Synyster Graves

Parents and video games are like oil and water

by on Oct.25, 2011, under Gamer Rages

Maybe it’s a generation gap but it’s incredibly amusing to myself how parents never quite understood the concept that you just can’t put down a game at the drop of a hat. In my youth I was fortunate enough to have a SEGA Mega Drive (and it still works today!) of which I used to spend many many hours on instead of getting any sunlight on weekends and school holidays, which probably explains why I’m so short. LOL

Gods was a bastard hard game!

Anyways I was going to highlight that fact that the saving grace with lots of games these days are the fact that you can save your progress, rather than you attempting to repeat persistently difficult levels which you’d only ever complete 5% of the time and actually beating that level was a monstrous feat. It was the subsequent levels of which you had never seen before and opened up a whole new world, which was usually the time when your mum came in and instructed you to turn it off because you had to go somewhere. Upon attempting to explain that I’ve never actually got this far and I probably will never again, fell totally on deaf ears and the console was switched off, much to my displeasure. Mega Drive titles which were pig hard and very VERY occasionally managed to get past games of stupid difficulty sometimes had codes you could enter to get back to that level, but never with all the items and buffs you’d have managed to acquire on your journey.

Gynoug was another game which was either hampered by difficulty or parent!

Games such as Gods, Gynoug and Earthworm Jim 2 were Mega Drive titles which spring to mind as having a really difficult level on it and once a few times in my gaming history did I ever manage to get past said levels. And a number of times my progress has been thwarted by a parent wishing me to be elsewhere and subsequently turned off the console.

It was only until the arrival of the Playstation with it’s memory card feature did it become possible to actually save your progress for later use. This was a GOD SEND as (with the exception of Sword of Vermillion) you were able to resume a game from where you left off rather than starting from scratch every time you powered the console on. Talk about saving your sanity!

But parents still don’t understand the importance of letting you get to a save point, despite the desperate pleas for just a few more minutes…

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2 Comments for this entry

  • Russ

    Brian Lara Cricket on Mega Drive 2 had a save feature built into the game cartridge

  • Synyster Graves

    Hi Russ, I’m not saying that all Mega Drive games never had save features, like I previously mentioned Sword of Vermillion had one, I’m saying the hardest games which were impossible to get past never had them!

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