by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
Today’s installment of our PC & Console Game Week (for me at least) is going to continue with Nintendo then on Friday I will finish up with come PC gaming stuff.
After many years of joy from the Super Nintendo and many painful hours with the incredibly difficult Super Star Wars series and some great epic gaming moments with Final Fantasy III and Chrono Trigger, and Front Mission Nintendo announced the U64. This was their entry into the 64 bit market. Before the game system launched they renamed it because the marketing people thought Nintendo should be in the title so the Nintendo 64 came out. This was the one of the new 64 bit consoles that could now utilize 3D graphics. I got one a while after they came out and fell in love with Mario 64. The graphics were great (for their time) but the fun lay in the game play. This was one fantastic game. It has some great music too. I got StarFox 64 which was awesome too. I later got Zelda and then became disinterested and that was about all! There wasn’t much else on the system that I liked so most of my time was spent on Mario (that’s how good that game was).
Now Nintnedo had totally skipped the 32 bit platform but that had been taken over by the new Playstation. When it first arrived on the scene it was $600 so that meant I was not bothering to even look at it. A year or so later it finally dropped down to a reasonable price ($300) and I got one. I can’t remember how I did that (probably used my Best Buy card) but I got it and enjoyed the flying flip out of Warhawk. Believe it or not I was never into Laura Croft or any of those 3D platform games. One of the games on the PlayStation that I still dust off and play every once in a while is Wipeout XL. Such a cool game with an awesome soundtrack!
A couple of years after having my console I got the idea to have it modded (so I could play copies and imports). I sent it away and paid some people to do it. When I got it back I could play imports so I started buying games from this dude overseas. I got Jumping Flash 2 and really liked it’s quirky game play and music. I also loved playing Metal Gear solid and the Metal Gear VR missions where the point of both is *not* to fight, but to evade. I had real interest in Carnage Heart which was a mech battle game but focused on the programming of the units. It was truly a programming game, not a battle game. I had a hard time wrapping my head abound it so I gave up.
I also enjoyed some great RPGs like Final Fantasy VII, and Suikoden. There is this dice rolling mini game (got to the 7:10 mark) within Suikoden when I got addicted to and started playing it in real life because it so fun. I also enjoyed Final Fantasy Tactics (a turn-based RPG) as well as Vandal Hearts (another turn-based RPG but simpler than Final Fantasy Tactics). After several more years Sony started releasing some games previously available on Nintendo & Super Nintedo such as the Final Fantasy Series so I ate them up too. Front Mission 3 came out so I grabbed it and enjoyed the similar gameplay to the original Front Mission on SNES. One of the early games I got for the PlayStation was Project Horned Owl. It was a shooting game that reminded me of the awesome Steel Gunner arcade game.
Once again I spurned the dying Sega but years later I did get a Dreamcast bundle when the price was right and played that a bit. The Sonic game was pretty fun but nothing to make me change my ways. Sega finally stopped making consoles and devoted their resources to games only. When the price was right I also bought a Gamecube. My main reason for that was that Nintendo would put out collections of old games (for some good prices). There was also a cool adapter for Gameboy games for the Gamecube. Good times.
Join me next time when I will cover PC gaming and some stuff that Chris’ article got me thinking about.