A couple months ago I found a (very heavy!) CRT television by the dumpster in my old neighborhood. I hauled the thing into my car, then home. A few days before a much skinnier LED TV appeared in the same spot, which I also snagged. With a whimsical heart I imagined the little spot by the dumpster was spawning TVs from across eras. Next there would be a wood-paneled thing from the 80s with knobs, then a black-and-white antennaed thing from the 60s.
That didn’t happen.
So now I had a CRT and nothing to connect it to. Childishly I looked up old game consoles in my area on craigslist and found a guy selling a PS2 for $80, including two controllers, a memory card, and three games. I snagged the thing. And now once again I am a game collector.
The console came with:
MAX PAYNE. I’d tried playing this one on PC a few times, but it never captured me. The PS2 port is quite terrible, as was often the case with ports during the console’s early years. It’s easy to forget how underpowered the PS2 was. Fucking Nintendo had a more technically powerful console. Can you imagine? The lesson here is to look out for games designed with the console in mind, of which there is no shortage. Anyway, in spite of the slideshow-level frame drops I got pretty far. Appeal shone through the performance issues and visual downgrade. It’s wonderful, seeing a game try so hard to pastiche a genre that doesn’t really exist in its medium (noir) and largely succeeding. I love his voice-overs, the plot’s convolution, the bleak universe of snow and concrete. The only real mechanical novelty is the Matrix-style slow motion, which is fun enough. Playing 3D shooters with a controller is just disgusting, especially when there’s no generous auto aim.
PRINCE OF PERSIA: SANDS OF TIME. Never played this one, though knew it by reputation. Like Max Payne it has a core mechanic revolving around time (rewinding time in addition to just slowing it down) and a narrative told through the player character’s voice over. (Theory: VO was such a popular feature of narrative-based games during this era because it allowed for a showcase of then new hardware’s ability to stream audio recordings without burdening animators with task of convincing lip-syncing). I pretty much ignored the plot. Juvenile love story, though there is a pretty steamy for T Rating scene involving the mating couple taking a bath. Orientalist as hell, obviously, but it could be worse. Final twist, in which the main guy remembers the entire adventure and his love that he ends up rescuing does not, is neat, at least. The platforming holds up astonishingly well, acrobatic with a great sense of momentum, setting a template that AssCreed and Uncharted still follow, though it’s not nearly as mindless as either. Combat is simple and fun…except for a pretty terrible mechanic requiring you manually absorb the souls of each enemy you kill before they come back to life, rendering the whole affair sluggish. But it’s a good time, all in all. I beat it, didn’t I?
TOM CLANCY’S SPLINTER CELL. Haven’t played this one yet.
Console also came with a demo disc from Playstation Magazine, including a racing game, a third person ninja stealth game, a 2D action rpg with anime aesthetic, and an FPS shooter running at 5 fps. Also some video previews. Upon booting it up I was greeted by the mournful trumpet blast of the Godfather theme, then an FMV of 3D model Marlon Brando smoking a cigar. Would not in a million years have guessed the disc would open with that.
I’ve been acquiring games through Ebay, retro game stores, and thrift stores at a constant trickle since then. They include:
FINAL FANTASY X. Played the HD port of this on PS3 multiple times. First played it immediately after completing the PSX trilogy of Final Fantasies, to which I compared X unfavorably. From VII to VIII to IX you could feel the translations getting better, such that by IX the dialogue was not totally embarrassing. X introduced voice acting, and the necessity of needing dialogue to approximately match the duration of characters’ mouth flapping meant quality took a hit overall (Japanese can be a much denser language than English…this is a well-known problem in anime and Godzilla films, too), though during this playthrough I found the dialogue was better than I imagined, but still admittedly pretty rough. Can you believe that this game also has its MC narrate much of the game through voice-over???? But anyway. On the whole I’ve come to realize I love this game a lot. Its narrative is by FF standards very digestible. You start at the bottom of the map and pilgrimage your way to the top. There are surreal revelations, ludicrous character designs (Pay attention, people: Tetsuya Nomura is about to enter Sicko Mode), and most memorably a cutting critique of organized religion’s rationalizing of mass suffering. Yevon is the Hi-Potion of the masses, if you will, Blitzball the Ether. And an actually good love story! Tidus is a great character, actually, a bratty fish-out-of-water whose refusal to be sidelined as a minor player in the events is both selfish and admirable. Not to paint with the broad brush of a gaijin, but his iconoclasm is interesting when considered in the light of Japan’s collectivism, traditionalism, valuing of not-rocking-the-boat, the ganbaru-ness of it all. Idk. He can be sensitive to the culture he’s been thrust into, (the choice to either pray to or ignore the shrine before departing for Killika is a nice little moment of player empowerment), but he never stops questioning. And fuck, I love Yuna! Cute as hell, even if her English VA sounds at times narcoleptic. What an arc! I have a soft spot for female characters who go from meek adherers to the status quo to confident blazers of their own destiny. Girlbosses, basically. Secretly it’s what I aspire to. Peggy Olson is the real protagonist of Mad Men, not Don Draper. Tried getting into the postgame content, but the grind was too intimidating.
^Beloved idiot
^...and the love of my life
Have only played a few hours of FINAL FANTASY X-2, but it didn’t hook me. I’m more willing to accept the camp girl power stuff now than when I was a teen boy, but I don’t know. They brought back Active Time Battle, the (to paraphrase Tim Rogers) quite bad but bafflingly iconic turn-based system of previous entries. Dress Spheres seem cool. Will try again sometime soon.
CRAZY TAXI. Excellent, extremely addictive arcade game. Had tried it on machines before, but never got into it. Now I can get an S rank with ease, have gotten an AWESOME!! rank and am striving towards CRAZY!! Gena is the female character, and she’s my favorite. The license of her cab reads 5EXY 5I5. The soundtrack is like six pop punk songs on loop, but fuck man it owns. DAY AFTER DAY YOUR HOME LIFE’S A WREEEECK. THE POWERS THAT BE JUST BREATHE DOWN YOUR NEEEECK. I had an idea for a kind of insane tribute/clone game in the vein of Freedom Planet or Pizza Tower that had multiplayer and Twisted Metal-style combat. Someone make that, please.
^Photo evidence of my claim. Believe it or not I've already topped this score B)
STREET FIGHTER ANNIVERSARY. Includes Street Fighter II Turbo and Third Strike. Owned this as a child. I accidentally stepped on the case when we were living in an apartment in DC before moving to Honduras, an event I’ll never live down. Over the years I’ve played Third Strike the most, mainly on PS3 and PS4. Had vanilla SF II on SNES for that brief window where I had an SNES. So wonderful playing these games on a CRT. The scanlines blur the pixels into something beautifully fluid. I’ve beaten SF II arcade mode, but not Third Strike. I got to the final boss, but the meat grinder wore me down and I gave up. My favorite characters are Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Alex, and Elena. Maybe goes without saying that I stand no chance against even a bad competitive player.
That’s enough for now. Next time I’ll talk about: TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER 3; JAK I AND II; METAL GEAR SOLID 2; ONIMUSHA; STAR WARS BATTLEFRONT II; SKY ODYSSEY; and more!!!! Stay tuned.
