MY HISTORY OF GAMING PART 4

If there is anyone still interested in this, then I applaud and pity you at the same time.  I promise I will keep this entry brief as it brings me right up to date with where I am at with gaming at the moment.

I will hold my hands up first of all and say that the Dreamcast passed me by.  I was fortunate enough to have a friend who owned one so I was able to access and play some the the classic games that came out for it, but my confidence in Sega had been rocked with the whole 32X fiasco and then the subsequent struggle the Saturn had against the Playstation.  I was not too interested in investing a considerable amount of money into the Dreamcast when it came out only for it to prove to be another poor investment.

Of course had I done this, one could argue that would not have been the case.  The Dreamcast had a plethora of exciting games and the console itself, it could be argued, was more powerful than the Playstation 2.

As it was I opted for the PS2 and never regretted it.  The Dreamcast failed to have the legs to keep in the fight and Sega took the brave decision to cease production of it and focus purely on games.  It was probably the right thing to do as Nintendo were releasing the Game Cube and Microsoft were stepping into the console market with their X Box.

For the first time I found myself in a position to own all the major formats.  I also got the Game Cube as well as the X Box.  In fact the X Box supplanted the PS2 as my main console which I never thought would happen.  It's additional horse power and the ability to install your own music to play from the built in hard drive while you played games was fantastic  Although the PS2 was still used for the classic games that were still coming out for it, all the cross platform purchases went onto the X Box.

A similar pattern emerged with the purchase of the X Box 360, PS3 and Wii.  The 360 has been my mainstay although it is fair to say that the PS3 is catching up rapidly.  The Wii probably sees the least action of the three, but I so love playing games like Super Mario Galaxy, Metroid and Zelda on there.

I feel very lucky to have been around to see the games industry grow into what it is today.  The advancement in technology has been truly astounding.  In 30 years in home gaming has gone from pushing various sized rectangular and square shapes around the screen in two colours to the millions of polygons that make up the games we see today as well as all the vibrant colours the eye can see.

I wonder what gaming will be like in 30 years time.  I know one thing, if I am still around, I will be still playing!