What Today’s Young Gamers Missed Out On

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Nintendo Entertainment System

If you were born some time after the mid 90s, there are a few things you have never had the pleasure (or pain) of experiencing. For one thing, you probably don’t know what a pager is and you’ve probably never dealt with a 56K dial up internet connection that took 5 agonizing minutes to load a simple “pr0n” picture. If you’re a gamer, you’ve probably missed out on even more. Here’s a list of things we older gamers have had to deal with through the barbaric 80s and 90s when we didn’t have chainsaw bayonets and ergonomic Xbox 360 controllers…

Cartridges

These days games come on a DVD which simply requires you to insert into your console to run the latest and greatest of cutting edge graphics. Back in the day however… we had to deal with bulky plastic cartridges. These things held a fraction of a percent of what a dual layer DVD holds and the worst part about it is they tend to get worn out after repeated use in the console itself. Sometimes it would take a few tries of pulling out and re-inserting the cartridge before the game would actually load. One technique to help involved taking out the cartridge and blowing on the exposed pins in an attempt to clear out the dust. What always seemed to work for us was wrapping the cartridge in a cotton shirt and blowing on it through the material (I guess it works like a filter or some shit…)

Controllers

The Xbox 360 and the PS3 (to a lesser extent) have very comfortable controllers. The joysticks ensure that your fingers don’t get worn out but the vestigial remnants of that classic D-pad still remains. Imagine if that was all you had to control movement. You see before these little joysticks, our thumbs had to endure hours and hours of friction on the old NES and SNES controllers. Don’t take our word for it, you can play NES emulators on your computer with a controller and see for yourself! You may need a NES USB adapter though to connect that primitive controller to your computer but hey if you want to pay homage to the past you gotta take a little pain!It didn’t help that game makers decided to map special moves to down-foward-Y or back-down-forward-Y. Hell if you were a real asshole, you’d make a move that required back-down-forward-up-back-back-forward or something crazy like that. Yup I’m pretty sure I have limited nerve damage in my thumbs thanks to Mortal Kombat…

Incredibly Difficult Games

Just mentioning the name Battle Toads still sends shivers down my spine. This game was BRUTAL. If you think playing Halo on legendary was difficult, try to make it past level 3 of this game and you’ll really see what difficult means… Hell, get a Nintendo USB Controller Adapter and use the clumsy NES controller if you really want a challenge. Go ahead! You can even use the save function of the emulator itself… Just resist the urge to hurl your NES controller through your monitor (don’t say we didn’t warn you). On the plus side, this game probably trains your reflexes to somewhere around the level of a martial arts expert (or a housefly?).