The Adventures of Last Gen Consoles

Story time:

I do stupid things. Let's face it, we all do. One of the stupider things I have done, on more than one occasion, is get rid of/sell my consoles sometimes before they are even near the end of their life cycle. I have also been known to do the less damaging practice of selling back games when I'm done with them. Yes you lose money, but let's be honest, am I really going to play Phantom Hourglass again after doing the god damned ocean temple 5 times in a row. No, I'm not. But let's not get too far off topic and keep this post about consoles.

I have always been a Nintendo fan so it may come as no surprise that the first console I bought with my own, hard earned money was a Gamecube. I bought it for the new Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games. I brought it to college and had a blast with it there playing through Super Mario Sunshine, Metroid Prime, and Zelda: Wind Waker (still one of the best looking games, in my opinion). One of my roommates, having no other choice as it was the only console in the room, also had a great time playing with the Gamecube. Somewhere down the line probably around my junior year of school a little game called Halo 2 came out. I had always played shooters, just not much on the Gamecube, so I hadn't played one in a while. Let's just say that I have never played past the first level of single player in Halo 2, but managed to log over 100 hours in multi player in a very short period of time. One of my roommates was obsessed with the game and would request we play with him every instance possible, which we easily complied to.

As time passed I got bored with the XBOX not being able to see any other game I wanted to play on it besides Halo 2, and I had been bored with the Gamecube for a while as nothing good came out for it after the Metal Gear Twin Snakes, which is a great game, but technically a remake. So I decided to buy a PS2, seemed like a great idea at the time. Best selling system in the history of games with an epic library of great games. You can only guess what I did. I got Metal Gear Solid 3, beat it, and sold the PS2 back for half the price. I know, dumb move. I make very quick and very dumb decisions very often. I never bothered to look into other games, even older ones for it. I saw that there was nothing on the horizon and got rid of it. I never bothered to play games like ICO, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear 2 even, and again was left with just my Gamecube and XBOX.

After graduating college I stopped playing games for a while. The Gamecube was done with the official announcement of the Wii, which I was very excited about, and the XBOX was done with the release of the 360. I had no money saved up after college and video games are very expensive, so you can see why I stopped. It wasn't until I got my first real job and first couple of paychecks that I started getting back into gaming, around the Fall of 2006. I sold my Gamecube (which I didn't regret because I knew I'd get a Wii at somepoint), sold all my games for it (which I'm regretting now as I'd love play me some Wind Waker and Luigi's Mansion) and bought an XBOX 360. I loved it, although I loved my Gamecube and everything Nintendo, I realized that I was missing out on some great games and gaming genres, specifically shooters. I picked up Gears of War when it came out, and loved it, played me some Halo 2 again, Rainbow Six Vegas, it was great. Then I began to realize something. I missed Nintendo. The games for 360 started to seem generic and rehashed concepts from the original XBOX, sure they looked great, but the game play mechanics were all the same. I missed the cartoony and unique style of Wind Waker, the classic platforming from Mario Sunshine, and the amazing recreation of the Metroid franchise. I hit a wall. I stopped playing the 360 altogether and cried myself to sleep every night in lament over my sold Gamecube. I had betrayed it, it was gone, someone else was having the fun I could only dream of.

You can only guess what I did next. I sold my 360 on ebay, I did manage to make a good sum on it though, still ended up losing money, but a lot more than selling it back to Gamestop. I had nothing, no games for me. I was a goner. I went with no consoles from March of 2007 until the end of August 2007 when my girlfriend bought me a Wii. I was back! It was fantastic, all the games and characters I loved were all mine once again. I started getting some Gamecube games again and playing through those. Ahhh, it felt damn good.

I am now two years older than my college self and have come to appreciate gaming for the gameplay, and more stylized and unique games, over the graphical powerhouse games. This led me to think about the games I had passed up on the XBOX and PS2. There were tons of classics I had completely bypassed. By this time my brother had gotten his own 360 and had managed not to get rid of the original XBOX. He mailed it to me and I began to get some, very very cheap, games for it. Games I had never known even existed for the XBOX like Halflife 2, and games I had only heard of but never played like Fable, Max Payne 2, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Black. I can't imagine myself enjoying any 360 games more than I'm enjoying regular XBOX or Wii games. I recently finished Black and man, what a fun game. I know it's not 360 graphics but I really can't believe how they got some of the visuals and effects in there on the original XBOX, pretty impressive stuff.

Now I don't doubt for a second that there are fantastic games for the 360 but when you have limited funding, and want to play some great games, older systems are the way to go. In this gaming rebirth, if you will, that I have gone through I've been playing some great games on the virtual console, Dreamcast, and XBOX. Every system has it's share of great games, and if you don't mind dated visuals, you can have a really great time for not that much money. So the moral of the story is to really think hard about selling your old consoles and even games, because if you're like me, you'll eventually get to the point where you just want to play that one level from Metroid real quick, have one more go at Ninja Gaiden Black, or actually play through the single player of Halo 2. The virtual console has been a godsend for this because you can get a lot of the games you (or at least me) grew up on for a very small price, all bundled nicely into your Wii.

So play older games, they're fun.

The end.

Labels: Microsoft, Nintendo, Retro, Reviews, Sony