Rohit Mordani’s Blog

It was a really long time ago when my cousin, Manish, actually came back from a vacation (from Lucknow - in Northern India ) and he told us about this cool gaming system that he had played while he was on vacation. He played Super Mario Brothers when he was in Lucknow. I had no idea what he was talking about. A few days later, we all came to know that a store in Shillong (yeah - thats the little town that I am from in North-East India) called “Lila Brothers / Super Bazaar” was actually renting out the “Nintendo Entertainment System” for Rs. 100 per day ! We were shocked - Even though we didn’t know what it was we still knew it was something really nice !

That was a lot of money for those days ! Anyway, somehow we got our parents to give us that money and we rented the NES for a night - of course it wasn’t a school night ! That night has changed my life forever - I know that sounds cliche but that has been the turning point in the gaming work of mine as far as I can remember !

When I played the game I was in shock ! We had NEVER played a game like that. We loved it. Prior to that, the only games we played were the single screen or dual screen black and white Nintendo games such as “Fire”, “Donkey Kong”, “Popeye”, “Snoopy Tennis” and at the arcade (which had 2 games) “Galaxian” and “Pac-Man” . Those were nice but nevertheless it was just some static sprites and nothing like this ! After that - any holidays we got were spent either trying to convince our parents to let us rent the NES or playing it !!

It was a while after that, when I finally got a ripoff of the NES - but it still had a good selection of games - all of which were NES games. I also had a cartridge converter that allowed me to insert NES cartridges to my system. You will laugh at me but the shape of this ripoff system was a red racer car !!

We all enjoyed playing games such as “Road Fighter”, “Excite Bike”, “Tiger heli”, “Contra”, “TMNT” and some other classics on this system !

Playing the NES was the first turn-around point in the gaming world of ours ! After that gaming went down considerably. We played games on the PC such as “Doom”, “Prince of Persia”, “Prince of Persia 2″, “Dune”. the graphics felt better than the NES and this was another step towards better gaming. It also introduced me to a series of First Person Shooters (FPS).

W hat really changed my gaming interests was the PS2 - I got that just over 2 years back - as a graduation gift from my brother. We were struggling to play madden NFL on our PCs with USB controllers before that. The PS2 allowed me to play a plethora of games with some excellent graphics ! I loved playing “Ratchet and Clank” - my first game on the PS2. I have also played (and finished) Prince of Persia 1, 2 & 3 ; God of War; Killzone; Madden NFL (nearly every year from the past 3 years).

This gaming experience has got me so interested that I bought a PSP on the day that it released. Games such as Killzone:Liberation have also shown how great “Third person shooters” can be ! My brother has also been a keen player in gaming and we have played Halo and Halo 2 on his XBox !

Enter the HD revolution and I got myself an XBox 360 - this is an amazing gaming system and the kind of games available for this system is unbelievable. Of course the first game that I played on this system was “Gears of War”. I also played Lost Planet. Gaming, HD and a strong Graphics Processor is a match made in heaven !!

To top it all off - and come around to the starting point - my brother got a Nintendo Wii. Nintendo is what started it and that is back where we are today ! Kind of reminds me of the saying - “Dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return”

EDIT: My friend Neeraj just reminded me of the times in LA where we played EA Cricket on the PC. This game is awesome and though it had a number of crazy key combinations to use to bat or bowl, we still loved it ! Thanks Neeraj for that. I bet there are more games that I have missed out. Please leave a comment for such games and I will edit this blog and add them !