A (half-) life well spent

I am 22 years old. Of these 22 years (and some months to be precise), at least 14 have been spent playing video games, either at home, or at friends, net-cafes or Nintendo/Playstation clubs. Some say it’s an addiction, one that turns healthy little kids into raving, foaming-at-the-mouth, hungry for blood animals with no sense of right or wrong.
The truth is it’s more easy to play patsy and blame it on violent cartoons, angry music or violent videogames than it is to be a good parent. Parenting has never been an easy job, and since the afterburners of human innovation have been ignited, these so called „generation gaps”, these invisible walls which make understanding between people of different ages nigh impossible, parenting has become something not everyone is suitable to handle.
Many people have more or less joked about parent licences, but I sometimes fear that the time has come to enact and impose such a rule. It’s not overpopulation that makes me think of it, fuck no, all the more important for as to move to the moon or Mars if there are too many people living on the same strip of land. No, dear reader, parenting should be only allowed to certain people because of responsibility.
People get so shocked when they hear about kids who, withouth their parents knowing, end up playing violent games, and without having someone to explain to them the inner workings of the REAL world, end up substituting reality with what they see in these polygon paradises. A world where the rules are few and far between, where they are the masters of their own destiny, may it be demise or fame, a world where they feel they count. The REAL world to them is the world of reheated food, baby sitters, or relatives watching over them while their parents are away working, to busy either earning money to sustain the family or too self centered to remember they have a child, a world where they don’t count as much as they should. A nice quote from The Crow: „Mother is the word for God on the lips and hearts of all children.” These children aren’t monsters, they’re misguided children, misguided because they are left alon without guidance.
I remember when we first got our 286. A Compaq Deskpro.... 1 MB of RAM, 10 MHz processor, 20 mb Conner Peripherals HDD. The first person to look at what I was playing, and asking if she could have a go was not my elder brother, or my elder sister, it was my Mother. Yes, imagine a forty something year old woman, with a wounded left hand (work related accident, she can’t really use her fingers on her left hand, except for her thumb, all the other fingers are in this semmy clenched position) sitting down for the first time in front of the computer, or a videogame for that matter, and playing Xenon 2 – Megablast almost to the end. My mother, she was always into these things. She didn’t really get along well with the consoles, but PC gaming, oh hell yeah. Fun fact: she finished Quake 2 before I did (actually I don’t think I finished Quake 2, since I didn’ like the futuristic setting), she played with cheats of course due to the hand issue, but even so, that’s something to be proud of. She used to laugh whenever bits and bloody pieces of here enemies flew by her. Any other parent would have been shocked to death that his/her child is playing such a game. Mine was actually ok with it. What she used to do though, is kick me out of my room, or send me to study in the kitchen, or send me away on some pretense just so that she could play some more.
But what is important is communication. My mother used to let me watch horror movies when I was small, but she always explained that it’s a movie and it’s fiction and that this is done as a creative thing, as a „what if”, because people like being scared, and that villains sooner or later get caught and that all life is sacred and violence should be avoided. She knew that when I clicked my mouse I was playing a game, and not a MURDER SIMULATOR, because she knew I see these games not as alternate worlds in which to escape, but as stories waiting to be discovered, with rules that were meant for that specific setting/universe. A game, like a bok or a movie, often depicts, or has you perform(hence the novelty) things of questionable morality, but it’s all roleplay, it’s simulation. It’s trying what it’s like to be the bad guy without actually being him. It can be a valuable lesson, if taught well.

And for the naysayers: a little list of some of the things I have done
in these worlds:

• Fought and beat the Shredder and his minions multiple times in multiple incarnations
• Conquered the Dark Water and defeated the evil pirate lord Bloth
• Ran over and fought alongside all the (ig)noble races of Azeroth
• Stopped Hell from permanently relocating to Earth by shooting John Romero in the head several times
• Spent time kicking ass and chewing gum, being all out of gum, paying strippers cash for them to flash their boobs at me
• Took part in the most awesome sniper battles ever fought in subarctic regions, while fighting through enemy ranks to reach my twin brother who I deftly defeat with the aid of a rocket launcher, a ninja sidekick and a virus
• Killed a floating fetus alien with a crowbar to stop an invasion only to cause an even bigger invasion that I am currently in the process of re-stopping
• Stopped a Soviet terrorist from prostituting the US and probably the rest of the world, after his country’s leaders prostituted it to the West, while also seeing what it’s like to be shot in the head on prime-time, or die of fatal radiation in a fallout zone that recently „fell out”
• Acrobatically across rooftops trying to not kill anyone in order to save my sister from being convicted of a crime she didn’t commit
• Saved the galaxy and my babysitter from stupid aliens using a spaceship built by myself, a raygun powered by potatoes and a pogo stick
• Stopped the Triad from rising, occasionally being either high, a dog, or a God
• Have been the cause for the extincion of pretty much all prehistoric life with the help of a club and a mallet, and just to prove how badass I could be, I also had a REFRIGERATOR in the STONE age where I gathered all the stuff collected through my journey


And the list could go on forever.......... and it still goes.
and so I can only say that although there are more important things that video games in my life, it would certainly be a lot more dry without them. to quote an elderly lady still playing:

GAME ON FUCKERS


next up: will I get the collector's edition of Street Fighter IV?

Visions of Trilogy

TOASTIE :)

A long time ago, in a former Communist country, far far away, two good friends, one age 8(me), the other age 12 (Ionuţ Botez, but for keeping things simple, let's call him Johnnie), were coming out of a Nintendo club, after playing an hour of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. What is a Nintendo Club, you ask?

Well, you see, Romania didn't really have al that many arcade parlors. In my home town, Oradea, there was only one, and there were a few arcade cabinets with various games scattered around the city, in seedy bars, next to the poker and slot machines (places that if our parents knew we visited, they would probably have killed us, I mean GAMES IN BARS? BARS FULL OF DRUNK PEOPLE?). And one more thing: arcade coins (they operated here with tokens, not quarters, like Stateside) cost a LOT, so it was a thing we couldn't really afford to visit. So, some smart people, who actually could afford traveling, decided to open their own little business: they bought Super Nintendos (SNES-es) and cartridges, bought som big ass TV's, and rented our bought some places where for a reasonable fee, you could spend your time/money/youth playing SUPER NINTENDO GAMES. Back then consoles cost a fortune, and I didn't have any friends who owned one (ok, there were these Chinese counterfeit cheap NES knock-offs, but those sucked big time).
So instead of wasting our money on tokens which would last directly proportionate to our skill, we used the same money to pay for an hour or two of playing games (you could ask for your cartridge to be changed, if it was available, except for a few games they only had one copy of each).

Paranthesis closed. So as I said we had just finished playing UMK3, and went for a walk, talking about how shitty it was that there is a Sheeva bug in UMK3's tournament mode. And then it dawned on us: wouldn't it be cool if they made a game which actually contained ALL MORTAL KOMBAT CHARACTERS at once, ALL STAGES, ALL costumes/sprites, all FATALITIES, and then some, even for the BOSS CHARACTERS? Mind you, this was in 1995 (we were lucky to get UMK3 at the Nintendo Club only months after release). And we started pitting characters against each other, make-believe battles between MK1 Raiden and Kabal, MK1 Kano vs. MK3 KANO, MK3 Noob Saibot vs. UMK3 Noob Saibot and the list goes on forever. And we fondly remembered the pits, and towers and dead pools and whatnots.

After this brief discussion the topic came up almost all the time. Blame it on youthful imagination but it was one of our prime discussion topics (aside paranormal activities and the X-Files, we were hooked on that too). And we could not let it go, although at the time it only seemed a dream.

Now fast forward one year into the future. We were still religiously attending a weekly service of SNES games (when we could afford it, having finished such stellar games as Pirates of Dark Water and Turtles in Time), when someone told us there's a new place in town and they have both SNES-es and PLAYSTATIONS. We were like "PLAYSTATION???? is that the new NINTENDO?" Initially reluctant to let go of the friend called SNES, we sold our souls for one game:

FUCKING
MORTAL
KOMBAT
TRILOGY

IT WAS OUR GAME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Well, not really our game (not all alternative sprites, not all fatalities and other finishes were included, and depending on the platform, the boss characters didn't have fatalities), but so close. This was a dream that came true, the Second coming of Christ.
And we were hooked., it was amazing, the sprites looked better, the sound was better, and although people keep complaining about loading times (like the infamous Shang Tsung morph-into-another-character-load(TM) ) I don't remember it. Or maybe it didn't matter. What mattered is that something that had been persistently on our minds for about a year was there, no longer the figment of our imagination, and we could play it. Of course when we told people about our idea (back when all we had was UMK3) some said it would be cool, others laughed their ass off, saying it's never gonna happen. Well it did.

One nice memory regarding Mortal Kombat Trilogy: since both Johnnie and me came from well lower middle-class families, we couldn't always afford to go play. Actually even the once-a week thing happened courtesy of our grandmothers (may they rest in peace) who would give us their loose change every now and then. So one rainy day, when we were broke, we decided to feed our appetite for destruction by WATCHING OTHERS play MKT. We thought that maybe some were willing to let us play a round or two if we told them moves/fatalities/hints(mind you this was way before we had the internet, and we used to deal in this kind of information, we had notebooks stuffed with moves and combos and secrets and stuff, some of them I still keep to this day). It was cold and wet, but we still decided to go. On the way to the establishment, we found a few bills, about 5000 old Lei (the old romanian currency, not we have new Lei, which is basically a denominated version of the old one), money that was enough for TWO AND A HALF HOURS of play. We never, ever had played this much before at once. It was a gift from (the Elder) God(s), so we did what we were expected to do. Played two and a half hours of MKT. And although that day we paid 5000 old Lei, the memories of that day, and others are priceless. And for everything else there's insert credit card name here (TM).


Thanks for reading, and please feel free to share similar experiences in the comments section.

Here to PLEASE

Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.

Come freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring. I am Transylvanian, and I bid you welcome.

Although blogs about video games are not quite in the few and far between category, I've wanted to do this for a long time,because every now and then I end uo with thoughts and impressions that I would like to share about video games. Hailing from Transylvania, a part of Romania(which is in Eastern Europe, duh!, get it? get it? ), the life of gamers was, and sometimes still is different than in the rest of the world.

What can you expect: well, pretty much anything involving games, retro stuff, abandonware nostalgia, but also discussions about new, and recent games.

I'd like to add that I own the following platforms: PC (though it's very dated, and then some) A PS2, A PSP(phat, cause I like the cushion for the pushin') and an Xbox360(Arcade, so no HDD ).

That's about it for now, thanks for your interest. Hope to see you herer again soon.

P.S. The cake is a lie :)