For this summer article, I wanted to share some of my gaming memories during the summer vacations. This ended up being a bit heavier than I expected. From a young age, I haven’t really taken summer vacations due to work or study commitments. So I don’t really have a lot of poolside stories in some fancy resort. But it was still interesting to revisit some of these old memories. Have fun and thanks for reading.
Wonderboy Travel
One of my earliest gaming memories of summer was: child prodigy on the Game Gear. Me and my brothers often played this in the car when we were traveling to our holiday destination. Usually a campsite. If you remember the Game Gear, you may remember the terrible draining of batteries. Requires six AA batteries which seemed to last only about 3 hours. My parents became so frustrated with this that they opted for rechargeable batteries that also didn’t seem to last long. Still, child prodigy was great. A conversion of the arcade game into portable form, you run through levels throwing your hammer at enemies while avoiding a nasty one-hit death. Hard as nails, but if it’s the only video game at your disposal, make sure to make the most of it and we did. It was at this stage of my life and probably while playing this game that I sadly discovered that I couldn’t play portable games in the car because they gave me motion sickness. So child prodigy my time of playing games would end while I was traveling as a car passenger. Oddly enough, I was fine on boats, trains, and planes.
Holiday with Arcade and SNES
When I was younger I spent most summers with my grandparents on the Isle of Wight. A beautiful island in the south of England that was to become a much anticipated annual summer holiday. Living on the south coast of the island, I first learned about arcade games at the beach entertainment venues. Discover classics like the arcade version of Sonic the hedgehog, Mortal Kombat and so much more. My grandmother often gave me a bag of 2p coins to use on those coin pushers, but sometimes I traded these to play on the arcade machines, much to the dismay of the guy in charge of exchanging a lot of 2p coins for 20p -coins.
A lot of times I just liked watching other people play the games since I was very young. I didn’t really understand the game mechanics at this stage. Some years my grandparents rented me and my brothers a Super Nintendo console from a local rental store. This was a pretty big deal for us, as our only other console experience was with the Sega Mega Drive.
It was like going over to the other side of the console war. Thanks to my grandparents, we were able to enjoy a variety of titles, including some niche ones for me like Ghoul Patrol a sequel to the famous Zombies ate my neighbors (or just zombies in the United Kingdom), The Itchy and scratchy game and probably my favorite Earthworm Jim 2. Many of these games are not fondly remembered now, but when I was young I didn’t complain.
Summer job and the Xbox
College wasn’t cheap, so to help pay for the experience, my older brother and I would take a summer job. We both worked on a private golf course where we woke up at silly hours to maintain the course and the sand traps before the dreaded members of the golf club graced us with their rather cranky presence. During this job, I quickly learned that wealth clearly doesn’t bring happiness. But back to video games. For six to eight weeks, seven days a week, my brother and I would wake up, do the work, and come home around lunchtime.
After a nap we usually did some co-op gaming. My brother didn’t play many video games other than football titles, which I secretly despised, but played to make him happy. Sometimes he surprised me. The two notable games he loved were the originals Halo and Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance 1 & 2. The latter in particular was a surprise, as he never showed any interest in RPGs.
This is probably where my love for dungeon crawlers started. We played crazy amounts Dark Alliance 1 & 2 and even on completion we would again go through a new game plus on a more difficult setting just because. Halo we’d even complete the Legendary difficulty in co-op and for many years to come, we’d still play through the game if we reconnected during vacations. Those times are sadly over now, but looking at these games still reminds me of the fond memories of my brother and our time working together.
Conventions and Street Pass – 3DS
Summer was also a time to enjoy some conventions. I used to go here often with my girlfriend (now upgraded to wife). We went to comic cons and game conventions and spent many hours queuing for things and trying to find a place cheaper to eat than the convention itself. Turns out bringing your packed lunch was the best idea.
When it comes to gaming, I enjoyed experiencing different games for the first time. It was through convention that I would demonstrate games like Portal 2 on Xbox 360, Tear off on PS Vita and even try it warframe before it became hugely popular as it is today. But by far my favorite memory of conventions is packing my 3DS in my bag and grabbing all those Streetpasses.
For those new to this, this is where you leave your system in standby mode and walk past someone with a 3DS and share your avatars and usually a nice message. By doing this you could also collect puzzle pieces and even in-game items for some titles on the system. The only problem is that you could only take 10 street passes at a time to begin with. So I regularly pulled out the system to collect and accept every StreetPass, which took so long.
The battery of the 3DS was also empty. Annoying, but I did it anyway because it was a nice feature that is sadly absent on the Switch. Eventually, Nintendo would update StreetPass to accept more avatars and just go a lot faster, but by this stage, fewer and fewer people were carrying 3DS consoles to conventions. At the last convention I went to a while ago, I only got a single StreetPass that was pretty sweet but also sad. Times have moved on, but the memories remain.
Thanks for reading and share your summer games memories in the comments below.
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