Post
by Magical_Isopod » August 5th, 2018, 10:14 am
(This post will likely be a work in progress until September because I will likely remember a ton about this thing over the next few weeks, but here goes ...)
Following from my commentary on the Sega Genesis is a little difficult, because the timing of events at this stage of my life is a little hazy. I got my Genesis at Christmas 1995, and my parents had divorced by Summer 1997. We had a Genesis at home, and a Super Nintendo at our Dad's place, whom my brother and I would stay with every other weekend.
For Christmas of 1998 or 99 - I'm not exactly certain - we got a PlayStation. But with no games! My brother, whose birthday fell on the 22nd, would receive Crash Bandicoot from our uncle. I would receive a copy of NHL Faceoff '97 at some point during that Christmas break, but I honestly can't remember where it came from. It just sort of appeared one day - either my dad or his girlfriend at the time must have noticed I didn't have a game to play on the new gaming machine. Although Faceoff does not survive the passage of time, I do remember having great fun manipulating the free agent system in the game to ensure my favourite team was stacked with all-star players while other teams were simply unable to complete.
That first year, we would pick up one of my all-time favourite PS1 compilations - The Raiden Project. My dad had actually played Raiden in the arcades, and when he saw a used copy for $5, he just had to have it. My only other SHMUP to that point had been Thunder Force II, which I could never advance in. So in a sense, The Raiden Project would serve as my introduction to SHMUPs. This version of Raiden II in particular persists today as one of my personal favourite games.
We also had a PlayStation Underground Jampack demo disc that we played for tens of hours. I could tell you the contents from memory: It had playable demos of Tomba!, Einhander, Jersey Devil, Tekken 3, Duke Nukem: A Time To Kill and an import preview of Tail Concerto. That demo disc was played more than some of the full games we owned, we absolutely scoured every inch of those demos. And fast forward to now, I've owned every single of one those games - though Einhander is the only one that remains in my collection... I'll come back to that one.
The next few years saw my brother and I owning copies of JetMoto 2, Biofreaks, NHL Faceoff 99, and other things presumably fished from a bargain bin. Little wonder the demo disc got so much play, really.
But one particular year was a major turning point for my life in gaming. For that Christmas, my brother and I were each given $100 to visit Toys R Us and buy *whatever we wanted*, so long as we stayed on budget. After much discussion, we both decided to get 1 PlayStation game from the $20 or less bin, 1 Game Boy game, and 1 deck of Pokémon cards.
I went with Mega Man Legends, he went with Final Fantasy VII. I had been a Mega Man fanboy since a very young age, having played X at my cousins' house. My brother, being younger, picked Final Fantasy VII for no other reason than he'd seen it in a magazine ad and "it had more games in it", citing the larger box. We knew nothing about RPGs, but came out with two of them. These two games in particular were stories I daydreamed about for months, or maybe years. They were very, very special to me. Still are, really.
Fast forward to my teenaged years, when I finally had expendable income - PS1 games like Final Fantasies 4, 5, 6 and 8, Chrono Cross, Resident Evil 2 and 3, Metal Gear Solid, Mega Man X4 through 6, Dino Crisis, and many, many more would enter my life for the first time. And most of these were well into the PS2's lifespan - I'd beaten Kingdom Hearts, which by that point had seen a Greatest Hits release, before I had bought most of these games.
One distinct memory I have of the PlayStation is the sheer rarity of some of the best games. I remember hunting high and low for copies of Tomba!, Einhander, The Misadventures of Tron Bonne, Valkyrie Profile, and more... And let me tell you, in Sarnia, Ontario, you were never going to see these games in person. And if you did, it was at a flea market, for ludicrous prices, even back then. By this point in my life, I had very discerning tastes about video games - I knew what I wanted, but not always where to find it. So being the clueless teen I was, I put all these ludicrously rare games on my Christmas list... And my mom actually found one of them.
Listen, my mom is a great person. She will always try to make me and my brother happy, even if it means giving a hand-written list of obscure Japanese PS1 games to a store clerk and asking which they have in stock. And because she is who she is, I own a mint condition copy of Einhander, which she gleaned for the exorbitant price of $7.99. Because I doubt it will ever be featured in a full episode itself, I really want to highlight: Einhander is a masterpiece, and a game that every game developer ought to play if they want a crash course on how to use music and sound design effectively to create something mind-blowing. I have studied this game for hours, watching how incredibly a game from 1998 integrates sound and motion so perfectly to create these amazing emotional climaxes, especially before each boss fight. In my mind, it has not been matched since. Einhander is a very special PS1 title that does not get nearly enough love, but I'm telling you, it is every bit as essential as Crash and FF7.
I am now 28, and still finding new PS1 games to add to my curated collection. On my backlog, I currently have D, Front Mission 3, Lunar 2, and digital versions of Suikoden II and the Misadventures of Tron Bonne. My brother also sent me a copy of Raiden DX from Japan, where he now lives and works, but I have not yet figured out a way to play it.
Just a few short months ago, my friend and I played through Metal Gear Solid together. We were both impressed at how incredible that game *sounds*. There's something about the PS1 and early CD gaming in general that is still really impressive today, and I hope it might be clarified in this podcast... The PS1 could deliver this really clean CD audio that doesn't really resemble modern games. It almost feels like CD sound was new, so developers played with it in really interesting ways. You wouldn't have background score, you'd have a distinct soundtrack. You'd have these sound effects that felt designed to make full use of contemporary surround sound systems. Games today generally feel very "flat" in their audio presentation - like everything is in this very narrow band of sound. On the PlayStation, it felt like sound was much more of a priority, and it's not nostalgia speaking. Some games have these incredibly "full" soundscapes that I've really only seen in early CD-based games. Playing certain 20 year old PlayStation titles on my modern sound system still sounds bloody incredible, and I really wish I had the technical know-how to better explain. Whatever the PS1 does with sound, I love it. I love the Sega CD and Turbo Duo for the same reason.
I also want to briefly mention the mod chip and the culture surrounding it at the time. Most kids I knew had a modded PS1. A lot of game and computer stores would install it, but would not sell it - they'd usually direct you to a sketchy shop in the city, or a website from which you could obtain one. When the slimmer PSOne came out, everyone knew this "secret trick" where you could play burned games by spinning the disc with your hand before starting the console... And it actually worked. Kinda. Some of the time. I recall mod chips also being unreliable - some would kill your console, some just wouldn't play burned games, it was this really bizarre time in gaming history where computer technology felt like this underground black market of secret hacks and dubious tech. Kinda cool, in hindsight. You gotta know a guy who knows a guy, but everyone can get a mod chip.
I'll leave it there for now. Might add or revise... Gimme some feedback if you like, folks.