Confessions of a Gameless Child

Ok! Gameless is actually not quite true in my case, so it should be

Confessions of a Game Console-less Child

When I was in my early primary school years, I was like every other kid in my school, not studying much and playing all the time. At that time I didn't know anything about video games, all I wanted to do everyday was to play finger games. Finger games are those we play one on one, some are more complex versions of rock paper scissors and some are special hand shakes. My favourite was called "Ji Gu Ba", a two hand combination of conventional rock paper scissors and 가위 바위 보 (kai-bai-bo), Korean rock paper scissors. *I just found that out recently*

Agumon from an old mathematics book

Then came my generation's video game age. I remember when I was 8-9 years old, my friends in school who had elder siblings would have played the PlayStation at home and were the cocky ones in school bragging about how Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil were the best game in the world. Another group of cocky kids were those who had either Tamagotchi or Digimon Digipets. Most of them brought those to tuition classes to play since they were not allowed to bring them to school. I always wanted to have one myself but my parents told me "how can you take care of a pet when you can't take care of yourself?". There was also a trend to shade old mathematics exercise book pages with 8-bit pixel Digimon shapes. So I was the kid who would be salivating when a bunch of friends discuss their newest games and levels.

This look like my old GBC!

The other phenomenal game that time was Pokémon, both the GameBoy games and the trading card games. Everyone was playing Pokémon cards around the early 2000s. When my parents bought me my first deck of Pokemon cards, I felt like I was back in the "trendy" world in class again, or at least not an outcast anymore.  Around that time, my aunt gave me a GameBoy Color for my birthday. I literally felt like a superstar that year thanks to Pokémon. The GameBoy came with just one cartridge which had 101 games, among them were Mickey Mouse: Magic Wands!, my favourite game at that time. My best friend Guan Huan introduced a game he said to be "the best game ever made", which was Pokémon Silver version. He lent his cartridge to me after he finished the game and I was hooked for hours.

During one Chinese New Year, my family visited my dad's cousin and for the first time in my life, I played my cousin's "old" PlayStation *PS2 was out already*. We played the original Gran Turismo while the adults chat. That was the time I understand why everyone was crazy about it. If I am not mistaken, I played that racing game with him for the whole afternoon and I was still not satisfied.

More than ten year later, I still have an underlying urge to play video games. A few months ago I was watching several videos by James Rolfe a.k.a. the Angry Video Game Nerd and Pat Contri a.k.a. Pat the NES Punk about classic games and I decided to download a Nintendo 64 emulator to play Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time. Before that I also downloaded an NDS emulator to play Megaman ZX Advent and Digimon World Dawn and Dusk. It is just like reliving my console-less childhood, bringing out the fun and excitement from those naive years of the past.

the best Zelda game ever!!!

Am I the only person who still plays vintage games on my pc?

Am I missing out on more modern games?

I still play my League of Legends when my internet is not at snail speed. But whenever nostalgic feeling kicks in, I will always open my Project64 for a spin on Starfox 64.

lalanandaFRY
16/12/12