I’ve got a pretty long-standing love affair with video games. Although I liked playing them as much as most kids of the 80s, I think I can trace the obsession back to the fall of 1993. I was in sixth grade, and my friend Cliff bought Final Fantasy (the orig) for the NES at a garage sale for like $15. We played it for like ten hours straight – first at his house, and then Cliff coming back to my house to sleep over so we could keep playing. Computer games were a pretty big constant in my house with my programmer brother and former computer salesman father, but when I got the SNES (and later, the Playstation), my obsession exploded. If it was made by Squaresoft and released in America, I probably played and beat it at some point between 1995 and 1999.

This was more or less pre-Internet. Admittedly, I lived in a stronghold of tech nerds, so we had a modem back in 1990, when there was nothing to see, and I think I registered my first Yahoo! mail account in 1996. But when I say pre-Internet, I mean Internet as we know it now, a well-organized resource with thousands of people contributing information for no apparent gain. Which is to say, I beat most, if not all of these games, without consulting some kind of strategy guide or walkthrough. I believe I used to pride myself on the fact that I could make it through these games without resorting to buying the $15 guide most of my friends relied on. I’m pretty sure I considered that cheating.

Now? I’m a cheater. I regularly consult GameFAQs when playing new games if I get stuck for more than 15 minutes. I have the page for FFXII bookmarked so I know I won’t miss any important items and whatnot and have to go back to get them later. And still I miss things. I recently replayed Lucasarts’ exemplary biker adventure game Full Throttle and found myself going to the online guides with an annoying frequency because I forgot things like which stone to kick to open the secret door. This from a guy who once spent FIVE HOURS wandering around the completely wrong part of Chrono Trigger because he couldn’t find the right way to go (although, this did lead to me getting the Rage Band extremely early, which made Crono a total badass for the first half of the game [this is NOT prompted recall, people; this is what I think about when I think about Chrono Trigger]).

In the mind of my 15 year old self, I’m a cheater. But I’ll be straight with you: I don’t have time to play it straight any more. If I waste two hours trying to figure out something that I could’ve looked up, that’s my night. Between improv and derby, I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, certainly not like I had it coming out my ears when I was a teenager with no discernable hobbies other than being a huge nerd. Am I as satisfied as I once was when I beat a game by using my own grey matter? No. I’ll admit it. Every time I check one of these guides, I can feel the value of beating it become that much more hollow. I wish this were not the case, but it most certainly is. I feel a deep personal disappointment when I can’t figure something out in a game. But what can I say, other than I’m not fifteen any more? I have a job. And a life. And Things to Do. Things that are much, much more important than video games.

So to my younger self: I’m sorry. We’re using walkthroughs now, and we won’t necessarily go back and get every possible ending for a game. We’re also much cooler now, and sometimes girls are excited to talk to us. I’m saying we got more than we gave up, my friend.