Welcome to the video game section of my website. This section is dedicated to all arcade and home system video games. To the right are 3 links associated with video games : IGN, GameFaqs and Game Winners, all of which provide reviews, cheat codes and walkthroughs of almost every game on every system.   Below you will see how the video game genre evolved from the arcade to "Atari" to "Xbox " and beyond. Game (not) Over!

IGN.com's Website GameFaqs Website Game Winners Website

	"Computer Space" was the first commercial arcade video game released to the public in 1971. It was designed by Nolan Bushnell. It had many technological innovations, but the gameplay was confusing and it didn't become a commercial success. Using the profits from the game Nolan Bushnell left Nutting Associates and formed Atari Inc. Shortly after, games like "Pong", "Tank", "Spaced Invaders" and "Breakout" hit the market.  Arcade games like "Pac-Man" are a thing of the past, but at the time,  were the height of gaming technology. How far we've come over the past 30+ years. Video games slowly went from arcade to home systems. Originally, most video games would come out at the arcade, then, years or months later, would arrive on home systems. In today's world, that is no longer the case. Games now come straight to home systems and bypass the arcade alltogether now. Sadly, this is slowly bringing to an end the need for arcades. Once a staple of my childhood and growing up, now a relic, a sign of simpler times. Before there was Nintendo or Sega, there was Atari, Commodore and Activision. Atari began releasing it's premiere titles and then ventured on to dabble in all of the video game genres of the day, sports, action, adverture/puzzle solving and believe it or not, movie themed games like "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Halloween" and "E.T." to name a few. These games seem tame and boring, perhaps, by today's standard, but have recently enjoyed a resurgence in the home system market via portable plug in joysticks containing a cartridge memory system that allows a person to play anywhere from 10 to 84 classic games. This is an attempt to woo back adults into nostalgia for the games of their youth and to interest younger people in the humble beginnings of video games.
	In the days of Nintendo and Sega, 8 and 16 bit games began flooding the market with hundreds of titles of varying genre to attract all people, no matter what age, sex or race, to the once unheard of notion of home gaming systems. Once these systems started coming out, they slowly became cheaper to buy, as years went on and more noticeably, began the inevitiable competition against each other by "one-upping" each other in both system and game complexity. When Nintendo hegan it's push into homes around the world, they used flagship titles and characters like "Mario" from "Super Mario Bros." and "Link" from the "Legend of Zelda" franchise. Let it also be known that these games and systems started originating from overseas in Japan and other foreign markets. Soon, Sega released it's 16-bit Genesis system, it's flagship title being "Sonic the Hedgehog". I'm not sure when, but it didn't take long for people, especially in sports related games to start adding their names as selling points for these systems. Prime examples of this are boxing, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield and George Foreman, football like Joe Montana, John Madden and Troy Aikman, baseball, Ken Griffey Jr. and even Wayne Gretzky hockey. With these and several "made for home systems" only games, it began a landslide of technological and entertainment advances over the years producing hundreds of thousands of titles each year. Even today, the early 80s style systems like these are still moderate popular in the used gaming market, so even in the 21st century, one can still go back to the "classics".
	Now with Playstation 2, Xbox and GameCube, we have reached the height of gaming technology. Or have we? These systems have now abandoned cartridge based games in favor of the new CD format. One of the few drawbacks most noticeable to this change is game saving progress. While cartridges held internal memory to keep your place should you stop playing, now it is relied upon a memory card (sold seperately, of course) to save your progress. This would become more important in today's world when games take days, weeks and sometimes even months to complete fully. Only Xbox so far has created internal memory to forgo the extra cost of memory cards with limited space.    It's gotten to the point now where most games out there have no real end or "pay-off", if you will, until several dozen levels/games later. In today's busy world and with ever decreasing attention spans in both children and adults, one wonders why games are so complex and difficult, at times even impossible to the less talented gamer, like myself. Does the world still make time for such things? Apparently so. As it is, it seems every week one of these above systems (the only 3 active and productive selling systems on the market), come out with a handful of a half dozen to a dozen new games *per week*. This is tempered with what I call the domino scale.   The domino scale being, as games and systems get older by the month and year, their cost continues to go down. Not unlike the music or movie industry that pushes their "now" titles at high dollar prices in favor of older, simpler titles that sell for practically nothing. Fortunately for the gaming community, today's world is far too impatient to wait for such inevitabilites, myself included. It seems as though they aren't even trying anymore. Rarely are unique games and concepts produced. Instead, tweaking an exsisting game, or updating it, by adding a 2 or 3 or even a 2003-2004 to the title just rehashes what has already been done but adds one or two little things to make it "different:".   The latest additions to the ever evolving sxale of video games and their systems, the Nintendo Gamecube, which has been out a while now, but only recently personally gotten as a Christmas gift to a friend, sports the unbeliveably small CDs they use for their games. These CDs are unlike the Xbox and PS 2 CDs which are the size of normal music CDs and movie DVDs, the Cube's CDs are like the mini CD player discs. Like computers processors and hardware, apparently video gaming is getting smaller, more compact as they go along. Nintendo has also upgraded their Gameboy handheld video games for a 4th time. First it was just yellow and black screened Gameboys. Then Color, Advanced and now DS, which sports new double screens to play your games. Handheld seems to be the way of the future as rumors of P2P a person to person Playstation handheld and N-Gage, an offshoot handheld with it's own brand of games, which can also be played online with other players around the world.   Online is also the wave of the future as Xbox mainly touts this feature above others. As if that weren't enough, there are now a half dozen (at least that I have/have seen) plug in controllers like Atari, arcade style and now Sega, along with it's own offshoots touting classic gaming with the memory and games themselves crammed in these controllers only. No system, just joystick. As is ever the case, more inventive and compact gaming models will be made to further "entertain" generations of people. One wonders, though, especially to myself, with all these neat new "toys", how will one get his/her work done with all these enticing distractions? Some have even made careers out of not making, mind you, but *playing* video games in tournaments like golf and poker. Bad enough bikers and skateboarders are encouraged to drop real productive careers that help companies or others, they selfishly now go for the money, TV coverage and "fame" of once known hobbies becoming jobs in and of themselves. Enough's enough. I think they've taken things a bit too far.   In this, it will never end. Much like the supply and demand need of gaming systems and the games themselves, there will be constant improvements and advances all across the board. Much like movies and music too, video games provide an escape to the person playing or watching, giving people perhaps more of what they want to see in fantasy than what they see in reality.

dave626@earthlink.net