My first console

I've talked about some gaming memories before, so I thought about doing another one! This time, my first ever gaming console!

It was Christmas, I was still a child, we were in my uncles’ house and me and my siblings went downstairs to see the gifts under the tree! I remember my sister’s gift quite well, it was a Mega Blocks set of Dora the Explorer, actually kind of awesome, not gonna lie.

When I tore apart the wrappings of my gift, I remember being quite excited about it, it was a game console! What model? what brand… ? I have no idea at all!

You see, it was one of those so called Famiclones. Yep, my parents gifted me a bootleg console.

I still can’t help but wonder what made my parents think it was a good gift? It’s just kinda baffling to me, they don’t really like games, but they got this? It didn’t look like, high quality at all, but they still got it? Maybe they just thought it was cheap enough to give it a try or something, maybe they just didn’t even bother to look it up? I gues the internet wasn’t that huge back then. It’s still a mystery how they chose that over everything else I don’t really want to ask them. 🤣

I was old enough to know this wasn’t really the best thing ever, and I was also old enough to be happy with what I was given. I think I had some conflicting feelings, but maybe it’s just current me thinking what could have been, could I have thrown a tantrum? told them to ask for a refund and just give me the money? At the time maybe I would have rather had an action figure or racing track to play with my toy cars, something like that. But it was fine honestly—I was a little jealous of the Dora The Explorer set my sister got, it was branded and the plastics felt really high quality in comparison with the buttons on the cheap controllers my console had.

The color scheme of it was rather weird, it was black and green, maybe orange. The d-pad was really, really bad, it was more like a flat analog stick, I remember because the cross pad broke off in both controllers after a while, leaving only a small protuberance that I could still tilt to control the games, even though it was rather painful and bruised my thumb when used for too long.

Despite everything, I remember taking it everywhere during that Christmas vacation, I would plug it to my uncle’s TV, some other family member’s TV too, and of course once we were home I would play it there as well.

I recall playing quite a bit of Duck Hunt there—the console came with a gun!—and some sort of Olympics game too. But of course, the main focus was Super Mario Bros!

There were lots of weird Mario clones or romhacks, my favorite was one that added Moon gravity to the game, and playing it would allow me to jump super high, until I was off-screen, and I could advance whole levels with only a couple of big jumps.

Eventually, the console fell off from somewhere and something inside started to rattle, when I used it too long it smelled like burned plastic, and I kind of lost interest in it after a while. I am not sure what happened to it, but I no longer have it.

Despite not being the best gift ever, it was still quite formative and entertaining for me, and it’s interesting to reflect on how things used to be.

Nowadays, I am quite a fan of retro handhelds, and a lot of them have Bluetooth connectivity and HDMI output. I could go back and play those old games and have a great time with them! I could also revive my Raspberry Pi and try to set it up with RetroPie or Batocera to recreate that retro experience. Of course, now I have a Nintendo Switch, which provides quite a lot of fun already, so I don’t really feel like doing such a project, for now.

Anyway, this little post was somewhat inspired because today is March 10…

Happy Mario Day!!

This is day 34 of #100DaysToOffload

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