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[GGM] Genesis
Growing up, I spent weekends and most holidays with my father. Not to be undone by my mother’s purchase of a SNES, he decided that he would buy a Sega Genesis for his place. But I was not allowed to take it back with me during the week – it was supposed to be something special that I could only play at his place. Fair enough.
This must have been later on in the Genesis lifecycle, because the game that it came with was Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I have a lot of great memories of that game, which always felt kind of more involved than you think. Looking at a complete playthrough video though, that is probably the nostalgia and/or “kid losing multiple times” talking. Still, it was pretty inventive stuff for the time to have your platformer have those quasi-3D tunnel sections, the introduction of Super Sonic, and so on.
In any case, I did end up beating Sonic 2 and my father was… kind of not happy about it. If I was able to beat these games and thus become bored with them so quickly, then he’d rather not buy any more games at all. Thus started the weekend tradition of renting games from Blockbuster.
The whole situation is kind of funny, when you think about. Renting games back then, that is. This was all before the advent of memory cards, so if a game allowed you to save your progress – which was not always a sure thing! – it belonged specifically to that cartridge. Thus, if you didn’t beat it, chances are that your save file would be overwritten by the next person renting the game. Or maybe you rent the same game but get Blockbuster’s 2nd (etc) copy instead. Meanwhile, videogame companies were occasionally making their games almost impossible to beat on purpose, so kids couldn’t just rent them and be done in a weekend.
At some point during renting random Genesis games, I came across Dune: the Battle for Arrakis.
This game outright blew my mind. It’s not very often that you recognize that you are playing an archetypal game when it’s initially released, and I certainly would not have known what “archetypal” meant in 1994, but I felt it. If you have ever enjoyed a Real-Time Strategy game, such as Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and/or Age of Empires, all of their conventions pretty much originated in Dune. Base-building, fog of war, micromanaging of units, having a resource-gathering economy, all came together in a unified whole in this title.
Over the next several years, I probably rented Dune enough to have purchased it twice over. I could have sworn part of it was due to having my save file overwritten, but the Wiki is saying it had codes for the levels instead. I like my own headcanon version better, but alas. Dune did feature three separate factions with their own unique units and, I think, unique maps. I mean, it’s Dune, so everything was rock and sand anyway, but you know what I mean.
Dune was definitely the highlight of my Sega Genesis days. And it would become a very important piece of serendipity in meeting my soon-to-be best friend, whom has remained so for ~30+ years.
[GGM] Secret Star Fox Shame
One of the things my mother and I did for fun back in the day was just go to the mall and walk around looking at stuff. Well, she would mostly go looking at stuff while I made a beeline towards Sears, and specifically the videogame section. Back in those days, they had the gaming kiosks where you could try out a few games, but they were like… normal. If you have ever been to Walmart or wherever lately, the new kiosks have long been designed to be at the most uncomfortable neck angle possible, presumably to encourage people to play for 5 minutes and move on.
Jokes on them, but we would hang out for hours. Which, incidentally, is how I discovered that Sears was the place to go. EB Games had more kiosks and was obviously more focused on games generally, but that also meant it had higher foot traffic and thus kiosk turnover. I wasn’t going to hog the kiosk, if someone else came up and wanted a turn. If no one came up though? Fair game.
Anyway, it was the beginning of summer one year, and my mother noticed that I really liked playing this one particular SNES game that had recently came out: Star Fox. And during this particular summer, we happened to be going to the mall a lot more than normal. I figured something was up, but had not quite put the pieces together yet. I was just happy to be gaming with something new.
And then it happened. I beat Star Fox in its entirety at the Sears SNES kiosk. A few weeks later, my birthday game was… Star Fox.
My mother had put Star Fox on layaway and thus been heading to the mall so often so she could add to the payments. I felt genuinely awful, like I had wasted weeks of her life (and paychecks). I’m not sure if I spilled the beans later on, but at the time, I definitely pretended like it was game I was super interested in playing. Which… it kinda had been up to that point.
After that, I definitely made sure that I never asked for a game that I had played at a kiosk. Kind of the opposite situation the marketing departments were going for, but that was the 90s.
[GGM] Linking My Past
The transition into the 16-bit era represented a substantial leap not just in technology, but also in memories. So, let’s talk about heading into the SNES and what would become my comfort game: Zelda: A Link to the Past.
My mother and I moved about an hour away from my father, so that she could attend college. I have few memories of the Nintendo during that period of on-campus housing, aside from having a pet rabbit who consistently chewed through the cords to the controllers. At a certain point we had neither a rabbit nor a Nintendo, so I imagine that the Nintendo went back to my father’s place.
Later on, we moved again to a low-rent apartment complex up in the mountains. I was sent to play outside any time it was not actively raining, as parents were wont to do back in the 90s. One day, I was walking around, and what looked like a little boy called me over to the dumpster area. There, he asked me if I wanted to smoke a cigar with him – the kind that I had seen in grocery stores with the little mouth cap thing? I declined and ran back home. After telling my mother the story, suddenly I was not asked to play outside anymore. A few more days after that, a shiny new Super Nintendo appeared.
I am not certain whether Zelda: A Link to the Past (ALttP) was the first game I got for the system, but it was consistently the most played and most beaten game I have ever owned. Back in those days, I only ever got a videogame on my birthday and during Christmas, so whatever you got had to last. Which was a bit hard, as you never really knew going in how in-depth anything was beforehand. Luckily for me, ALttP had secrets galore. So much so, that it inspired me to start my own cassette tape “[Azuriel]’s Secrets” series, where I basically recorded myself narrating all the game secrets I had uncovered.
I still have the tapes, by the way. A few years ago, I bought a cassette adapter so that I could “rip” the tapes to MP3 and put them on my computer. I only ripped a few though, because A) they are cringy beyond belief, B) they happened to have also recorded the very loud sound of the boombox in which I used to record, and C) the whole thing was kind of a pain. It’s one of those things you think you should preserve, because… reasons. I let Little Man listen to the ALttP one and he was thoroughly bored within two minutes. Which is understandable, honestly, as I wouldn’t really care what a 10-11 year old version of my father thought about life either. May be a weird thing for a blogger to say, but nevermind.
Anyway, the other series of memories I have surrounding ALttP was how often I would get stuck on a boss or puzzle, and only get unstuck once I showed my mother. Not because she was good at videogames or clever with Socratic questions; she was actually quite terrible on both fronts. Rather, whenever I called her over to show her where I was stuck, I felt the desire to explain the situation, how unfair it was, and how many different things didn’t work. “I tried using my sword, I tried using a bomb, I tried using a boomerang, I tried using the hookshot… oh wait. That worked! Now, go away!”
I was a bit of an ass. Glad I grew out of that. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
[GGM] Nintendon’t Remember Much
After my first encounter with Super Mario Bros, there is a videogame gap. I went from that formative gaming memory to the next gaming memory being “having a lot of Nintendo games.” Were they bought for me? Were they someone else’s? Who owned the Nintendo? It’s a mystery, lost to the ages1.
From this time period, I remember the following:
Top Gun: the Second Mission – Until literally right now, I had not realized that we had the Top Gun sequel and not the original. When looking for a video of the gameplay, I was like “Where is the tree level? There was definitely a tree level.” Anyway, this game was my father’s favorite, primarily because Top Gun was (and probably still is) his favorite movie. It was fun enough for the time period, but none of us ever got past the tree level, so we just played the opening mission a bunch of times.
Super Mario Bros 3 – I ended up playing a lot of SMB3 in this time period, easily 5x as much as any other NES game. I only skimmed a bit of the playthrough video I linked, but I was immediately reminded how much additional depth (and difficulty!) was added to the overall formula over the original. I also very much liked how you had a limited ability to choose the next level you played, rather than being forced into the next one immediately. Also, proper boss fights were memorable.
Zelda II: The Adventures of Link – My first Zelda game… and what a nightmare for young kids to play. Did anyone legitimately beat this without a guide? Much like with Top Gun, I started this game a bunch of times but never really got very far. Or maybe I did, but later? My strongest memories were the fact that the cartridge itself was golden, leaving the main road was scary, and I never got past Mirror Link.
Castlevania 3: Dracula’s Curse – Funny story with this one. It was around Christmas time, and I remember my parents asking me what game Santa should buy. They had also told me that Santa knows when you have been naughty or nice… even when no one is looking. I was getting older, and this struck me as suspicious. Why would they need to know what Santa should bring me, if the old man had around-the-clock surveillance? So, I hemmed and hawed with my parents all through December, while voicing aloud the game I wanted while alone in my room. The result was Castlevania 3.
It was not the game I had wanted. And so I learned two important lessons that day.
Blaster Master – When I think about my overall favorite game from the NES era, it would be Blaster Master. This is another one of those “start a hundred times, never finish” games, but it is also one that somehow feels way more advanced than its peers. It has side-scrolling action platforming with a tank car that jumps (!!), features progressive movement unlocks that allow you to find more secrets as you backtrack, and has an entirely separate 3/4 perspective dungeon aspect when you leave the vehicle?! Also, while Duck Tales gets a lot of praise for its soundtrack, Blaster Master is on the same tier, IMO.
1 My mother was not in the position to be buying games at the time, so I assume my father bought them. At the same time, it would have been very uncharacteristic for him to do so, especially as evident later in the 16-bit era (foreshadowing!). So, it is possible that they belonged to someone one of them were dating, or maybe someone staying with us, who eventually let me have possession of them later on.
[GGM] In the Beginning
I’m starting a new post series called Gratuitous Gaming Memories, or [GGM]. If you aren’t interested in new lil’ Azuriel lore drops, feel free to bounce when you see it. I’m mostly writing these posts for myself – hence the gratuitousness – and for Little Man to discover later, providing that the internet still exists in a recognizable state in ten years. Let’s roll.
My earliest memory of any videogame was the original Super Mario Bros for Nintendo. Getting there requires some setup.
I grew up in relative poverty, in a very poor state. At the time, I did not realize this, and so it didn’t bother me (neither then or even now); that was just how life was. My mother was young when she had me, like around 20, and my father was not much older. They divorced when I was 2 years old which, again, I did not particularly recognize as being outside the norm. Weekdays were spend with mom, weekends were spent with dad. Luckily, they were pretty amicable. Life moved on.
One of the things I always remembered with mom were our “expeditions.” Essentially, just walking around town. I do not recall whether it was a matter of necessity (car not working, etc), to combat boredom, and/or conduct healthy exercise. In any case, keeping a 5-6 year old boy occupied and on-task for a multiple-mile walk was difficult, so we often… kicked rocks. As in, I would kick a hefty rock down the sidewalk, then she would, then I would, and so on. Sometimes the rock would hit a crack at a crazy angle or perhaps you put too much force into it, but that was all part of what kept it fun.
At some point during the walk, I kicked the rock a bit too hard and it bounced up and hit the side of a parked car. Which was sitting in front of perhaps the largest, fanciest house in the small town we lived in. I wanted us to flee the scene, but my mother took us to the open front door and wanted to apologize. I’m not quite sure how the conversation went, but at some point I was sent to wait in the living room with the owner’s kids… just as they turned on Super Mario Bros.
I was transfixed. I don’t even really remember if I got a turn with the controller. In fact, I don’t have any memory at all of the following… however long it was. It’s like a dopamine cigarette burn in my head.
Afterwards, we left, and continued on our expedition. After putting some additional distance between us and the fancy house, we found the next rock for us to kick. I remember that very specifically.
But the seed had been planted.
In An Age 