ARTICLE AND TEXT BY ________ (THEY’VE BEEN HERE THE WHOLE TIME)

you know when i was a kid i looked for the long trips that came. they never happened long enough. never frequent enough that id get to spend any time with my family, but always after something bad had happened. we needed to get out the patriarch and matriarch would say, lets all take a trip somewhere

i wont put the reason i never really left the state ebfore now on them. thats all my own cowardice: the way i was raised, to be afraid. constantly told everything around me was going to be enough forever.
is there any wonder i can remember exactly what game consoles i was holding in all of these trips. the sega game gear and its hellacious amount of batteries. a classic gameboy i had been yelled at on a return trip down some mountain to turn the dome light off. listening to the audio for that split second in the darkness before turning the light off.

“videogame portability” is shorthand for comfort, or maybe long hand. i don’t know. college is a scam. all this bullshit about taking things places. handheld videogames are a comfort object for escapists and people too terrified by the outside world to engage.

but still. i reckon that a hand-held game console can go a long way. my gameboy advance and a dustry cartridge of Megaman Zero was a beacon of light on many a long journey. lets go to some fucking lake. lets go up to the woods and be so upset at eachother for a car ride.
unfortunately my passengers were really zero or before that some spiky haired kid on the gameboy i probably named the same thing i named them all playing back at home on the nintendo intertainment system.

in sunwashed skies and ild cold ponds that hadnt really risen above the grass since the time my parents were my age. all of these different ways of escaping to avoid what was really in front of me. i still feel like Final Fantasy Legend I & II are underrated. saga this and saga that, fuck it, i want a roleplaying game where i can swing a chainsaw and be friends with a robot.
can you even use the little smartphone games these days to avoid anything. what the fucks the point in genshin impact if to fucking do anything i have to cross the equivalent of two hyrules to unlock the magical girl.

the nintendo game boy (sometimes marketed as the nintendo game girl, somewhere, i remember, dont hold this against me) was a real way to get out of reality for a minute or two. it is not nostalgia when i say something later pokemon games lacked is the ability to meet a new monster in a ten minute car ride.
editors side note: i do not give a fuck about fire emblem heroes and you cant really make me write about it. fire emblem is the best when it can be loaded onto a cartridge and i dont gotta see all of these faces i dont remember. give me eliwood or give me death.

every few weeks ill put one of these new gatcha games on my phone but its a poor replacement or even fucking worse a poor simulacrum of a megaman or metroid or fire emblem or all of these things they want us to remember. even worse if its some japanese rpg about summoning demons with just the fucking serials filed off.

“it respects your time” is the carry and crow-call of a dozen reviewers who get paid to do this shit. what an asinine saying. no videogame respects your time: some videogames don’t respect your time enough to keep you playing. they present tall grass or unfamiliar dungeons breaknecked between save points on a cartridge someone you dont even know loaned you for a week.

escaping through these little handheld mirrors years ago and well into adulthood was a kind of repriever. we didnt know words like gameplay loops or any of that shit: now i work in an office where a dozen people are playing some fucking card game or god forbid genshin impact or some true time waster where you tap and tap and tap and tap and maybe the numbers go up.

videogames especially ones you can really get away into are about numbers going down. let me lose my place. sacrifice half of a days car ride to a battery death. the feeling of losing one of your only game paks to a puddle of water will always be different than the numerous smartphones i lossed to my own drunken bullshit.

some fucking guy is probably ripping me off right now by drawing a sketchy watercolor comic about how much he loved his little game boy. i hated it. it took too many batteries and didnt have a backlight. i hated it when i had to go through and re-write my siblings save data knowing id never even get to talk to them about how far i got because they gave it up.

i hated that stupid fighting robot game because it wasnt street fighter or snk card fighters clash but i spent all day reading about those on the internet and its all i had. i hated how hard it was. somewhere its kicking around in a bag i bet or maybe it got traded off.
content to spend hours in the back of a car. or on a school bus. or between dates or breaks in a small shitty car in the hot southwestern sun. a gameboy or a gameboy advance or a playstation portable and a miriad of terrible anime starring rpgs kept me company. a little adventure burning a hole in your pocket waiting for the time you had a few minutes to fire it back up.
now i just get to look forward to the next shitty crossover between an anime im too old for and some fucking game i dont even care about. thats it. i stare at the little device in my hands and wonder what else it could be used for. mini gold simulators and little experiences that wouldnt be out of place on the consoles my parents played that had a single knob.

the chirping buzz of adventure music and the promise of some kind of strange world that never quite had all of the dots filled in. little arrows telling you discretely where to go. the gesture of something greater. it all felt so constrained at the best times. so unplanned at the worst. at least i have my memories and emulators now huh?