So, since someone on my Twitter commented on how it was rather greedy that I had multiple handheld devices, I think it's best that people know why I actually have all these devices.
First off, when I was 6 years old, I asked for a GameCube for Christmas and instead my brother and I each received a GameBoy Advance. They were the limited edition silver ones, and since I was only six years old, that thing faced much torment: it fell down the stairs, got taken to the beach, and was roughly treated as back then I didn't know how to care for expensive devices. When I sold it, it was heartbreaking to here that my pride and joy was worth only $8, but I convinced myself I would enjoy the GameBoy Advance SP even more.
I was about 8 at the time when I finally got the new GameBoy Advance SP, shortly after my Mom's then boyfriend won a couple hundred bucks at the casino and used it to finally buy us a GameCube for Christmas. I spent many a year playing Pikmin on it. I still get urges to play Pikmin every once in a while, but it was something I had to give up for newer systems eventually.
At the end of grade 2, my Mom decided to move all the way up to the countryside near Ottawa, about a 6-8 hour drive from where we lived previous. It was an easy move since I didn't really have any friends after only living in Cambridge for half of a year, so I didn't mind it much. Actually, I welcomed the move. I had my GameBoy for the drive, but the power cord for the GameCube got lost in the move and we didn't get another for quite a while. We had to live in a trailer for a while and sometimes slept in my Mom's boyfriend's parent's basement, as the house we were building was on their property. My Mom's boyfriend...I think it'd be easier to refer to him by his name, Joe, even if I hate saying it...had brought along his Xbox and I got accustomed to playing that until we finally got the cable for our GameCube.
Back at my Dad's house, Teri's (my stepmother's) grandparents bought us a PS2 Slim for Christmas. (I think it was during grade 3) and it was probably the nicest system I had ever seen. It was a lot smaller and lighter than the GameCube, but there was one problem: we got barely any good games for it, so we never really played it. After we got about 6 games (Spongebob Squarepants Move Game, some Scooby Doo game, two Harry Potter games, and a couple Eye Toy games that didn't work very well) Teri decided we had enough games to keep us amused and stopped everyone she knew as well as everyone my Dad knew from getting us games for the system. Later on they bought Singstar games for each other and took over the PS2, so I don't have that with me anymore, even though it belongs to both my brother and I.
Right at the end of grade 3, my Mom and her boyfriend broke-up, and instead of getting to go to Playdium for the first time on a year-end trip with my class, I got to endure the same 6-8 hour car ride I had to take every other weekend to see my Dad in Oakville, except this time we were loaded down with all our stuff and headed for a new apartment in the neighborhood. Sometime during grade 4 my Mom got a new boyfriend who ended up buying us our own original Xbox, despite the fact that the Xbox 360 had already been out for a while. It came used with a couple really bad games, and we ended up buying a couple really good third-person shooters when my Mom finally caved-in and decided we could try some 'M' games. The GameCube was still going strong and the Xbox worked fine so we were kept busy for quite a while. I took a huge liking to the Grand Theft Auto series, played Burnout 3 Takedown constantly, and Driver: Parallel Lines was fun to play as well. I liked them most of all because of the variety of vehicles and the variety of different scenarios in which they could be used. The shooting aspect really didn't keep my interest much at that point. We also got DS Lites, but they mostly came out of our own pockets.
In grade 5 we moved in with my Mom's boyfriend Mike to save us having to pay rent on our apartment. My brother and I no longer had to share a room, and we had the entire basement to ourselves for our video games and other nonsense. We also had a really nice desktop computer in the living room that I liked to play RollerCoaster Tycoon and such on, which I became addicted to back in Ottawa when I only had one friend that I barely ever got to hang out with. 45-minute car rides to school every day meant I needed something more than just my DS for entertainment. I soon came to be interested in music a lot more, and my Dad gave me his old MP3 player for my birthday so I had something to listen to music with in the car. The MP3 player died shortly afterwards, and I was distraught.
The summer in-between grades 5 and 6 wasn't much to remember. I spent most of the time going to Christian summer camps and playing on the dirt mountain across the road from our new house. We were now living in the Binbrook countryside within a newer development of houses. It was different being in the Hamilton-Wentworth District, but grade 6 turned out alright nonetheless. My teacher wasn't too bright and as usual I was sort of a teacher's pet, but I found it to be more annoying than tolerable that year. I was getting bored of my outdated gaming consoles and after hearing so much about the Wii, I wanted it so badly. My Dad and stepmother played a trick of buying us, as a family, a Wii, and my brother and I were only allowed to play it every other weekend when we were over there. But like the PlayStation 2, the Wii got boring quick when the only games my stepmother would buy for it were basically the ones with "Wii" in the title such as Wii Play and Wii Fit. She even disapproved of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (at the same time as I was getting into a huge Halo phase) and wouldn't even get us that. Since my friend Brock was talking about Halo 3 so much at school, I decided I wanted an Xbox 360 instead. So Mike finally decided that he'd get us either an Xbox 360 or a PS3, and I instantly chose Xbox 360. I had to part with my old Xbox to put towards the cost of it, so a friend bought it off me and we both went off to the store with my Mom and bought the Xbox 360.
Since my second cheap Mp3 player had broken and I was on my third, and since the DS was getting barely any new games, I traded in my DS and got a PSP. I had to get a used PSP 1000 even though the PSP 2000 was already out because my Mom refused to put money towards it and I didn't get any allowance at the time. The entire cost of the system had to be covered by selling all of my Nintendo handheld stuff, so I sold it all and got the PSP, a memory card, and Need For Speed Carbon. Eventually the analog stick died and another friend offered to buy the PSP and the game with it for $100, and my Mom agreed to put forth the difference to get me a new PSP Slim. That summer I took the PSP everywhere, all the way up to New York City and back by car, and even into grade 7 I still had it. The GameCube was still interesting from time to time but my main focus was on the Xbox 360, and I pretty much refused to play anything at my Dad's house as I had a limit of 30 minutes to an hour a day for all electronic devices. I spent most of my time reading books and finding other ways to be anti-social, so it still didn't work out the way my stepmother planned.
My PSP Slim was my pride and joy at that point. I would use it for music, for games, for videos...pretty much everything. I had Pandora'd it and bought two 4GB memory sticks for it. One day I sneaked out of school to go to lunch at Subway with some friends, as my Mom hadn't yet decided on whether she'd give me written permission to go off school property or not, and my friends invited me. I am not sure whether I took my PSP with me and accidentally left it on a table while ordering my food and forgot it, or whether I left it in my locker and had it stolen as someone had yelled my locker combo out in the locker room a week or so before, but when I came back I knew for sure it was stolen. I was a little heartbroken, and by that I mean the tears started flooding out as soon as I got home. I don't think it helped much that Kelsey, who at the time hated me, said it was a good thing I lost it and it served me right (she didn't even know about me sneaking out for lunch).
That Christmas my Mom got me a new PSP 3000 as my big Christmas present to replace the one I had lost. I loved it to death but it just wasn't the same...it wasn't Pandora-able like my other one, and soon my brother bought his own PSP 1000 and I traded him for it. On a trip to Florida that summer, the flight attendant spilled coke all over the PSP 3000 and some of the buttons stopped working, so my Mom got my brother a second PSP to replace his loss. At some point something happened with his DS Lite as well and I never saw that again. I think he sold it. He also lost his new PSP and never replaced it.
The GameCube had a terrible time in our new house. First the awesome Madcatz turbo controllers got attacked by a sewage flood and had to be thrown out. Then the system itself decided to stop reading disks and the friend that bought my Xbox off me (Delroy) came over and we both smashed the thing to death on the driveway since it was less expensive to buy a new one as opposed to getting it fixed. But it turned out that Brock had his own GameCube lying around that he never used anymore since he had a Wii and an Xbox 360, and he gave me it to replace my old one for free.
Later on I ended up selling it and trading my Pikmin games to Scott along with a wireless controller and in return got Guitar Hero for PS2 and a wired guitar controller. I was borrowing Delroy's PS2 at the time and enjoyed playing Guitar Hero so much that I kinda got addicted to music games.
For Christmas between grades 7 and 8 I got an iPod Touch 8GB instead of the iPod Nano 8GB I had asked for. Since my Mom couldn't afford an iPod Touch I asked for the Nano, but I had a feeling she'd learn about the recent craze over iPod Touches and try to find one on sale somewhere instead. It was an amazing piece of technology and I enjoyed it up until just after this Christmas when I was fed up with it being unable to handle half the games I purchased for it and decided to sell it, among other things, and get an iPhone. A while back I had traded my old PSP 1000 and all the games and accessories I had accumulated for a PSP Go on Kijiji, so I decided to sell my iPod Touch through there. However, it took forever for my Mom to decide whether she'd allow me to sell the iPod or not, by which time all of the ads for cheap iPhones had vanished and all of the more expensive ones had taken their places. While browsing Kijiji for other things I might like, I spotted an ad for a guy selling a practically brand new DSi in limited edition blue with five built-in games for $80. I sprung for it and used the money I got for the iPod Touch to buy it as well as Pokemon HeartGold and Super Scribblenauts. I wasn't disappointed by the lack of an iPod too much as I had won a fourth-gen iPod Nano not too long before by selling the most chocolates in a fundraiser out of the grades 6-8 in our school.
And about a year or two ago, somewhere between all the iPod commotion, I convinced my brother that'd he'd rather get an old PS3 Phat rather than get himself a new PSP with his birthday money. He leaped for it and I contributed some of my old PSP games and a small sum of money. My Mom was furious that we decided to spontaneously buy a game system during one shopping trip and apparently cost her another $100 when she was actually the one who not only prompted us to get the 60GB model instead of the 20GB or 40GB models, but she also expected us to get a warranty, and when we came up short for the warranty and the bigger-sized hard drive, my Mom decided to dish out $100 towards it so that the ridiculous amount of time we spent in the store choosing consoles and trading stuff in wouldn't have been an embarrassing waste of time. She was extremely mad at me for a couple days until I was able to finally make her realize that it was her own mistake that caused us to be short so much money, and it was her own choice to then put forth the money to close the gap. Shortly after getting it I ended up playing it more than I did the Xbox 360 and my brother didn't really like the PS3 much, so I gave him half my game collection and handed over the Xbox 360 while I got in return the PS3 and it's single red controller. Since then I have souped it up by upgrading it to 200GB with my old and dead laptop's hard drive a few months before the power cord ripped and I had to get a new laptop for my schoolwork.
For grad this year my brother wanted a DS Lite because I had so many devices still and he had lost or sold all of his in exchange for money to buy more games for his Xbox 360. So he asked for a DS Lite as an early grad gift. I was a little pissed off because all I got was Green Day Rock Band for my grad gift, and had to wait until like a month after grad to finally receive it, but I played it cool. When we got to GameStop to buy it for him one month before grad, all they had in terms of used DS Lites was a pink one. At that point I was fed up with my brother's reluctance to just accept that he'd have to put up with another colour, and I offered that he could have my DSi if he gave me the DS Lite. He took my DSi happily and I took the used pink DS Lite begrudgingly. I got my Xperia Play shortly afterward as the smartphone had just come out in Canada exclusively for Rogers customers, so my Mom got me that and gave my brother my old phone for his birthday, and my Dad passed his plan on to my brother.
So between my Xperia Play, my iPod Nano, my PSP Go, my DS Lite, and my PS3, I can't exactly afford a lot of new things trying to keep up with getting at least one game for each every once in a while, but I don't really care. Pokemon has followed me all throughout my childhood, and I can't give up my DS Lite for that reason. I also accumulated a GameBoy Color over time which I also use to play all of my old Pokemon games, including my original Gold Version, the first game I ever played on GameBoy. My PSP Go can't go either, as it carries a long chain of history with it and still has Spyro for PS1 on it, the first purchase I ever made online back on my original PSP 1000, the game that I first played on a PS1 at a babysitter's house back when I lived in Cambridge. My iPod Nano has switched ownership between my brother and I when he didn't have an iPod and since I already had an iPod Touch my Mom suggested I give it to him, even though it was the first thing I had ever won and didn't want to let go of it. I eventually gave in to that, of course, and the back of the iPod is all messed up and scraped because he doesn't take care of things. My phone is a partial replacement for my laptop while that remains hooked up to an external monitor at home due to a shattered screen and the lack of money to have it repaired. My Xperia Play is much more personal than my laptop, and I use it for my email, my camera, my music, my social networking, keeping in contact with my friends no matter where they are, and it even replaces my handheld gaming systems when I don't feel like lugging them around in my pockets but still need a quick fix to keep me entertained on the bus. And my PS3 is my main gaming system...not as special as my more personal devices that I take everywhere with me, but certainly still up there somewhere. It has been my main source of entertainment for a long time, introduced me to entirely new ways to game, and it doesn't pick my pocket for any of the services it has to offer. It's given me Netflix for cuddling with a plush and watching, even if I originally used a free trial and now use a friend's account from time to time. It's even given me a bit of a social experience with it's free online play and it's various different ways to keep in touch with friends over PSN. And even though the thing is probably like 5 years old, I have never had a single problem with the system.
So, if you were wondering why I have so many handheld devices, this is it. They carry a lot of history from throughout my childhood. They were huge outlets for me whenever people on the bus or at school would bully me or simply even ignore me in the past and sometimes still in the present. They were things I could always keep with me and take wherever I go, always having them there to fall back on since my Mom wasn't always there to fall back on and my Dad hasn't connected well with me since he married Teri. As geeky and depressing as it sounds, they're closer to me than my friends and family, and I honestly think I'd feel less sorrow if my Mom died than if I was mugged and had my smartphone or something else stolen. While my Mom was busy getting new boyfriends all the time and moving between so many houses, my electronics stayed constant unless I wanted them to change.
That's about all I have to say on the matter. If you actually read the entire thing and still have questions about something, whether it's related to just the video games or not, go ahead and post your question in the comments section below.
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