I don’t think there’s an industry that has evolved more rapidly than video games. In the past 20 years we’ve seen movies go from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray and 3D, we’ve seen books go online and onto E-Readers, and we’ve seen radio become more syndicated and music based. But as these things existed long before the 90’s, that left video games with a lot of catching up to do. We’ve moved from the 8 bit graphics and sound of the 80’s into full HD worlds and online gameplay. As a child of the 90’s, I can’t help but feel a bit of nostalgia when I think back to the years filled with Nintendo 64 games at Christmas time and unwrapping my first GameBoy Pocket for my birthday. Those were some great times, and kids still experience the joy of getting new games but there are somethings they will never understand or be able to relate to as the technologies have changed. For example, kids of today will never know what it’s like to...
5. Use a flashlight to see your gameboy game
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent hundreds of hours playing Pokemon games. I was introduced to Pokemon: Red when I was 8 years old and I quickly became addicted. A universe that most non-gamers know from the show, I would sit daydreaming about raising my Charmander during my 2nd grade lessons. I would sneak my Gameboy into school and play it during recess, and in the early days of home dial up Internet, I would go online and look up secrets and tips to help make my Pokemon stronger.
As a result of loving this game so much, I wanted to play it even at night. For those of you old enough to remember, the old Gameboy Pockets and Gameboy Colors didn’t have backlights. Even the Gameboy Advance didn’t have one, it was not until the Gameboy SP that Nintendo gave us the ability to play at night. So what did I do as a young boy with a bedtime and a need to play Pokemon? I hid under the covers and with a flashlight tried to play the game (A very difficult task, as you need two hands to play and one to hold the flashlight).
It wasn’t just Pokemon, either. Anybody who loved their original Gameboys had access to great games like Castlevania, Harry Potter, and Spider-Man. The second the sun went down or the lights went out we had to wait until morning before we could play again. Developers eventually realized this problem, as they released a light that could clip onto the different models of Gameboys out at the time. But still, now with the Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita, children will never understand how good they have it.
4. Saving to a memory card and bringing that file with you.
For a long time hard drives were synonomous with PC gaming only. Now, every system has an internal hard drive and very often developers will offer 2 or 3 different sizes to choose from. Back in the 90's when the Playstation and Nintendo 64 ruled, this was unheard of. You either saved directly to the cartridge or you saved to a memory card.
When Gamecube came around, many Nintendo fans got the experience of saving to a memory card for the first time. Using the cryptic block system, the back of each game told you how many blocks it took to save. After a few years I bought a memory card that held over 1,000 blocks, allowing me to save all of my games to it - Even Animal Crossing, a game that came with it's own memory card because of how much data it required (Surely one of Tom Nook's ideas).
But now kids have the Playstation 3, X- Box 360, Wii-U, and the upcoming Playstation 4. All of these systems allow you to save right to the system, making the sharing of files a bit more difficult but still possible. The sharing of files on PC used to be impossible until Steam introduced their cloud based saving system. Now you just need to log into Steam on a friend's computer, download the game and you can access your save files. Still, a child born today will most likely not even know what a memory card is by the time he or she reaches an age capable of comprehending such a thing.
3. Wired Controllers
We've been leaving the age of wired things for a while now. Even the concept of a car phone is laughable, something that used to mean you were wealthy or important. Nobody wants to deal with something that is attached to something else. Even house phones, for those who still bother, are usually found to be portable. So with the current generation of systems all featuring wireless controllers, children of this new gaming age will not even realize that their movements were once constricted by short, black wires.
Most gamers from this age of gaming have experienced the same plights: Wires getting tangled or crossed during gameplay, cords that were too short to reach the couch, and the worst: An unsuspecting parent walking across and tripping over the wire, causing it to unplug from the system. There were wireless controllers back then, I remember owning one for my Nintendo 64, but they were never reliable and rarely accurate. Back then, a wired controller was your best option. When the Gamecube was released you could get the WaveBird, a wonderful invention, but for some reason those were discontinued. I still have my Gamecube set up in my bedroom and am currently playing through Luigi’s Mansion. My solution? On Amazon for about $4.00 I bought two 6ft extender cables, allowing me to double the length of the controller so I can sit comfortably in bed and hunt ghosts. In the modern age, however, no such thing is needed.
2. Blowing Into A Game Cartridge
Many children of the 80’s remember this as a common habit from the NES and SNES days. They don’t seem to realize that this method of clearing dust from a cartridge continued well into the 90’s with the Nitendo 64. Up until discs completely took over the console gaming market in the early 2000’s, we would still need to blow dust free from the N64 games as well as the system itself. As great a system as the N64 was, it was never very reliable. It could take a long time to get to turn on sometimes, needing to re-blow into the game and system and re-adjust the game within the console. I still have my N64 and play it from time to time, but unfortunately the longevity of the system is not great. I wish they would release digital copies of my favorite games on the Nintendo E-Shop. Some have been released but not as many as I would like. Give me games like Perfect Dark, Goldneye, and Banjo Kazooi. At the very least I’ve been able to download Majora’s Mask so I can play that with no issues whenever I please.
1. TVs That Don’t Have Game Inputs
When was the last time you tried to hook up a game console to a TV only to find that the TV didn’t have the proper inputs? Probably years, possibly even decades. TVs today come equipped with every possible input you could imagine - HDMI, VGA, AV, and others. You can plug half a dozen things into a single television with no problem, and buy a remote that can operate all of them at once. Though this is a great convenience of today’s world, it wasn’t always this way.
The next time you can take a look at an old tube television, check the back and see what kind of inputs there are. Some TVs were not made with gaming in mind, and in fact some are so primitive they only have a cable jack in the back. What do you do in this case? You’d have to buy a VCR, run the cable into the VCR, run another cable into the television, and then through the VCR you could hook up the game console. This was a hassle and a half and defined most of the vacations I took as a kid. For some reason, hotel rooms and timeshares had little sympathy for the young gamer back in the day. Now, whether a child is going on vacation or visiting their grandparents they need not worry about their console being compatible with the TV, most everything has been streamlined nowadays. And with iPhones and handheld gaming systems, it’s becoming less necessary to transport home consoles with you. There was a day when people would bring their Nintendo 64s and Gamecubes to their friends houses, but now that’s a rare thing. Even with online gaming you no longer need to be in the same room with someone to play with them, but a physical connection is still an important part of gaming. If it weren’t, people wouldn’t go to the lengths of having LAN parties and consoles would attempt to specialize in only single player games. We’ve gotten through the dark ages of gaming and TV incompatability, but we’re heading towards a brighter horizon yet. We’ve only seen a fraction of the excellent games we’re bound to see during our lifetimes, and that is something to look forward to.
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