So it all began when I was kid. My brother has asthma from birth, so he wasn’t allowed to play outdoor games because it could lead to asthma attack. As a child my brother used to game on the Playstation 1, and then as a kid I would love to play with my brother. Games like Tekken 3 and Brian Lara Cricket were favorites back then. We used to play lots of games but I remember only those two in particular. We even used to play on cassette consoles, the ones with 100 games in one. Above all we used to love playing Mario.
Then the Playstation 2 came out and we used to play games at a nearby Gaming Cafe. We spent hours playing playing GTA: San Andreas, Smack Down, WWE RAW, etc.
Then my father realized that we both were spending way too much time at the Game Zone. So he purchased us a Playstation 2. I used to hate playing missions based games like Call Of Duty and Medal Of Honor. I used to hate it because neither did they have Undertaker nor Free Roam! Sounds funny, right? But I used to love playing rounds of deathmatch against my brother and his friends. Soon, we got so addicted to it and ended up spending whole nights playing these games. Grenade kills felt so cool back then.
Sadly our extensive usage of the console lead to a broken lens inside. We have to wait for 5-6 months to get it repaired, because I live in a town where there was no Sony Store back then. When it was repaired we put were back with our boots on the ground.
Then the Playstation 3 came out, and we were blown away by the graphics. We had to buy a whole new TV just so we could play games on the Playstation 3, as our older TV didn’t have HDMI input support. Soon after our final exams got over and we were free to play unrestricted on our beloved console.Obviously, we pushed it too far and burned the power adapter.
We were only able to get a temporary fix done for it from an unauthorized repair shop, and it died soon after.
And after that my parents never allowed us to buy another console. Luckily, a couple of years later, we got the Xbox 360, along with the Kinect, as a gift from our grandmother. We loved the console, even the Kinect. Playing Fighters Uncaged and Kinect Adventures was too much fun.
And then Grand Theft Auto V was released. We pre-ordered it. I failed my upcoming exams.
My parents were pissed, and forbade us to buy any more games. We started saving money and buying games in secret. I was almost like a smuggling racket. We would hide games in our rooms, away from our parents.
Soon after, my eyesight started getting weak. The doctor said it was because of me spending too much time in front of a screen playing video games. I got specs, and wasn’t allowed to play as many video games any more.
I passed school, studied Computer Engineering. New consoles had come around by the time I had was in college.
So we decided to get PS4 but my parents refused. They even taunted us “Abhi tak bacche ho kya?” (Are you guys still kids?!).
My brother then suggested that we get a PC and tell the parents that we needed it for projects and stuff. I didn’t want to get a PC, since I didn’t enjoy PC Gaming at the time. My brother was stubborn about it, and got himself a gaming laptop. I never got the chance to play on it much, since he moved to another city to pursue further studies.
It wasn’t until he returned and I played NFS Rivals on his laptop that I was blown away by how beautiful the graphics looked, especially in comparison to the graphics on my Xbox 360. I immediately asked my parents for a gaming laptop, stating programming reasons as to why I needed. It was a GT940MX powered system, fairly good for games at the time. I got Just Cause 3, Battlefield Hardline, Call Of Duty Ghosts and a few other games.
I was having some issues running particular games, like Just Cause 3, and that’s the first time I reached out to the folks at Gaming Central. They suggested that I always check minimum system requirements before I bought a game. While it might sound like pretty obvious advice, for someone who had been playing on consoles all their life, that was really meaningful and I appreciated it a lot.
However, I was still getting some mixed results with game performance, and that’s when a friend suggested that I crack the games and play them to see if they would work on my laptop. That was a big mistake. I was addicted to playing games, and would download and finish them in a few days. There was no way I could afford all the games I wanted to play. I went down the rabbit hole of pirating games.
Till date I have completed over 81 games, of which around 30 were pirated. I finished up all the remaining games and decided to move on to Origin Access. I made a list of all the games I had pirated and have started buying them.
Now when I complete a game, I screenshot the end credits and post them to Instagram with a small caption of my impressions about it. My friends ridiculed me about it, making fun of me for still playing video games. I tell them that video games are my biggest passion and feel free to block me if you don’t wish to see my posts. It’s weird how gaming is still considered a childish or wasteful hobby.
I want to share my love of games with more people, and tell them that it’s not just for kids.
Thank you for reading!
Aditya Pahilwani – Facebook
