NON-TOXIC GAMING

I am a girl. I am a gamer. I am a gleefully, glorious goddess…oh wait, did I take the alliteration too far? I have been a gamer all my life, as I picked up my first controller in 1978, at the age of 5, to battle the mighty ball that you could not let pass your bar. Yes, I am describing Pong, and it was essentially ping pong in the electronic format. Now, it sounds rather boring and it makes me wonder how video games ever advanced, but it was just the beginning of video games and my gamer life. It was the “gateway game” that led to my somewhat obsessive addiction to newer games and consoles. In fact, I was so enthusiastic about gaming that I turned my grandmother and mom into gamers. Eventually my grandmother was fighting me for the controller so she could play Asteroids on Atari, and my mom would wrestle it away from her so she could get her fix of Missile Command and River Raid. Thus, gaming is fondly ingrained in my memories and it will always be a part of my fabric. Sometimes it f...

It haunts us... Mocks us... Taunts us... Makes us question why we spent the money in the first place. It's our gaming backlog. Naturally, the first thing to come to mind is, geez, FF, that's a massive first world problem. I agree wholeheartedly. We are, generally speaking, our own worst enemies though, and it bugs me that I've 'wasted money' on games that I have yet to play. (Steam and humble bundles , I'm looking right at you.) My wife reassures me that I'll eventually  play them. Even if that eventually is when I retire in forty(?) years. Yes, this is the reason I've never sold a console system; I feel the shame strongly and don't want to lose the ability to play them someday . It's also why my launch PS3 is still connected to my TV since it can play PSone games. Time to fess up then. What is my oldest lame claim to shame? Final Fantasy VIII. I'll admit right now that I haven't played Final Fanta...

Come my friend, it’s time to put on the nostalgia glasses and come back with me to an era when after school cartoons were a thing and the Internet was a movie dream shown by a young Matthew Broderick or Tron. If I didn’t manage to make it home in time for X-Men then Goof Troop, Duck Tales, and TailSpin kept me in good company as I did my homework (if I had any). When I first got wind of the Disney Afternoon Collection it went to the top of my wish list. I remember renting both DuckTales and Rescue Rangers growing up and beating them triumphantly. Due to how often I rented them my mom even got DuckTales for a birthday for me back in the day. Having beat it, my young mind went for an unopened exchange of Base Wars at Walmart instead. The collector me of today still cringes at that decision. (Though I’d love a Base Wars remake at this point actually, staying true to the original. Hey, they did it for NBA Jam.) Have I beaten them all again yet? No. I hung my Playstation Network tro...

The first time I remember picking up a gaming controller it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. I was used to going outside and playing with friends and putting all our action figures together to have them fight wars, participate in heroic clashes against some of the most villainous characters, and that would create such epic battles only in my head. When I held that controller I did not have to imagine what the battle looked like because it was being transmitted to the television in front of me. The game I can first recall playing was a game that had been released many years before this was written, November 29, 1972 to be exact; a game that was so simplistic in nature but could be played for hours with many different outcomes. Pong may have been the first game I remember playing but it was most certainly not the most intriguing of games, intrigue would come later on. Now I did not actually play these games until the age of 5, or thereabouts, and at the time there had a...