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I've been addicted to gaming for as long as I can remember. The first game I remember playing was "pong". I have no idea what it actually was, but it was probably something like a Hanimex. I don't recall it having anything other than pong (which was supposed to be tennis) and a game involving a light gun that you shoot at a white spot on the screen, but it looked pretty much the same as this Hanimex (from memory). It was definitely black, I remember those people figures. Maybe it did have the other games, which I've read are essentially pong versions anyway... The silver dials turned the left/right to make the bat go up/down on the screen - hilariously primitive. I was convinced the light gun fired some sort of invisible lazer (remembering that in those days having a "pause" button remove control that had a cable connecting it to your Betamax machine was the height of sophistication!) So I was terrified of people walking between the gun and screen, and I wouldn't look at the business end of the gun for fear of having some terrible lazer incident. |
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Then we got an "Aquarius" - Some hugely unpupular computer that bombed.... it seems most people haven't heard of it... (ours was the non-mattel branded version) which we thought was the most brilliant thing ever. You could type stuff on the screen.... and pretend to be all grown up and stuff... a colour screen even! (and the keys were soft like a calculator) Ohh.... how cool were we! And games... coloured games, that were interesting.....cartridges, you could change games! We had 2 games... "Burger Time" and "Snafu" (thanks google - No way I'd remember the name of that and "snake thing" is hardly descriptive enough). Ohh how I loved Burger Time! Something about these little pepper people, and running over ingredients to drop them onto the awaiting buns below - ahh....
I was vaguely aware that there were other gaming systems around by the fact my younger sister's friend's brother, had an Atari... Of course him being a boy, and me being a girl, meant we were mortal enemies... so I never got a chance to do more than look at it once or twice. |
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Then of course the good old C64! My uncle gave us a huge disk box of *cough* copied *cough* games for it...A lot of them
didn't work and none had any instructions, but there was more than enough there to keep me occupied.
(Go here for a spot of nostalgia) I even tried my hand at programming a running man.... it was something like 18 screens worth of data, painstakingly entered in... and at the end, I hit run triumphantly, and it didn't work. Syntax Error. I tried several times to go back through the code and work out where it went wrong, but no luck. Probably a "," where it should have been a "." or something. GRR. |
I luckily had the C64 in my room for a while. :D :D We had it in the study for a while (which doubled as a music room... yes... we had a mini band happening... Drum kit, organ, an acoustic guitar, electric guitar and electric bass guitar - I played bass and a little guitar :)). I'm not sure if it got moved from the study *to* my room (since I was the only one who ever used it), or if it was moved to the study *from* my room (to stop me playing it at night when I should be in bed hehe). But while it was in my room, I'd spend many a night playing when I was supposed to be asleep. I remember one night, it was after mum and dad had gone to bed, and I'd snuck out of bed to play.... it was Impossible Mission, and the little dude fell down the hole in the floor, and screamed! I'd not encountered the scream before - I'd lucked it not to have fallen obviously.... so it scared the bezeebus out of me. I jumped a mile. The monitor was up too loud, and in the silent house, a computerised scream was VERY loud! I quickly switched the monitor off and leapt into bed - figuring some angry parents were going to be stomping down the stairs any minute now. Amazingly not though... I learned to keep the sound down low after then ;)
There was a period of about 6 months where we had no C64... thanks to me spilling a cup of coffee into it.... They don't appreciate that I found out. The "L" key stopped working. Which is kind of essential when you need to load games by typing in "LOAD".... But eventually it decided to work again - praise the electronic Gods!
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Then nothing new... for ages... I had 2 little handheld games, and I played the occasional duck hunt, Mario and megaman
on my cousin's NES.... full of jealously, because I wanted one.
Then when I was around 19 (living out of home with my boyfriend at the time) I found our local video store hired out SNES and Megadrive consoles - WOOT! So since I was also unemployed or part-time employed for a large portion of that time... guess what I spent all day and night doing :D I think it was about $20 a week to hire the console, and games must have been only a couple of dollars, so we would hire a SNES one week and a Megadrive the next, usually with 2 games. I ended up finding a Megadrive console at Cash converters one day, so I snapped that up, and I started buying games for it also from Cash Converters. But then we got into this terrible cycle of not having enough money to live off, so pawning the gaming console to get money, then pawning something else to pay to get it out and having to pawn the console again to pay that off....and so on... Needless to say, I ended up losing everything (lesson learned.... don't shack up with a looser who will pawn your stuff to feed their drug habit *ahem*) |
 (Is it surprising Sindel was a favourite character? lol) |
| I won a N64 in a supermarket competition that I never thought I'd win. Ok... not the cool purple one shown here, but I desperately want one!!!!! It came with Diddy Kong racing... and given that games were horrendously expensive to a poor unemployed person who can barely afford to eat.... there was no way I could buy games. So I was stuck with that one (which I liked!), and very occasionally hiring out other games... and occasionally a playstation console. Of course the N64 got pawned too *GRR*... but then skip forward a few years and an older, wiser me, bought another... with a purple controller! And I think I bought just about every N64 and gaming related magazine for a while there :D |
Staunchly Nintendo-devoted, I was refusing to buy a playstation, Infact I refused to buy a game cube - thinking that Nintendo were being terrible for abandoning my beloved N64! and instead collected a good amount of N64 games for my library. Then came the dawn of PC gaming... and paying a fortune to keep computers upgraded enough to play them *sigh*. I'd never really thought about computer gaming until I read in one of my gaming mags about this new people simulator game... "The Sims".... it looked really interesting :D So I went out and found it was just about to be released so I ordered it in! At the time it was $92 and I considered that to be horrendous... so I looked for alternatives, as I was mostly interested in the house building aspect (having had the notion to become an architect at school, until I actually did "technical drawing" classes, hated every second of it, and switched to something else instead)... there were other house building programs, designed for interior designers and stuff, but I decided to get the Sims. Which then started an obsession. Not only did I buy every expansion for the Sims, and found online communities of devotees... and downloaded tons and tons of extra content.... I decided "hey, I can do that" and started up my own little Sims download site lol. Probably not all that well known, but it was popular enough that it gave me heaps of trouble - I kept exceeding bandwidth at my hosts and being shut down.. so after a few years of struggling to relocate it numerous times, it closed down... by then Sims2 had come out, which I was avoiding, since I'd spent so much money on Sims1 expansions, but in the end I just couldn't resist :D But I have resisted the urge to get into Sims3...
| So several years of PC gaming... not all Sims, I promise!... Though I do have a soft spot for Sim and Tycoon games (love my Zoo Tycoon2 and the expansions!)... I've played your usual Half Life, Halo, A fair few Star Wars games (tell me, what's better than running about with a lightsaber!).... With the obligatory PC upgrade/overhaul to play the as technology got the better of my antiquated PC. With a modem upgrade and the jump to ADSL from dialup (also conveniently networking my "Work" and "Gaming" PCs), I finally join the modern age and bring my gaming PC online... finding the joys of Steam (*squee*) and an online gaming group to join (TOG, for us "Older" gamers lol).... I end up finding friends to play online with, and I'm usually found playing Team Fortress 2 every night, when I'm not running away from creepers in the amazingly addictive, Minecraft. |
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So many games..... so little time.....
One day I'm going to win lotto.... buy all the games I want and just sit there gaming all day (just like my pre-family, unemployed days :D)
- that's the plan!
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