"Go play outside." was almost the first thing I heard when I told my mother I was bored. The thing was besides playing on my Sega with Sonic the Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter, going outside was a reward. I grew up on forty acres of farm land in good old outback Australia with my older sister and cousin, the mischief we came up with was unbelievable.

My grandad, a retired war veteran used to have too much time on his hands. When he wasn't restoring motor bikes, he was building us a cubby house, a seesaw or rope swings. Though the sad thing was, when ever I was playing with my sister and cousin we barely used any of his creations.

We had vivid imaginations as children, if we weren't the three musketeers; we were acting out on of our grandfather's war stories with sticks and twigs. On occasion we stole a couple of tennis balls and played the good old fashioned game of Brandy', which many people would call Dodgeball' now, though the way we played someone almost always ended up in tears. Of course we played 'Fly' the game my mother taught us from her youth or we played 'Block-o' with garbage bins or of course my favorite. 'Ghost in the Darkness' (named after the sensational movie with Val Kilmer) the petrifying game of walking through the dark house with nothing but a torch and waiting for someone to jump out (A lion) and scare the socks of us small ten year olds.

Than technology took over and we discovered laser tag or 'Lock Down', gifts the three of us received for Christmas one year. We played all day and we begged my mother if we could play at night too, of course she almost always refused, due to the brown snakes that roamed around our property. The strange thing was we never realized when we were younger was where our parents disappeared to when we were told we couldn't go outside, that was until one of our guns ended up broken.

After Laser tag and a few years had past, we grew up a little more and started to have adventures on our motor bikes and quad bikes. By the end of the day the dust that filled the sky around our house from the constant riding was like a dust storm, though mum didn't mind, as long as we weren't in the house, messing up her recently cleaned floor. (Love her!)

Most of the time we entertained ourselves outside, except on those rainy days where we were stuck inside, even than we would find uses for my grandmothers knitting wool. We tied the wool to different objects around the a room so they were what we liked to call Laser beams, than we had to manoeuvre around them until we could get to the other side untouched to grab the booty, which was normally a GI Joe figurine.

So the toys I grew up with before the play station are called Kristy and Shaun, us three together could make our own fun just from the imagination of our minds, and in my opinion that's the best type of entertainment.

Learn more about this author, Tara Vernon.
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