MY character

More than ten years ago I remember seeing a certain ad for an accessory for the SEGA Genesis. I can’t recall what the name of the product was, not even clear on what it did exactly, but I remember it offered the possibility to save your game characters and take them with you. At that moment my mind went on this trip about being able to save your character and play it in other games. Keep in mind I was a kid then.

It was pretty much hours of fantasizing. “What if I could take this guy and play it on that game?” I wondered. Take a second and think of a situation where this would not kick ass. What if I could load Sonic The Hedgehog into Street Fighter? Better yet! Mortal Kombat! Of course we all know this is not possibility. It would be impossible to program every game to be able to accept every kind of character. I figured that out that same day, duh!

Fast forward to the 90s. I gawk at the concept of M.U.G.E.N. I see glorious “Sonic VS Mario” fights. I was right, it DOES kick ass to bring characters into other games. Of course in this case whoever did that had to reprogram the characters to fit in a fighting game engine, and was probably violating all kinds of laws, but that’s not my point.

When the Playstation came out, it faced the challenge of not being able to save your game into CDs, for that they invented the memory card. By now you should have figured out this is a spinoff from the previous article. I would scan through magazines waiting for the chance to see my dream come true; a game in which you could save your character to the memory card to play in another game. To this day I have seen no such thing. That’s one of the reasons I cried when the Dreamcast died. I knew the promise of the VMU and the Naomi board died as well.

Character customization is a big deal nowadays (especially since the advent of MMOGs) as well as cross-genre sequels. I hope the dimwits at Silicon Valley eventually put 1 and 1 together. Maybe I like this custom character so much I’d like to see how it does in this other game. Maybe after I get my “guy” to level 900 I’ll get tired of your RPG. Maybe I don’t want to buy that sequel cuz I don’t feel like starting over. Maybe I should go back to bed. *yawn*