 at this stage and it was the time when the 3DS was about to come out, I remember almost every day going to my computer and googling to see if any more information had come out about the 3DS, I was so excited for the next generation of my favourite handheld at the time (especially since I skipped the DSi). I had saved up my pocket money and I was able to buy my 3DS at launch, I remember my Dad picking me and my brother up and driving to Curry's to buy it (Curry’s is like a general electronics store in the UK). Looking back now I think that my Dad may have reserved one for me because I remember going up to the till and the guy just going to the back and grabbing the console for me and then he held up two games which were Steel Diver and Nintendog's + Cats and he asked me what one I wanted with the system and I choose Nintendogs which I think out of those two games having played both of them was the right choice. It was the Aqua Blue System that I got at launch which again I think was a good choice because I still think that console looks good. I did do a little bit of PC gaming around this time too because Minecraft wasn't available on console yet and it was BIG when I was growing up. I then bought a PS Vita soon after in 2012 with my birthday money due to wanting to play some PlayStation Exclusives which I hadn't played in a while due to mostly playing Nintendo games. It still amazes me to this day that I was such a huge supporter of the Vita, I remember having tons of games for it and I mostly bought games as soon as they came out which was something that was new for me. The Vita was my gateway into PlayStation games that I had missed out on like, Uncharted, Little Big Planet and Sly Cooper. I also remember downloading lots of stuff from the PlayStation Store, My Dad got me a year's subscription to PS Plus that Christmas so I played and downloaded so many of the earlier PS Plus titles. I also remember buying lots of PS1 and PSP games on the store because they were quite cheap and it was great to have them on a handheld system. I still have and play this Vita to this day and I honestly think that the Vita was underrated because it was a great console and I honestly don’t know why it didn’t take off. I think a huge part of why I enjoyed playing handheld games and still do, was because my parents were divorced when I was growing up (Which is why if you noticed I mention my Dad seeing on me a Sunday a lot during this post). The PS1 and PS2 were the consoles that I had at my Dad's house growing up and the Wii was a console we had at our home with my mum, but with the Handheld systems I could travel with my games and I wouldn't have to stop progress in a game when I had to go to my Dad's. However, there was a point in my life when I was a teenager when I just completely stopped playing video games and I remember selling off most of my PS Vita, DS, 3DS and Wii games (Which is seriously something I regret now). I was going through a hard time at school and I just lost my interest in gaming. I think it was due to the fact that none of my peers was into video games and at the time gaming was seen as a "Boy's Thing" (which looking back is completely ridiculous) and because I was at an all-girls school I just wanted to fit in so badly, especially since I was struggling to come to terms with my sexuality and I just wanted to be seen the same as everyone else so that no one would suspect that I was a lesbian. I threw myself into learning how to edit and started making videos on YouTube and switching my interests over to music because that was something that I could talk to my friends at school about. It may sound like an overreaction but I was miserable when I pulled away from gaming and I didn't realise it then but it was because games were a healthy outlet for me and it was something that I genuinely loved and had a passion for. It was also around this time when my brother was getting rid of his Xbox 360 stuff because he had gotten an Xbox One and he ended up giving me his old system and some of his games so I hadn't 100% checked out of gaming I just wasn't up to date with the newest things like I used to be because gaming was something that I felt like I had to keep a secret. I slowly started to get back into gaming again from watching Let's Play's on YouTube. I saw gameplay of Until Dawn and that's when I knew I had to get a PS4. I remember I was on my way to meet up with some of my school friends for the night and I had an hour to kill before I had to meet them and it was Christmas time so the shops were open later. I called into an HMV store and at this stage, Xtra-Vision was struggling and it was part of the downstairs area of this HMV. I went down there to look at the CDs and the PS4 Shelf caught my eye and that's when I saw it, Until Dawn was sitting on the shelf for £15 and even though I didn't have a PS4 and I wasn't sure if I could get one I ended up buying that copy of Until Dawn and brought it home. It wasn't until 2016 that I was able to get a PS4, which I got preowned on eBay for £180 along with a copy of Kill Zone Shadow Fall, it arrived boxed and in really good condition so it felt like a brand new console. I thank the PS4 for getting me back into gaming because it meant that I could catch up on some of the games that I had missed out on playing like The Last Of Us and the rest of the Uncharted games. I also started to follow gaming news again and I got up to date with all of the newest releases as well as playing the games and systems like the 3DS, PS Vita and Wii that I had held onto. It was also around this time that I started to experiment with emulators like PPSSPP and Dolphin to re-play some of my old childhood games and systems that I had sold or gotten rid of. I also for some reason bought a Green Gameboy Colour Bundle around this time too which I think is what started my love of retro games. I then went back to buying consoles in their launch year in 2017 when I bought my Nintendo Switch along with a copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe as a treat for myself for finishing my exams and dropping out of my A-Levels (I honestly have no idea on how to describe what an A-Level is to anyone outside the UK, I guess sort of like Majors in the US??). I originally started buying games on my Switch digitally until I started to get into game collecting in the summer of 2019, when I bought a GameCube controller and two games from CEX. This is why I don't own physical copies of my early Switch games like Splatoon 2 and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. There are so many consoles that I want to collect for and I think part of what makes game collecting so special to me is that I really enjoy learning about the history of video games and discovering games that I wouldn't have been exposed to growing up, there are so many great games to discover from all generations of gaming. And That leads us to now!
In 2020 I was very lucky and I managed to get myself a PS5 on launch with a copy of Spiderman Miles Morales. I've also started going back and playing some games and consoles I completely missed out on like the PS3 and the GameCube and I got myself a Retron 5 so that I can play some old cartridge based games as well, especially since the NES, SNES and Mega Drive would have been out before my time. I just love everything that comes with this hobby especially discovering and learning about games, both new and old! I also kept that YouTube Channel that I mentioned running and even though it started as a vlogging channel it slowly transitioned into a place where I made videos where I talked about game collecting and other gaming topics. There are some old videos where you can see me getting back into Video Games which I think is pretty cool to look back on. I don't really make videos for the channel as much anymore but I have started to Livestream on Twitch this year which is something I really enjoy doing and I play a mixture of retro and modern games on there. My Journey with video games has been a fun one but it's one that I would do all over again. Writing this post has taken me down memory lane and really made me appreciate how big of a role that gaming has played in my life. I'm sure that lots of people can relate to this even if you're not interested in games, it might be books or movies that seem to always stick with you through the hard times. So that's my first blog post done! I hope that was fun to read... be sure to check out my YouTube, Twitch and Twitter as well!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|