New Contributor Introduction: Andy

I am one of the new contributors that Torrey mentioned, so I’ll give a quick introduction.

My name is Andy Bates, and I’ve been gaming since 1977, when my brother told me to ask for an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I had no idea what it was, but I trusted him, and we got our Atari. I played console games until the Crash of ’83. At the time, it really was a huge crash. I mean, why spend all this money on console games, when there were computer games available that were much more complex? I actually remember talking with a friend in 1985, and he asked me what I thought of the new Nintendo console that was coming out. My response was, “Too little, too late.

”Besides playing a few games at a friend’s house, I completely missed the NES. The only SNES game I played was Super Mario World at a friend’s place in college. I got a Genesis late in the game, and spent some time with that, but back then video games were still seen as a fringe activity. And then the PlayStation came out. After my wife rented one for my birthday one year (we had some guys over), I eventually got a PSX of my own. Finally, games were becoming more mainstream, and I ended up on the PS2 bandwagon. But at that point, I still hadn’t owned a Nintendo console.

The system that finally got me into Nintendo was the Game Boy Advance SP. At some point, I got over the stigma of playing portable games in public, and realized that there was this completely untapped system just waiting for me to try it out. I was also really fascinated with WarioWare for some reason. So I picked up the SP, and suddenly there was this huge backlog of classic Nintendo games that I wanted to try. Thanks to the SP, I played through all of the classic Super Mario Bros. games that I had never finished, from the original all the way through to Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.

It was all downhill from there. I ended up getting a $99 GameCube with Christmas money one year, and again, since I got it late in the cycle, I had a much better selection of really good, cheaper games to choose from. By that point, I was hooked. I picked up a bunch of used games for cheap, then the Nintendo DS, and then the Wii as a birthday present.

One other thing you should know about me is that I’m a completist. Remember all those old Nintendo games that I missed? Well, I’m going back and playing them now. For example, I just finished Metroid a few weeks ago; and The Legend of Zelda a week before that. I am trying to catch up to the present day, but there are so many good games that it’s kind of slow going. Hopefully I can share my thoughts on these classic games, albeit with a perspective of playing them twenty years too late.