I brought my shiny new PS3 home on a warm day while my wife was still at work. I knew I had at least three hours of interruption-free gaming ahead of me before dinner needed to be cooked and adult life had to resume.
I found the launch titles I had purchased lacking. There I was with my shorts on, a T-shirt hanging comfortably off of my 34-year-old frame. The windows were open and the breeze was calming. Buyer's remorse set in almost immediately. This black box of technological promise cost me near $600. Where was the wow factor? Where were the life-changing graphics and revolutionary technology I had been promised?
Nowhere.
After a monumental let down I remembered that the PS3 was capable of playing Playstation 1 games. Wow. A brand new heavy in the electronics world was capable of playing games that could have easily run on the primitive technology that lived in my modest cell phone.
But it was something.
I popped in Medal of Honor: Underground and fell in love all over again. At a time when console FPS games and WWII backdrops were rare, this game excelled in breaking boundaries. It was barely an expansion to the wildly popular Medal of Honor, but the improvements to story and character made this a whole new game. As a female warrior packing weapons and a camera, you were truly embodying a fantastical character in a genre best-known for brutes and bullets.
I played that game for hours and obsessed on it later. I played nothing else for a week until I finished it. My new PS3 could play blu-ray discs and superior shooters such as Resistance: Fall of Man, but all I could think about was Manon and her (my) crusade to avenge her fallen brother.
That's a game, my friends. That's a fine memory.
By Victor Paul Alvarez
valvarez@eastbaynewspapers.com
