One random day, I bought my first Saturn game ( Panzer Dragoon) a few months ahead of buying the console. I could only stare longingly at all the store displays that carried video games, and my coveted Saturn. At the Saturn’s launch, I was still young enough that I had no steady income of my own. This continued on throughout the Saturn era. This started a trend for me – it was months before young, no-income me could scrounge up the $14.99 to buy my very first game with my own money (the criminally underrated World Court Tennis, if you are curious), but when I finally bought it… the ride home from the store was another session of reading and re-reading the manual, cover to cover.Ī sophisticated manual, compared to earlier-generation offerings. Unable to contain my excitement, I did the next best thing to actually playing the Turbo – I DEVOURED every single line, screenshot, and drawing of the Keith Courage manual. I couldn’t play it right away – there were other folks opening presents, the lone family TV was in use, and there was supper to be had.
He had no idea what to get my younger brother and I, so he took his best guess… and that Christmas day, I unwrapped a TurboGrafx-16 complete with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones! Getting a Nintendo NES or a SEGA Master System was out of the question, even though I had friends who had both – until one Christmas, when an uncle came from out-of-town to spend the holidays with us. As a youngster, my parents didn’t approve of video games – I got the classic ‘games will rot your brain’ dose of parental sensibility.