gameandgraphics:

The process of designing a Game & Watch: Octopus

I love how simple this is, “Welp, I just designed a game.”

I’m sad that it took me as long as it did to get into Game & Watch stuff.  These games should be classics over here as they are in Japan.  However, I’m glad that Nintendo has made these games available to the west with the various Game & Watch collections for the Gameboy and DS handheld consoles.  Actually I think I’ll pop the Gameboy version into my Super Gameboy and play right now!

[Quick Note: Game & Graphics is my new favorite game art blog, check it out.]

When I was a very young child my parents had a Mattel Intellivision for some reason, I think that it may have been a wedding gift.  We had a handful of games like Pac-Man, Pitfall, Beauty And The Beast and The Empire Strikes Back to name a few.  I remember the games being incredibly difficult.  Naturally being a child and the level of difficulty didn’t help retain my interest for too long.  I hung up the paddles for good. Until one day at the Goodwill near my parent’s house.

I was born In 1986, right when the American video game industry was getting back on it’s feet.  The Nintendo Entertainment System had been out for a little while and was making people forget about the over saturated market of the early 80’s.  My first experience with the NES was the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridge that came with the system that everyone under the sun with an NES has.

The other day I was trying to figure out what the first video game that I ever played was.  I somewhat narrowed it down to Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros. or some random game on the Mattel Intellivision.  I’ll start off this three parter with Pac-Man.

I remember playing the game in it’s greatest form, the original arcade cabinet.  There were two locations in town that had this cabinet, neither were an arcade.

My first experience with Ico was way back in 2001.  I remember playing the demo at the Playstation 2 Kiosk at the north Target in Lincoln, Nebraska.  I couldn’t really figure out what you were supposed to do because I picked it up somewhere in the middle.  This was because either that’s where the demo started or that’s where someone became bored and quit playing.

Ghost In The Shell was one of my earliest exposures to anime, I remember renting it from Blockbuster (r.i.p.) when I was in middle school.  I made sure that my mom was aware of how not violent and not sexy anime was by watching Toonami, which as we all know showed violent and sexy anime that was heavily censored.  Eventually she thought It was harmless and would allow me to rent anime, which at the time had a big YRV (youth restricted viewing) sticker on the box.  The film has alway stuck with me as being one of those great anime films from the late 80’s to the mid 90’s, Like Akira and the second Patlabor film.  Naturally I’m also a fan of all things Ghost In The Shell, the manga, the other films, the Stand Alone Complex series and now I’m starting to get into the games.  I picked up this game on ebay for a steal, like $2.50 + shipping.

I recently did a write up for Bionic Commando for the Nintendo Entertainment System over at Little Gray Blog so I decided to download Bionic Commando Rearmed for the Playstation 3.  I’m a big fan of older games so when I saw that they remade this classic I was all over it.

It must have been the summer of 1999 or 2000 and I was looking to beat the Nebraska heat in the typical fashion, by playing video video games in my parent’s basement.  I had gotten just about all the use I could get out of my Nintendo 64 and I was looking for something new.  A close friend of mine was having the same feelings about his Playstation and he allowed me to borrow it for a little while.  He had some of the titles you would expect like Final Fantasy VII, Resident Evil, a game called Ehrgeiz: God Bless The Ring (which I hope to review on a later date) and a little game called Metal Gear Solid.