Early video games were a chore

Do you ever look back at your earliest video games and wonder how you got into the hobby, like a negative kind of nostalgia? I got the NES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for my birthday and somehow didn’t abandon the whole medium.

Sure, Super Mario Bros. was a lot of fun, but I recall playing more stinkers than good games until the Super Nintendo era. Except I made the mistake of getting a Genesis and missed out on years of Final Fantasies and other SNES classics. It’s not that there weren’t good Genesis games, but my tastes went to JRPGs p quickly after playing Chrono Trigger at a friend’s place.

Thankfully Nintendo lost the war on game rentals and I was able to rent a lot of turds instead of wasting birthday and Christmas presents on them.

The advent of the Let’s Play was a great thing as well. By then renting games was harder to do, but at least I could see gameplay. I never would have asked for TMNT had I seen the gameplay. I was expecting the arcade game, which finally arrived a few years later, though I never owned it. 

XBox Game Pass has been amazing as well. Obviously I can’t play PlayStation games on it, but it’s otherwise superior to the old game rental model. I never have to settle for Caveman Games because Mario 3 was out (I actually owned both, but you get the idea). I can also quickly rule a game out as bad without feeling like I wasted my money. If anything, it’s great to rule out 5 games in a couple of hours and then spend the rest of the evening playing game 6 that turned out to be great. 

I’m so glad that early video games didn’t ruin the hobby for me.