The Adventures of a Canadian

Gaming Life

Gaming used to be such a large part of my life, but not so much in the past few years. Though I've tried getting back into it, and have downloaded/purchased games like Dota 2, Marvel Avengers, and Guild Wars 2, I can never find myself creating time to play. I'm definitely not too busy, and my Google calendar can support this.

I think it maybe that I've just moved on. The excitement I used to get from gaming is no longer there, or really minimal. I rather flip on my Netflix, bother a friend to play tennis, or go out for a walk.

All of this being said, I want to share some of the fond memories I have of my gaming life.

1. My first console was Super Nintendo. My parents bought it for us (myself and brother) when I was 8, and he was 10 (or 11, he has one of those late bdays so can never recall), and the game we first bought for it was Super Mario World.

2. I don't recall many things in my younger years, but I can vividly recall the experience while playing Super Mario Brothers for the first time. Sitting on the floor of our apartment, with our eyes fixated on our larger than life Toshiba televesion set, my mother sat next to me, and my father, next to my brother, both feeding us chow mein while we played away.

3. Nintendo 64 will go down as my favorite console of all time! Perfect Dark will go down as my favorite game of all time! I can't even count the amount of hours my brother and I spent playing this game. The laptop gun was too good for words.

4. GameFaqs = life

5. Gamecube is where things started to slip. Mainly because it's when I started getting intense headaches and dizziness from playing specific games. Some would be so bad I'd have to lie down for an hour or so.

Thus beginning my PC gaming life...

5. Emulators were my life, specifically for Gameboy Advance and SNES. One of the best things I learned about playing with emulators was the fact that I could do "quick saves & reloads." What this meant was that I could save at any point in the game, and reload it if I wasn't happy with the outcome.

Example: Sandshrew of Pokemon did sand-attack, and I missed my attack? No problem, click *reload* continuously until he chose a new attack :)

6. I enjoy MMOs a lot. In fact, it's generally the only type of game I will still attempt to make time for. My first foray into the MMO world was not World of Warcraft (WoW), but Rappelz. It's definitely similar to WoW, but I liked it better. I spent a good 3 years on Rappelz, eventually [and illegally] selling my account for a pretty good amount of money. I was promptly perma-banned from the game.

7. I still do get the intense dizziness/sickness from PC games, as I did with console games, but it's now much more game specific. For example, I cannot play most first-person shooter games without the feeling of wanting to upchuck.

8. Every now and then, I do replay the oldies like Pokemon, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu, etc (comment if you know any of these games).

9. Funnily enough, I never got into the Final Fantasy games. I have a major OCD for levelling chracters all at the same time. Have a rotation cycle for characters bothers me way too much.

10. I do all of my gaming on my Macbook Pro. I just run bootcamp, which allows me to switch to Windows. I've gotten a lot of flack for this, but I just keep calm and carry on.

Alrighty guys, this is all for my gaming adventure. Hope you guys enjoyed, and comment below if you know any of the games, or do any of the same things or have the intense dizziness condition from gaming.