Reading04: Gaming in the 90s

According to my Steam Library, I've put an absurd number of hours into prepping for this weeks assignment. And that is just on the HD remaster of one of my favorite games: Age of Empires II. This is a game that I have been playing since I found the Age of Empires Gold 3-CD set at a Staples, and got the original Age of Empires, Rise of Rome expansion, Age of Empires II and the Conquerors expansion. I have spent literal weeks of my life meticulously developing my bases in this fantastic world. I never even played the game right, and I only played against other human beings on three or four occasions (which involved some buck-wild third party setups as the remaster did not yet exist and the official servers had long been shut down. Such were the days of middle school). When I handed down my old laptop to my younger brother, the very first thing we did was LAN party some AoE. I took the soundtrack files off the CD-ROM and put them on my iPod Nano. Seriously. I found the thing a few months ago and the Age of Empires II theme is the most played song on the thing. Well, the album is actually second to the Pokemon Gold and Silver soundtrack, but those are shorter songs. But I digress.

These are RTS games: real-time strategy. Until I found the Elder Scrolls series, these were far and away my favorite games to play. My first multiplayer game experience and game development experience came with Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne one summer at iD Tech Camps. I really started down computer science because of these games, not just what they were in gameplay and the memories this has given me, but also in their fantastic modding support, with full scenario and level editors that I used at least as much as the games themselves. With all of these games, I could literally write thousands of words as to what makes each one great, objectively and personally in my life, but I have now actually read the prompt and see that the reflection is more about games and I should stop ranting on about Age of Empires. The faster I get this thing written, the sooner I can go back to procrastinating my machine learning assignment and hit up another round. But one more clarification, in case P.Bui is curious. When I say I never played the game "right," I didn't play any of the "story" scenarios until last year, and I never rushed developments and tried to crush the CPU players in record time. I played the game where my base was not a base but a city, and built it up like one would in an empire building title like Civilization, with an excessively elaborate defense structure and ridiculously over-the-top invasion strategies that involved conquering opposing peoples with only 1 builder, 1 monk, and 1 trebuchet. Build a square of wall, build a tower, monk convert any opponents, trebuchet castles and town centers. I would drag games out to take 6 or more hours. The minimap would be just my team color in every single pixel with the number of outposts and walls all over the place. Age of Empires is one of the greatest games ever made. But anyway, on to the actual thing I am supposed to address.

So, consoles. Above is the first console I ever got. It was passed down to me from my cousin Tyler as a Christmas gift in 2003. It was one of the most vividly happy memories of my life, and one of only maybe two things I can recall to still even literally right now as I am typing this thing make me tear up from joy. The original system saw its time come to an end, but I do still proudly own one of these and many of the same games from that day. The same discs. In the same cases. Since like 2000. Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Crash Team Racing, Madden 2003, and Gex: Enter the Gecko. I have kept these, and will continue to hold onto them. The first game my kid will play is going to be that same copy of Spyro the Dragon. No joke. The point of this story, though, is to say that I did not choose the console, it chose me. I did not ask Santa or my parents for this, it was given to me and it changed my life. I couldn't tell you a darned thing about why this is better than the SEGA genesis (but it is) or the N64 (but it is), but I can tell you there is nothing you can tell me that will make me think anything other than this. My favorite console ever is the PlayStation2. I still have one, and I still play it every time I go back home. For me, a big reason for this is probably nostalgia. I love going back, turning the thing on, seeing the old blue cubes floating in space, and being 7 years old again. My favorite thing about it was that not only can it help me relive the glory days of Madden 05 and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal and literally dozens of my favorite games, but also lets me keep playing my Spyro and Crash. Backwards compatibility is my favorite thing in the gaming world, and I am sad that it doesn't really seem to exist much anymore.

I guess the most important things to me about a console are the games that it lets me play, as a lot of my favorite games are exclusive to the PlayStation, but also the reason they are my favorite games is that I have had them for literally almost 20 years. And that isn't even just Sony PS1 stuff. The desk drawer to my left has the same GameBoy Color I got in 2001 and the same Pokemon Silver cartridge from the following year. My favorite games and consoles are the ones with which I have the deepest emotional connection, because I am just a great big ball of feels. Maybe there are technically better things out there, maybe I just missed out on playing all these greats, but that's fine. I wouldn't trade my purple dragon friend for anything.