(Wavy flashback sequence with harp sound effect)
Ah, here we are, back in my childhood. One of my very first memories is of playing Wolfenstein on a computer at my dad's workplace. As a result, one of the first things I remember asking for for my birthday was a Super Nintendo system. I don't even think I was in kindergarten yet, and I wasn't too competent with my very first games of Super Mario World and Mario Paint. Most of the time, I would ask my dad to play them for me, while I would watch intently.
When I started to get a bit older, I was more or less a tomboy. But you see, I threw (and still throw) like a little girl. As a result, instead of being all into sports, I was really into video games. I loved my Super Nintendo, particularly such other games as Super Mario RPG, Super Mario All-Stars, and the infamous horrible discount games Pagemaster and Out to Lunch. Life was good. Then I eventually bought a Nintendo 64, solely for the announced sequel to Super Mario RPG (which ended up having nothing to do with the original game, and I have yet to play it, though my brother Morgan swears it's awesome), and a Game Boy, solely for Pokémon.
In fact, all the HTML I am using today (which is like one baby step above basic knowledge) I taught myself creating a Pokémon website for myself when I was 10 years old. This was roughly half a year before it became some giant trend, so I actually became a reliable source for information and ended up with tens of thousands of hits.
Anyway, while all my womanly peers were busy sneaking makeup out of the house and giggling over what boy was the cutest, I was frantically becoming a master trainer or trying to stop the world from being turned into a stage. My memories of my primary days are marked with drooling over Starfox 64, being confused by the poorly translated Mystical Ninja, and being angered by only getting a cake for beating Mario 64.
During this time period of the late 90's, video games were regarded as something solely for geeks and little boys, but I was more than happy being a geek for the rest of my life - it was better than turning into a valley girl, which I assumed was the only alternate path. My guy friends would always comment that it was cool that I was so into video games, while all the girls would roll their eyes about what a waste of time it was.
And then...it happened.
You know what I mean. The Playstation, and later the X-Box, became huge successes. Only years earlier, it was Nintendo and Sega locked in an intense battle for superiority. But suddenly, Sega was bankrupt and Nintendo was pulling out all stops to keep from going under. Why? How could this happen? For one reason - they went to my mortal enemies. No, not the valley girls. They tapped into the cursed jock market.
Video games have become a source of macho posturing. Instead of fun, creative games, we have a million clones of Grand Theft Auto, a new sports game that's basically the same thing being re-released every year, and a shooter with a wafer-thin plot. Whenever something remotely interesting, like Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Reqiuem or Beyond Good and Evil come out, big surprise - they sell hardly anything.
Thinking? Creativity? A deep plot? No scantily clad women running around for no reason? This doesn't compute in the empty skull of the meat-head jock boy. It flies right over the thought capacity of the drugged-up, drunken punk brat or wigger. Interesting plots don't give you the opportunity to babble to your moronic buddy about how "that chick is soo hot" or "ohh man, check out that blood, I sure shot him!" Actually playing a game for the sake of the game, instead of the graphics or gimmicks, provides too much of an opportunity for poor stereotype-ridden macho boy's insecure side to show through. Unless he is constantly into the "real man" things he is told to like, his friends might think he's fruity!
It's bad enough that the alternative music I hold so dear has been co-opted by my preppie valley girl enemies, but that's different. Preps liking good music doesn't change the fact that the music is good. But jocks dominating the video game market is much, much worse. Now, the only video games being manufactured are horrible clones of macho man video games. Imagine every movie released suddenly became a bad action movie or American Pie-ripoff, leaving no room for the normal Oscar-nominated worthwhile stuff because it just wasn't selling. That's exactly what's happening to my beloved video games. Do you honestly think a game like Mario, Zelda, or even Pokémon would be released under today's circumstances? No. Developers would cancel the project at the first glance, insisting that today's teens aren't into this kind of game.
These jocks are stealing my geek culture. They have no idea what it's like to get hit by a Poison Mushroom, or blow up Slippy "by accident," or slice off a servant's head just because you can. They have never laughed at horribly mistranslated quotes, learned that "time is marching on!," or bumbled their way through confusing 2-D maps and menus. They have had shiny graphics and weak plots spoon-fed to them like the commercialistic bastards they are. It's amazing how my two favourite things, music and video games, relate so closely together. I have had to see mainstream music reduced to bad gimmicks and hollow hype, and it's the exact same with video games. The only problem is, another music trend is bound to roll in soon enough, but video games appear to be permanently associated with drooling teenagers from now on.
There's not much I can do, other than buy video games I enjoy and ignore the other ones. I cringe everytime I see some brat, about the same age I was when I discovered video games, whining over some horrible kill-the-terrorists game. It angers me to my very core. And these losers, who beat up the geeks who originally played video games long before it was trendy, are the reason why video games are being blamed for violence? (I'm not saying I don't love video game violence as much as the next person, but it's not what's making kids violent. Of course, that's a whole other rant.)
It enrages me. Maybe they'll learn the true meaning of video game violence when I take care of them all.
Hypothetically, of course. Don't want the police busting me for terrorism, now...