Sunday, September 12, 2010

How I got Started

Hi all.



Well let's kick this thing off with a little introduction to how I got started with mainstream gaming, which was pretty much all there was at the time this saga begins. I began gaming on the Atari 2600 when I

was in high school, back then many of the games had pretty good sound cues

that actually meant something because of the limitations on graphics at the

time. This made for some really great games that could be learned fairly easily even by a totally blind person which I am if you wanted to put the time and effort

into it. I first saw the 2600 while staying over at a friend's house and we stayed up playing “combat” until all hours. I was hooked. I still own two 2600 systems and a lot of games, not sure how many at the moment I've lost count. I progressed through the atari computers of the early to mid 80's, the 400, 800, 800xl and 130xe. There were quite a few games that could be played by us on these too. I experimented with doing some programming, however with no speech access whatsowever it was simply too difficult to do anything really long or complex, although I do

remember sitting up nights and entering many a BASIC program out of some of

the old mags that I had access to. I actually have a programming reference

manual in Braille around here still, and I have an Atari 800, an 800xl, and

a 130xe around here along with numerous peripherals and games for them. But back to gaming.

With the advent of the early Nintendo systems which is what we had where I

lived from the late 80's to early 90's I found that gaming access was far

more limited than before. More emphasis was starting to be placed on graphics and the sound cues that were there grew less and less meaningful. For that reason I became somewhat dissolutioned and frustrated with mainstream gaming and pretty much gave up on it for a few years.



In the late 90's or maybe around 2000, I started reading about the Atari

Lynx which was the first color handheld system of its day and, like many

Atari products was extremely advanced and ahead of its time but failed due

to poor advertising on Atari's part. I picked one up off of ebay with maybe a dozen games and started experimenting with it. I still have this system as well.

Gaming access was somewhat mixed. While I can and do have fun with a few of the games that I have for the Lynx, Switchblade II, asteroids, atari pinball and

roadblasters come to mind, many are pretty much not playable for us or at

least I haven't figured them out yet. It's still a really cool system though

and I still get it out from time to time.



In the last two or three years I've really gotten back into mainstream

consoles with a vengeance thanks in no small part to some of the folks on the BlindGamers list, you know who you are and if you're reading this I say thanks again. I've picked up a Sega Gennisis, a psp, then a ps2, and most recently a ps3 with of course games for all of them. It is really great to see the resurgence of meaningful sound cues in many of the modern games, it's like the good old days in many waysexcept the sounds themselves are of course much much better than they were

back then. My ps2 is currently on loan to another blind friend who I am

teaching about gaming. He is a formerly sighted guy who used to really love

gaming and had pretty much thought that he couldn't do it since losing his

sight. My psp is pretty much inseparable from me it's always in my backpack

with its charger and games. I'm still just getting started with the ps3 but

so far it is the bomb! Thusfar, I would have to say that my favorite game on the system is probably Super Streetfighter IV because of the incredible variety of audio cues that are present in the game. In fact this game is 100% playable without sight which is not all that common if one is willing to put the time and effort into learning it. This is as good a time as any to mention that no mainstream games are accessible in the strict sense of the word. Menus and moves need to be memorized or written down and there is a great deal of trial and error involved in learning the games. If you are blind or visually impaired and are considering getting into mainstream gaming it is important to be aware of this from the getgo. If you don't have quite a bit of patience, at least a halfway decent memory and enjoy fooling around with things in general then mainstream gaming may not be for you.



Now even though this blog is mainly going to be about mainstream gaming I will say a few words about audio games. I think the first audio game I discovered was grizzly gulch from Bavisoft. This game is really quite fun and the sound work is

extremely good, I only find it very sad that their support is so poor

especially recently. After that I believe I got the first Troopanum from

BSC Games which led to my friendship with Justin Daubenmire, the president and founder of the company and my starting to work with BSC Games and Blindsoftware.com. Over the years I have also picked up all of the GMA games from gmagames.com although I have frankly never done all that great at Lone wolf, a World War II submarine simulator. I also have Rail Racer from blindadrenaline.com when I get in a mood for some driving and racing, although again I have just not put the time into this one to get good enough to want to compete online all that often which is really one of the highlights of the game. Due to my spending what leisure time I have working on learning my mainstream games, mainly my Playstation 3 titles, accessible games have kind of got put on the back burner at least for now.



Well that pretty much covers my gaming experience both in the mainstream and

the audio gaming genres. Feel free to comment with any questions or experiences that you may have.



Game on!