Measuring my life in gaming devices

I am a gamer, these days primarily of the video / computer game variety. Lately I haven’t felt like writing about gaming on my blog for a variety of reasons.

I do hope to get back to it at some point, and I felt a bit inspired to take a step in that direction by this #blaugust2024 writing prompt from Rieaglenest :

Do you have memories of an old game consoles/device that you have? What games do you usually play on that console? If it’s not specifically a game console, what do you usually do when using the old device?

After reading a couple of related posts by JCProbably and Lou (Ameripie) I decided to jump in. I’m going to roughly list the different computing devices I’ve used to play games on with a few memories from each.

Mattel ‘Classic Football’ hand-held

I honestly could not tell you how this thing played. It had an LED display with about four rows of ‘blips’. It made beeping sounds. That’s about it.

Coleco Telstar

I had this little wonder when I was about 12 years old in 1976. The Coleco Telstar or as I called it ‘Coleco Pong’ was one of the early Pong imitators. Technically a ‘first generation’ console, it sported three whole games: hockey, handball and tennis (Pong). Obviously the controls were extremely simplistic, but I played the heck out of the three crappy games.

This was probably the device that first taught me about gaming (and programming) exploits. There were ‘tricks’ you could use to completely dominate or outright break pong. Mostly I just worked out angles so I could play the games by myself.

Apple ][+

The Apple ][+ was my first ‘real’ computer. I got it when I was about 16 in 1980. More about my passion for computers including this machine can be found in my “Who is Kelly Adams?” post.

I played a lot of games on the Apple 2 (I interchange the style of the name: sorry). At first I typed a lot of them in from books like “Basic Computer Games: Microcomputer edition” and monthly magazines. But I eventually started playing early commercial games like Adventure, Wizard and the Princess, and the Hellfire Warrior series.

ColecoVision

I got a ColecoVision when I was 18 in 1982. The ColecoVision was a huge step up from the Coleco Telstar. For one thing, it used game cartridges: this meant a theoretically limitless number of games. It’s primary advantage over my Apple was that it had superior graphics and games could be started up almost ‘instantly’ instead of waiting for them to load and initialize from disk.

My recollection of the games I owned is rather sketchy: I definitely had Donkey Kong and Venture: these two were the ones I played the most. Zaxxon rings a bell, as does Centipede. I probably had a couple of others, but not many: cartridges were expensive, around $50 in 1982 money which is like $200 in today’s dollars.

Amiga 1000

When I got my Amiga 1000 in the fall of 1985 it was just called “Commodore Amiga” in marketing materials with no numerical suffix. I got one of the first handful of the machines in Canada.

The Amiga was arguably the most graphically advanced machine of its time with multiple co-processors dedicated to sound and graphics to go along with the 68000 CPU. Its windowed operating system, AmigaOS, was truly multi-tasking with a pre-emptive scheduler when most of the competition was still non-preemptive. The spinning beachball animation and early ray tracing were years ahead of what other platforms could accomplish.

I was astounded by what the Amiga could do. I played a few commercial games with it: Archon and Arctic Fox are two that come to mind. Arctic Fox stands out as perhaps one of the first games I played that had a ‘stealth’ mechanic: you could cause your tank to ‘dig in’ to snow to hide from enemies. It also was the first ‘first person’ game I played that actually showed and animated part of my avatar- their hand on the tank’s joystick controls.

Sega Genesis

The Sega Genesis was a great console, technically a member of the fourth generation of dedicated consoles. I got mine in 1989 when it came out, making it the last console I owned prior to getting married in 1990.

I ended up with quite a few cartridge games that I ‘carried over’ to my CDX. I’ll list some of them there.

Sega Genesis CDX

I got the CDX in 1994/1995 so I could carry a gaming system with me on business trips. It was a full-powered Sega Genesis with cartridge slot and CD drive, which could also be used as a music player (!). The whole thing was the size of a couple of paperback books.

My full collection of cartridge and CD games was pretty extensive and included games like D&D Eye of the Beholder, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Revenge of Shinobi, and Aladdin. My wife often still comments about ‘her’ dwarf in Golden Axe- we played it together quite a bit for a while.

I eventually sold it in 2016 on Ebay for about $550 including all the games: I see now that the CDX by itself is selling for around $1,400. Maybe I should have held on to it…

IBM compatible (‘PC gaming’)

I had a few IBM compatibles over the years, but didn’t really start using them for gaming until sometime around 1994.

At first I just played the occasional session of Doom, then Quake, then Unreal Tournament. Somewhere in there I played a couple of the Ultima games, then in 1997 I bought the special collectors first edition of Ultima Online.

That’s about the time that I started spending too much money on PC upgrades each year: new video cards, more memory, entire new machines. Games became more demanding each year and I always wanted to keep my PC somewhere near the performance peak.

I jumped off the PC upgrade merry-go-round in about 2007 when Vista 64 came out. I had built a brand new machine with RAID-0 drives, the best possible video card I could afford, and an amazing 4 GB of RAM (apologies for missing images and broken links in the post) in anticipation. Vista 64 and its driver problems destroyed my machine several times, and thus ended a decade of expensive computer gaming upgrades.

Since 2007 I’ve focused my gaming primarily on consoles and my non-gaming on macOS machines. Consoles and Macs are things that ‘just work’. I dipped my toe back in to PC gaming a couple of years ago, building a decent liquid-cooled rig, mainly for Elite Dangerous. It currently collects dust next to my gaming station where I mainly play games on my Xbox Series X. I may return to PC gaming at some point: such a choice is mostly driven by specific games e.g.: something I can’t get on the console.

Xbox

I bought an original Xbox in 2005. I didn’t play a lot of games with it, but it was fun enough.

Xbox 360

I don’t have an exact date, but I believe I bought my Xbox 360 in March of 2007: based on my sleuthing through my blog, that is the first time I mention actually owning one. The 360 was the system that fuelled my transition from PC gamer to console gamer.

I played a ton of games on the Xbox 360: I have a big box full of them somewhere. Some of the early titles I recall include Fable, Halo, Gears of War, and Call of Duty 3. I even experienced the Red Ring of Death, got a replacement, and carried on quite happily.

Xbox One

The Xbox One with the mandatory bundled Kinect thingy came out in 2013. I got mine in November of that year, and I reported in April of 2014 on my observations after using it for six months. Apparently I was pretty happy with the Xbox One, but was disappointed by the fact that Witcher 3 had been delayed until 2015.

PS4 ‘Uncharted’ edition

I purchased a PS4 ‘Uncharted’ special edition in May of 2016. I bought it for one primary purpose: to play Uncharted, which was and remains a Sony exclusive.

I enjoyed Uncharted 4, hated the PS4 user interface, and never really used it after I completed the game. I also bought the Uncharted Nathan Drake collection but I only made it through about half of one of the earlier games. The Playstation sits collecting dust next to my gaming station.

Xbox One X

I got my Xbox One X in November of 2017. It was more of what remained a great console, at least for me.

The One X is notable as the machine that I transitioned to purely purchasing digital downloads on. This came out of two considerations: the way I play games, and the effort required to organize my DVD game collection. As for the former: I pretty much never replay a game once I’ve completed it, so having the ‘safety’ of physical media isn’t particularly helpful to me. As for the latter: well, I had a big box full of Xbox game DVDs, and was getting tired of carting that box around. going digital just made the most sense to me.

Xbox Series X

I acquired my Xbox Series X in November of 2021. People who endured the Covid pandemic may recall that this timeframe was fraught with supply chain issues. Getting the Series X took me months before I finally realized I could get one almost ‘instantly’ by purchasing it as part of a package with Xbox Live Ultimate. Score!

I already had Xbox Live Gold, and Ultimate added PC games to the mix so it seemed like a reasonable deal. It was also paid for via monthly instalments, financed at zero interest through a major Canadian bank.

I was happy from the start with my Xbox Series X, although there weren’t many games to take advantage of its increased power. When those games finally started arriving I discovered that my particular Series X machine was defective. Microsoft took my diagnostic information and approved a replacement, which came in about a week.

The Series X replacement I got has been working fine ever since.

Some closing notes

I have a few other thoughts about the gaming devices I’ve owned / not owned over the years. These are in no particular order, so I list them here using bullet points:

• PlayStations are just not for me: I have nothing against PlayStations. It is really just a matter of the types of games I like to play not really being common on that platform. There is the occasional Playstation exclusive e.g. Uncharted that I wish I had: if there were more such games I might buy a PS5
• No mobile (iOS/Android) gaming: I find that mobile games, even the really good ones, just don’t feel right to me on a touch device. If I ever got into mobile games it would likely be with a device more like the Steam Deck
• No macOS gaming: I have never felt very interested in playing games on my Macs. That is partly because of the dearth of titles that support macOS, and partly because (as with mobile gaming) it just doesn’t feel like the ‘right’ platform.
• No Nintendo: Similar to PlayStations, there have never really been any games on the Nintendo that appealed to me. Family or ‘party’ games are sort of Nintendo’s strength, and I prefer more ‘solitary’ gaming for the most part.