I'm writing some bullshit, reminiscing about my experience with video games throughout the years until the present day. I plan to make short Youtube videos out of them, making each section a separate video with footage of the game I'm writing about in that section.
1. NEScapism
I was born in 1996, so the NES was already old news when I arrived on the scene. My first, and so far only memory of playing on an actual NES on a real TV is before I turned 4. My older brother and I were playing Super Mario Brothers, and I was confused that we had to take turns rather than playing together. Not a very exciting memory, but for some reason it stuck.
For the most part, I remember playing Nintendo games on an emulator called Nesticle. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had a computer and emulation is free. My older brother had downloaded a ton of games for me to play, and I was terrible at all of them. I didn't even know what half of them were called, because I was just barely starting to read.
They were all bright and colorful. Most of them I only picked up once and then never played again, to be forgotten, just vague memories in the back of my mind. I remember playing a game about shooting soldiers in some sort of desert. I remember thinking, "Don't those guys have families too?" And that was the last I ever saw of that game, because I couldn't read the title.
I was a dumb kid, exploring. The NES was a portal to a bright and colorful fantasy land, where I became anything that I wanted. I loved playing these games. I wanted to be good at them, but I never was, because I was just a kid, and little kids generally aren't good at video games.
One of the games that really stuck with me was The Legend of Zelda. I don't know why this game especially caught my fancy; there were plenty of games that offered adventures in a fantasy world, but something especially stuck about Legend of Zelda. It seemed like every time I played, I got a little bit more out of it. I'd discover a new secret, or make it a little bit farther in the dungeon. It grabbed my attention and excited my imagination. Why did the enemies appear out of clouds? Who was Link? Who is the old man that gives him the sword, and why does he die? The questions I answered for myself filled in the gaps of Link's world, until it seemed as real as my own.
2. Emulation and Fan Fiction
Fast forward. I'm seven years old now, having moved to a whole new state. I'm old enough to use emulators all by myself now, and I can even read the names of the games that I'm playing.
Besides the NES, there's one other console I remember playing: the Nintendo 64, with fancy 3D graphics. At this point in my life the N64 was even more vague than the NES, but I was determined to rediscover it. And I did... with emulation.
The game I really wanted to play was Perfect Dark, a game with guns and violence and aliens. N64 emulation was still pretty young at this stage, so I couldn't find Perfect Dark anywhere. I scoured and scoured website after website, to no avail. So I settled for the other game I wanted to play: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
I was instantly in love. The music was so delightful. The forest you start in was like the ultimate playground. You even have a best friend: Saria, a green-haired Kokiri girl. I didn't even care about beating the game, not really; just the first little area blew my mind. But there was even more. Sneaking past guards in the Castle, meeting Malon and Epona, rolling in the field, meeting the Princess and learning your destiny; it was a living, breathing fantasy world, and I loved it to pieces.
Zelda wasn't just a game that I liked any more; it was my favorite game. It was an obsession, an addiction. I wrote about it in my school binder. I made a shield out of cardboard and I wanted to be Link for Halloween. And I browsed the Internet for websites talking about The Legend of Zelda.
I found one, called Legends and Adventure, which was later renamed to The Sacred Realm.
I feel like it's really boring and uninteresting, though. :/
I'm mostly doing it for myself and the joy of reminiscing, but is this interesting to anybody else? Or is it just rambling nonsense?
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Topic: ___/The Writer's Apprenticeship\___ (Read 314130 times)