Hello! Well, apparently there's a blog feature here at Destructoid and I'm always looking for a place to waste my day away reading and writing about things that really don't matter... So here we go! I'm not exactly sure how this whole thing works, so i thought I'd give it a shot and take it from there.

I'm a retro gamer at heart... So the things that I'll talk about here will mostly be for people with over active nostalgia like myself. I realize however that most retro gaming blogs have list after list of "Top 10..." and other things of the sort, so I'll do my best to come up with some original content or at least content that someone would care about. Other than that, I'll just make some posts about my life.

This is just an introductory post though so the main topic will be... ME! Yay!

First, the only list I'll give you...

My top 10! (ooOOooOOoo).

1. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (or Ocarina of Time... It's a tie)
2. Final Fantasy III (VI)
3. Super Mario Land 2: Blah blah of the coins whatever...
4. Super Smash Bros.
5. Final Fantasy IX
6. Super Metroid
7. Contra (series... 2D series)
8. Metal Gear Solid
9. Actraiser
10.................. . . .. . ......

CRAP!! This is hard! I may have to do what Chad Concelmo did and just list all my favorite RPG's, SNES games, etc. in my profile. Holy Hell... There are so many others that could be up there. I could fill this whole list with just one or two series... Or just SNES games! Oh well it's not important anyway.

Here's my story! (Just skip down the THE BOTTOM LINE! for a short summary)

I was born in 1987! My parents tried to shield me from games because they were (supposedly) all violent and stifled using your imagination and being creative. However! I still played games at the arcade on occasion. When my parents got divorced, I lived with my mom mostly and we were poor... We couldn't afford any video games... However! My grandma was awesome and bought me a Game Boy! Wheee!! I played the heck out of it with my brothers and it was AWESOME. We'd already missed out on a lot of games and the Nintendo 64 was right around the corner, so when a friend of mine heard about it, he gave me his old NES because he said he didn't need it anymore. The NES was my first console! (Like it should have been all along), I played games like Super Mario Bros. 2, Metroid, Batman, Pac Man, Excitebike, Contra, etc. I was lucky my friend had so many good games.

Later my mom got married and my step-brother owned an SNES, so I started playing games like Super Mario World, Tiny Toon Adventures, Super Metroid, etc. and the SNES was my second console (like it should have been). A couple of years later, we got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas and this was the console that really changed how I played games... With it I received The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which I told my dad I hated and wished he wouldn't have gotten it for me (SUCH A STUPID BRAT!! I should have been slapped). So I started playing... And playing... And playing... All of a sudden, this huge world that Link was in seemed to be real... It's almost like I believed the game itself was magic... Every secret I found seemed like it was part of a bigger picture... It's hard to explain, but it felt AWESOME. My little brother was the same way and we spent the majority of the time playing together and switching off.

After Ocarina of Time, I was sold to gaming... I later bought a Playstation instead of a PS2 and was introduced to RPGs which, up until that point, I had thought were boring. After that I bought a Dreamcast, then a Gameboy Advance, then a Gamecube, etc.

Somewhere along the line though... My friend introduced me to emulation which I immediately fell in love with... I began to realize that there were mounds and mounds of amazing games I never knew existed. I played Zelda: A Link to the Past and realized it was nearly the same game as Ocarina. I played Final Fantasy III and realized that it blew the Playstation games out of the water. I played NES side-scroller after side-scroller and realized how terrible I am at games, haha.

Eventually I began to crave those games I had gotten to spend so little time with as a child... I dusted off my old SNES and started buying games for it, same with my NES as well. I bought a Sega Genesis and a Master System. The Nintendo 64 had long been my favorite game console, until just this year when I decided I was only going to take one console to college with me... And when I sat down and looked at my options, it was obvious that my choice had to be the SNES, and after this past year, I have officially declared myself a retro gamer.

THE BOTTOM LINE!

Even though I didn't even start playing games until the late 90's, in that time up to now I have gone back to look at the roots of gaming and found them to be sweeter than the fruits... Sprites for the win...

And there you have it! You didn't read it all, I know (DON'T LIE!), but I didn't expect you to. I'll have something that'll be more interesting for you next time.