07-20-2022, 01:48 AM
One of the (endless) perks of being a kid was that my dad would reward us with a visit to the video store every Friday, right after turning in a good report card. If we did exceptionally well for that week's period, we would see our earnings double and we would be allowed to pick both a movie to watch and a video game to play, all through the renting time of a frantic weekend that, unsurprisingly, didn't really leave much room for doing our homework and therefore seemed to work against our chances of earning the "awards" again. Yeah, it was a flawed system but one we would die by if necessary.
I rented a ton of bad movies with my "credit" and I regret almost all of those choices, but I enjoyed great success with my SEGA Genesis picks, very rarely hitting the double 00 on that roulette. And when we brought home a game, my cousin would tag along and spend the night over, often challenging us to beat it and oftentimes giving us advise when we were stuck. He was 21 at the time and had played many of those games himself, so he knew what he was talking about... but that was not the reason he chose to stay, no. He actually just wanted to give us a fair chance of beating him in any game of our choosing while we played on the Genesis because, after a few matches, he would ask my mom if he could takes us to his home (on the same neighborhood) and would challenge us again on the same game, but on his Super Nintendo.
Yes, we had our very own version of the "Console Wars" and we enjoyed it thoroughly.
I know what you are thinking: in order to challenge us again, he would have to have the SNES version of any game we had happened to rent and how likely was that? Well... he had the largest game collection I have ever seen and it is likely to have contained every single SNES game released on the west up to that point. How did he manage? I don't know and never asked, but he seemed to be doing well by himself, as his bedroom walls were covered side to side with shelves upon shelves filled with cartridges, in a display that made the damn video store look small.
Nine-year-old me was fascinated and didn't even mind the fact that his (my) hands were so used to the Genesis controller that couldn't even grip the SNES one properly. I got the tar beat out of me on every single game we tried for months, but I never cared and looked forward to it every time.
Sometimes, my dad would join in on the fun and then things would get real, as they would go back and forth playing the different versions of the classic, revered International Super Star Soccer Deluxe. This could go on for hours and we would watch how entire bowls of candy would disappear and reemerge, as they would absentmindedly down piece after piece, leaving the wrappers behind and munching to the rhythm of their incessant tapping of the joysticks.
It's quite funny to me now how we would essentially be left to watch two grown men playing, when the night was supposed to be ours to enjoy and especially after making it exceedingly clear that we would have to return our game before the weekend was over. We could have complained but didn't bother... they just couldn't listen to us anymore.
Sadly, this fun tradition also a short-lived one. My cousin made some very... economically-unsound moves by the end of the decade and was forced to sell both his impressive collection and the console itself, so there was no going back. He even stopped coming to our home to play, leaving us with a bit of a bitter aftertaste and the certainty that we would never enjoy ourselves as much anymore. Predictably, we stopped renting games soon thereafter as well.
We really had fun doing this and I really wish that I could go back and try my hand at it again. His was the first and last SNES I have ever seen in person and I would have liked to have enjoyed it a bit more before he had to sell it.
I rented a ton of bad movies with my "credit" and I regret almost all of those choices, but I enjoyed great success with my SEGA Genesis picks, very rarely hitting the double 00 on that roulette. And when we brought home a game, my cousin would tag along and spend the night over, often challenging us to beat it and oftentimes giving us advise when we were stuck. He was 21 at the time and had played many of those games himself, so he knew what he was talking about... but that was not the reason he chose to stay, no. He actually just wanted to give us a fair chance of beating him in any game of our choosing while we played on the Genesis because, after a few matches, he would ask my mom if he could takes us to his home (on the same neighborhood) and would challenge us again on the same game, but on his Super Nintendo.
Yes, we had our very own version of the "Console Wars" and we enjoyed it thoroughly.
I know what you are thinking: in order to challenge us again, he would have to have the SNES version of any game we had happened to rent and how likely was that? Well... he had the largest game collection I have ever seen and it is likely to have contained every single SNES game released on the west up to that point. How did he manage? I don't know and never asked, but he seemed to be doing well by himself, as his bedroom walls were covered side to side with shelves upon shelves filled with cartridges, in a display that made the damn video store look small.
Nine-year-old me was fascinated and didn't even mind the fact that his (my) hands were so used to the Genesis controller that couldn't even grip the SNES one properly. I got the tar beat out of me on every single game we tried for months, but I never cared and looked forward to it every time.
Sometimes, my dad would join in on the fun and then things would get real, as they would go back and forth playing the different versions of the classic, revered International Super Star Soccer Deluxe. This could go on for hours and we would watch how entire bowls of candy would disappear and reemerge, as they would absentmindedly down piece after piece, leaving the wrappers behind and munching to the rhythm of their incessant tapping of the joysticks.
It's quite funny to me now how we would essentially be left to watch two grown men playing, when the night was supposed to be ours to enjoy and especially after making it exceedingly clear that we would have to return our game before the weekend was over. We could have complained but didn't bother... they just couldn't listen to us anymore.
Sadly, this fun tradition also a short-lived one. My cousin made some very... economically-unsound moves by the end of the decade and was forced to sell both his impressive collection and the console itself, so there was no going back. He even stopped coming to our home to play, leaving us with a bit of a bitter aftertaste and the certainty that we would never enjoy ourselves as much anymore. Predictably, we stopped renting games soon thereafter as well.
We really had fun doing this and I really wish that I could go back and try my hand at it again. His was the first and last SNES I have ever seen in person and I would have liked to have enjoyed it a bit more before he had to sell it.
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