Then came the Super Nintendo and I was blown away. I had to have it! I remember going to a friend's house and playing Suoer Mario World and Super Mario Kart for hours. And we were so pumped up after finally beating Super Mario World. I actually didn't get around to buying my own SNES until around 1994 or so, which I bought with my birthday money. It might have been 1995 actually. I'm not completely sure. But I got the Super Mario World/All-Stars cartridge with it. Like NES, I owned almost no games for it. I remember buying Donkey Kong Country used from Funcoland and my dad came home one day with Super Mario RPG for me, which absolutely hooked me on RPGs. I loved that game to death. Then one fateful day I was taken to Blockbuster and I saw this giant box in the SNES section. On the front cover it said "Earthbound" I looked at the box and I thought to myself, "This looks like an RPG" and seeing as I was new to genre I was eager to find others like Super Mario RPG. I brought Earthbound home, played it, and HATED it! But for whatever reason I rented it again later on and somehow fell in love with it! I only got to Saturn Valley that time but I saw the game sitting in a case in a used games store called MicroPlay for a measly $30 (well, it was a lot of money to me at 13 years old but nowadays the game goes for $100+) and after playing it all the way through and taking ages to beat it, it was forever known as my favorite game of all time. No game has ever dethroned it since. Of course I went on to get many more games for the console: Donkey Kong Country 2, Donkey Kong Country 3, Super Mario Kart, ummm....wait I know I had more than just this.... or did I? Like I said, I rented the vast majority of the games I played. So I didn't get to own that many SNES games back then. Oh, and I also had an original Game Boy at some point but not many games for it.
Then came the Nintendo 64. I remember playing Super Mario 64 at Blockbuster. I was dying to have that console! I wanted it even more than I wanted SNES! I actually rented the console at blockbuster with Super Mario 64 and played it that way at first. It was great! This was also the first time I subscribed to Nintendo Power, which made me even more eager to get the system. I finally did in March 1997, just after my 14th birthday. Of course I used my birthday for it. However, I didn't have enough money for both the console and a game and the Nintendo 64 originally didn't come with one. So I had an empty console for some time. I rented games for the time being until I finally bought Super Mario 64 and Mario KKart at Funcoland. During the lifetime of the N64 I had a lot more games for it than for SNES and NES but still not enough. I would read about new releases in Nintendo Power, obsess over them with my friend and then we would run out on release day to go get them. Our biggest obsession at the time was Banjo-Kazooie. We were dying to have that game so bad that we had our parents drop us off at Wal-Mart so we could play it for an hour or two and then we got McDonald's Chicken Selects afterwards while we waited for our parents pick us up. Fun times. I miss getting that excited over a new game.
Then there was the GameCube, the console which has slowly been taking first place as my favorite console of all time. The Gamecube was the first console I bought right at launch. Well, maybe a week after it came out. But it was the console I got closest to launch day. Even the Wii I got maybe a month after it came out. But I literally just started college a few months before GameCube came out and, oddly enough, I finished college just months before the Wii came out, so the GameCube was entirely my college console. I started working at 16 and by college, I was able to buy my own games so I went crazy and bought any game that interested me in the slightest. So I owned a ton of GameCube games. I eventually bought a PS2 a few years later but only owned a handful of games for that. At the time, GameCube was my least favorite Nintendo console and that's also around the time I started buying games for older consoles. I collected mostly for N64, but bought some SNES games as well til Gamestop no longer carried them. I also went nuts buying Game Boy Advance games and would bring it with me to college and play it between classes...or whenever I skipped classes. Ah, good times. I could honestly go on forever about GameCube so I'll save it for its own post, but I played the shit out this system. More than any other. Between Super Smash Bros Melee, Mario Kart Double Dash, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, oh and let's not forget Animal Crossing! Man, the original Animal Crossing was the best! I love New Leaf for the 3DS but the original still has the most charm in my opinion. One of my favorite things about the GameCube is the fact that I owned a plethora of games and yet there are still a lot of games I haven't played and want to, or just recently played for the first time. So there's still some discovery involved. The vast majority of NES, SNES, and N64 games I have played or at least tried to some extent. There's still a certain amount of mystery with the GameCube since while I have played a huge chunk of its library, there is still more left to discover.
And it's all downhill from here. Well, not necessarily. The Wii was good but not great. It's my least favorite Nintendo system mostly due to the awkward controller and pointless motion controls. Not only that, I just felt the game selection wasn't as good. Okay, I got the Wii about a month after launch day and I was really excited, sure, but I just didn't get the same feeling about it. Perhaps it was because I was getting older. After all, I was 23 when the console came out. Not necesarily old but old for getting excited over a new console. I felt like at that point, a new console was just something you buy. I wasn't
No comments:
Post a Comment