It's summertime, RFGen!  Well, in North America anyway.  For many of us, the summer season holds a lot of nostalgia, be it the warmer weather, the vacations, or the increase of free time due to school being over.  Or all of the above!  For me, summer mostly reminds me of playing video games in some form, and something as simple as waves of cottonwood seeds drifting through the breeze triggers it.  Originally, I was going to focus on one game, but the other day when driving home from work, I got a strong whiff of green grass and the leaky lawn mower that cut it and I was instantly back in 1987 playing...  Well, we will see.  For now, let me welcome you again to summertime, whatever this may mean to you, and also to this little retrospective on my own summer memories.





Summer is a special time when you are a kid, but summer in Metro Detroit was particularly special.  While many pundits signaled the death of the arcade during the early eighties, in 1987, Detroit was simply flush with arcade games, with at least one in every grocery store, convenience store, and laundromat in the 313 area code and beyond.  And everything was new.  Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of classic arcade games to be found, but for the most part, stores were inundated with those great Japanese raster games of old, along with some Western goodies occasionally thrown in for good measure. 

At this point, many of you are saying, "Yeah, well me too.  We had arcade games everywhere, too."  But did you have $0.10 bottle returns?  No?  Find three bottles with it and you have enough for a single turn on a arcade game and a Laffy Taffy to chew on whilst doing it.  Back in '87 in Michigan nearly every bottle (glass, aluminum, or plastic) was worth $0.10 and for some strange reason, nobody was returning them, but rather throwing them out of their car windows or just straight chucking them on the side of the road.  My friends and I capitalized on this strange behavior, and used our profits (collected usually every other day) at the local 7-Eleven store near my house to buy Garbage Pail Kids cards, candy, and play arcade games.  And this place was popular with the kiddies, all summer long.  While we still behaved as our parents believed boys our age should (bopping around the woods, making forts, playing with action figures and diecast cars, and daring ourselves to venture into the abandoned psychiatric hospital, Eloise), at least three days out of the week we loitered inside our local 7-Eleven, hoping the attendant wouldn't reject our recovered returnables due to "dirt" (real or perceived).

This was also the only time in my memory that those horrible little social classes children fall into disappeared (if temporary).  When "geeks", "jocks", and "bullies" of every description rubbed elbows, traded tips for Ghosts N Goblins, or desperately worked together on Contra to finish the game on only a handful of quarters.  My most vibrant memory of this time was that of a particularly nasty bully and how he and I, in the summer of '87, spent around twenty dollars on Victory Road the few weeks it was featured in the arcade lineup.  Any other time, he would have been chasing me down like a dog, but in front of Victory Road, we alternated between who got the sword and who got the boomerang (the "best" weapons in the game), as well as discussed the merits of the flamethrower (and if getting the powerup twice resulted in a different animation and more damage). We also noted the proper tactics for covering a newly resurrected fellow until he was able to retrieve a better weapon. 

The whole summer passed in this fashion, alternating with some of the best and least know arcade games on the 80's, from Trojan and Break Thru to Ghost N Goblins, Double Dragon, and Contra.  I even remember a few late Friday and Saturday nights waiting in long lines to get into the 7-Eleven to play the newest hotness.  The stores even paid local high schoolers to shake down kids in line to make sure they actually had real money (as opposed to specially weighted pieces of metal or even the old quarter on a string trick).  It was a very sublime period of my youth, and one that I enjoy revisiting once or twice every summer.  Nearly every year, I search for playable cabinets of old, specifically Victory Road. Although, the expense usually deters me ($400+ for the cab or $150 for two LS-30 controllers + USB interface for my MAME cab) after a short period of thought.  Still, maybe it's better that certain games stay in the long halls of my memories.




Unless one is in college (and not taking spring/summer classes), summer when you are twenty is kind of a joke.  The old cycle was broken a few years ago, replaced by something new, be it work, school, or just hanging around.  Regardless, the old days are gone, and you can never play in the sun like that again.  Life is different now, but not bad, just something else other than what it was eleven years ago.  Arcades are still here, but have been in steady decline since the release of the Sony PlayStation.  They would kick around for a bit longer, but over the next decade, would either close or become havens for redemption machines.  In Metro Detroit, home consoles (mainly the Sony PlayStation) rule the market, with dedicated game store chains popping up in every city (sometimes two or three at a time) to keep demand. 

Local game shops are doing better than ever, offering the console mods, soundtracks, Japanese imports, and anime that the chain stores won't touch.  Every store is crammed with (in some cases) with over twenty years worth of gaming goodness, and it has never been a better time to buy up everything in sight.  One can enter a FuncoLand armed with nothing but a twenty dollar bill and exit with a lot of amazing game experiences.  Unless you want Ogre Battle, Tengen's Tetris, or Goldeneye.  You can also somehow manage to leave the store without being harassed into buying a game cleaner or magazine subscription.  Does anyone else remember when Electonics Boutique, Babbages, and FuncoLand existed and Gamestop was only a pretender (and Funco was the "evil empire")?  Weird, huh?

So all that stuff I said above about not playing in the sun?  Rubbish as far as I was concerned.  Not a bit of it applied to my situation at all.  As far as I was concerned, at that time life was perfect and couldn't be any better.  I was engaged to a beautiful young woman, I was a year out of my mother's house living with an awesome (quiet) roommate whom had a computer, and I was an assistant manager of a certain chain video game store.  I was working a lot of hours, but still playing more games than I had in any other time in my life.  How was this possible?  Simply put, no one bought or even browsed for games at my store during the summer.  I can't really account for the reason, but yet it happened in an era when one could find, NES, SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, PSX, Saturn, and N64 games in one spot.  So it was me, in an entire store of roughly 1000 games, the appropriate systems to play them on, and a Samsung gxTV.  Over the course of the summer months, I made it a point to boot up and play every game in the store.  And I managed just that.  Some were great, some good, some bad.  There were a lot of stinkers, but there was one game that stood above the rest.  That game was Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (C:SOTN).

Believe it or not C:SOTN was not a breakout hit in Metro Detroit.  In fact, my store (which back on the initial release of C:SOTN was only a store I shopped at) only received a few copies, and when they were gone, no more arrived until the summer of '98, when the "Greatest Hit" variant arrived in bulk.  Considering the original release, I was surprised to learn that this was a popular game, so initially I ignored it in favor of the mass of games I was determined to play.  It wasn't until one of the local game "geeks" arrived with an imported copy of Front Mission 2 that I had ordered from him, that I got the skinny on C:SOTN, and promptly dropped everything (including  the $80+ import game I had just purchased) to play Castlevania.  As many of you know, C:SOTN is an awesome game, and I found myself not only playing it during store hours (in lieu of everything else), but also buying a copy so that I could play it at home.  For about a month, I put my head to the grindstone.  Finding all the weapons, armor, and accessories consumed my every moment, so that every other game was left by the wayside.  I couldn't stop until everything was 100% finished.  It is a well-remembered experience, and one that I would only duplicate a handful of times after this (ironically one experience was only a year away, that being Silent Hill).  Ah, nostalgia.  Well, I think we should move on to our last entry.




We finally arrive now, to the summer of good old 2015.  You know what that's like, right?  Gaming is as different now as it was back in 1998, or 1987.  The PC has enjoyed a massive surge in popularity, no doubt due to Indie games reaching mainstream appeal first on that platform, but also due to the inability of a single console manufacturer to gain dominance in nearly two console generations (perhaps).  Whatever it may mean, it is a great time to be a gamer, as whatever platform you own, whatever genre you are a fan of, there is a ton of interesting stuff out there to play.  Now the only problem is where to get the money...

At this point, making generalizations about a person's life based on age is very difficult.  Most who were ten during the mid to late eighties did the same things for entertainment, as did those that were fifteen during the early to mid nineties.  Many of us have that commonality.  But a divide begins to appear around the end of high school, when we start breaking off to do our own things, which only widens as we grow older.  There just aren't too many situations that are the same now, with too many factors to take into consideration.  Is one married, divorced, with children or without, working or not, or in school?  And this all filters into our enjoyment of the summer and what we do to celebrate (if anything).

I find video gaming as an adult parent of two youngins' with a committed relationship to my wife to be very different than even when I only had one child.  Most free time has to be bought, usually with sleep, and anything that I don't want my kids to see (which is a fair amount these days) is saved for either the dark hours of late night or the wee hours of the early morning.  The real difficulty is balancing single player with multiplayer (local co-op).  Lately I've been into retro PC games, but most of them are not multiplayer, so that cuts out playing with my kids.  But now that it is summer, it is time to indulge in one of my favorite summer-flavored games, that being Boku No Natsuyasumi 4 for the PSP.

I always get a kick out of reactions people give me when I make this statement.  On one hand, you have the those that don't understand what I just said, and on the other you have those that know what the game (or series) is, but can't understand why someone who is not Japanese would want to play it.  To those in the former group, the game roughly translates to My Summer Vacation, and you play a little boy named Boku (a clever play on words, as boku translates to the first-person personal pronoun, I) who is taken to his Aunt and Uncle's coastal house during the summer in Japan.  The entire game has you controlling Boku as he explores the town collecting bugs, meeting people, and engaging in traditional Japanese-boy activities for the year (such as beetle fighting).  There are daily routines, such as in Shenmue, so you have to be home in time for meals as well as bed.  There is a story, and if one is skilled in the Japanese language, you might understand it, but alas I never have.  However, I have been content with tooling around the island, going swimming, catching bugs and entering them into Boku's bug diary, and generally just soaking in the atmosphere.  I have been told by others that this series is generally meant for Japanese men who wish to go on nostalgic trips, but I can't help but love this game (and the series as well).  Even though I am far removed from this culture, the near constant droning of the insects, the beautiful country atmosphere, and the innocent naivete that the main character possesses, just brings me back to a simpler time. 

Now are you ready for the oddest part?  There is not a video game to be seen in the entire game, even though it is set in 1985.  I've pondered the meaning of this truth for a while, and wondered exactly what it says about me.  Maybe even with all of my love of gaming traditions during different times of the year, all I really want is to tool aimlessly around the countryside, not noticing the heat or the bugs and just be a kid.  Maybe it is nostalgia that I'm really after, or maybe I simply love the game.

I'd like to thank those who have stuck it out to the end of this article.  Believe it or not, this article started out as a review of Boku No Natsuyasumi 4, but somehow mutated into...  this.  The more I thought about how to approach reviewing the game, the more I thought about the summer of 1987 and 1998.  But now that I've got that out of the way, what is summer to you?  Do you have any awesome summer-related memories (especially those of the gaming variety)?

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