My love affair with video games began with an Atari 2600 and still lives with me today. To date I have about seven systems including a Ps2, Dreamcast, Nes, SuperNes, Turbo Grafx 16, N64, Ps1, with about 500+ games each.







I often play these wonderful games and noticed that I keep playing Konami games the most out of all of them.



My love affair with Konami began with Castlevania.



I had a friend who lived down the street from me who let me borrow the game and as soon as I saw the title screen and pressed start, the fun began!!!!




Right from the start, you can tell that this game was different. For one the graphics were mind-blowing (or as great as they could be at the time). The sound of the whip cracking was awesome and best of all you could upgrade to a mace. This is classic gaming.

The next notable game was Contra, the series that gave rise to the infamous up,up,down,down (you know the rest) game code that gave you 30 lives right from the start!!! How cool was that?




Trust me, you needed all those lives to beat this game. But as you learned the game, it became easier and the code was not as necessary. Except when playing with a friend. My cousing Mambo and I used to get on this thing and he would die like nobody's business. Well, in Contra, you can take your partners lives should you lose all of yours. If only games of today would let you do that!!




The Konami code also managed to weave itself into another Konami classic called Gradius

But in this game, you didn't get 30 lives for cheating, you got all of your weapons maxed out. I could never finish this game because it was just too damn hard.



Another game similar to Gradius was Life Force. I first came across this game in the arcades and a friend of mine, Ben, used to talk about this game as the end all, be all of videogaming. When it arrived on the Nes, old Benny was the first to get it and we spend countless afternoons playing this game in between eating Doritos and sipping on Cokes.





I can't forget about the war games, Rush N Attack, and Jackal, which had a different name in the arcades. These two were also classics that I look fondly on.





Next, I think I'd like to talk about one of the greatest sports games ever made. Track and Field 2!!!



I can write a whole article about this game. So many cool events!!! But I will just say that I had to buy a special controller,the Nes Max, just to compete in Track and Field 2. I'm sure if you have tried to play this game with a regular controller, you didn't get very far.

With the Nes Max, I kicked ass at swimming!!!!



Of course Konami had many hits on the Super Nes and Genesis, but my love for Konami began on the Nes so that is what I talked about. There was something comfortable about purchasing a Konami game. Almost as if the gamble of purchasing crap didn't exist anymore with Konami. You knew if it had Konami on it, the game was gonna be good. I loved that!!!!

In conclusion, Konami made some of the most challenging, fun and innovative games of the early Nes days and provided me with hours of gaming goodness