Game History: And then there's me

As a child, I played next to no video games. I spent most of my time wading about in the river by my house or collecting large sticks in an almost pathological fashion. Whilst I watched a fair amount of television, I had an electric mini-scooter that went a whole eight miles an hour at top speed and by best friend only lived a street away and she had a dog. These things considered, video games didn’t appeal to me enough to ask for one of my own and therefore a long time the only real contact I had with video games was through Ben – a fellow avid stick collector – who would, at a pinch, allow me access to his Nintendo (Under strict instructions not to save over his game) provided I was prepared to reimburse him with Jaffa cakes.

Then my Uncle introduced me to Sims –during the summer holidays, on a trip to visit my Aunt and Uncle in London that he booted up Sims on his PC and let me play. After playing it every evening for the remaining evenings of the holiday and some initial concerns that it was not suitable for my age (I was nine) He bought it for me the following Christmas when I turned ten. I cannot imagine how much time I spent on that game, but let’s just say I had every expansion pack barring Hot Date – deemed inappropriate for a ten-year-old – for the original game, and I’ve done my damndest to keep up with the other series as well.

The first game console I considered to be a ‘real’ game console that I owned would have been the Game Boy Advanced SP and I bought it to play Pokémon Fire Red (Which gives you an idea of what time I started playing games that weren’t Sims). With Pokémon I also had a couple of Dragonball Z games and Minority Report which to this day I have never gotten out of the first level of because even for me – a fan of dull adaptation games – I found it monumentally dull. I also had Shrek 2.

I replaced the SP with a Nintento DS in when the DS came out in 2005. I bought one that was bundled with the Nintendogs game and since I wanted the game that had a Husky in it, I had to get a pink one. Since then I’ve amassed twenty three DS games, including blockbuster titles like the Fullmetal Alchemist Trading Card Game, Lost in Blue and every game adaptation of Bleach that I can get my hands on (Have I mentioned I like some weird games?). Aside from those though, I’ve played Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Pokemon Soul Silver and most of the Professor Layton games with varying degrees of skill.  Then when it came out in 2011 I bought a 3DS and played Ocarina of Time like there’s no tomorrow. The only other title I’ve bought for the 3DS was Tales of the Abyss, which personally I adore but there you go; I think those games where you roam about with a party of people with a conveniently concise skill set, who tolerate each other in order to save the world are marvellous.

The first non-handheld console I owned was a Wii, which I used to play yet more adaptations of films and animes along with Legend of Zelda – Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. As well as games like No More Heroes and I like the freeroaming nature of these games and that’s probably what lead me to get a playstation. Most recently I’ve been playing Portal 2 (Probably my favourite game thanks to GLaDOS) and Skyrim, but finding it really hard to get on with what I’m meant to be doing because I keep poking around in odd corners to see what I can make happen. Thinking back to my first computer game, it’s pretty amazing to think how much it’s come on since then – wandering around in Shrek 2 for the GBA the chances of seeing some kind of Easter egg in the background would be slim to none, but now you can walk around Skyrim and just the graphics involved with the scenery are enough to keep you entertained for hours – Me and my horse go for walks.

Nowadays we see hyper realistic, cinematic games with realistic sounds and physics. We’ve come a long way from OXO and Starwar! with our open maps and hours upon hours of gameplay, but I don’t think we’re done progressing yet; though it’d hard to tell where we can go from here, I’d like to see even more emersive games. As processors become more powerful, special effects and graphics quality can only go up, but it’d be nice to see a console that would really emerse the player. We have glasses-less 3D now, so lets try head mounted displays or something. Like .HACK.