WELCOME TO OLD MAN GAMING

 

Trapped in this gaming generation, I am an old man.

I was born and raised on 2D blips and bloops on screen.

My Atari 2600 had a special controller for a Sesame Street Cookie Monster game. 

A Magnavox Odyssey lived in the crawlspace of my parents’ basement.  I never could get it to work.

I played Spider-Man and Tapper on our Commodore 64 obsessively.  Spider-Man actually made me a fan of Madame Web, somehow.  The Transformers game was dumb and slow, though… but it was the greatest thing ever to hear the theme music crackle out through the speakers.

When I played Super Mario Bros. for the first time, I tried to talk to a Koopa and died.  These days, that would be known as interacting with an NPC, which means that I was ahead of the industry at the time.

I bought the shareware for Wolfenstein 3D from Radio Shack for a whopping $5, showed it to my dad, and he lost his shit over the graphics.  Flipped out for a good twenty minutes.  Greatest day ever.

Doom came out when I was in middle school, and everyone lost their minds.

When the Super Nintendo came out, I couldn’t understand why it had purple buttons.  I played Super Mario World, and I didn’t care about the stupid purple buttons.  Mode 7 was great.

Conversely, “blast processing” hit for the Genesis, and I could care less.  Rah rah, Sonic was fast… but did he have a pet dinosaur that he could ride?

Battle Arena Toshinden was the greatest thing ever… for a day.

I had a 3DO.  I had eight games for it.  That… was a dumb decision, but it still had a great port of Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo.  Did anyone else play Road Rash for that thing?  Good lord, that was great- okay, I’ll stop now.

I almost started a fight between employees at Software Etc. and Babbages’ over who would get my money depending on which store got their shipment of Resident Evil first.

I spent A LOT of money I should have used on my college campus for food and books importing games for my Dreamcast.  Taking a look at those games now being out for Xbox Live Arcade, that was another dumb move.

In between late nights of playing Dead or Alive 2 Ultimate on Xbox Live and holding down job after job after job and quietly buying system after system in hopes that the magic and wonder of my youth returns, my place in the gaming world has been overrun by foulmouthed twelve year olds and people on message boards that can’t spell.  I am a dinosaur of a gamer, lumbering off towards whatever asteroid is going to come down and wipe me out.  I may have forgotten what it means to care about which scope to use for my sniper rifle, or how many frame rates there are in a jump kick animation, but I still remember that “down, down-forward, forward + fierce = fireball”, I still know what it’s like to not know what the hell you’re doing and use nothing but strong attacks to win, and most importantly?

I can still press ‘A’ repeatedly faster than you.

With that said?

Welcome to Old Man Gaming.

These are my adventures in a gaming world split between “casual” players, “hardcore” players, and players like me.

Enjoy yourselves, and don’t let the Ghost of Sega’s Saturn scare you during a dark night.