I’ve been a gamer since I was around 5 (in 1994) so I’m old enough to remember games like the original Super Mario bros for the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System), Super Mario Allstars for the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), Bubsy for the SNES, Yoshi’s Story for the N64 (Nintendo 64), Crash Team Racing (CTR) for the PlayStation 1 (PS1), Spyro 2: Gateway to Glimmer for the PS1, Super Mario 64 for the N64 & many many more.
Man those days were great weren’t they? For a girl gamer like me they sure were! I could have listed so many great old games there that I have such fond memories of and for me that’s part of what’s missing from gaming now, the market just isn’t aimed at us girls like it used to be in the days of NES, SNES, N64, PS1 & Ps2 but gaming has moved so far forward graphics wise and general smoothness of playing games on our next gen consoles now like Xbox 1 & PS4 that to go back to those consoles feels clunky and less pleasing on the eye graphics wise.
A great example of this is before Christmas I was keen to get my PS2 out, bit of nostalgia for some of my old games and I really thought I’d love it, it was a simple console wasn’t it? Nothing fancy about it and any game files were saved to a small 8gb memory card – with our next gen consoles we are having to buy 1tb hard drives for our games 8gb would hold nothing now where as back in the day those 8gb memory cards held multiple game files with room to spare!
I’ve had my PS2 since Christmas 2001 as well (yep 14 years!) without it breaking once! (Another thing you won’t get with the next generation consoles but we can talk about that later) but the fact is I didn’t love it, it felt clunky to play and the games I loved 10-14 years ago seemed slow and hard to get into and I’ve no doubt that other consoles would feel much the same now in 2016!
Another thing I really miss about those retro consoles though, probably more than games designed for girls because let’s face it we can adapt and play games we may never have played if there were more games designed for us right? I mean I probably wouldn’t have NBA 2K games or any of the 8 Forza games among my catalog if games like Spyro and Mario were available for Xb1!
No what it is that I really miss is the ability to have multiple of the same console in one house and be able to play any game on any of those consoles – hell with my PS2 way back in 2002 I could take my saved games on my tiny 8GB memory card round to literally anyone’s house anywhere in the country if they too had a PS2 and play the darn thing where I left off and more importantly doing sowouldn’t have messed with their games (unless I purposely overwrote their games with mine but I wouldn’t do that!) and neither would it take up space on their console.
This just isn’t possible now, gaming may have advanced beyond all recognition in the last 21+ years – a far cry from 2D edge scroll games we now have 3D graphics that were beyond our wildest dreams 20 odd years ago and it’s great to look at how far gaming has come in such a relatively short space of time really but now you consoles don’t last at all like they used to and there’s no way I will still have my Xbox One in 14 years from now without replacing it like I did with my PS2 and if I want to play my game downstairs for a change in forced to download my game and take up space on that console for the privilege
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