Systemic Babble

I am a long time Nintendo handheld gamer, but were it not for a family tragedy when I was young I might never have picked up a portable system.  My brother, suffering from the leukemia (ALL) that would eventually kill him, was given a Game Boy and four games – shown below – by the local branch of the Lions Club.  I don’t know the reasons behind the generous donation, but it was a toy that was shared by the whole family and gave us some good times in the midst of pain.   Although we couldn’t afford any games [... read the rest ...]

With last week’s 25th anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System, there is no better time to drive back down memory lane and remember what made that system great. My family was going through a rough patch when the NES was first released, and thus my parents could not afford to buy us a top of the line gaming system.  Our old C64 was all the gaming we needed in their opinion.  Agonizing through commercials depicting this awesome new gaming revolution was not something that we could do for long and, as the eldest of the siblings, I [... read the rest ...]

The first computer my family ever owned was a Commodore 64.  While the C64 wasn’t the first time that I had played a video game, when my father brought the machine home some time in the mid 1980′s it represented the start of an unbroken chain of home video gaming that has lasted to this day.  As a kid in elementary school my parents imposed relatively strict limits on my computer time.  I was allowed an hour every weekday, and double or triple that on the weekends.  The only exception to these rule was that any time spent doing something [... read the rest ...]

A recent article on Gamespy reminded me of my first forays into online gaming: BBS Doors. Back before the Internet had become available to the general public, computer enthusiasts would set up self contained dial-up sites called Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). Users would dial up on their modem to connect to these sites, and once online could access any of the message boards or games that were hosted, all rendered in beautiful state of the art ASCII. Typical BBS intro screen Applications on a BBS were known as ‘doors’, and so games that were played on these systems were referred [... read the rest ...]