This is the beginning of a monumental project. I have now played video games since I was five years old. That adds up to 18 years of gaming tomorrow (my 23rd birthday), over three quarters of my life. And now I've decided to do a retrospective on all that time spent staring at a screen, pushing buttons. Come with me and perhaps we can bond over a shared gaming experience. Nostalgia, it's almost as good as real emotions. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it.

The first number in the title will always indicate the series in the history and the second will indicate the specific game. The first series I will be delving into is comprised solely of computer games, most of them falling into the edutainment segment because that's the only things my parents would buy/let me play. They've gotten progressively cooler as the years went by, but man, a life without GI Joe's was murder on my self esteem. But enough of this prattle, onto the games!

Gorillas



The first game I ever remember playing, this ran on the old programming language QBASIC. It involved two King Kong sized apes who had just about enough of each other's stupid faces and decided to settle their feud once and for all. They did this by climbing up onto a cityscape and hurling explosive bananas at each other. I don't know why you're laughing, it all makes perfect sense: I mean, why wouldn't they have exploding bananas? The gameplay consisted entirely of you entering in a velocity and angle for your flying death fruits to take. This was back before games realized that numbers were not that sexy. Come to think of it though, a lot of them still haven't realized this. Then, you sat back and watched as they hit absolutely nowhere near the other fucking gorilla. Or at least, mine did. Thankfully, I can blame my horribleness at the game on my severe lack of knowing what an angle or a velocity was. I was five years old at the time and I often fell asleep in hampers. Take that for what you will. I rarely if ever hit my opponent and, since the AI was almost as stupid, games would take up to a half an hour at times. The long confrontations would lead me to wonder "Why are we, gorillas, fighting? Don't we have a common enemy in the cheetah or the jaguar? Couldn't we ruin their shit completely with our lethal Chiquitas?" The only time a quick game happened was when the random level generator managed to put me and my foe right across from each other. When a banana would hit true, the struck gorilla would be completely obliterated in a miniature atomic explosion, wiping out a sizable circular area around it. Then, your ape would do a celebratory dance. Epic, thy name is Gorillas.

The landscape was semi-destructible in that a banana hitting a building would put a small hole in it. It was not destructible enough though to notice that a building cleaved in two by plantain grenades should probably fall down. That is, to say, you could cut a building in half and the top portion would float in mid air like freaky ass Salvador Dali painting, "The Persistance Of Gorillas With Exploding Bananas." It's one of his lesser known works. I think this was just the buildings being affected by the sheer incomprehensibility of the game's premise. As a bonus feature you could adjust the gravity which usually either led to me throwing a banana and boomeranging it right back into my own face under G-forces somewhere in the trillions. Or I launched one straight up into the upper ionosphere, never to be seen again. To reiterate, this will most likely be the only game on this list where you can and likely will kill yourself with a banana.

Next time: The Oregon Trail