Monday, December 25, 2006
MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
Joyeux Noel and Happy Hannukah to all the people who are actually reading this today! Christmas 2006, which will take me into the fun-filled year of 2007, is shaping up to be one of the best yet thanks to an influx of Wii and DS games that should be heading my way. What are you all getting?
Of course, if you're in the United States or thereabouts, it's not actually Christmas for you yet, but that's OK, because Christmas only officially begins for me once I've woken up later today. Being a nostalgic git, I've been playing some "games of Christmas past", such as Shenmue, Quake III Arena, and Marvel vs Capcom 2 on the Dreamcast, all from 2000. How time flies huh?
Anyway, to continue that theme, I'm going to take a look back on the Christmasses of a few years ago to see what was happening at the time...
Last Year (2005): I came back home at 4am, crawled into bed, and the next day opened my brand new Nintendo DS, a console that I'd predicted would be a gimmicky flop a year before and was now beginning to take notice of. I also got a lovely signed Psychonauts poster as well as the lovely-looking NTSC Futurama DVDs!
2003: Back in '03, me and my brother had only just moved off of Graham's Rawr-Squared.net site and bought our own domain and web space, which we called LandOfWhimsy.com (which is actually still there but for various reasons, my site's now here at it's own address rather than being a subdomain). On the site at the time, I was all ready for Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and I-Ninja on the GameCube, both of which were damn fun games.
Also at around this time, I was toying with the idea of importing a 23" LCD from America. Why from America? Well, at the time, just about all LCD TVs in Europe had no Component Video jacks and had crappy SCART terminals instead, which meant I wouldn't be able to play my GameCube games in the elusive Progressive Scan mode. HDTV was basically a non issue to me back then. Me oh my, does a LOT change in 3 years, or what! Back then, I was just getting interested in LCD technology, although most LCDs were fairly crap so the talk was on Plasma. A few people I talked to told me that LCD would never, ever be able to produce watchable pictures from a TV point of view, to which I disagreed with. A minority would still agree, but I like to think that this is one of the few times I've made an accurate technology prediction.
2002: I was wowed by the quality of the graphics on the GameCube's StarFox Adventures, enough to be distracted by how average the game itself was. At this time, I actually didn't have a web site online, so none of you got to hear about it. Aren't you sad?
2001: I was scooping up ridiculous amounts of Dreamcast games from bargain bins across the land (I bought PAL video games back in these days, you see!) and was enjoying some fairly fun games for £4.99 each. Add this together with Shenmue II and Headhunter, as well as large amounts of Phantasy Star Online, and you had one fun Christmas!
2000: I enjoyed playing, for the very first time, Shenmue for the Dreamcast, as well as the fantastic port of Quake 3 Arena, Marvel vs Capcom 2, and Evolution: The World of Sacred Device. Yes, this was definitely the Christmas of the Dreamcast.
I also got an MPEG-2 card for my computer (this was back in the days when the average CPU wasn't fast enough to do the decoding work on its own) as well as a DVD drive (which I STILL have - a Pioneer DVD-105F).
Anyway, I'm going to bed. Talking about past Christmasses is fun, but this one is going to at least as good as these!
Posted at 1:16 AM
