I've known video games as long as I've known books, films, and television shows (in the cases of television shows, I've actually known video games quite a bit longer). I've shared their experience with my brothers, once played Pokemon using my brother's GameBoy under a table so no one would know for months, collapsed on the floor from that one time with the headcrab I just didn't see coming inside that vent, and yelled in rage as I clicked the single wrong space on my Diablo map that ran me straight into the spear of a very angry zombie Amazon. To sum up: I've been a gamer my entire life and games have always meant a lot to me.
Unfortunately, with the price of games, getting games at all has become a war of attrition between me and game publishers, with me lurking around the shelves of GameStop hoping to glimpse the shining corner of a game that I thought I might have wanted to play two years ago but couldn't afford to, like Indiana Jones hitting stone in the desert in Raiders. I bought Bioshock: Infinite for forty bucks the other day and devoured the game in less than a week and felt real smug afterwards, like I'd just duped Ken Levine into giving me his credit card number.
So this is my journey as a late gamer, examining the games people forgot about three years ago and I picked up, weeping in bittersweet joy at the price tag, the accomplishment of months of spoiler avoiding. I have to confess that I did preorder Remember Me for about five dollars when my wallet and checking account were housing a terrifying moth army, but I did desperately want to support a game that apparently needed to dare to have a leading female person of color. And that is the sort of anecdote that also explains a lot about what you'll find in this blog.
But join me, if you feel like it, on this belated quest, the life of the one-step-behind. It's a hard life, but some of us live it still.
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