Video Game Memories Series and July 10th, 2014

Gaming Memories: Top Gun

(from my gamer blog, here)

My Video Game Memories series will be just a simple concept; I'll pick a game and tell a memory of it.  At first I'll kind of skip around, but if nothing is coming to mind, I'll fire up a randomizer and click until I get to a game I do have a memory of.  It may be a memory that has nothing to do with playing it, and it may be just the box art.  It is just a kind of grab bag post.

They say that dreaming in black and white is caused by growing up while watching black and white television.  It is something you hear less and less about because it is not part of the human condition, its part of growing up with black and white TV.  Well, the cousin I knew that owned Top Gun had an old black and white TV set up in the living room so that while he played games, his parents could watch the news.  I played Top Gun at his place a lot and never realized just how colorful the game itself was.

It would be years later that I would pick up the game myself, and maybe see it at a school friend's home and realize that the game had neon orange, bright green, and high contrast colors all throughout the user interface.  To this day though, when I dream that I'm playing Top Gun, it is the black and white version that I see pop up, never the color version.

July 10th, 2014

Time passage is weird.  Parts of games that would take forever and day now seem to come and go when I blink.  Certain scenes happen way closer to the beginning than I "feel" they should.  The most weirdest part of all... I generally ran and skipped what fights I could back then so that I could hurry up and get to the story bits.  Final Fantasy 6 has a big branching story part near the beginning that seems to come up in the first 15 minutes(that's exaggerated, but it feels like it is that fast) that I remember being this big huge event before.  The Wall Market scene in FF7 too comes so very fast(though if you've played, you know what I'm trying to postpone and keep away from as long as possible in that game).  In Chronotrigger, I blink and I'm already in a Dome.  I think my "time" equaled out at around 1998 because last time I played Xenogears, everything seemed to fit to my expectations.

Well, here's a lesson learned kind of thing.  Tales of Phantasia on mobile is going away... and even if you bought it and have it downloaded, you'll never get to play it again.  Why?  Well the saves are all online instead of on your mobile device.  Of course people brought up to the devs "hey, this seems like just a blatant way of fighting Pirates, looks like it could cause legit players to be screwed" and the devs of course said "to the contrary, this lets people download the game on their tablet and phone and share the save between them".  Well we know that was all a bunch of bullshit.  Pirates have the game, legit buyers have lost their money, and now the only way you'd ever be able to play is if you can find a pirate version with local saves.  Good job.

You know, Nixon loved bowling so much that he had a bowling alley installed in the basement of the White House.  I'm sure that people he considered old would've told him to quit playing games and run the country, that bowling is for punks.  They would probably tell him to play something respectable people would play, like bad mitton or shuffle board.  That's how these things go, you know.  Its only a young person's activity for as long as young people play it.  If they keep playing when they get older it becomes their activity.  The people that do it decide what's acceptable, and everyone around them is going to bitch.  Its the same for video games, skateboarding, whatever.  I think the time for arcades has passed and so there will never be an arcade installed in the white house, but I wonder sometimes what the next presidents will add.  Do politicians even have time to learn the activities they like anymore?  I'm sore what they like it decided in a committee now to maximize voter association.  How cool would it be to have a home brew pub in the White House.