In 1993, my parents decided to emigrate to Adelaide, Australia, and start a new life for us. I never really knew the actual, proper reason for it, it was always just explained to me as "wanting a better life".
We arrived on April 19th, 1994, which was coincidentally also my 7th birthday. The place they put us in for the first year of our new Australian life was this isolated complex of near-identical units called "Pennington Migrant Centre". There were other families there, many from Russia, and many with kids of their own who would become my friends.
The day after we arrived, my parents took me to the city to explore and to shop. One of the things they bought was a Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES, for my birthday. By this point in time, the NES was in its twilight years, and the SNES was definitely out. Not knowing anything about video game console generations, my parents bought me the cheaper console. Hey, they all do the same thing, right?
I didn't care. I was happy. Overjoyed, even.
Along with the console, my dad and I picked out three games. I think we picked them just because their covers looked cool/interesting. We would come to love two of them, and regret buying the other.
Super Turrican
Super Turrican was awesome. At the time I was hugely into robots and transformers and just dudes who were like, half machine, so I think it was probably I who picked this game. The game was a hard-as-nails platformer, sort of like a lesser-known Metroid. I think Turrican could even turn into a ball as well.
Controlling a robotic badass (presumably named Turrican), you traversed a weird world full of metal hands that floated in the air and tried to smash you, as well as all manner of other bizarre enemies. It was very cool, but also very hard. I could not get past the first level, so my dad had to take over playing the game.
Something else about this game was that the levels went almost as high vertically as they did horizontally. This actually caused my dad and I to draw up maps of the levels on A4 paper. I don't think we ever finished Turrican, maybe because we got stuck.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
This game. This game totally ruled. I also picked this game because at the time the Turtles were my heroes. This game gets talked about very negatively these days, especially when people compare it to the later NES turtles games, which were more traditional, easier, scrolling brawlers. But to me, this game was fucking awesome.
You controlled the turtles on their quest to stop Shredder from doing... something, and also I think Splinter was kidnapped, I dunno. The plot didn't matter. What did matter was the fact that you were the turtles, you fought some downright bizarre and imaginative enemies (99% of which were made up and not from the series, but I didn't care), and the game was god-damn hard. If you've played this game, you would remember the dam-swimming bomb-disarming level, where everything you touched would hurt you and you also had a timer to race against. Nasty.
My dad and I got pretty obsessed with finishing this game. We actually got into the habit of leaving our NES on overnight, because I don't think it had a save or a password feature. One time, a couple of my Russian friends were at my house, and one of them wanted to play a game so he turned off the NES. I cried for hours. We had maybe two levels to go...
Dad and I wanted a memento of our time with this game so we began to record our progress on VHS. I think this VHS still exists, in a dusty corner of a cupboard in my mum's house somewhere.
And yes, we eventually did finish it. And it was good.
Elite
Elite was the game that we regretted buying. I think my dad picked it. I know the game has been lauded for its intricate portrayal of space trading and combat, and I think dad even tried to play it alone for a while, but I was having none of it. "It's just two colours!" I remember saying.
We only ever owned these three games on our first console, but we definitely used to rent a whole lot more. A rental that I hold in really high regard was "A Boy and his Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia". It was about a boy and his blob, and how they deal with the trouble on the blob's home planet, Blobolonia. I remember actually being emotionally touched by the boy's friendship with his friend, who would follow him anywhere. Also the concept of feeding jelly beans to your blob and your blob reacting differently to each flavour was a very novel concept in platformers -- up until then I was used to "A is Jump and B is Attack".
My mum and dad would take me sometimes to the local Foodland supermarket, and while they were collecting groceries, would leave me alone with the sole arcade machine at the front of the store -- motherfuckin' "Street Fighter II". I remember being wowed by this game -- smooth, colourful graphics, amazing looking characters, the exclusivity of having to pay a dollar to play. I think I got to play only a couple of times, and both times I chose E. Honda for some reason. The only way I would win is by doing that thing where he moves his hand really fast over and over again.
Another thing I recall from this time, in a similar vein, is what my parents used to do when they would go shopping at Port Adelaide. They would leave me in this small, privately owned computer store for at least an hour, to play on the computers there while they went about their business. There was only a handful of computers there, and not that great a selection of games -- the only one I distinctly recall was a collection of Monty Python minigames. The visits to that store stopped after one fateful day, in which one of the sales assistants physically chased after my parents and me after they picked me up, and said something to the effect of "We are not a daycare. Don't come back".
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