This post is in response to this weeks NBI 2016 writing prompt.
When my family moved closer to the rest of the extended family, I got to know my cousins better. They were around my age and we liked the same things. We would have sleep overs and watch Pokemon, talk about digimon and play with action figures.
Growing up I never had cable. While other kids were watching Cartoon Network I was watching PBS. So it’s not really a surprise that when Saturday Morning Cartoons were still a thing, I was glued to the TV.
Our Saturday morning cartoons were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Spider-man, Batman, and Power Rangers. I was always looked forward to Pokemon and Digimon the most.
One day they showed me a Gameboy Color with Pokemon Blue. My 7 year old mind was blown. Not only could I catch whatever Pokemon I wanted, but I could battle them and get gym badges too! I watched them play these games any chance I got. Never playing a video game before, I was ecstatic when they let me play. We spent a lot of afternoons after school sharing a Gameboy and leveling our horde of Pokemon.
We played Pokemon games for a long time. my cousins got a second Gameboy and Pokemon Red so we didn’t have to share as much. We could finally collect them all. I remember having to connect the Gameboys with a cable to trade and battle. Ialways wondered how the pokeballs fit through that tiny wire.
We eagerly looked forward to the next installment of the series when the Ash set out for the Johto Region on TV. I don’t remember much about Silver or Gold, but I distinctly remember cloning 6 Quilavas and completing the game, good times.
A few years later, they got a Nintendo 64. I took every chance I could get to visit the cousins. We’d spend hours together playing Super Smash Brothers, chasing each other around in Golden Eye, and trying to get all the stars in Super Mario 64.
As we grew up, we grew apart. They grew out of Pokemon (I still haven’t).
Now when the family gets together it’s the younger cousins who want to play the games. They take out the Wii U and school us in Super Smash Bros. They teach us about Minecraft and show us their favorite streamers. We take out the N64 and they make fun of the graphics. But when we all get together we still play games and it’s just as much fun as it was back then.
Many Welps 
Those sound like some great memories. It’s always good to have someone in the family who loves games like you.
In my case, it was my younger sister whom I shared all my games with (she had Red and I had Blue, but we never beat Pokemon like you did). Till this day, we still run dungeons together in FFXIV, even though we live hundreds of miles away. 🙂
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Oh goldeneye, how I’ve spent so much time playing you. I think I have the maps imprinted in my brain somewhere, just waiting for the right conversation to become relevant again. 😀
I remember being deadly when I figured the button combo to blow up remote minds in mid air, and throwing proxies on ammo boxes, then picking up the ammo box to bug out the proxie and make it invisible. My brother and I were such trolls to each other. And then came perfect dark.
Now that game can give you some PTSD when playing the computer on very hard. They could do things like round the corner head shot insta-kills where you just barely see a pixel of them.
Enough of me zoning off in memory, I need to be supportive during the NBI. Um… make sure to walk your blog twice a day and it likes to be scratched behind the ears?
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I remember there being a good number of maps but I only remember us ever playing Bunker and Archive. I didn’t know you could blow up the remote mines in the air but I always thought the detonator watch was the coolest thing! I never could aim, so the only way I ever got kills was running up to my cousins and hitting them with a rocket point blank or being sneaky with the mines. Good times had by all.
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Pokémon on the Gameboy Color! This is also how I grew up gaming, although I was a few years older. My brother had Pokémon Red, which I could borrow at times, until I bought Gold and he Silver. After that Crystal and Emerald… in fact, I picked it up recently again. It’s a great shame that the original games I own don’t work well anymore (some don’t save properly or the internal battery is empty, causing an absence of the day-night cycle). Either way, really cool to read about a shared childhood memory here. 🙂
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Reblogged this on DDOCentral.
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