girly games

The Quest for Legitimacy ・・・ Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Girly Games

May 10, 2015 — 2 Comments

When I was in year 6, I had a Tamagotchi and a Digimon. I loved both, the Tamagotchi was cute but the Digimon was cool. Those terms seemed mutually exclusive. I once had a fight with a boy I sat next to in class because ‘the Digimon is for boys’. I nearly hit him.

‘I have both. I’ll play with whatever I want.’

I wanted the best of both worlds, I wanted cute and cool. Why should I have to choose? It was seemingly impossible for an eleven year old girl to find something that catered to both desires. Cute things were too kiddy, and cool things were always solely aimed at boys or girls much older. I got really suckered into everything Pokémon because the characters went on fun adventures and there were some cute Pokémon, but also some very cool ones. Continue reading

Everything I Learned, I Learned From Gaming PART SIX: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon Another Story (1995) ・・・ Emulating Nostalgia

February 21, 2015 — Leave a comment

When I first started using the internet independently as a kid, I was really into Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon R had just finished airing up to the usual part where the dub cut off mid story arc and it started from episode one again. Desperate for any other information I could find out about the series, I spent countless afternoons on different GeoCities Sailor Moon shrines. Finding out the Japanese names of the characters, discovering there were even more Sailor Senshi than just the inner five – it was like a whole new world of this series opened up to me. Don’t get me started on the soundtracks, because I was all over that. In midi form, of course…though I somehow amassed a rather large collections of .ogg files as well. I eventually came to terms with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to download all the newer episodes on my pathetic dial up connection, and gradually became engrossed in other anime instead.

As a teen who completely missed the 16 bit generation, emulators were crucial to filling the gaps when I was broke in high school with no easy way to track down classic consoles. I forget how I initially stumbled upon them, but it was amazing to finally play all of these games I had read about online. The majority of them being Japanese RPGs. Games like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy V, and Terranigma. Of course the most awful thing about using emulators was the throw-away nature of the ROMs. If something didn’t keep my attention past the first three hours, I usually dropped it pretty quickly and moved onto the next game. Continue reading