Much to the relief off my gaming friends I kept bumming video game usage from, I finally picked up a PS3 during the 2011 Black Friday special. I thank the lady who picked up the last one but decided to give it to me after deciding to buy her kids toys instead. But it was while waiting for my games to install themselves into the console and then waiting for the console to download updated firmware that I wondered when I would actually get to play a video game on this PS3.
It got me thinking back to the ’80s when all I had to do to play home video games was insert the desired video game to play into the console, turn it on, pick up the controller, and start playing. It was a simpler time. So while waiting for the umpteenth minute for the latest graphic intensive video game to install itself into the PS3, I dusted off my antique Atari 400 (I have never been a Nintendo kid) and an assortment of cartridges.
I’m amazed that the Atari 400 still worked after so many decades. While the graphics of that Atari will never match up to today’s home consoles no matter how many of them I tape together, I still enjoy the Atari games. It’s mainly because the games of the Atari focused on GAMING, not story or graphics. When I want to enjoy some time playing video games, I sometimes just want to play a simple game. I can appreciate the elegant simplicity of 80s game plots of “Enemies over there, kill them all” instead of having every motive of my character and the enemies spelled out in slow-paced non-interactive cut scenes (Recent “Final Fantasy” games take note).
One fond memory of the 400 I had was introducing myself to the BASIC programming language where I could create my own games and save them on to a cassette tape. My games were never any good, but it was an interesting feature that I wished I gotten more involved in.
So after finishing a few rounds of “Pac-Man,” “Missile Command,” and “Galaxian,” the PS3 finally finished installing and updating itself and was ready to let me play. But I was having too much nostalgic fun on my Atari 400 that I decided to keep playing it for the rest of the night. Maybe some other time, PS3.