The First Days I Started Playing Computer Games
I have a very long history with video games. Let me tell you a little bit about it.
I started
playing video games when I was at the age of 3 or 4. My very first video games
were educational games. The one site which I strongly remember was called
“UpToTen.com”. It was an educational website with hundreds of videos, games,
audio, and more on it. The site mostly ran on adobe flash, an old, deprecated
video player plugin, which dominated the online game and animation scene in the
early 2000s until 2021, where it got shut down due to a lot of safety issues
regarding the plugin itself. Anyway, the site “UpToTen.com” was one of my first
experiences with this so-called “Flash Player”. It was basically a learning
platform for toddlers and very young children. There were two main characters
on the website included in every game, video…etc whose names were Boowa and
Kwala. Boowa the dog and Kwala the koala bear. Two best friends who did
everything together. Boowa was the more adult character and Kwala was the more childish
one. I remember everything like it was yesterday. It was so much fun playing
through all the games on the site and watching the short films. It was then
when I was introduced to the internet and internet “Flash Games”, so they were
called back in the day.
Soon enough
I would also try out different games on different sites. Many of those games
included cars, jump and run elements, and most importantly: trains. I was a huge
train fan when I was young. I used to play train-themed games all day long until
my mother would tell me to shut the computer down because it was already time
to go to bed. That’s how much I loved trains. I was, and still am, a big car
fan. But sadly, I probably won’t ever be able to play a lot of those games
because as I said earlier, Adobe Flash Player was shut down and so was every
game and website related to flash. Some sites managed to survive the
shutdown by converting many flash games into HTML5 based games so people could
still enjoy them to this day.
I don’t
even remember the names of the games I used to play, but some of them I still
remember to this day. One example would be the beat-em-up, platformer adventure:
“Cactus Mccoy”. Cactus Mccoy was a huge flash game back then. I remember all of
my friends played it and we were talking about it in school. But what exactly
is this game about, and what does it even look like??
Well, I
remember playing the game around 2013 or 2014, so it had to be a newer game
then. The story is basically about this cowboy, whose real name is never really
mentioned in-game, whose plan is to steal a mysterious cactus artifact and
sell it for money. But suddenly, once he has it in his hands, he turns into a cactus-cowboy
named Cactus Mccoy. It’s a pretty straightforward storyline, but it’s also lots
of fun to play through the actual game. Every level is simply going forward,
platforming and beating up enemies are your main tasks in this adventure. I
can’t really remember the ending of the game, because I never played through
it, but I can assure you that it is a lot of fun if you enjoy beat-em-ups and
platformers. This game is also based on Flash so you can’t play It any more but
as for every game, there are a lot of playthrough videos of it on YouTube that
you can watch anytime and experience the game once again. So that was one of my
favorite browser games back in the day.
There was
another game, made by the same developers of “Cactus Mccoy”. To be more
precise, it was a whole series of games. They were called the “Papa Louie –
Games”. There was Papa’s Pizzeria, Papa’s Donuteria, Papa’s Wingeria, Papa’s
Taco Mia, and a lot more. I think you already know what these games were all
about: Food. To be more detailed, make food and serve it to customers. So
the games all had the same concept. It works like this: You first prepare the
food, then cook it, then decorate it a little and finally serve it to the
customer. Once he receives his food, you will get a rating from him, how well
it was cooked, how well it was decorated…. etc. And depending on your efforts,
the customer will then be happy or upset. With the money that you made after a
long working day, you can buy customizations for your restaurants like
Wallpaper, posters, tables, and more. You can also buy items that can be useful
in the later stages of the game when there are more and more customers that
come to visit each day and your work will be more stressful. My experiences
with the game were always fun. I just loved making food for others and seeing
them happy (or upset) about my creations. Also Flash-Games, so not playable
anymore, except if you buy the mobile versions of the games.
What Am I Playing Now?
But now
that I told you a little about my past with video games, what about the present?
Well
nowadays, I have my own PC that I can play on. A gaming-pc. There’s this
platform called “Steam” which is used to publish and buy games from a lot of
different developers and companies. I also have a huge library of games that I
can play on Steam. But my favorite game right now is probably Sonic Mania. I
think everyone knows Sonic the Hedgehog. One of the most iconic video game
mascots in history, next to Super Mario. And with a mascot, you’re also going
to produce games that include said mascot. The first Sonic game was released in
1991. Probably the most iconic of them all, starting out with the famous “Green
Hill Zone” and its respective soundtrack. Later games were released all along with the 1990s when the videogame market kept evolving and new consoles and game
concepts were released one after the other. The Sonic games were produced by
the Japanese videogame company, “Sega” which also had its own console/s in the
1990s. Their first successful console was the so-called “Mega Drive/Genesis”
on which you could play all of the original Sonic the Hedgehog games, which
were 5 in total (not counting the spin-off games).
But back to
Sonic Mania. Sonic Mania is a fan project which developed into an official sonic
release. The game was created by die-hard sonic fans, who developed sonic fan
games before. One of those developers already worked for Sega before, so he was
the first one chosen for the project. The game was released in 2017 and the DLC
in 2018. I first played it on the PS4, when the DLC came out in 2018. I
recently bought it again on the PC along with the DLC so I don’t have to play
it on the console every time. It’s also easier to install MODs (in-game
Modifications) on the PC. Sonic Mania is just like any other Sonic game, a
fast-paced platformer with a wide variety of stages, special stages, and minigames.
It is packed with a lot of content, so it never gets boring.
But now
that we have my history with video games behind us, let’s take a look at this
website that someone recently recommended to me. It’s called plays.org.
The first
game that I tested on this site is called 1930. It is an arcade-style puzzle
game that looked pretty interesting to me. So I played it to level 14 until I
eventually got stuck. The objective of the game is basically to try and get the
“circles” into a door that only opens once you destroyed all “squares” or
until you get over an obstacle. It’s pretty tricky sometimes and I think I
haven’t gone through a single level without a second try. I think the pixel-art
style is pretty neat. I’m a huge fan of pixel-art games. The Soundtrack is also
really great. It’s so melancholic but at the same time so wonderful and
mysterious. The games give me a nostalgic feeling, even though I’ve never
played it before! It’s a really well-made game and the first one that actually
caught my attention on the site. The website has a lot of variety, but I
couldn’t find a lot that I would like because most of the time, the games are
just Cartoon-based games, which I personally wouldn’t play in my free time.
The next
and last game I tried was named “2 Minutes to Escape”. This game is also made
in a pixel-art style. It was pretty fun playing it. The goal of the game is to
escape a spaceship in exactly 2 minutes. To escape, you have to get through
different rooms as fast as you can. To finish a room you have to press a red
button which opens the door to another room. I have to admit, after the 4th
room, it was already getting too hard for me! It is a really challenging game
and one of the few games on the site that I think is really good and high quality!
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