Game Gallery Amusements

Written by Victor.
This past month I have been in Brazil visiting family and friends, after eighteen years of absence from the country I was born in. Needless to say, things are different. People walk, people drive like madmen (the idea is, if you don't get touched, no harm done), and exchanging U.S. dollars to Brazilian reais leaves you with a lot of money to spend in the vast malls Brazil boasts. Now although I was there for a non-video game purpose, I made it a point to note everything related to gaming that I could get in contact with. The areas of Brazil that I covered are Rio De Janeiro, Buzios, and Santa Catarina, and sadly the results were below expectations.I have often found myself casually browsing the web and finding many miscellaneous clubs relating to video games to Brazil. I had at least thought that gaming in Brazil was somewhat accessible to the general public in that if one wanted to make it a hobby (or religion as I have) to start playing video games, it was was a somewhat viable goal. In reality, Brazil is a terrible place to learn, play, or even think about video games. Probably the only thing that kept me sane was my Nintendo DS, but then there was even a problem with that.First off, I'll explain how arcades work there. What happens is that when you go in an arcade with a pocket full of quarters (centuvos) and you can't even play one game yet. Reason being, the government has changed currency so much over the years that keeping up to code on machines is too much of a pain. So to play, you have to turn in your money and pre-plan everything that you're gonna play. This can get pretty tedious, because every $.25, $.50, and $1.00 game requires a different kind of coin. Nothing like the versatility of the American quarter. So that's just the hurdle of getting the ability to play something, now let's move on to the machines. This is where depression hits, as you find that the machine almost always has something wrong with it; either more than half the buttons are stuck, or the screen itself is only partially working. Many times it's a little of both, or the machine itself is completely inoperational. So basically all the arcades in Brazil are just like American arcades, except American arcades work. I remember I played at least three different DDR machines in Brazil, and I failed every song that I played. I'll have you know that I'm a pro at DDR. I can do 90% of all songs in any difficulty. For me to not pass one single song proves that the machines were broken. Pads didn't work, music was turned down too low... it was terrible.Now as a game creator, this hit me pretty hard. To think that one day my games could be in this arcade with nobody playing them because the buttons didn't work, which would piss people off and make them say that the game is terrible, all because the darn owner of the machine wouldn't clean up the grime left from the twelve-year-old that ate their nachos with more cheese on the hand than the chip. There are a few places where the arcade was actually clean. The second largest mall in Latin America, Bahia (which displays a Triforce symbol), had a Gameworks-esque place that looked nice enough. Looked. I put about twelve bucks worth of credit on a card and played only six games. That's a whole lot of nothing. Also, every game I played had a problem with it or was broken. But what I didn't get was that the place was spot-clean. Literally you could eat of the floor, but the games never worked. Go figure.Now as far as the home console scene goes, that's even worse. You either have to play games illegally or pay up an asinine amount of cash to get them. Another interesting fact is that in every mall that I visited (and I visited at least thirty), I saw not one video game store. You can buy them on busy street corners, but they sell games for sixty reais each, and they're not even the original copies. And as far as the PS2 goes, the only system popular in Brazil, these are actually burned copies of games. In order to play them you have to buy a PS2 and mod it to play any region. Therefore, to start playing just one PS2 game, you have to pay two hundred fifty reais for the PS2, one hundred to buy the kit to make the PS2 region-free, and sixty reais for the non-bonafide copy of the game. That is four-hundred ten reais, which is a ridiculous amount of money in Brazil. Now, if you want to avoid the modding and burned games and just play legitimately, you would have to pay the initial two hundred fifty for the PS2, and then a total one hundred and thirty reais for the game. That is the price of Grand Theft Auto III (Greatest Hits), which is around twenty dollars in the US. So if you want to keep up your gaming hobby in Brazil then you better be rich, which isn't likely, because more than seventy-five percent of the people of Brazil are poor or live in favelas (slums). Obviously the lack of disposable income in Brazil is one major reason gaming in Brazil is so bad. The other is because there is no passion for it. Most people believe that video games are not for the fun possibilities of mastering a character and competing against other people, but just for getting kids to waste money on a passing phase in their life. There's still some hope; there are people who sell games, which means that there is some small market for gaming. But until people start vocalizing interest, much like how America did in the NES/SNES era, Brazil will see slow movement towards the world of video games if any. My advice to everyone reading is this: if you plan on going to Brazil, or even South America in general, bring a Game Boy or a PSP or a DS. In my excursion into the southern hemisphere I lived off this DS, and I definitely started to appreciate the battery power of the system, for it was good to me. It kept me alive. It kept me from killing myself.