I was never very heavily into games, because I could never afford them. My parents didn't spoil me, so I was left with the few choice video games I did have, and I came to appreciate them. On the rare occasion that I obtained a new game for keeps, I would play the living daylights out of it until I found absolutely everything, no matter how long it took. Donkey Kong Country 3 was a constant source of enjoyment for at least ten months when I was 11 and 12, if I recall correctly. As is with all games, I would beat it, keep that one file for my 100% attempt, and then start a fresh file. Every once in a while, I would find something in my new game, whether it was another DK coin or hidden Bonus barrel, that i couldn't remember seeing before. I would then proceed to see if I'd ever found it in my original game, and usually, I wouldn't have found it. Slow and steady progression finally reached its climax when the fourty-first DK coin was found, the secret submarine exposed and the Mother Banana Bird freed. 103%, over a course of an ungodly amount of hours.

I share this anecdote not because DKC3 was hard (fun, yes, but not "hard," not in the common sense of it), but because it's the clearest memory I have of finishing a game entirely by myself. No "handbooks," no Nintendo Power cheats, no internet walkthroughs, just me and the brat also known as my little sister. I finished the game in 1997, which was a landmark year, because it was the first year that the "big business" of games I talked about earlier started to show. And the one that stood out above all the others was Final Fantasy VII, which has time and time again been called the greatest game ever made. Whether it is or not is up for debate, but I doubt I'll ever truly know, because unbelievably, I missed that party, as well as many others, because I was narrow-minded at the time and thought it was a choice between only Nintendo and death. But that's in the past.

The next year, 1998, saw the release of the Nintendo 64's best game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I didn't even own a Nintendo 64 at the time it came out, but everyone else I knew seemed to own it, so in an ironic twist, I looked up things about the game on the internet so I'd know what they were talking about, and to maybe tell one of them something he didn't know. I actually got the game the following February, and coupled with my past memories of A Link to the Past and Link's Awakening, I dove headfirst into LoZ's new world, hardly reemerging for some time. However, I started to get stuck in some places, and lo and behold, I used what I remembered from the internet to figure some things out. Finally, I reached the Water Temple, and that inevitable missing key, and that was after all the other headaches, mostly having to do with the water levels and rooms uncovered by them. I did something I thought was exciting at the time: I logged onto the internet and found a rather low-quality FAQ (by today's standards), but it got me to where I wanted to get. However, this almost backfired, as I also read a strategy on how to beat Morpha, the temple's boss, and I beat it, only to die afterwards without saving. I panicked, because I was afraid to fight him again without consulting the walkthrough, which I hadn't saved. However, since I was still using a phone line at the time, and I wasn't allowed to tie up the phone, I fought Morpha without help. I beat it and moved on; crisis averted.

My realization that I'd become a chump was three years later, when the Zelda Oracle games came out for GBC. Sure enough, I wouldn't even play Seasons unless I had that stupid issue of Nintendo Power in front of me, guiding me. It stopped after level 4, so I continued on my own, warily. Constantly, I looked up strategy on the Internet for all sorts of reasons, ranging from I couldn't find the animal flute to I couldn't find my way through a forest. Somehow, I reached Seasons's end, and linked my game to Ages. Ages was a lot different, and somehow, I got through it more easily, but there was still way too many usages of the old Temple of 4 Seasons web site to figure out what I was missing. I cared way too much, and placed way too much importance on doing all the things Shdwrlm3 and AstroBlue did. And what did it get me? A game experience I found disappointingly lacking by the end. I'd become such a patsy to the free advice of the internet, two of the greatest GBC games lost their meaning on me.

And what did the big game companies begin realizing? They realized that the entire game world was filled with tools like myself who'd somehow been dumbed down, but more importantly, who weren't going to buy their games if they weren't easy enough. I'm at a loss when it comes to many of the games that were like this, because to be honest, I never experienced most of them, but I know they're out there. I'm actually taking liberty with this subject, because for all I know, I'm in a very small minority here. But I think my becoming a stooge in games is widespread; whether people realize it or not is something I don't know. We'll now skip ahead in time again to early 2003, to the reason I foolishly continue to hold on to only Nintendo.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, along with its Ocarina of Time & Master Quest bonus disc, was enough to get me to shell out for a Gamecube. Well, in actuality, it was my mother who did that. I'd buy my games with what little money I had from jobs that never lasted more than days. The Wind Waker became the latest victim to my toolness. I'd go maybe an hour at a time, or to get stuck and give up rather than keep looking for the answer. I'd developed the mentality of a scared little cretin. "Well, if I can't do it as well as the best players, there's no point." Man, I'd love to solve the problem of time travel so I could slap myself two years ago. Anyway, there were points in TWW when I didn't care about the halfwits on the internet and I just kept playing, and that felt so incredible because I didn't care. When the game finally started to feel like Zeldas of the past, I couldn't stop. After the point in the game when you find out Tetra is really Zelda, the only time I used an FAQ again was only for a couple of two-character dungeon puzzles and the trading sequence. But despite my desparation to love it like Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker holds much less for me, in part because again, I didn't do it on my own.

I also decided to buy all the Resident Evils, and those didn't give me that problem, mostly because I played those games with friends and collectively we knew where to go without any outside aid. (Resident Evil REmake remains possibly my favorite Cube game.) I then got a job I was able to hold on to, so my buying of game because more frequent, and so did The Problem.

Eternal Darkness, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Beyond Good & Evil were all games that scored very well, and I bought them based solely on that, not because I had any interest in them, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that I still haven't finished any of them as well. I truly want to, but I can't delve into any of them. No, my delving was reserved for two games I bought two days after Christmas in 2003: Metroid Prime and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell.

The geopolitical intrigue of Splinter Cell kept me entertained for the next month and a half, when I wasn't in school or playing NHL 2004. Once I finally reached the end and killed Nikoladze, the appreciation I had for it was something I hadn't felt in years, because it was done all by myself. Maybe it was because I felt I had a reason for continuing, and I didn't feel any "pressure" because the game had been out for months and everyone had already beaten it. It was at this time that the first glimmer of the idea that we'd all become suckers was dawning upon me. It would take me a year to actually realize where I'd gone oh so wrong.