Editor’s Note: The Post-Journal was lucky enough to have once published a monthly column by Nick Dean called Nerding Out, a roundup of comics book breakthroughs and cinema-related content. This column will not feature anything about comic books or superheroes but it will warrant the Nerding Out title.

Let me begin with this, just in case you’re expecting an article you can relate to – I enjoy video games.

I’m not sure when it started with me, but my earliest recollection of playing a video game was playing Zelda on a 19-inch television in my parent’s bedroom. It was on some sort of rolling cart, a fancy entertainment center back in the early 90s, I suppose.

The Nintendo Entertainment System

Let me backtrack one second to the beginning. I remember, almost as if it was an out-of-body experience, screaming with joy the Christmas I opened my Nintendo Entertainment System. It was the Christmas of ’90 if memory serves. I can’t remember asking Santa for it, or if I knew I wanted it but wasn’t expecting it, I just remember opening it and freaking out. According to Wikipedia, it was $89 at the time – chump changed compared to the cost of consoles in 2016 – games alone today typically begin at $59, for perspective. Although after inflation, the cost for the system in ’92 was the equivalent of about $450 today. Pretty much spot on considering new systems today start at $399.

The system came with Duck Hunt, a shooting game that used a receiver and wired gun to simulate the shooting of ducks as they flew out from the bushes at the bottom of the screen. (Could you imagine if they sold a toy gun shooting game today!?) Crazy technology considering its predecessor was the Atari, a system that offered games with no real end, the Indiana Jones game comes to mind. Nevertheless, it was the Nintendo that had me hooked on videogames.

There were no Gamestops, Wal-Marts or online stores back in the day. I remember going to Toys ‘R’ Us when I had earned enough money to buy a new game. I loved grabbing that slip of paper and bringing it to the front counter so that a store clerk could go in the back and grab the physical copy of the game. It made the purchase a memorable one. I remember when I purchased games like Tecmo Super Bowl, an absolute classic that still resonates with my generation to this day; and Kung Fu, a game that consisted of only five floors or levels, each with a different “boss” at the end. It was so simple yet I played it constantly.

I was an outdoor kid, don’t think I wasn’t, but if kids in the neighborhood weren’t home or in the mood for street hockey or football, I was playing a video game.

The years after getting my Nintendo have become a blur. I know I played it for a few years, but my next memory is of being at my best friend’s house playing his Sega. Like many commercial products, there are different companies manufacturing similar products. This was same in the case for videogame consoles. There was Nintendo and Sega in the early 90s and a few, less popular systems like the Turbografix-16 and the Neo-Geo.

The Sega Genesis was 16-bits, compared to the Nintendo which only displayed 8-bit graphics. I remember them each having value in their own right. Nintendo had Mario and Sega had Sonic the “Sega” sound at the opening of one of their games is forever engrained in my memory. But this is also about the time when video game companies began using buzzword such as “graphics” and “processing” to push their new consoles.

When I received my Nintendo, the Super Nintendo wasn’t far behind. It was a more powerful system with new games and no backward compatibility. I was content with what I had, but I remember some of my friends always seemed to have the latest and the greatest when it came to videogames. I didn’t mind, I would just go to their house all the time anyway.

Sony Playstation

I used to love getting things in the mail, I think all kids do. When I was playing Nintendo I had an Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine subscription. The magazines would give you some hints, codes for games and reviews of upcoming titles before they released. It was in this magazine I remember reading about the Sony Playstation. I had lagged behind at this point, owning only the original Nintendo Entertainment System while my friends enjoyed the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo consoles.

I read article after article about the system, saved enough money and purchased it in ’95. I finally had the latest and the greatest and great it was. It was the first to use a CD-Rom drive for games and was 32-bits, 16 more than the Sega and 24 more than the Nintendo. There’s a theme developing here.

I loved that system. I played it so much it would overheat. A design flaw, I’m sure, but I would have to actually tilt the system upright and at a 45-degree angle to allow for proper cooling. It wasn’t as annoying as blowing the dust out of Nintendo cartridges, but it was a problem nonetheless. I remember even having to take it to a repair shop, some VCR/TV repair place far from my house. Raise your hand if you remember VCRs.

Important to note for the purposes of this story, I became hooked on RPG or Role Playing Games while playing the Playstation. Specifically, I remember on my 16th birthday wanting to purchase a game. I asked the clerk at EB Games, a store that no longer exists in the McKinley Mall, what Playstation game I could get that would take a while to finish. Most games weren’t very challenging at this point and I needed something with some longevity. He recommended Final Fantasy VII.

I had no idea what to expect, but I saw that it was a game that actually required three CDs to fit the entire game on. The clerk was right. It was a captivating game with a fun story and hours of gameplay, 60 or so hours if I remember correctly. I was hooked on the Playstation and I was hooked on the Final Fantasy series.

N64 and Dreamcast

Outside my own bedroom, my friends were getting involved in other games and other systems. I remember one having the N64, a Nintendo system that had a few memorable games. An exclusive game, Golden Eye, was an absolute treat. Both single and multiplayer modes could be played for hours.

Moving ahead I stayed up to date with new console releases. That overheating problem with my Playstation, well that never went away and the system eventually died. It happened conveniently around the time Sega was coming out with its new system, the Dreamcast. I was able to rent the system and give it a whirl for a week before it was released for purchase. Looking back, I sort of forced myself to like the system just because it was new. Newer isn’t always better. I did end up purchasing the system to tide me over until the next. It wasn’t all bad, a game called Shenmue offered hours of unique gameplay, but that was the only game worth remembering.

Playstation 2

I had seen the best the Dreamcast had to offer and after a little over a year it was already on the decline. Looking through videogame magazines, like I had in the past, I became interested in Sony’s upcoming console, the Playstation 2.

Like its predecessors, the Playstation 2 one-upped the competition, this time by providing games on a DVD format. So we’ve gone from 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit to the 128-bit Playstation 2 in over the course of about 10 years. Memory cards with 8 MBs of space were used to save the progress of games. It’s amazing to think that in 16-years-time some videogames now require upwards of 50 GBs of hard drive space for saving game data.

I was able to enjoy a few years of the Playstation 2 before I headed off to college and slowly began to change my priorities in life. My desire to play all types of games had diminished, but there was one game that kept me playing. By this time the Final Fantasy series was up to XI. It was the first in the series that required all online play, a co-op strategy game that required you to befriend others online and team up with them to achieve in-game success.

Online play was new to me by this point. The game had already been available in stores for a few years before I decided to purchase it and most players were already at the highest allowable level. It didn’t deter me, and like Final Fantasy VII, I fell in love with the storylines and adventure. The addition of playing with an online community of like-minded gamers was also a bonus.

I still played video games in college, but priorities change. I was in a new relationship with my future wife, and I was pushing myself to do well in school.

While we were together I purchased a Nintendo Gamecube, an afterthought of a system at this point. It was never a graphics powerhouse like the Playstation 2, but it had Mario games and a nostalgic feel about it. I only purchased two games for that system, Mario and Zelda, two games featuring characters I had played on the original Nintendo some 10 years earlier.

In 2006, I was in my senior year of college and preparing for a wedding the following year. I was as distant from video games as I had ever been before in my life. During this time, the Playstation 3 was released. Like the original Playstation, the third installment was leaps and bounds better than its predecessors thanks in part to High Definition technology in televisions.

HD TVs were sort of new back then and not nearly as cheap as they are today. But the new Playstation 3 was taking advantage of the new technology and offering games in high definition. It was very nice to look at but that’s about all I was doing at this point, ogling over it as it displayed inside Gamestops and Best Buys.

I no longer played games leisurely at this point. The only game I’d boot up was Final Fantasy XI. Unfortunately, the Playstation 2 was outdated by now and limiting to the player. In-game friends told me about the PC version and how advanced it was compared to the console. I purchased the PC version, and luckily had a decent enough computer to run the software.

I played with a couple people I came to know well over the years. One day, in an odd and mutual agreement, we all decided to call it a day. My Final Fantasy XI career ended rather abruptly in 2010.

Wii

At this point in my life, I’ve been married for almost five years and have two young daughters. We had no reason to continue playing videogames on a system designed for mature audiences. As a family, we turned our attention to the Wii, another Nintendo system that turned out to be rather successful. It was already four-years-old when we decided to purchase so it was rather cheap. The console focused on the player actually having to get off their butt and move to accomplish in-game objectives. It was something my wife was able to get on board with because it doubled as an exercise routine. As a family, we enjoyed the child-friendly games and other options like the Netflix app.

Console upgrades continued to pass me by during this time: the Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One. I was distant from the industry and the hobby.

Wii U

Later in 2010 my first son was born. Ahh, an heir to my videogame conquests of days gone. I’m being facetious, but just last year he did end up taking an interest in video games. Lo and behold, he was watching Mario on Netflix, a cartoon from my childhood. He asked for the Wii U, drawn to it thanks to the Toys ‘R’ Us Big Book, a system that by-and-large was designed for children and only children in mind. I’m not sure one game is rated for mature audiences.

The Wii U was a fun system that the kids received from grandma for Christmas. It had the Mario games, nostalgia again, but it lacked any real, challenging videogames like the one’s I played in my heyday. I remember when Mortal Kombat came out, a fighting game that featured some of the first controversial images in a video game that I remember. For finishing moves in the game it wasn’t uncommon to decapitate your opponent or rip out their heart and of course there was 16-bit spurts of blood spilling from their body.

Back to the matter at hand, the Wii U lacked some age-appropriate gaming for myself. Feeling an itch to play games again, I began looking online to see what the video games industry offered at this point. We’re on to the Playstation 4 which was first released in 2013, so already a three-year-old system. Some real nice looking games have already been released but nothing that caught my eye enough to seriously consider buying a new system for $300-plus (a few hundred more than where it began with the original Nintendo).

Playstation 4 or

Playstation Pro?

Then I saw it. Square Enix, the company that developed the Final Fantasy series, was near completion on Final Fantasy XV. The game has been 10 year in the making, almost the entire time I’ve been away from seriously playing and enjoying videogames. I watched the trailers and have been following the development of the game for almost a year.

If I was ever going to make the jump to buy a videogame system now would be the time. But wait, for years it was an easy decision. There was the 8-bit and the 16-bit and so on and upward. The Playstation 4 has already been out for three years by now so I knew something else may already be around the corner. I was right.

Rumors began this spring about a new Playstation system codenamed the Neo. Apparently, Internet-blogger-types like to use Matrix references when naming yet-to-be-released consoles. The name Morpheus was used for some handheld system before it was officially announced.

The PS4 Neo turned out to be a factual rumor and was just recently announced by Sony in early September. However, unlike console upgrades in years past, this new console, officially named the PS4 Pro, is supposed to sit side-by-side with the Playstation 4 as a partner and not a competitor. All old and new PS4 games going forward will work on both systems. That’s like being able to play Golden Eye on the Super Nintendo. Graphically speaking, it would have never been possible back then. But today, consoles use much more sophisticated processors, much like how PCs allow you the ability to install the 1990 version of Doom on a 2016 computer.

I thought a decision to buy a new system would be an easy one, buy the latest and the greatest because it s been 16 years since I have. Growing up in the 90s when technology was starting to pick up steam it was easy to see the leaps and bounds being made in new consoles. But this is not an easy decision thanks to Sony. The Playstation 4, an older system now, has received a nice price decrease and game bundle options – $299 with a highly-rated game, Uncharted 4. The new console, the Playstation Pro, comes with no game, costs $100 more and doesn t come out until Nov. 10.

The positives for the Pro is that it does come with some more power, the ability to upscale for 4k and HDR televisions and a larger 1 TB hard drive. I’ve been out of gaming for so long I don’t even know if this is a big selling point.

If it hasn’t been clear from my 16-year drought of new video game consoles, I have not been up to date on many things, especially televisions. We just went HD and flat panel a few years back. Apparently there’s a new trend in display technology that’s gaining some steam and video game companies like Sony are trying to offer content.

To take full advantage of the Playstation Pro, I’d most likely have to purchase a 4K, HDR capable television. I don t see that happening for at least a few more years, maybe when the prices come down below $1,000 for a decent 55-inch, but not now.

To make matters worse, there’s no firm indication games will run better or prettier on a 1080p HDTV using the Playstation Pro. For some reason Sony officials were very vague about this possibility, maybe so not to alienate the 40-million-plus consumers who already shelled out $400 only three years ago to purchase the original PS4.

So therein lies the rub. Do I go money-saving and settle for the older system or go new and future proof myself if this is where gaming is going. It’s been 16 years since I purchased a console for myself and I don’t want to mess it up. I’m sure Final Fantasy XV will look good on either console, but if it plays better on the Pro, shouldn’t I take advantage? Damn you Sony for making this a difficult decision. Why couldn’t they have just called it the PS5.

The new console comes out Nov. 10, the primary reason I’m buying one is to play Final Fantasy XV which comes out Nov. 29.

I’ve waited 16 years to buy a new console and 10 years for them to release Final Fantasy XV … I suppose waiting two more months wouldn’t hurt.