Retrospectives

Everything I Learned, I Learned From Gaming PART FOUR: Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped (1998) ・・・ Sibling Rivalry

February 7, 2015 — Leave a comment

When my family was still together, we didn’t really do the whole extended family thing. My cousins were either too old or too young to hang out with, and most of my other relatives lived interstate or overseas. So when my family decided we were going to spend Christmas in Adelaide with my auntie and uncle, my brother and I were kind of bummed out. We complained that there would be nothing to do but hang out with our auntie’s dogs for a week, so our parents caved and let us bring the Playstation along. Which was great, because it turned out there really was nothing to do down there.

I’ll always remember this trip because of three things:

  1. It was during the drive down that I heard Cher’s ‘Believe’ for the first time and was certain she was a man.
  2. I had a stomach bug at one point and requested that someone rent Good Burger on VHS in order to nurse me back to health. It worked.
  3. It was the Christmas that my brother and I got Crash Bandicoot 3.

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Everything I Learned, I Learned From Gaming PART THREE: Bust a Groove (1998) ・・・ Saturday Night Fever

January 30, 2015 — 2 Comments

Renting games as a kid was always a gamble, there was nothing worse than being stuck with an absolute disaster of a game that was either too hard or too boring all weekend. Whenever I got to baby-sit my brother, which really wasn’t that often, I was allowed to rent a game for the evening for us to play. I usually played it safe and chose one of two stand by games if there wasn’t anything else worth trying – Gex 3D Enter the Gecko and Bust a Groove.

My first encounter with Bust a Groove was on the demo 1 disc (I still maintain that it might have been the biggest influence in getting me into console gaming). You had the choice of playing as Pinky or Heat and their respective stages. I was awful at it, and the demo did a terrible job of conveying the controls to people unfamiliar with the new rhythm genre. At age nine, the closest I’d been to a rhythm game was Spice World and although I was right into everything Spice…I’d be hard pressed to actually call it a ‘game’ as such. As a kid right into bubble gum pop and fancy choreographed dance sequences, Bust a Groove glided down from the heavens as a beautifully colourful jagged mess of polygons. Continue reading