Many gamers will boast that they are true gamers because they’ve played all three Halos and Mario. While I would tend to agree with standard-jock-stereotype that the Halo legacy seems to be the gamer marker these days, I would also mentally *pffft* at him, because disagreeing in real life and calling myself a true gamer would grant me a hearty laugh and a butt kicking. The more I look around at our shelves though, the more I believe I’m right. Many benchmark games have released in this past week leaving me to riffle through all my old games and sigh. I still have all my old games for the simple fact that I tend toward nostalgia frequently and would randomly like to be able to play Sonic or Rampage without scanning Ebay. Why do I need a GBA when I have a DS Lite? Why do I need a GameCube, a PS1, or an Xbox when I have all their respective upgrades? And not only do I have them; but they’re all plugged into the TV. Simple, they’re neat and give me a sense of time and progression. Decades of systems sit before me, decades of games, decades of saved games and memory cards. It’s the same reason your parents have kept every little thing you’ve done since age 0.
Earlier, though, I found myself going through my screen shots folder for World of Warcraft and was startled by my sighs. Has the game really been out that long that I can look at an image and go “Oh I remember when Slackers took Deviant Delight, turned themselves into pirates and raided Freewind Post. Good times, good time.”? Or “Oh wow, I remember the first time we tried to do Deadmines and couldn’t because it was too hard.” The best thing about going back through all the screenshots was seeing my armor progression. I lack a lot of images from my low levels; but the shots I found should suffice.