I’ll start this off by telling that you read that title right, Yes that is Family Computer up there not the Nintendo Entertainment System but Nintedo’s Family Computer. I really haven’t been able to tell my back story to the Destructoid community so I’ll be using this monthly musing as a chance to do so.

It all started around the early 90’s for me, at the age of three in the archipelago (LOLDYSON) nation that is the Philippines, I was able introduced to my first video game--- the Atari 2600. I know that it should be the Famicom cause of the title up there but since I was 2 or 3 years old at the time I couldn’t care less about games and would only be momentarily distracted by all the pretty colors before turning my attention to something else. I still have vivid memories of myself pretending to play with the unplugged Atari joysticks and I even have photos of it back in the Philippines.

My real affair with video games started about a year or two later, with the Famicom. The Nintendo Famicom or the Family Computer, was the Japanese precursor of the Nintendo Entertainment System. In the early 90’s, the Famicom was slowly bowing out of the stage and a surplus of Famicoms were sent all throughout Asia and one of them was my country, the Philippines. My memory’s really good and I do remember owning the fancier version of the Famicom which had a special bright orange “Turbo” buttons built into the controller. Though I couldn’t find any proof of its existence on the internet today which leads me to believe that I may have owned a really good Famiclone.

Around that time I had older cousins who lived in the same neighborhood as me who also had a famicom. I grew up as an only child and my cousins were my best friends (most of the time). During the summer, our daily routine would consist with us playing (and mostly me watching them play) games all morning until late afternoon then we’d go out to play until it got dark. We would play the usual NES games you’ve heard like Super Mario Bros to the Hard as hell Contra (even with the 30 lives—yes we knew about it), to the unofficial Famicom ports of Street Fighter 2 (which had all 12 playable characters).



Most of the stuff I played on it were pretty much the same as those of you in the US, the only difference being the game was in complete Japanese but wasn’t really a problem in those days. We also had the Zapper games and Duck Hunt. That annoying dog’s laugh transcends all languages (including frustration), and yes we also tried to shoot that dog every time he laughed at us. Most of the game we got were Japanese games but we weren’t able to get our hands on Famicom Disk games like the original Legend of Zelda.



Instead of that gray box you call the NES, I got that sleek little maroon and white system which had those permanently connected controllers and had a mic on the second controller which I never found any use at all. My game cartridges were all in bright colors. My favorite game was a red Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartridge which was in Japanese which still didn’t make sense when I played it in English a few years later. The feature I loved the most about the Famicom is that every unit had a second controller built into the unit, this encouraged two-player games which adds so much to the experience.

As time goes by, consoles age and eventually die. My famicom passed on but my love for games lived on as I moved to newer consoles. I will always cherish those days spent watching my cousins beat Contra almost every day, trying to figure out how to that Dragon Punch, cursing at that damn dog in Duck Hunt, shooting the pants off of the gunslinger in Wild Gunman and the best memory of it all--- blowing on the cartridge to make the game work.