How I Got Started In Video Gaming

Pink Playstation 3 controller and gold Playstation 4 controller
Photo by Alyssa Gallano

It should be the experience, that is touching. What I strive for is to make the person playing the game the director.

Shigeru Miyamoto

When I was six, I became absolutely fascinated with video games. I didn’t grow up with gaming consoles at home. Even then, I still knew my friends were playing Super Mario Kart – without me.

Most people wanted to be like the “cool kids” when they were a kid. The cool kid (in this case, my uncle) had all the best gadgets. My brother and I tinkered around with Bomberman World on the Playstation on occasion. During the rest of the week, I survived my video game craving by playing Solitaire. Yes, solitaire, the game I played on my family’s rinky-dink Windows ’97 computer, but it was bliss. I fantasized about the day I could play in a world with a D-pad.

Fast forward to 2002, my dad, a “PC Master Race” enthusiast, bought my siblings and me, our first video game console, the Playstation 2. The console was a black box with the Playstation logo marked in gradient blue block font. I’ve only ever heard the capabilities of the Playstation 2. Luckily, our new Playstation 2 came bundled with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

The game had a simple character creation with an option to change the character’s gender. Honestly, I was happy using Tony Hawk as my main character. He was cool then, and with the multiple iterations of the video game series after THPS3, other people thought he was cool too.

In Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, you were Tony Hawk and Tony Hawk were you – you were the same.

I manically played this game. At first, I only played the game to clear the missions. Over time, I fell in love with the soundtrack, a mix of the hip hop and rock genres dripping in skater-culture influence. I’m listening to this soundtrack right now with a dumb grin on my face. Songs like Amoeba by Adolescents hold a distinct memory of mine, a twelve-year-old me trying to perfect a skateboard combo – to no avail.

I wasn’t even good at THPS3. Man, I just loved to play it. If I asked you to pick a game off my gaming shelf right now, I would be able to tell you a fantastic memory I had playing it.

A great video game should export you another world. A good game should rip you away from your daily thinking, entirely immersing you in its made-up world. 

All this talk about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 makes me miss old video games. I miss the past video games: no microtransactions or forced player-vs-player (PVP) interactions. If only Bethesda kept their #savesingleplayer campaign. 

It’s this nostalgia that inspired me to create this blog. It’ll mostly be blog posts of recollections of my past gaming memories. There will be video game reviews – new AAA titles and old video games. 

Fun fact: I haven’t played Final Fantasy VII before. There may very well be a review for FF7 shortly.

Here’s what you should be expecting from my humble little abode from now: 

  • Video game story time series (because if YouTubers can do story time for content, so should bloggers) 
  • Video game reviews 
  • Rants (another YouTube content troupe but I’ll throw it in here. Who doesn’t love a little Angry Video Game Nerd action?)
  • Commentary about the social and cultural effects of video games

Welcome to this short-Asian gamer girl’s journey through her best and worst gaming experiences. Join me for the ride. I can sure use a player 2. 

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