Game Log #0 (A chance some poetry... before a fortnight)

This is where I lose all crediability as a gamer. For every one game that's generally accepted as a game you need to play to be a "literate gamer" (air quotes), there's 50 I probably haven't ever played. I played Halo, the original Halo, less than 3 months ago for the first time. I'm just now playing through Starcraft. I think alot of this stems from how I played games as a child. I didn't generally read gaming magazines, so I was left out in the cold when it game to gaming news. I was a Genesis kid (and briefly a used NES, though it was years after the system's life ended). My first videogame period was Sonic the Hedgehog, which definetly steered my decision of begging my parents to pick one up for Christmas. I still acknowledge the Genesis as being a great system that only gets hate because it wasn't the SNES. However, the Genesis was, and still is, a system mainly of "underappreciated games you should play" rather than widely accepted "games you must play". On top of this, my taste was admittedly not as "refined" (air quotes) as it is now. I universally steered clear of RPG style games (barring Legend of Zelda), mostly because they had so little prescense on the Genesis anyway. The majority of my gaming experience was random games from the local Blockbuster. As ashamed as I am to admit it, I played a lot of movie games. And I mean a lot.

And then, I made the "best" (super super sarcastic air quotes) videogame-related decision I've ever made: I asked my parents for a Nintendo 64. Thanks to the fact that N64's games were so expensive, combined with the fact that Nintendo was producing worthwhile games at a rate of once per year at the time, I owned maybe 4 N64 games for the entire time I owned it. The rest was taken up with the most god awful Blockbuster rental filth imaginable. About one year after I got it, I felt like the biggest moron in the world for not getting a Playstation. It's terrifying when you go to a site like Wikipedia and check out the "List of Nintendo 64 Games" page. Wasteland isn't the right word, but it's the first word that comes to mind.

And you can imagine how it all went after that. I remained mindlessly faithfull to Nintendo all the way up till the Gamecube, at which point I was goddamn finished. I was tired of owning the system with 2-3 worthwhile games and finally adopted the correct attitude ("I go where the games are" and all that.) This post itself is ment to put into context my later game logs, as I'm taking much of my current gaming time not only playing the new titles, but catching up on many games I completley missed or ignored. My original plan was to name this blog "Late To The Party" and I may have to follow up on that, though I haven't decided what I actually should call this. Oh well.