Where’d MY Game Go? Part 1
Posted in Geek / General by CujoNovember 7th, 2005 - 1:7 AM
To begin my timeline may be “off” and my “facts” might not be accurate so don’t attack for those small errors, the points below are just to emphasize the bigger picture.
I have an X-Box, I barely play it, we bought it last year for the sake of getting one and thought we’d spend some time playing it here and there, we haven’t. At first we did, we bought games that we really shouldn’t have and probably don’t have any of the “top titles” that all the hard core gamers have, yet, I still have an X-Box.
My nephew (Brandon) has an X-Box as well, he’s 9 and is addicted, he’s probably played my X-Box more in 2 weeks then I have in the 10 months that I’ve had. He plays it so much he beat Halo in 2 days when he was on vacation in Florida near the end of the summer. He sure loves his X-Box.
Brandon then asked me this past weekend if I’d play with him, I was reluctant as I had other things to do and I honestly don’t know any of the games really but ended up playing anyway. We were playing Halo, this was my first time playing it since the X-Box first came out and I played it during what is now the Future Play conference and was the Computer Game Technology conference way back in 2002. I can honestly say I was completely lost, not with the gameplay or the story or anything like that but with the controls. Maybe I’ve reverted away from my once game geekedness and have become a total newb but operating the controller made me thing back to the “older times” the “good times”.
To start off I didn’t look at the manual because really who looks at the manual? I just started playing and Brandon said he’d “show me how”. After not moving too well for the first bit he then told me I needed to use the OTHER directional pad/joy sticky thing to turn and that one there to move forward/back. Say what? Two movements at once to move my guy, what happened to the simple cross shaped directional pad that did everything, oh there it is, but “it’s so much easier to use these ones”.
I then had to hit A to fire, X to reload, Y to change weapons, who knows what B does, right trigger to do something else, left trigger to order a smoothie, the white button turned on lights, the black I’d assume turned it off but no that’s the white again and I got fed up and just decided to shoot my “partner” in “team” mode or whatever in the world we were playing.
All these buttons got me thinking to the simpler time when we just had the good old directional pad (or the D-pad) and the A and B button. This was the original Nintendo and what I started my gaming glory days on, we used to sit for hours playing Zelda and Blades of Steel, I never owned a Nintendo but a friend did and we’d play all weekend. Then it got crazy, Sega Genesis came out and introduced the “C” button, this simply blew our minds, how can it be possible, 3 buttons? My thumb can barely handle hitting A for fire and B for jump now I have this third mystery button coming into play. The Super Nintendo then spiced it up a little more adding yet another button, creating their controller of A, B, X and Y. Totally insane.
These were days when gaming was good, well I thought it was good anyway, original ideas were coming out and there were tonnes of consoles in the market place trying to get your money and new add-ons coming left and right. I’ll admit it, I owned the Sega CD and loved Sewar Shark.
Sitting playing Halo with Brandon I then told him that all the buttons were confusing me and when I was his age all we had was the directional pad and A and B. He looked at me as if I was insane. Kids these days.
I’ll have Part 2 to this in a day or so.
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