Monday, March 14, 2011

Handheld Gaming

If you haven't heard yet, I will be a communications intern for the American Junior Golf Association this summer. What this means is all summer I will be traveling A LOT, and sleeping in hotels a bunch. So my PS3 and Wii? They won't see any action from me for four months. (I will let my family use my PS3 as a Blu-ray player, though.)

So I had the thought today: maybe I should buy a Nintendo DS and get the new Pokemon game...

Well, I actually have put a ton of thought into this today. Just ask Danny. I will need to address my gaming fix this summer, and if I am on the road a lot, and spending a lot of time in hotels, handheld gaming is the perfect solution.



Now brace yourselves, this will be one epic post.

I used to be quite the handheld gamer in my day. Gameboys? I had them. Just about every kind. Gameboy. Gameboy Color. Gameboy Advance. I would bring my GB in any car ride I went on. Going up north, to my aunt's house in Lansing, even short trips to the store. Pokemon, Mario Tennis, and Zelda saw a lot of playing time. Hell, I just remembered that I would play Mario Tennis on bus rides during tennis season. I was much better at Mario Tennis...



I bought the GBA as a sort of graduation gift to myself after middle school with Golden Sun. It was perfect. I must have played through Golden Sun about 6 times. Golden Sun 2 about 4 times. Pokemon Sapphire about 3 times. Advance Wars 1 and 2. Who knows how much I played Mario Kart. FIRE EMBLEM! HOLY MOLY! FIRE EMBLEM! After all that and more, my GBA has had a funky screen for a few years now. It happened sometime between playing it in class my freshman year and jury duty last summer. See, my GBA went everywhere.

(Sidenote: On my GBC last summer, I also played Pokemon Red, Zelda: Oracle of Ages, Zelda: Oracle of Time, and some more Mario Tennis.)



That's isn't all the GBA I've played, though. I've had a GBA emulator on my computer(s) for the past seven years or so. That's Fire Emblem (again!) and two more Fire Emblems, Final Fantasies 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, at least one play-through of Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow a year, Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance, some Mario Golf, a bit of Tony Hawk, Metroid: Zero Mission (multiple times), and Metroid: Fusion (even more times). It's ridiculous.

Oh! And my sophomore roommate had a PSP, which we only used to play Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories. Between the three of us, we had one monster vigilante mission going. We would spawn a tank, aim backwards, and light up anything behind us, using the cannon as a boost to catch up with our target.

See, that's all handheld gaming. Imagine all that time if I had a book in my hands instead. Let's not even get into the amount of time I may have put into console gaming (and PC gaming, too. I guess).

So that brings me back to the Nintendo DS. My research says that the 3DS is coming out later this month. But I don't want to spend $250 on a handheld gaming system. The debate instead came down to the DSi vs. the DS Lite. Do I want the newer version with a larger screen, downloadable capabilities, a camera, and other features with the DSi? Or do I want the older version, that is equally portable, plays the same DS games, but is also backwards compatible for GBA games with the DS Lite?

Well, if you have read anything above, you might have concluded that backwards compatibility is VERY important to me (i.e. my 80 gb PS3 and my Wii). I still want to be able to play the older games in the current generation. I've written this before.



Which brings me to my decision of buying a DS Lite as a college graduation gift to myself in May. We have come full circle, and everything you've read just now makes sense. Here's to more countless hours playing Pokemon, Fire Emblem, and Zelda.

1 comment:

Danny B said...

Yay! Hope your summer travels bring you to Georgia!