About Me

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Hey there, my name is Josh, and this is a page that should give you a little bit of background information about who I am and where I came from. Of course I'm sure the intimate personal details are the kind of thing that nobody is really interested in, so that isn't what I'm going to talk about. Being as this is a blog about video games, I figure I should talk instead about my history as a gamer. So let's get this party started.

I was born in 1988. This was a pretty good year for gaming, but sadly being a newborn, it was not one which I could take advantage of. In fact there are a lot of really great classic games that came out before or soon after my birth. Part of me wishes that I had the opportunity to experience games like the original Zelda during my childhood, but then the other part of me slaps the first part and yells "that's what emulators are for dummy!" At any rate, I of course have no real memory of the early years, but one of my earliest clear memories is that of my father and I renting a Super Nintendo from the video store. This was something that we did fairly frequently, and the game that always went along with it was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Of course then we always referred to it as "The Legend of Joshua", but that's neither here nor there.

For my 6th birthday I received both a SNES and a copy of Link to the Past for my very own, and the beginning of the end was nigh. For years upon years I was hooked on video games. However at the start I was always a little bit too scared to do much on my own. The big bosses and enemies were a little too scary for me, and the puzzles a little too complex. So instead I opted to watch my Dad play games like Zelda, The Lost Vikings, Young Merlin and Ultima. Renting games quickly became something that we did almost every single Friday, and this was a routine that would continue pretty much all the way through elementary school. Eventually I got more into playing on my own though, and my entry point so to speak, was in the slower more cerebral genre of the Role Playing Game.

It all started with game by the name of Final Fantasy II. Of course now adays we know it as Final Fantasy IV, but back then Japan refused us even more of the good titles than they do today. My dad and I had just visited a new video store for the first time, our regular place having shut down. I was amazed at the massive rows of SNES games I had yet to experience and could barely decide where to start. Then I saw Final Fantasy II. Having always been a huge fan of knights and swords and everything medieval (a theme that persists to this day) I was instantly drawn to the grandiose title with a sword for a 'T'. I picked up the box to see pictures of a knight walking along the ramparts of a castle, and was instantly sold. From that day on I have been addicted to RPGs, though a lot of the more modern day titles don't satiate my taste for them as much as even this simple SNES title did so many years ago.

Before long I had built a repertoire of SNES titles and developed an unquenchable love for games like Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire. However by this time, a contender was rising. I was hearing tell of "the greatest game ever made", a massive 3D adventure in a land that would take a full day to walk from one end to the other. Granted this was a day of game time, but I didn't realize that at the time. Being such a huge fan of Link to the Past, I realized that I needed Zelda 64, and as such, I needed an N64. So I begged and eventually I got one for my birthday, the same year that the object of my desire was to be unleashed upon the masses. That same year, not even a month later, I received my own copy of Ocarina of Time, and all was good in the world.

I loved my Nintendo 64, but I was always a little bit saddened by the lack of good RPGs to play. By this time I had become interested almost exclusively in RPGs, and the N64 really didn't have much to offer on that front. I ended up playing Ocarina of Time so much (despite only ever beating the Water Temple once), but then that was just sort of what I did back then. At any rate, it was around this time that I had made a new friend. He was a little older than me, and while we met somewhere else, we happened to go to the same school. At recess he would dazzle me with tales of his Playstation and this sword wielding, motorcycle riding badass he called Cloud. I didn't quite grasp what he meant, but before long our parents had set things up so that I would go to his house every day after school until they could pick me up. It wasn't long before I realized that I needed a Playstation of my own. So many of my favorite series from the SNES had ended up on the Playstation! While the N64 was virtually devoid of the RPG, the Playstation was like a golden land for one such as myself.

It was some time before I got one of my own. It wasn't until after they released the little slim PSX, but good lord did I use the heck out of that thing once I got it. My library built rapidly, and it wasn't long before I had a collection that could keep me busy until the end of days. With so many excellent games to partake of, my N64 lay virtually unused for the rest of time. Or at least until I found Ogre Battle 64. My friends and I got into the habit of meeting regularly and playing games together, all of us having similar interest in games, and we all had a grand time of it.

Eventually along came the PS2. It was a system I never expected to own, any yet a mere year or so after it's release it was mine, along with some stellar titles to get me started, namely Final Fantasy X, Okage: Shadow King and Dark Cloud. I was the first of my friends to receive this monster system, and they were all in awe as I showed them the magical world of Final Fantasy X. My friends got PS2s of their own before long, and it quickly became clear that this was the system to own. Together with the backwards compatibility with all the PS1 games I had grown to love over the years, the PS2 quickly proved itself to be the only thing I needed for my entertainment needs. To this day it holds the title, in my own opinion, as the best video game system to date. Of course that's not so much the PS2's doing as it the number of third party devs that got on board, but whatever. The sheer number of quality titles this thing had command of far surpassed that of even the PS1. It was truly a golden age for me.

Eventually I got a Gamecube and I collected a small collection of very solid titles. It's intriguing to me how Nintendo has shifted over the years. Way back on the SNES they were in command of such a large array of titles, but as soon as that era ended they quickly devolved into a company reliant primarily on first party titles. Ever since then, their systems have been around almost entirely for a small handful of truly great titles. Things are a little bit different for their handhelds, but now I'm getting off track. For a while it was all about the PS2. I got the Gamecube, a Gameboy Advance, a Nintendo DS, a Wii even. Still the PS2 was the source of all things good in the world. Unless I was on the road, but even then it was mostly just the car since I would usually bring my PS2 with me on extended trips.

Today I own all the previously mentioned consoles, as well as a PS3. My life as a gamer has had to change somewhat drastically though. As the 7th generation of systems began, and even towards the end of the 6th, the market began to really shift. The JRPGs that have been a huge part of my life practically since birth are something that you really don't see any more, save for remakes and handheld titles. There are more high quality titles than ever, and my tastes as a gamer have expanded to encompass a lot of other types of games, but there is still that void that very few games these days can fill. Instead I gravitate more towards the PC these days. The MMORPG is something that has reared it's head in a major way the past several years, and it serves for now as a decent replacement. However I still hunger for those great JRPGs that tend to either not exist, or not make it to these parts of the world these days.