Something went wrong. Try again later

DevourerOfTime

This user has not updated recently.

771 7079 42 98
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

My Personal System Sellers

Idea shamelessly stolen from Slag.

Seriously, read that list before mine. I made this because I thought it'd be a fun experiment, but, honestly, theirs is way better than this. Just go read it.

------

The list below contains all the game that broke the wallet's back, if you will. The games that convinced me that not only do I want to add a new console to my collection, but I NEED it and will buy it as soon as I have the means to. Through anecdotes about the games and how I ended up getting each console, I hope to express how much of a thrill getting a new console can be.

There are a few consequences because of that approach:

  • This list won't include the NES, SNES, and Genesis, as those consoles were bought for my brother before I was cognizant of the world around me and I still have them to this day.
  • Some consoles I have had a lot of access to (either through family members or roommates) but I'll only be talking about the games that pushed me to actually buy the system, either as a joint ownership with my family or by myself.
  • I won't be highlighting the game that made me want the system in the first place, but the game that made me finally push to get the system. It's an important distinction to make as there are some platforms that had a treasure trove of games on it by the time I got around to purchasing them, but there was always that one game that pushed me to making the purchase.

So, without further ado, here's the list of my personal system sellers in the order of purchase.

List items

  • Nintendo 64 - 1997 - Super Mario 64 may have blown my six year old mind when I saw it on TV coverage of... I don't know... E3 probably?... but it was Mario Kart 64 that pushed my sister, my brother, and I to kick and scream about getting a Nintendo 64. We were all fans of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64 not only looked amazing, but it was four players, something that we all wanted after the memories of being left out of playing in the original.

    So, after enough kicking and screaming throughout 1997, and after we all chipped in $50 (a life savings for a 7 year old), we were greeted by three controllers, an N64, and Mario Kart 64 on Christmas morning.

    Which we couldn't play until the next day because my cousin's TV didn't have composite input and all the stores were closed. So we waited for my stepdad to run out to get an RF cable through Boxing Day crowds.

    And we played it pretty much nonstop until the car ride back home.

    Hell, it didn't stop there. We didn't get another game for the system for the better part of a year. Partly because games were $100+ back then with the bad late 90s Canadian economy (with inflation, that's TWICE as much as new game today), but also we were just satisfied with playing Mario Kart over and over and renting whatever else came out.

  • Gameboy - 1998 - Pokemon fever hit North America in late 1996 and I was just the right age to catch it. I had all three gen I pokemon games and routinely beat them over and over again. I had sunk several hundred hours into Pokemon Blue leveling over a dozen Pokemon to 100 to have the best, most versatile teams I could when I played against my friends.

    But there was one problem: I didn't have a Gameboy.

    I had a Super Gameboy, the cartridge like add-on that turned an SNES into a slightly better Gameboy. And the big draw of Pokemon, the trading and battling with your friends, was impossible on it.

    So I searched high and low for a gameboy that I, a small child with no income living in a town with no used game stores that could only save up allowance and leftover lunch money, could afford. And, in 1998, I found an old, gray, AA battery guzzling, brick-shaped Gameboy for $20 at a used game store in Red Deer, Alberta that I somehow convinced my parents to stop at as we were passing through. I even brought my games with me on that trip, somehow knowing (or wishfully thinking) that I would find a Gameboy just for me.

    It was the first video game console/whatever I owned completely on my own and I played the hell outta it for years to come.

    Going through many, many AA batteries in the process.

  • Gamecube - 2011 - Fortunately, the stories get shorter and sweeter as time passes and the frequency of consoles and handhelds added to my collection increases.

    The Gamecube was the first system launch that I was excited for that I could fully, I don't know, wrap my head around as something I could own in the near future? The little bits of Super Mario 64 I saw before release just seemed like some sort of impossible future tech in my 6 year old mind. But Luigi's Mansion? Pikmin? Super Smash Bros. Melee? I was glued to coverage from Gamespot and IGN while debating what characters were going to be in Melee on forums across the web. Probably being an insufferable twerp while I was at it (my apologies).

    And it was Melee that drove me to the Gamecube over the other systems, even as friends swore by Halo or I had access to the PS2 through my brother. The hours I had put into the original with friends and family made it one of my favourite games on the N64 and Melee looked to be an improvement in every way. Melee, a gamecube, and a memory card were the only things on my Christmas List that year and I was so excited and surprised to see Santa pull through.

    What I got was a game that I sunk hundreds of hours into, but was never quite as satisfying as the first. It was an important lesson that not every sequel will live up to the original, no matter how much you want it to.

  • Game Boy Advance - 2002 - I don't even know why I decided to get a Game Boy Advance or why Golden Sun was the only game I got for it when I did. I wasn't especially hyped for it when it was announced, there was barely anything out at the time that interested me, and I was obviously "too cool" to play Pokemon games anymore (a phase I think we all hit in our teens).

    Maybe it was just that emulation allowed me to play so many of the classic JRPG's on the SNES and Genesis that drove my interest toward Golden Sun, a new JRPG that looked like the classics that received a lot of praise from fans and critics.

    Maybe it was that I was actually making money by mowing grass and reffing soccer and I had the money to spend on the relatively cheap handheld.

    Maybe it was that I had given up on my Yu-Gi-Oh addiction and actually had money saved up instead of it constantly being funneled into my local 7-11.

    Maybe it was that I was heading to the East coast for the first time to visit family and knew I would be intensely bored for two weeks while I was there and was desperate for something to distract me.

    I don't know what exactly it was, but I bought a classic indigo GBA all the same, played so much Golden Sun that I was nigh invincible by the time I finished it, and my love for gaming handhelds continued into a new generation.

  • PS1 - 2003 - Speaking of emulation, Chrono Trigger became my favourite game through the lens of zSNES and I was planning on saving money for a PS2 to finally play its sequel. But a used Playstation basically fell into my lap from some relatives who already had a PS2 with its near-perfect PS1 backwards compatibility. One week and $20 later, I had Chrono Cross, a new controller, and a memory card ready to experience (and ultimately be disappointed by) Chrono Cross.

    To this day, I still have only a handful of PS1 games and, beyond some JRPG's that have filtered their way onto PSN, I still don't hold the PS1's catalogue in high regard. Yes, I'd even go as far as to say the N64 was a better platform, but I won't deny that my Nintendo bias was pretty thick in my childhood.

  • DS - 2004 - The DS was another console that I learned a valuable lesson from: never buy a console based on what was about to come out, buy it for what is released. Boxing Day 2004 might have given me a good deal on the system, but it wasn't until late 2005 when the DS became anything other than an alarm clock on my bedside.

    But, hey, I had an inferior version of the best Mario game to beat once and then never touch again in the meantime.

    Hooray.

  • PC - 2005 - So it's 2005. How does a 3 year old game finally convince me to get a PC? Well, I was still a teenager living with my parents. They had the family computer. They had the money to actually buy a new computer. They made the decisions of when to update our ancient 1998 computer that my brother helped them pick out to something more modern. So, while I played my fair share of Heroes of Might & Magic 2 & 3, Diablo 1 & 2, and Warcraft 2 on that dinosaur, it was Warcraft III that really pushed me to sell my parents on getting a new computer. Always with healthy enough specs to run the games I wanted on it, obviously, but spun to make it seem like a good idea for the whole family. Eventually it worked and I've been hooked on some aspect of the Warcraft universe ever since, from Warcraft 3 to World of Warcraft to Hearthstone.

  • Wii - 2006 - In 2006, I was hitting the middle of my high school career and experiencing what I can only describe as a massive hit by undiagnosed depression. It was negatively affecting all aspects of my life, but, as they always had with cooping with my mental health, it was video games that helped me out of it. Part of it was this unnatural powerful urge that I had to play Twilight Princess. The "blades will bleed" grittiness and "more mature" nature of the series I loved spoke directly to my idiot, naiive 16 year old heart. And, despite my huge apprehensions about the Wii as a platform, I worked hard to have the money to get one day one.

    Twilight Princess wasn't my favourite Zelda game (not even top 5), but it was the game I needed at that moment in my life, the game that I needed to motivate me through one of the hardest slumps in my life. And I'll always be grateful for that.

  • 360 - 2008 - 2008. The last summer holiday. The transitional two month time between High School and University that I luxuriously did not work during as scholarships paid my first year of university. So I spent those two months with nothing but revelry with friends that would all be heading separate ways at the end of it. That and video games. Lots of video games. Including picking up the first model of the Xbox 360 to have an HDMI port, a benefit of waiting to pick one up (that and a lifespan of over 5 years).

    The first game I picked up is still one of the best deals in gaming: The Orange Box. Portal with its ingenious puzzles and story structure, Half-life 2 with its classic sci-fi story and amazing world building, and arguably one of the best multiplayer shooters of the past decade. Sure, it was 1.0 of TF2, but that's how I liked it (and continue to like it to this day). An excellent introduction into the world of HD games.

  • PS2 - 2008 - I had already put in about 150 hours into Persona 3 by the time summer had ended, borrowing my sister's PS2 for the summer. But by the time it was time to pack up and move into dorms, I was still nowhere near completion. I still vividly remember that during my first full day in my dorms, I rode the bus to a local game shop, paid $30 for a used slim PS2, and continued where I left off for the rest of the day.

    It was a day or two later when I got other essentials like a garbage can and extra shampoo for when I ran out.

    Priorities, right?

  • PSP - 2009 - LocoRoco was always this cute, lovable platformer that was just out of my reach. Footage floating around on youtube was all the access to the game I had and it looked like a platformer right up my alley.

    By taking advantage of an EB Games trade in offer, I exchanged 6 DS games with incredibly low retail value into a used PSP and I was finally able to play LocoRoco... which thoroughly disappointed me.

    You win some, you lose some, eh? At least I also picked up the fantastic Final Fantasy Tactics remake.

  • Steam - 2010 - "Hey, you're bringing up the PC AND Team Fortress 2 again? Isn't that cheating?" Hey, it's my list. If you don't like it, I already told you to go read Slag's instead.

    So the PC was dominated by Steam by 2010, but somehow I didn't have a Steam account yet. How could that be? Well, once I knew I was moving out of home and going to university for Computer Science, I got a macbook so I could triple boot the computer with ease and be able to program on any OS I needed. This unfortunately meant that A) my Windows partition was my only access to Steam and B) any Windows partition I made was too small to play too many games on and, quite frankly, I didn't have a lot of love for PC games after being stuck with an outdated PC for such long periods of time in my life. Plus all the Blizzard games I really cared about ran on Mac so I really had no reason to focus on a Windows partition beyond development purposes.

    That changed with Steam hit OSX in 2010 and Team Fortress 2 was the game that made me make the jump. The game had evolved so much from my 360 TF2 playing days, but I was still able to jump into the game and have a blast... for a few weeks. It quickly became clear that I drastically preferred the purity of the original version of TF2 more and the zaniness that Team Fortress 2 had become had no place for me, even on classic servers.

    But it did get me signed up for Steam and, with a few major sales, I was enjoying dozens of new "XBLA-sized" games that either saw no 360 release or launched on PC first.

  • 3DS - 2011 - This was less of a reason to get a 3DS at launch and more of an excuse. The launch lineup was fairly dull for the 3DS (Shadow Wars being the surprising exception) and nothing interesting was coming out until the fall, but my undying love for Nintendo handhelds had only grown more intense as the DS hit its stride in 2005 and continued to pump out just hit after hit for 6 years.

    And it was, weirdly enough, finally having access to the DS's joke of a digital platform DSiware that sold me on picking a 3DS up on launch day. That and my 2004 near-launch DS Phat finally starting to show its age. So I didn't mind the gap in content on the 3DS as I filled it with games like Dragon Quest IX, Pokemon Black & White, Radiant Historia, Ghost Trick, and Solatorobo. And I got to play the new Shantae finally!

  • Wii U - 2013 - I waited a decade for a new Pikmin game and a timely $100 off sale on 8GB Wii U's hit just in time for me to snatch up the system in anticipation for Pikmin 3. Just a few weeks later, I was playing adorable, challenging strategy game.

    Three years later, that decision was worth every penny. Despite there not being an expansive library on the Wii U, I still have over 2 dozen physical games for the system and many more digital ones. People shit on the Wii U a lot, but I've thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

  • Vita - 2013 - Persona 4 is my favourite game of all time and knowing that there was a new version of it on the Vita was the push I needed to finally get one. Sure, I still have yet to play it, but I was already planning on getting a Vita for its japanese exclusives and as a fantastic little indie game handheld and it has been wonderful.
Load Comments