Since I was in my mid-20s when Pokémon was created, I never really “got” it. The only thing I knew about it was the whole seizure thing. But then I had kids. Just before he turned 4, my son went through a brief-but-intense phase of obsession with the Pokémon cartoons and toys just before he discovered Mario and the video game floodgates opened, leaving all past obsessions (Thomas, Star Wars, etc.) in the dust (if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor).

So as the video game thing took off, I bought him Pokémon FireRed for the Game Boy Advance, thinking I could tap into his pre-video game interest. I vaguely knew that the games were RPG-style, but I didn’t make the connection that, unlike in many games, where there’s reading but it’s fairly inconsequential, in a Pokémon game it is absolutely essential that you be able to read in order to play. Since my son’s still a pre-schooler, that didn’t work out so well. Read more »

I didn’t play many console video games between outgrowing my Atari 2600 in high school (while I would visit friends’ houses for regular reminders of how much I sucked at newer games on their NESes) and getting my GameCube in 2003, but since then I’ve had a bit of a renaissance and am a lot better at these games than I used to be.

But I will never be great at Super Metroid. In particular, I cannot for the life of me get the timing right for wall jumps in that game. I’ve been able to do them on occasion, but it’s just been luck.

Now my son is playing it (on the Wii) and he seems to be drawn like a magnet to the spot where you have to wall jump to get out of a deep shaft. (The spot where the native creatures “teach” you the wall jump.) And then he wants me to help him. Good luck with that! Read more »

MGC, for those not in the know (including myself, not terribly long ago), is the Midwest Gaming Classic, a big event coming up in a couple weeks in Milwaukee where I will join throngs of like-minded geeks, many of whom are also, like me, regulars in the AtariAge Forums, to play old video games, talk about old video games, buy and trade old video games, and just basically live for a brief moment in a world where they are still relevant (a world outside of our own heads, that is).

Being a person who can still fire up a game of Yars’ Revenge pretty much whenever I feel like it, this is a welcome experience indeed. I am planning to take a few of the rarer but also less-interesting (to me personally) titles from my collection as trading fodder, and I’ll see what I come home with. I just wish Paul Slocum would’ve been able to have a finished version of his Homestar Runner-themed Atari 2600 RPG homebrew ready in time for it.

The small town where I grew up had a fairly limited selection of available cartridges for the system, even when I acquired mine, at the peak of the innocent, naive, pre-crash frenzy, in May of 1982. Kmart and the small Kay-Bee toy store in the local mall were pretty much the only places you could go for this crazy new technological marvel, the home video game.

We didn’t have a Sears store anymore, its vacant anchor space in the sparkling new North Main Street commercial district (which has since become a grayed, decaying industrial district) having recently been filled by the town’s exciting new Kmart store. (More recently, the space, long abandoned by Kmart’s migration to the town’s sparkling new 18th Avenue commercial district — and now drastically renovated in an abominable and already “dated” 1990s architectural style — has become the home of the world-renowned Spam Museum.) As a result, I had no idea that Sears had its own version of the Atari 2600, complete with repackaged versions of Atari’s games, plus a few exclusives. (Even at the tender age of 8, however, I was already well-aware of the bizarre practices of Sears, Roebuck & Co. of selling products only under its own brands, even if those products were — as with the Sears Video Arcade — simply those of other manufacturers with new brand decals attached.)

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