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| This is your password, good luck! |
or “Why Modern Gamers are Sissies”In my day video games were hard, seriously ball-busting hard. We didn’t have endless continues. We didn’t have fancy memory cards or hard drives. If you were lucky, and I mean really lucky, your game MIGHT have a battery back-up, but most likely if you were going to be able to save your progress for later play you were going to have to enter a code and chances were damn good that said code was going to be roughly 45 characters long and the game programmers were wise-asses who used goofy-ass fonts that meant you had NO way of telling the difference between “0” and “O” and you better hope like hell you didn’t get confused and switch two characters, because if that code wasn’t exactly right you were screwed. And most games didn’t have codes anyway so when that screen said “GAME OVER” you hoped and you prayed that they gave you at least one continue so that you could see what was on the next level. And even if you did get that continue, you were going to have to start back over at the beginning of the very level that killed you. But it was even money that “GAME OVER” meant “START OVER” and that you were looking at chucking another half hour into levels that you had already struggled through just to get your ass handed to you again by that same boss that just ended your run. And furthermore this was a common occurrence since the difficulty of games was insane. Lots of games had cheap, one-hit kills, hit points were a fairly new innovation and not at all easy to come by. Level designs were insidious and usually ended in a boss fight that required near perfection to win. And we didn’t have fancy internets or millions of strategy guides either. If you couldn’t beat a game, you had to hope like hell that your best friend’s older brother was better at the game than you were and would tell you how to use the super secret attack to get past the final boss. That was it.
But, at the end of the day, when you beat a game, YOU BEAT A GAME. It was yours, you owned that game. Why? Because you invested hours, days, weeks, into that game. You played every level inside and out, upside down. You beat every bad guy every way possible; you learned every secret, every trick. You earned the right to say you beat that game and no one can say otherwise. Beating the game meant something because it was something that required work, effort, and time.
Then came the Game Genie. Apparently, the lazy, unskilled kids out there were getting bored with video games because they were too hard and they weren’t talented or patient enough to see the harder games through. The result was the Game Genie, an insidious little device that latched onto your video game and went with it into your console. Once inserted it would allow you to enter all kinds of nifty codes that would give you access to invincible modes, unlimited lives and continues, unlock all the weapons/items in a game, allow you to select which level to start at, and on and on. Now the entire game was at your command, nothing would stop you from seeing that ending screen now! And best of all, you didn’t even have to be good at video games, you just had to know which code to enter!Continued...
