The next game that changed my life is one that almost everyone has heard of, and one that almost everyone has played: Pokemon. For those who may not know what it is, Pokemon is a series of games in which you train a group of creatures to make them as strong as they can be so that they can fight against other trainers’ Pokemon and beat them.
Pokemon Sapphire, one of the games in the third generation of the series, was the first game that I ever owned. I spent months convincing my mom to buy me a Gameboy Advance SP so that I could play it, and once I got the game it was even better than I had hoped for. I spent hours playing the game, going through and beating it multiple times just to keep on reliving the experience. I was only about 8 years old at the time, so I certainly wasn’t very good at the game, but with a game like Pokemon, it didn’t matter. All you have to do is put some time into the game to make sure your Pokemon are all trained sufficiently, and you’ll win the game eventually. Of course, I got better at the game as my understanding of the mechanics grew, but for the most part, I was just having fun. It may seem cheesy, but while I was playing it really did feel like I had some sort of connection with the Pokemon on my team. Going through the game I felt like an explorer, like I really was the strongest person in this made-up world and that my team could take down anyone as long as I tried.
At the time that I played, all of my friends were just as into the games as I was, and we would talk for hours about our teams and the best strategies; we even bought cables to connect our Gameboys so that we could play together and trade Pokemon with each other. It was just something we did, and everyone was in on it; Pokemon was the cool thing for years, and we loved it. After a few years, though, it’s popularity plummeted. Pokemon all of a sudden became a “kid’s game” and if you played it, you were a baby. Everyone moved on to Call of Duty and Halo, and if word came out you were playing Pokemon, you’d be publicly laughed at. My parents weren’t a fan of me playing M-rated games, though, and I still loved playing Pokemon, so I had no problem continuing to play and simply keeping it to myself.
I ended up casually playing the game over the next couple years until high school, when it became retro and cool to play again. In high school, though, no one wanted to spend money on a Gameboy so we would all just play on our laptops. It’s possible to download programs called emulators and roms; an emulator is a program that acts like a Gameboy, and a rom contains the game data, so you can play any Gameboy and most DS games right from your computer (though the legality is questionable). My friends and I still played casually, but whenever we were bored in class would do speedruns of the games to see how far we could get and talk about it occasionally when we got bored.
When the most recent series of games game out, including an HD remake of Pokemon Sapphire for the 3DS, I decided that I had to get it to relive my childhood. I think it was a great decision; I still only play it occasionally, but every time I do, It’s like I’m stepping ten years back through the past to a time when I would lie on my bed for hours determinedly trying to catch that Rayquaza. This is what I love about video games. At the end of the day, they’re just plain fun, and even the so-called “childish” ones give you a link to your past that few other mediums can ever live up to.