Toys

A catalogue arrived in the mail this morning, from a Toy store that I occasionally buy things from.  They offer discounts on some games and things that other retailers don't so that's that main reason I am a customer, as for the rest of the catalogue 99% of it is irrelevant to me.  What I do find interesting however is the fact that it contains many of the toys and the types of games that I played with when I was a child.  I got my first PC when I was about 6 years old, an Amstrad CPC-464.  That was really around the time that I started to abandon toys generally and focus on technology.  Prior to age 6, most of the toys I played with as a kid were either construction based like Lego, puzzle based like a Rubik's Cube or jigsaws of which I had many, or they were designed for creating make believe worlds, like farming sets or motor cities where you created a world with people living in them going about their lives.

As I grew older and my fascination with technology grew, I got a lot of games consoles, most of which I would get a year or two after release.  I would come home from school, finish my homework and then sit for hours playing those consoles until dinner was ready.  My first console was a Sega Master System II with Alex Kidd in Miracle World built in - a game which to date I have never finished without the help of an emulator and save states.  That was also the first console where I was introduced to Sonic the Hedgehog.  Over the years I have played many different Sonic games, I still maintain the Master System version was the most difficult.  I eventually got into Nintendo consoles too with time and was introduced to Mario games too, and again the first games I played, the SNES All Stars collection and Super Mario World still remain to be my favourite games from the franchise, followed by Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube which I know is much maligned.

Liking games that didn't do that well or had poor critical response become something of a staple for me.  One of my favourite games for the Master System was Asterix and Obelisk, for the SNES it was the Addams Family, and for the PSX is was Casper - the version where you explored Whipstaff Manor solving puzzles.  Those games all represented puzzles, logic, reasoning, platforming, and exploration.  All of these things have stayed with me as influence over what types of games I am drawn to most.  Today one of the games I play most is Minecraft as it incorporates almost all of these elements in some way and provides you with the scope to create so much more.

Looking through the catalogue from this toy store however I do have to wonder how much the world has changed since I was a kid.  I don't have children myself and I don't know anyone close to me who does.  I can't really judge what it would be like raising a child today, but I would imagine there is much more pressure to introduce technology at a younger age.  I do wonder how I would have handled that as a kid, even with the limits of technology at the time when I was a child, I did have what I would consider an obsession with games for a time, where all I wanted to do was play them and nothing else.  Thankfully it wasn't really possible for me to do that in excess since I shared a bedroom and apart from the TV in the bedroom and the main TV in the living room there was nowhere else I could have played them - although for a time before we moved houses my Dad did build a sort of gaming grotto for me out of the unused space under the stairs.

Even as an adult I still have some of the physical toys I played with.  I still have Rubik's Cubes, 3x3x3 and 4x4x4 variants, although they aren't the originals from my childhood those were long lost.  I still have some of the teddies that I had when I was really young, mainly for sentimental reasons.  I still have a few of my consoles too but I don't think any of them work anymore except the more recent ones.  There is often the desire to buy all of those things again and hold onto them but if I did, they would take up a lot of space which I don't have - we live in a small house - and realistically I don't think I would actually use them enough to justify getting them, there would certainly be a novelty but I think it would wear off quite quickly and they would end up gathering dust as the originals had.

I find it fascinating when other people tell me what they held onto from their childhood, I've known people from either extremes, those that held onto everything and those that got rid of everything over the years.  There are some things I wish I had looked after better and still had but again that would mostly be for sentimental reasons, not for practical reasons.