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Literature Text
My teenage years were definitely the richest times when it came to expanding my gaming knowledge and becoming more acquainted with a whole range of different genres. As my brain matured, I could pick up and play games with much more complexity than the relatively straightforward games of my Atari and Mega Drive era.
This goes a long way to explaining why games are such an important part of my life and my memories. As I grew up and matured, the world of gaming grew and matured with me.
My first foray into this new generation of in-depth games happened whilst paying my regular Sunday visit to my gran’s house one week. My cousin Simon (the same one who owned the Amiga I had played Street Fighter II on all those years ago) had brought his new console over. I looked curiously at the grey plastic box on the carpet and the weird shaped controller. My curiosity was further piqued when I noticed that the games for this box were on compact discs instead of cartridges. How interesting! How novel! How modern!
Simon popped a disc in, clicked the lid shut and powered up. Soon, the game’s title screen popped up. Hm. Final Fantasy VII. Never heard of it.
I was blown away. What was this wondrous piece of technology and how could it produce graphics that looked so simplistic and yet so beautiful? I was mesmerised. I was hypnotised. I was instantly addicted. And all I was doing was watch Simon play a random part of a random game. After a while he sauntered off and told me I could play. I imagine my eyes grew as wide as they had for a long time when he said that.
I didn’t instantly play Final Fantasy VII (since there’s a lot of Final Fantasy game mentions, I’ll shorten them all to FF whatever number), bigger fool me. No, the first disc I was drawn to had a very colourful case and a suave looking lead character with floppy blonde hair and no limbs, just floating appendages. Sound familiar? Or just weird? Maybe both? Either way, that game was Rayman.
Yes, my first experience actually holding a PlayStation controller and playing a game was the first in a series that Ubisoft has since turned into a huge franchise. It was a platform game in the vein of Super Mario and Sonic, so I was in familiar territory. The major difference was that this game seemed so smooth and polished compared to those old Nintendo and Sega games. It was also very pretty and addictive. And a lot more challenging that any game of this type I’d played before. Needless to say, my gaming brain was gearing up to move to the next generation.
Yes, it was true. Sony had muscled their way into the gaming market by releasing the whirling dervish known as the PlayStation (hereafter referred to as the PS) onto the market. It had already been out for a good three years before I first played on that fateful Sunday though. I was twelve, and still parked quite firmly in the camps of Sega, Nintendo and Atari. This was, however, mainly because I was not earning any money of my own and therefore a bit limited in what I could get hold of.
Sometime soon though, that would change. But not quite yet.
Back to the PS. Both of the games Simon brought to my gran’s house that Sunday, Raymanand FFVII, were both prime examples of the next generation stealing the thunder of its predecessors. Rayman was originally being developed for the Super Nintendo and then switched to the Atari Jaguar before actually being released on the PS a week before it made its’ Atari debut. It went on to become the biggest selling game for the PS, while the Jaguar and the Super Nintendo went into decline (although Nintendo replaced their ailing system with the N64, which we will come to later).
FFVII, on the other hand, was a case of long-time Nintendo stalwart Square switching allegiances to create a better game. Every other game in the Final Fantasy series had belonged to Nintendo, but what with them being pretty stick-in-the-mud with the way they wanted to move forward, Square upped their stick from the mud and pledged their allegiance to Sony.
So on that note, let’s get back to my gran’s house. While we were eating our Sunday dinner, Simon graciously offered to let me borrow the PS for the week. Without trying to sound too eager, I accepted. This moment isn’t too clear in my mind anymore, but I’m guessing I probably did sound too eager. Far too eager.
I wolfed down the rest of my food and ran to the living room to start unhooking the system and bundling it all into a carrier bag. Before my gran had time to even start clearing the table I was out of the door and zooming back home to tuck into some new gaming experiences.
I hooked everything up to my TV, doing a bit of genius multi-plugging to ensure I could have my TV, Mega Drive and the PS all running at the same time. Kids are spoilt nowadays with HDMI leads. This was the age when you had to plug your console into the TV aerial jack and then choose a channel to play it on and then tune the channel to get your game screen on. It was a challenge just to get up and running!
After wrestling with the TV remote for a while, I had everything ready to go. I fired the PS into life with Rayman all ready to go, and started playing. It was a game I loved to play purely because of the fun characters and backgrounds and music. I was never too invested in actually completing it (I still have never actually made it through the whole game); I was just enjoying the experience of playing my first 32-bit game.
To put that previous comment into context, my old Amstrad CPC from the beginning of this story was an 8-bit machine (hence the title), the Atari ST was a 16-bit along with the Mega Drive, and now I was diving into the 32-bit ocean for the first time.
To put the context into context, the more “bits” a console boasts, the prettier it makes things look. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but let’s keep things simple and purely focussed on gaming rather than get into too much detail about what happens inside those magic boxes.
I finished playing Rayman after getting stuck on the second land and decided it was time to get to grips with FFVII. Now, I’d watched Simon play a part of the game which was well into the story, so I knew I had a lot to look forward to. The title screen flashed up and I selected “New Game” with the same amount of anticipation I felt when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
That opening sequence still blows my mind. The slow pan around the city of Midgar (where you start the game), the camera zooming in on the action that starts the plot running and the music rising to a crescendo as everything on screen sparkles despite the gloomy setting.
So as I tucked into the game and played through the first couple of hours, learning how the battle system worked, learning a little bit about the main characters, learning more about the role-playing game (RPG) genre and generally became addicted, it was time for me to go to bed. Ah well, there’s a save point right there, I’ll just walk into it and pick up where I left off tomorrow.
Wait, what? No memory card detected? Oh. Yes, believe it or not I had been in such a rush to pack up the PS and bring it home with me that I’d forgotten to bring the memory card with me. For the uninitiated (or just the kids who have never needed to worry about memory cards, what with everything having a PC-style hard-drive built in nowadays), this meant that I could not save my progress in any game I played. With some games this doesn’t matter, of course. When you’re playing a game that only takes an hour or two to complete, you don’t need a save mechanism. But games like FFVII have more than fifty hours of gameplay (even longer if you’re anything like me and like to complete every little thing and get all of your characters up to the maximum level), so without some way of saving progress now and again, there’s no way to finish without leaving the console up and running constantly. I would have taken the risk and done that if not for two things.
Firstly, this was not my possession. Tempting as it was to just go for it and leave it on, I didn’t want to break it and be responsible for replacing it. Because it wouldn’t have been me doing the replacing, it would have been my parents. And that might have meant they would have sold my current collection to do that. Too unbearable a thought!
Secondly, my dad had grown wise to my attempts at being a sneaky gamer. I would sometimes stay up late and play on my Mega Drive and simply make sure there was something covering the power light on the top in case I needed to quickly put the TV onto standby and leap into bed if I heard someone heading for the toilet during the night. But after a few times being caught, the red light trick stopped working and my dad would just switch all of my equipment off at the wall if he thought he heard me rustling around.
The PS made it even more impossible to pull that trick. The Mega Drive was nice and quiet when it was running since it was a cartridge console, but the PS would be whirring away, spinning the disc inside around and around. Doesn’t sound bad when you have the TV blasting and it’s daytime. But when it’s night-time and you’re playing something with low volume in the dark it sounds a million times louder than a nuclear explosion. And my dad was a very light sleeper. And my bedroom door never closed properly thanks to a problem with the carpet being too thick and the door latch being painted over.
Long story short, I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. And my dad was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.
So, since I couldn’t leave the thing running all week with no breaks, I did the best I could in the situation. I played the first couple of hours of FFVII every day of that week. I was just so invested in the game and so obsessed with it that I never got bored of doing that. The same two hours of story every day, for a full week. And then Simon got his console back. I’d had a taste of what the next generation had to offer though, and I knew I’d go back for more as soon as I could.
In the meantime, I continued to tinker around with my current consoles, giving my Atari ST to a school friend named James (a curious chap who told stories of setting fire to abandoned police cars and making customised shotguns down in the midlands where he lived prior to venturing up north) to do some awesome military camouflage style design on it. When it was done, it looked so much better after sporting that dirty white colour all those years. I was also wrapping up my Mega Drive wall plug cord with endless amounts of tape to try and hold it together. It was starting to get reminiscent of how my Atari Lynx cord had died. But it held on and I kept enjoying what I had.
Now and again, I would have a night over at Steven’s house. As my bestest of best friends, we’ve been on the same wavelength for so many years now (twenty-five years and counting so far, to be exact). But he was always on the opposite spectrum of gaming to me, having a Commodore instead of an Amstrad, a Game Boy instead of a Lynx and a Super Nintendo instead of a Mega Drive.
I’d spent a bit of time playing on his Super Nintendo in the past. I spent most of my time playing Mario Is Missing, which is not in any way the best of the Mario games. I have no idea why I liked it so much. He had other classics in his collection, but for the life of me I can’t really remember what. To be honest, we spent more time watching terrible horror movies like Troll 2 and playing with Boglins than we did playing games.
That changed one day though, when he acquired the other next-gen console that was attempting to do battle with the PS, the aforementioned N64. Nintendo have always been a bit of a stubborn bunch, and they refused to entertain the idea of putting games onto discs for fear of piracy (a fear that was well-founded, considering that pirated PS games didn’t take long to surface). Instead of discs, the N64 challenged developers to cram a lot of game data onto the quickly declining cartridge format. For this reason, many developers up and left Nintendo and moved to Sony, Sega and even Atari to produce their wares instead. Which is a pity, since the N64 was, in theory, the most powerful machine available at the time.
Yet despite losing a lot of business, Nintendo still managed to release some absolute gems for their N64 system, and Steven had three of them. Firstly, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. It was insane, gory, had dinosaurs and was based on a comic book series. Nintendo were on to something with that one, and two sequels followed on the N64 before the fourth game in the series ventured outside of Nintendo’s consoles and went multi-platform.
Then there was Super Mario 64. You cannot have a Nintendo console without the short chubby Italian plumber, and in my opinion, Super Mario 64 is up there with the best (for the record, it’s definitely better than Mario Is Missing). It’s fun, addictive, engaging, colourful and graphically gorgeous. Which is an impressive feat on a system known for its blocky graphics which pale in insignificance when pitted against the PS’s prowess, despite Sony’s machine not having as many “bits”.
Finally, the daddy of next gen shooter games. A game that still gets talked about. A game that got a reboot and re-release recently, which is incredibly rare for a shooter. Yup, that’s the one I’m talking about. If you’re still uncertain, I mean Goldeneye 64. It was sleek, it was sexy, it was Bond on your Nintendo. While the single player campaign was good for a laugh, the multi-player was where the real fun lay. Four-way split-screen mayhem, and everyone arguing over who gets to play as Oddjob. Steven usually won that argument since it was his console, so he would get to run around and sneak up on people as that tiny bowler-hatted psychopath and stab you in the crotch.
Or he would play his other trick, shooting a smiley face in a wall and then planting a mine as the nose. Cue someone (usually one of our hapless school friends called Phillip) noticing it and saying, “Hey, who did this?” Swiftly followed by an explosion and much mirth.
I swear I’ve never laughed so much while playing any video game past or present. It was never about whether you won or lost, it was all about what you got from playing it. I really don’t think I’ve come across many multiplayer games since that have that level of energy and excitement mixed with entertainment and enjoyment.
The N64 laid down some other benchmark titles, such as The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, which pretty much defined the new era of adventure gaming along withMystical Ninja Starring Goemon.
Nintendo also shocked a few people by releasing a crude little curio called Conker’s Bad Fur Day. I believe it’s pretty hard to get hold of these days, but the story features a foul-mouthed squirrel and his foul-mouthed forest buddies beating up on lots of foul-mouthed bad guys. The shock value was pretty huge, considering Nintendo are generally known for their family-friendly approach to games. Having a game with so much toilet humour and cursing was a radical turn for Nintendo, and making all the characters cute and cuddly probably confused a lot of parents when they bought the game for their kids and watched as they then controlled a squirrel trying to kill, in effect, a shit monster. No, really.
But as much fun as I had playing on that N64, my mind was firmly set on one thing. I wanted a PS, and I was determined to start saving up to buy myself one. My only income at this time was my weekly pocket money of five pounds plus the money I’d get on a Sunday visiting relatives. So I ended up with roughly eight pounds a week, with a little extra windfall now and again at times like my birthday and Christmas. Sometimes I’d even get a bit of money at Easter amidst the mountain of chocolate eggs.
If you asked me the timeframe of when I started saving for a PS and when I bought one, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. What I can say is that after a few months saving every penny I got, including money that the kids at school threw away (still baffles me why kids threw their change on the floor, I would never waste even a penny), I finally bought myself one of Sony’s wonderful machines.
The PS came pre-packaged with a demo disc, which has kind of become a little bit infamous. Titled simply “Demo1”, it slapped you straight in the face with some really “hip” 90’s techno music and footage of all the games the PS had to offer.
The disc itself had something called V-CD (where you could put a music disc in and random squiggles and shapes would swirl around on the screen, kind of like the cheap effects you get on Windows Media Player but with the game developer Psygnosis’ logo bobbing around too) along with some videos of games coming out in the future, information on the PS system and, the best part, playable demos of some of the games that would become PS classics like Abe’s Oddysee, Hercules, Lifeforce Tenka, Porsche Challenge, Rage Racer,Rapid Racer, Kurushi and Overboard.
OK, so only one of those games is really regarded as a classic. Abe’s Oddysee was unlike anything I had ever played before. You take control of an amicable being called Abe, a Mudokon who lives on a planet called Oddworld and works in a meat-processing factory that serves up delicious meat-based snacks (like Scrab Cakes and Meech Munchies). The only problem is the creatures used to make these foodstuffs are rapidly running out, and the greedy creatures known as Glukkons who run the factory need a new delicacy. Cue the excellent marketing idea of Mudokon Pops!
Our hero overhears the plan and thus begins his quest to escape the factory and save his friends. It’s all very unassuming gameplay, there are no weapons, it’s all about being sneaky. Abe has the ability to possess enemies and other Mudokons, which is how you progress throughout the game. Of course, I immediately used this ability to possess the main enemies (called Sligs) and make them leap to their deaths from high ledges or feed them into meat grinders. Because you know, mindless violence is always fun. This does not serve to advance the plot however, just so you know.
I spent a lot of time playing around with Abe and his odd world (see what I did there?), as well as a lot more time playing Overboard!, which was a pirate game where you go and blast other ships to smithereens. Another playable demo was called Kurushi. It was kind of like Tetris only… not. You control a guy who has to run around while random shapes roll around the screen and you have to activate squares after the shapes roll over them. It sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, believe me. But while playing these snippets was all well and good, I needed some full games to play.
Rayman was my first purchase, as it was tried and tested (by me). But as I saved up my pocket money more games found their way into my collection. I was quite a fan of G-Police, a futuristic adventure game where you pilot a police ship around a city and shoot down bad guys. Or act as a police escort. Or sometimes do some spying. It was one of the most in-depth games I can remember playing at the time. It reminded me a little of Syndicate, the game I’d played while trussed up in that hospital bed.
I spent quite a lot of time playing The Adventures of Alundra as well. It was an adventure game in the style of the Zelda series, and was pretty fun and very interactive. I found it got frustratingly difficult fairly quickly though, so I never did get around to completing it. It’s one of the many games on my “To Complete at Some Point in the Future” list. You know the type of list, one that keeps getting new stuff added to it and not much crossed off.
My first vivid gaming experience after buying my PS came at the hands of a completely different kind of game, however. One of my friends at school (a lad called Wayne, who was one of those kids who wanted to be part of the cool crowd but inevitably wound up hanging around with the nerds… i.e. me) found out I had finally entered the PS generation and offered to lend me one of his favourite games. It was another one I had not heard of, so I was intrigued. I’d be shuffling from intrigued to terrified soon enough though.
Wayne insisted I played a game called Resident Evil, and despite the fact that he told me about certain jump scare moments I still practically hit the ceiling whenever some beasty leapt out at me. I was petrified, but that was what kept me going and sticking with the game. The story was pretty fantastic, even though the voice acting was infamously terrible.
I’d never played a horror game before, unless you count the game Aliens (based on the movie) that I had on the Amstrad. Which was pretty darn scary. Well, scary for an eight-year-old.
The fear in Resident Evil was all generated by the build-up of tension. You could walk through a few rooms without anything happening, and wonder when the next zombie would pop out at you. After a couple of hours, the respite of the music you hear when you enter a typewriter room (a room where you can save the game and give your overactive imagination a break) becomes such a big relief you barely want to leave. You just want to set up a new life in this little room, living off the herbs (restorative medicines that are dotted around the place) you’ve collected along the way, maybe doing a bit of decorating. You know, make it more like home until all the zombies have rotted into piles of sad-looking mush.
Sadly, this is not an option. But the game rewards you with one of the most epic endings ever when completed. The next two games in the franchise also have fantastically bombastic endings, meaning it’s always worth sticking with them until the very end. Even if you do get devoured countless times. Or blown up. Or squashed by a booby trap. Or get killed in some other hideously imaginative way.
I have to admit that the original PS Resident Evil games are still my favourites in the series. The first one introduced me to the survival horror genre, the second one introduced smoother graphics and (slightly) better voice-acting whereas the third one pushed the PS to its limits while also pushing the story up to new heights and paving the way for the expanded Resident Evil universe we know and love today (terrible movie adaptations included).
After dealing with the gruelling terror of Resident Evil I needed something a bit lighter with less stress. While visiting the local video game store, which by this point was rapidly becoming my second home, with some of my saved-up money, I noticed that FFVII was now part of the PS Platinum series. This was excellent news, because that meant it only cost twenty pounds! I was home in a shot and diving in. No worries about not having a memory card handy this time, I made sure I had more than enough space for saving games. I think I had three memory cards for my PS. Mind you, one was set aside solely for saving my cities on Sim City 2000. You needed some serious space to save that game once you had a pretty vast city.
Anyway, the point is I could now play FFVII and actually save when I needed to do something more important like sleep, eat or go to school. None of which seemed too important when I was playing.
It was great to finally be able to play and enjoy the game and be able to advance forwards in the plot. I whiled away many hours going through the highs and lows of the story before polishing off the game once and for all. I was quite voracious when I was playing, not giving any screen time to any other games. All of my focus was on finishing, as I was so involved with the characters and the plot.
FFVII remains one of my favourite games of all time, and I have it to thank for introducing me to the world of role-playing games. I added many more to my collection as the years wore on. Breath of Fire III and IV, Grandia and Grandia II, Chrono Trigger, the Star Ocean series, the Persona series and most of the other entries in the Final Fantasyseries were all welcomed into my library, and I still look back to Square and thank them whenever I discover a new RPG to play.
While my PS game collection was piling up nicely, one of my older gaming systems was getting some new life breathed into it as well. This was thanks to the release of a game that would go on to spawn countless sequels and is still going strong today. Pokemon Red had got me hooked since I picked it up for my Game Boy, and when I wasn’t wrestling with PS games I was beavering away levelling up my Pokemon and earning my gym badges. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure a nearby child will be able to fill you in.
One of the best parts of playing this game was the fact I had a friend called Richard at school who had its counterpart, Pokemon Blue. So nearly every day after school we’d head to his house and have a battle against each other. He never beat me though, because I had a Level 84 Wartortle (believe me, it was awesome) and his highest level Pokemon was about 60. A grasp of simple mathematics should tell you that this made his task pretty difficult.
One day I felt sorry for Richard, and traded him my epic Wartortle for something a lot less impressive. So less impressive, in fact, I’ve forgotten what it was. He then subsequently went on to demolish me every week.
He went about beating me in such a way that would make some people hit that unfriend button. But this was before the days of Facebook so I had to keep putting up with him. I used to start with my strongest Pokemon and wipe him out, so he knew from the off he would struggle. His tactic was to put up five not quite that strong Pokemon against me first (you choose six Pokemon each in battles) that he knew I could beat. He would dangle that possibility of victory in front of me, but then out came Wartortle at the end to polish off any of my Pokemon still standing. Of course I knew what was coming, but it never got any easier to accept.
I never complained though, I was enjoying getting some multiplayer gaming done, and I’d like to think Richard still has that Wartortle. Although I doubt it.
Another game that kick-started a legendary franchise was coming into the public eye at the same time Pokemon games and toys and all other types of merchandise were flying off the shelves like proverbial hot cakes lathered with whipped cream and fresh jam. This wasn’t exactly one for the kids though. A little game had popped up and started stirring up controversy about violence in video games and whether there should be limits on the content. Ultimately, of course, that argument got bound, gagged, thrown in the back of a car and taken to the local crusher. Mostly thanks to the persistence of a company called Take Two Interactive and the legions of fans they gained with the release of Grand Theft Auto (or GTA as we call it to save on syllables) on the PS.
I’d read about it of course, it was hard to escape a game that received so much media attention. Even if I wasn’t an avid gamer, I would have seen the news tearing it to shreds without any of the people slamming it ever picking up a controller and actually playing it.
Perhaps because of all this negative attention, I was desperate to get my hands on it. There was one small barrier though. I was a few years shy of the rating. GTA was rated 18, and one of the very few PS games at the time to receive that honour. The Entertainment Software Rating Boardare the people who hand out ratings, and I was well versed in them all. There were games rated for anyone (3 and above), for 11-14, for 15-17 and then 18 and above. I could get away with sometimes buying a 15-17 rated game, but I didn’t even dare attempt to buy one that was classed higher. To put it into perspective, I still sometimes get asked for ID when I go to buy alcohol. So imagine how young I must have looked back then.
The best I could do at the time was convince my mum to take it to the counter at Blockbuster (Ritz had been bought out by them now) and rent it for me. I felt like I was breaking the law when I got that game home and surreptitiously popped it into the PS.
Now, there is a plot (of sorts) to be followed in GTA. There are missions to do, and as you complete them you make new contacts in the city and when you’ve done enough you can move on to the next level. But, as a 13 year old, the only thing I wanted to do in this open city environment was drive around and squash people. Which I did. Incessantly. For a good couple of hours.
I’d played violent games before, it was nothing really new. But this took it to another level. You have a whole cityscape to run around and create havoc in. You could yank anyone out of their car and go for a joyride. You could shoot random passers-by. You could get into a shootout with the cops, but it wasn’t advisable since the health bar on the game was brutally stingy.
The graphics were primitive compared to some of the stuff coming out on the PS, and the top-down view made the game a little infuriating at times, but as I
eventually got around to actually completing the missions, I realised that the game had a fascinating depth to it. I sensed that there was a big future for this series. Even back then, something told me that this would not be the only game to have the words “Grand Theft Auto” in the title.
Now, of course, would be the moment to bring up the argument about whether kids should be allowed to play games such as this one. My response is that it should always be at the discretion of the parent. The best way to gauge whether a game is suitable for your child is to play it yourself. Even if you are not a videogame addict like me, just rent it and give it a try. Or at least find some footage online, as pretty much every game now has an online play through posted somewhere. Only you know what you think your own child can handle. Don’t let the media panic about any game make a decision for you.
There is no one size fits all solution to this argument; it’s down to individual choice. And no, not all kids are going to go into murderous rampage mode when they play something with guns and violence in it. It always gets my back up when I see some elitist anti-videogame spokesperson demonising us all as dangerous psychopaths after some kid goes on a shooting spree and they find out they played Call of Duty or GTA. You know what, so do millions of other people, and they don’t go around deciding it’s time to kill everyone. Don’t tar us all with the same brush. The vast, vast majority of gamers are fully functioning, sensible and very sane people who know the difference between virtual reality and actual reality.
But if you’ve read this far into my story, I hope that you are already of that opinion and my little rant is something you agree with.
Sorry about that, I got into activist mode for a moment there. The butt of the story is, I played GTA when I was a young teen and I have so far not shot a single person in real life. Yeah, I’m pretty good at that differentiating between virtual and actual reality thing.
After my rental period was up for GTA, I decided to try my luck at buying a copy at my trusty video game store. I realise I’ve mentioned this store a few times but never divulged much about it.
It was called Chips, and they used to have branches all over the UK. Mostly in smaller towns, but they had a few city-based locations. My local hometown branch was where I would spend a lot of my time after school and on weekends, checking out the new games and seeing if anything good had popped up in the used games sections. The staff were friendly and knowledgeable, which helps when they recognise you and know what kind of games to suggest.
They also gave out free Creme Eggs at Easter.
A picture posted online by my cousin recently revealed that the store has now closed down. Another slice of my childhood has disappeared.
Well, one day I walked into Chips and casually browsed through all the games, noticing a used copy of GTA nestled on the second-from-bottom shelf. I picked it up and read the back of the case for a good five minutes before sidling over to the counter and plopping it down, trying to look as natural as I could. I probably looked unbelievably shifty and was probably also as red as a beetroot.
“What are you up to, buying this?”
I fumbled for words. For an excuse. For any reason to dash out of there without being arrested.
The young man behind the counter grinned a cheeky grin and said, “The Platinum edition of this is coming out early next year, why don’t you just wait and buy it brand new?”
That sneaky so-and-so made me panic for nothing! I allowed myself a huge smile of relief, and said I’d be back with Christmas and birthday money (I’m a January child) in the New Year. In the meantime I plopped GTA back onto the shelf and bought a different game instead. One that rewrote the book on next-generation survival horror that was penned byResident Evil.
The first time I played Silent Hill, it started off unassuming enough. Guy is driving along a road on a foggy night with his little girl in the car. Car breaks down, girl goes missing in the fog, guy has to walk to the nearby town to try and find her.
So far, so normal.
The game goes from relaxing to nightmarish in stunningly quick fashion. The premise is straight from classic horror movie lore. You lose your daughter in a desolate town which turns out to be full of hellish demons and crazy nutjobs. You have a couple of momentary companions throughout, who you bump into now and again to ease the tension. Any human interaction is a blessing in this place.
Every once in a while, you are warped into the other version of Silent Hill, which is even more demonic and insane. The enemies are tougher, and the background art and music get much more disturbing.
And that is one of the best parts of the game. The atmosphere created by the music. In some ways, the music is one of the scariest parts of the game. This is recreated throughout the Silent Hill collection. The second instalment was the scariest and deepest in plot, in my opinion. But the first one throws up lots of horror, an intriguing plot, and plenty of moments where you just don’t want to open the next door because the music is building up to a crescendo and you just know something bad is going to happen.
In essence, the gameplay is very similar to the Resident Evil games. There are locked doors and you have to complete puzzles to find the keys, there’s a lot of backtracking to previous locations involved to find items, but because of the warped nature of the enemies and the landscape, everything seems much more eerie than the world of Resident Evil.Silent Hill managed to differentiate itself by being on a different plain of horror. Psychological horror.
This is why the series is still running strong after all these years, with a new Silent Hill game currently in development with the help of Hideo Kojima (famous for his work on the magnificent Metal Gear Solid series) and Guillermo del Toro (famous for making some of the most ambitious and fun movies of our generation including Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy andPacific Rim). With those two names on board, it’s no wonder the build up to this Silent Hillgame has been the biggest yet. It’s got a lot to live up to, but the series is in good hands now after faltering a little over the last couple of years.
After mastering and completing Silent Hill, I browsed back through some of my old gaming magazines and came across a picture of the new console that Sega had in development. Back in that very first article it was dubbed Katana, and boasted 128-bit graphics. Looking at the magazines as the year went along, Japan already had these machines, and they had been renamed as Dreamcasts.
The pictures from the available games looked fantastic, and since Sega had abandoned the Sega Saturn (one of the few consoles I’ve never had in my collection), we were all waiting for this machine to hit our coasts. It would be quite a while before that happened though, which was lucky for me as it gave me plenty of time to save up for one.
In the meantime though, Christmas was just around the corner and that meant I would be receiving money from lots of generous relatives. Money that would be added to my games fund. The first thing on my list in the New Year was the Platinum version of GTA, and it was dutifully snapped up as soon as I spotted it pop up in Chips.
Not long after that, an add-on pack was released for GTA. This was highly unusual. Well, for console games it was. This new release was a short foray into London in 1969, which was unsurprisingly titled Grand Theft Auto: London 1969. Take Two may have been good with game development, but thinking up titles obviously isn’t their strong point.
To play the game, first you needed to buy it (that bit is always important), but you also needed to already own GTA. So you have to load up the GTA: London disc, then when that’s done you put your GTA disc in and then put the GTA: London disc back in again.
It was quite the rigmarole just to play a game a fraction the size of the original, but it was a fun little romp. There were some amusing British cultural references, and the game went on to do pretty well. I enjoyed it, but for me it was just a stop-gap until the proper sequel toGTA came out.
One thing I will say about the GTA: London disc is that I’m fairly sure it was the first time I noticed that you can listen to some PS game soundtracks by putting the game discs into a CD player. This wasn’t true for all discs, but that didn’t stop me putting every one of my game discs into my CD player to see if there was anything there other than the game data. To this day, the sound of the horrible squealing of the game data track is still more memorable than any of the songs I heard on those discs.
Once I finished playing GTA and GTA: London, I had another period of quiet time with gaming, where I spent more time outside and completely failed to get a girlfriend despite my (pretty poor, admittedly) best efforts. I always ended up being fed the line, “well, you’re more like a brother to me”. What is it with that line? Is it meant to make us feel better? Because to me it sounds more like, “I’m saying this because now if you try to kiss me it’ll be totally like incest and that’ll put you off, right?”
Anyway, summer romance heartbreaks aside, there were two games coming out near the end of the year that I was relishing though, and all of my money was put aside to buy them when they came out.
The first was Final Fantasy VIII (FFVIII). I remember taking the bus into the city (going anywhere other than my home town was a big deal when I was younger) the day it was released, and I was so excited. I’d read all of the build-up to release, seen all of the preview shots and then pored over the rave full game review in a magazine called GamesMaster, which was my gaming bible for many years. That was the same magazine I’d used to follow the development of the Dreamcast.
The magazine itself came about thanks to the Channel 4 show of the same name. GamesMaster was initially broadcast on Channel 4 starting back in 1992 and had a good run up to 1998. It was a visual feast for the eyes, with reviews of new games and a nice section where kids came and asked the GamesMaster (played by the legend that was Patrick Moore) for help on parts of games they were stuck on. Patrick Moore would deliver his lines with aplomb, as if he actually had played and completed all of the games he was talking about. Maybe he did. That would make him even more amazing than I had previously believed. Every series of the show would be set in a different environment, and I remember they were on a desert island one year and then in Hell another. It was crazy, and Channel 4 relished in delivering an alternative to mainstream television.
Another great aspect of the show was when developers made special levels of games to be played exclusively as part of the games competitions that took place. One great example is Shiny Entertainment, who made an exclusive level of Earthworm Jim.
I loved my weekly fix of the show, and I remember when it got cancelled. That signalled the end of quite an era. But even though the show had been taken out back and shot, I still had their company in a way once a month when the newest issue of the magazine came out.
So, with all of the hype whizzing around in my head, I bought the special edition of FFVIII,which came with a free memory card (just a cheap plain white one, no art or anything on it) and a t-shirt which was white with a cheap iron-on transfer of the game cover on it.
When we got home, I fired the game up and dived in. I knew the graphics were vastly different from the previous game; they’d gone for the Resident Evil style rather than the classic angular polygonal look. This was one of the things that put me off straight away, actually. They’d tried to make things prettier, but everything actually came across as a lot more clumsy-looking and blocky.
Next, the characters did not draw me in, their stories didn’t interest me. Everything seems to jump around from one thing to the next like an epileptic frog with a severe case of the hiccups. While trying to keep up with the character’s erratic hormones, emotions and relationships there is some kind of bigger story trying to develop but it never seems to come off.
I was hugely disappointed, and never finished the game. It was the first time I’d bought a game and felt let down by it. I am currently working my way
through it again, determined to actually get to the end so I can tick it off that huge list of games I need to finish.
Nonetheless, I never did quite forgive Square for this one, and I always approach new games in the series with a lot of trepidation. This might explain why I quickly lost interest in numbers X, XII and XIII.
Square burned me even more when they announced that number XI would be an online only game, when I was pretty late entering the arena of the online world (it would be 2005 by the time I lived in a house with an internet connection).
I did wear that cheap-looking FFVIII shirt until it dropped to pieces though, and like I mentioned earlier I still admire Square a lot for getting me into the world of RPGs. To me, though, they’ve never quite captured the same majesty and brilliance that they did withFFVII.
This could all be down to it being the first of the series I played, of course. My wife adores the sixth instalment of the game, and it’s still her favourite. And I am sure that somewhere out there are people who like others more than FFVII. This is one of the other brilliant things about being involved in the gaming community, there are varied opinions and everyone has their own personal favourites.
And that is fine. Because that’s what life is about and what separates us from the animals. Variety and differences of opinion.
Anyone that thinks any Final Fantasy game is better than the seventh one is wrong though.
After being let-down by what I thought was going to be a sure-fire hit, I got my hopes up again with the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 2 (stylised as gta2, which is a lot easier for me to write up).
It still had the top-down view, but the graphics had been smoothed out and the storyline was a bit more in-depth than in the first game. The basic concept of completing missions for various people still existed, but this time it was a gang warfare layout. If you completed missions for one gang and killed members of others, your respect levels with each gang would change accordingly. If a gang really liked you, you could go on to complete the top level missions for them. If they hated you, they chased you if you went into their territory. And the madder they were with you, the stronger the weapons they used. The flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails were the worst. There wasn’t anything more certain than death in gta2 if you caught fire.
The missions were more complex and fun, and the replay value was pretty high as well. There’s not a huge back catalogue of games I would want to go back and play again now, but that is definitely one of them. Actually, just writing about it had me hunting it down and ordering it online.
Another game I had not yet played but knew a lot about had recently been added to the elusive PS Platinum list. It’s a game I mentioned a little earlier, and it plays out like a top quality spy action movie. Now, our hero isn’t exactly suave like James Bond, he’s more of the rugged type who prefers wetsuits and camouflage to tuxedos and martinis. An infiltration expert. A man who can outwit guards and even wolves just by hiding under a box. Oh yes, Solid Snake. The protagonist of Metal Gear Solid (MGS), the first time theMetal Gear series had appeared on the PS.
It was another series that had made the jump from the Nintendo (the list of Nintendo casualties in this generation is a long one), and it propelled Hideo Kojima and his characters into a mesmerising and meteoric rise into the annals of gaming history. The series is still plodding along today, and this first PS instalment was so much fun to play whilst being equally infuriating at the same time.
As soon as it came out for cheap in the Platinum series I snapped it up. I was hypnotised by the opening sequence (it’s another example of a game’s soundtrack being absolutely stellar) and started putting my spy skills through their paces. Here’s a handy hint for you; spending a lot of time trying to kill guards in plain sight of other guards is not a good spy skill. I eventually got the hang of being sneaky and not charging in like Rambo, and managed to get into the facility where the brunt of the story takes place.
There’s one part early on in the game where you need to find the contact number for a certain character you bumped into earlier to progress in the story, with my hint being that the information needed was “on the back of the CD case”.
I hunted high and low. There was a computer room in the game with what looked like CD cases on it, so I ran around, hoping I would pick something up. Nope.
I backtracked through every part of the game I’d encountered so far, checking every corner and every crevice. Which resulted in me getting shot to death a few times.
Eventually I gave up for the night, turned the PS off and hopped into bed, bringing the case with me to have a read of the manual, which I had yet to inspect. I’m a man, we don’t do instruction manuals. Which is why we spend six hours trying to build a computer desk and end up with a bookcase.
Anyway, once I’d pored over the controls and read the character bios, I slid the manual back into the case and prepared to drop it on to the floor. Just as I did I had a peek at the back of the case. There was the character I needed to get in touch with, complete with the radio frequency required to contact her.
All at the same time I was annoyed and amazed. I thought it was a touch of genius, and when I played the game again recently I managed to forget how to do that part, so I ended up doing all the same things I did years ago.
The game was peppered with moments of genius like this. One of the boss characters, a psychic called Psycho Mantis, can read all of your thoughts. If you happen to have any saved games by Konami (the developers of MGS) on your memory card, he’ll mention them in the build-up to your battle. Mind-blowing!
He’s a tough cookie as well, using telekinesis to lob everything in the room at you whilst also knowing exactly when you’re about to give him a bunch of fives. Unless you cheat. If you plug your controller into the second port, he can’t read you anymore and you can beat the ever-living heck out of him pretty easily.
He even makes mention of it at the end of the fight if you do it this way, before doing what all the other bosses do when you kill them. He pours his heart out to you in (almost) Oscar-winning style.
There are so many twists and turns in the game, so many conspiracies to try and keep up with, so many characters you can’t trust that it makes for a rollercoaster of an experience that you never want to get off from. Mostly because you’d be too worried about being stabbed in the back on the way out.
While I’d been getting to grips with that slew of new games, Sega had unleashed the Dreamcast onto European shores. The price tag was a bit too hefty for me at the time, but I was determined to do what I did every year and keep my Christmas and birthday money to one side and buy one after that.
So I think this is as good a time as any to give you all a little break before we head to the year 2000, when the 128-bit generation and Microsoft started making inroads into my gaming life.
This goes a long way to explaining why games are such an important part of my life and my memories. As I grew up and matured, the world of gaming grew and matured with me.
My first foray into this new generation of in-depth games happened whilst paying my regular Sunday visit to my gran’s house one week. My cousin Simon (the same one who owned the Amiga I had played Street Fighter II on all those years ago) had brought his new console over. I looked curiously at the grey plastic box on the carpet and the weird shaped controller. My curiosity was further piqued when I noticed that the games for this box were on compact discs instead of cartridges. How interesting! How novel! How modern!
Simon popped a disc in, clicked the lid shut and powered up. Soon, the game’s title screen popped up. Hm. Final Fantasy VII. Never heard of it.
I was blown away. What was this wondrous piece of technology and how could it produce graphics that looked so simplistic and yet so beautiful? I was mesmerised. I was hypnotised. I was instantly addicted. And all I was doing was watch Simon play a random part of a random game. After a while he sauntered off and told me I could play. I imagine my eyes grew as wide as they had for a long time when he said that.
I didn’t instantly play Final Fantasy VII (since there’s a lot of Final Fantasy game mentions, I’ll shorten them all to FF whatever number), bigger fool me. No, the first disc I was drawn to had a very colourful case and a suave looking lead character with floppy blonde hair and no limbs, just floating appendages. Sound familiar? Or just weird? Maybe both? Either way, that game was Rayman.
Yes, my first experience actually holding a PlayStation controller and playing a game was the first in a series that Ubisoft has since turned into a huge franchise. It was a platform game in the vein of Super Mario and Sonic, so I was in familiar territory. The major difference was that this game seemed so smooth and polished compared to those old Nintendo and Sega games. It was also very pretty and addictive. And a lot more challenging that any game of this type I’d played before. Needless to say, my gaming brain was gearing up to move to the next generation.
Yes, it was true. Sony had muscled their way into the gaming market by releasing the whirling dervish known as the PlayStation (hereafter referred to as the PS) onto the market. It had already been out for a good three years before I first played on that fateful Sunday though. I was twelve, and still parked quite firmly in the camps of Sega, Nintendo and Atari. This was, however, mainly because I was not earning any money of my own and therefore a bit limited in what I could get hold of.
Sometime soon though, that would change. But not quite yet.
Back to the PS. Both of the games Simon brought to my gran’s house that Sunday, Raymanand FFVII, were both prime examples of the next generation stealing the thunder of its predecessors. Rayman was originally being developed for the Super Nintendo and then switched to the Atari Jaguar before actually being released on the PS a week before it made its’ Atari debut. It went on to become the biggest selling game for the PS, while the Jaguar and the Super Nintendo went into decline (although Nintendo replaced their ailing system with the N64, which we will come to later).
FFVII, on the other hand, was a case of long-time Nintendo stalwart Square switching allegiances to create a better game. Every other game in the Final Fantasy series had belonged to Nintendo, but what with them being pretty stick-in-the-mud with the way they wanted to move forward, Square upped their stick from the mud and pledged their allegiance to Sony.
So on that note, let’s get back to my gran’s house. While we were eating our Sunday dinner, Simon graciously offered to let me borrow the PS for the week. Without trying to sound too eager, I accepted. This moment isn’t too clear in my mind anymore, but I’m guessing I probably did sound too eager. Far too eager.
I wolfed down the rest of my food and ran to the living room to start unhooking the system and bundling it all into a carrier bag. Before my gran had time to even start clearing the table I was out of the door and zooming back home to tuck into some new gaming experiences.
I hooked everything up to my TV, doing a bit of genius multi-plugging to ensure I could have my TV, Mega Drive and the PS all running at the same time. Kids are spoilt nowadays with HDMI leads. This was the age when you had to plug your console into the TV aerial jack and then choose a channel to play it on and then tune the channel to get your game screen on. It was a challenge just to get up and running!
After wrestling with the TV remote for a while, I had everything ready to go. I fired the PS into life with Rayman all ready to go, and started playing. It was a game I loved to play purely because of the fun characters and backgrounds and music. I was never too invested in actually completing it (I still have never actually made it through the whole game); I was just enjoying the experience of playing my first 32-bit game.
To put that previous comment into context, my old Amstrad CPC from the beginning of this story was an 8-bit machine (hence the title), the Atari ST was a 16-bit along with the Mega Drive, and now I was diving into the 32-bit ocean for the first time.
To put the context into context, the more “bits” a console boasts, the prettier it makes things look. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but let’s keep things simple and purely focussed on gaming rather than get into too much detail about what happens inside those magic boxes.
I finished playing Rayman after getting stuck on the second land and decided it was time to get to grips with FFVII. Now, I’d watched Simon play a part of the game which was well into the story, so I knew I had a lot to look forward to. The title screen flashed up and I selected “New Game” with the same amount of anticipation I felt when I first played Sonic the Hedgehog 2.
That opening sequence still blows my mind. The slow pan around the city of Midgar (where you start the game), the camera zooming in on the action that starts the plot running and the music rising to a crescendo as everything on screen sparkles despite the gloomy setting.
So as I tucked into the game and played through the first couple of hours, learning how the battle system worked, learning a little bit about the main characters, learning more about the role-playing game (RPG) genre and generally became addicted, it was time for me to go to bed. Ah well, there’s a save point right there, I’ll just walk into it and pick up where I left off tomorrow.
Wait, what? No memory card detected? Oh. Yes, believe it or not I had been in such a rush to pack up the PS and bring it home with me that I’d forgotten to bring the memory card with me. For the uninitiated (or just the kids who have never needed to worry about memory cards, what with everything having a PC-style hard-drive built in nowadays), this meant that I could not save my progress in any game I played. With some games this doesn’t matter, of course. When you’re playing a game that only takes an hour or two to complete, you don’t need a save mechanism. But games like FFVII have more than fifty hours of gameplay (even longer if you’re anything like me and like to complete every little thing and get all of your characters up to the maximum level), so without some way of saving progress now and again, there’s no way to finish without leaving the console up and running constantly. I would have taken the risk and done that if not for two things.
Firstly, this was not my possession. Tempting as it was to just go for it and leave it on, I didn’t want to break it and be responsible for replacing it. Because it wouldn’t have been me doing the replacing, it would have been my parents. And that might have meant they would have sold my current collection to do that. Too unbearable a thought!
Secondly, my dad had grown wise to my attempts at being a sneaky gamer. I would sometimes stay up late and play on my Mega Drive and simply make sure there was something covering the power light on the top in case I needed to quickly put the TV onto standby and leap into bed if I heard someone heading for the toilet during the night. But after a few times being caught, the red light trick stopped working and my dad would just switch all of my equipment off at the wall if he thought he heard me rustling around.
The PS made it even more impossible to pull that trick. The Mega Drive was nice and quiet when it was running since it was a cartridge console, but the PS would be whirring away, spinning the disc inside around and around. Doesn’t sound bad when you have the TV blasting and it’s daytime. But when it’s night-time and you’re playing something with low volume in the dark it sounds a million times louder than a nuclear explosion. And my dad was a very light sleeper. And my bedroom door never closed properly thanks to a problem with the carpet being too thick and the door latch being painted over.
Long story short, I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. And my dad was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.
So, since I couldn’t leave the thing running all week with no breaks, I did the best I could in the situation. I played the first couple of hours of FFVII every day of that week. I was just so invested in the game and so obsessed with it that I never got bored of doing that. The same two hours of story every day, for a full week. And then Simon got his console back. I’d had a taste of what the next generation had to offer though, and I knew I’d go back for more as soon as I could.
In the meantime, I continued to tinker around with my current consoles, giving my Atari ST to a school friend named James (a curious chap who told stories of setting fire to abandoned police cars and making customised shotguns down in the midlands where he lived prior to venturing up north) to do some awesome military camouflage style design on it. When it was done, it looked so much better after sporting that dirty white colour all those years. I was also wrapping up my Mega Drive wall plug cord with endless amounts of tape to try and hold it together. It was starting to get reminiscent of how my Atari Lynx cord had died. But it held on and I kept enjoying what I had.
Now and again, I would have a night over at Steven’s house. As my bestest of best friends, we’ve been on the same wavelength for so many years now (twenty-five years and counting so far, to be exact). But he was always on the opposite spectrum of gaming to me, having a Commodore instead of an Amstrad, a Game Boy instead of a Lynx and a Super Nintendo instead of a Mega Drive.
I’d spent a bit of time playing on his Super Nintendo in the past. I spent most of my time playing Mario Is Missing, which is not in any way the best of the Mario games. I have no idea why I liked it so much. He had other classics in his collection, but for the life of me I can’t really remember what. To be honest, we spent more time watching terrible horror movies like Troll 2 and playing with Boglins than we did playing games.
That changed one day though, when he acquired the other next-gen console that was attempting to do battle with the PS, the aforementioned N64. Nintendo have always been a bit of a stubborn bunch, and they refused to entertain the idea of putting games onto discs for fear of piracy (a fear that was well-founded, considering that pirated PS games didn’t take long to surface). Instead of discs, the N64 challenged developers to cram a lot of game data onto the quickly declining cartridge format. For this reason, many developers up and left Nintendo and moved to Sony, Sega and even Atari to produce their wares instead. Which is a pity, since the N64 was, in theory, the most powerful machine available at the time.
Yet despite losing a lot of business, Nintendo still managed to release some absolute gems for their N64 system, and Steven had three of them. Firstly, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. It was insane, gory, had dinosaurs and was based on a comic book series. Nintendo were on to something with that one, and two sequels followed on the N64 before the fourth game in the series ventured outside of Nintendo’s consoles and went multi-platform.
Then there was Super Mario 64. You cannot have a Nintendo console without the short chubby Italian plumber, and in my opinion, Super Mario 64 is up there with the best (for the record, it’s definitely better than Mario Is Missing). It’s fun, addictive, engaging, colourful and graphically gorgeous. Which is an impressive feat on a system known for its blocky graphics which pale in insignificance when pitted against the PS’s prowess, despite Sony’s machine not having as many “bits”.
Finally, the daddy of next gen shooter games. A game that still gets talked about. A game that got a reboot and re-release recently, which is incredibly rare for a shooter. Yup, that’s the one I’m talking about. If you’re still uncertain, I mean Goldeneye 64. It was sleek, it was sexy, it was Bond on your Nintendo. While the single player campaign was good for a laugh, the multi-player was where the real fun lay. Four-way split-screen mayhem, and everyone arguing over who gets to play as Oddjob. Steven usually won that argument since it was his console, so he would get to run around and sneak up on people as that tiny bowler-hatted psychopath and stab you in the crotch.
Or he would play his other trick, shooting a smiley face in a wall and then planting a mine as the nose. Cue someone (usually one of our hapless school friends called Phillip) noticing it and saying, “Hey, who did this?” Swiftly followed by an explosion and much mirth.
I swear I’ve never laughed so much while playing any video game past or present. It was never about whether you won or lost, it was all about what you got from playing it. I really don’t think I’ve come across many multiplayer games since that have that level of energy and excitement mixed with entertainment and enjoyment.
The N64 laid down some other benchmark titles, such as The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, which pretty much defined the new era of adventure gaming along withMystical Ninja Starring Goemon.
Nintendo also shocked a few people by releasing a crude little curio called Conker’s Bad Fur Day. I believe it’s pretty hard to get hold of these days, but the story features a foul-mouthed squirrel and his foul-mouthed forest buddies beating up on lots of foul-mouthed bad guys. The shock value was pretty huge, considering Nintendo are generally known for their family-friendly approach to games. Having a game with so much toilet humour and cursing was a radical turn for Nintendo, and making all the characters cute and cuddly probably confused a lot of parents when they bought the game for their kids and watched as they then controlled a squirrel trying to kill, in effect, a shit monster. No, really.
But as much fun as I had playing on that N64, my mind was firmly set on one thing. I wanted a PS, and I was determined to start saving up to buy myself one. My only income at this time was my weekly pocket money of five pounds plus the money I’d get on a Sunday visiting relatives. So I ended up with roughly eight pounds a week, with a little extra windfall now and again at times like my birthday and Christmas. Sometimes I’d even get a bit of money at Easter amidst the mountain of chocolate eggs.
If you asked me the timeframe of when I started saving for a PS and when I bought one, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. What I can say is that after a few months saving every penny I got, including money that the kids at school threw away (still baffles me why kids threw their change on the floor, I would never waste even a penny), I finally bought myself one of Sony’s wonderful machines.
The PS came pre-packaged with a demo disc, which has kind of become a little bit infamous. Titled simply “Demo1”, it slapped you straight in the face with some really “hip” 90’s techno music and footage of all the games the PS had to offer.
The disc itself had something called V-CD (where you could put a music disc in and random squiggles and shapes would swirl around on the screen, kind of like the cheap effects you get on Windows Media Player but with the game developer Psygnosis’ logo bobbing around too) along with some videos of games coming out in the future, information on the PS system and, the best part, playable demos of some of the games that would become PS classics like Abe’s Oddysee, Hercules, Lifeforce Tenka, Porsche Challenge, Rage Racer,Rapid Racer, Kurushi and Overboard.
OK, so only one of those games is really regarded as a classic. Abe’s Oddysee was unlike anything I had ever played before. You take control of an amicable being called Abe, a Mudokon who lives on a planet called Oddworld and works in a meat-processing factory that serves up delicious meat-based snacks (like Scrab Cakes and Meech Munchies). The only problem is the creatures used to make these foodstuffs are rapidly running out, and the greedy creatures known as Glukkons who run the factory need a new delicacy. Cue the excellent marketing idea of Mudokon Pops!
Our hero overhears the plan and thus begins his quest to escape the factory and save his friends. It’s all very unassuming gameplay, there are no weapons, it’s all about being sneaky. Abe has the ability to possess enemies and other Mudokons, which is how you progress throughout the game. Of course, I immediately used this ability to possess the main enemies (called Sligs) and make them leap to their deaths from high ledges or feed them into meat grinders. Because you know, mindless violence is always fun. This does not serve to advance the plot however, just so you know.
I spent a lot of time playing around with Abe and his odd world (see what I did there?), as well as a lot more time playing Overboard!, which was a pirate game where you go and blast other ships to smithereens. Another playable demo was called Kurushi. It was kind of like Tetris only… not. You control a guy who has to run around while random shapes roll around the screen and you have to activate squares after the shapes roll over them. It sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, believe me. But while playing these snippets was all well and good, I needed some full games to play.
Rayman was my first purchase, as it was tried and tested (by me). But as I saved up my pocket money more games found their way into my collection. I was quite a fan of G-Police, a futuristic adventure game where you pilot a police ship around a city and shoot down bad guys. Or act as a police escort. Or sometimes do some spying. It was one of the most in-depth games I can remember playing at the time. It reminded me a little of Syndicate, the game I’d played while trussed up in that hospital bed.
I spent quite a lot of time playing The Adventures of Alundra as well. It was an adventure game in the style of the Zelda series, and was pretty fun and very interactive. I found it got frustratingly difficult fairly quickly though, so I never did get around to completing it. It’s one of the many games on my “To Complete at Some Point in the Future” list. You know the type of list, one that keeps getting new stuff added to it and not much crossed off.
My first vivid gaming experience after buying my PS came at the hands of a completely different kind of game, however. One of my friends at school (a lad called Wayne, who was one of those kids who wanted to be part of the cool crowd but inevitably wound up hanging around with the nerds… i.e. me) found out I had finally entered the PS generation and offered to lend me one of his favourite games. It was another one I had not heard of, so I was intrigued. I’d be shuffling from intrigued to terrified soon enough though.
Wayne insisted I played a game called Resident Evil, and despite the fact that he told me about certain jump scare moments I still practically hit the ceiling whenever some beasty leapt out at me. I was petrified, but that was what kept me going and sticking with the game. The story was pretty fantastic, even though the voice acting was infamously terrible.
I’d never played a horror game before, unless you count the game Aliens (based on the movie) that I had on the Amstrad. Which was pretty darn scary. Well, scary for an eight-year-old.
The fear in Resident Evil was all generated by the build-up of tension. You could walk through a few rooms without anything happening, and wonder when the next zombie would pop out at you. After a couple of hours, the respite of the music you hear when you enter a typewriter room (a room where you can save the game and give your overactive imagination a break) becomes such a big relief you barely want to leave. You just want to set up a new life in this little room, living off the herbs (restorative medicines that are dotted around the place) you’ve collected along the way, maybe doing a bit of decorating. You know, make it more like home until all the zombies have rotted into piles of sad-looking mush.
Sadly, this is not an option. But the game rewards you with one of the most epic endings ever when completed. The next two games in the franchise also have fantastically bombastic endings, meaning it’s always worth sticking with them until the very end. Even if you do get devoured countless times. Or blown up. Or squashed by a booby trap. Or get killed in some other hideously imaginative way.
I have to admit that the original PS Resident Evil games are still my favourites in the series. The first one introduced me to the survival horror genre, the second one introduced smoother graphics and (slightly) better voice-acting whereas the third one pushed the PS to its limits while also pushing the story up to new heights and paving the way for the expanded Resident Evil universe we know and love today (terrible movie adaptations included).
After dealing with the gruelling terror of Resident Evil I needed something a bit lighter with less stress. While visiting the local video game store, which by this point was rapidly becoming my second home, with some of my saved-up money, I noticed that FFVII was now part of the PS Platinum series. This was excellent news, because that meant it only cost twenty pounds! I was home in a shot and diving in. No worries about not having a memory card handy this time, I made sure I had more than enough space for saving games. I think I had three memory cards for my PS. Mind you, one was set aside solely for saving my cities on Sim City 2000. You needed some serious space to save that game once you had a pretty vast city.
Anyway, the point is I could now play FFVII and actually save when I needed to do something more important like sleep, eat or go to school. None of which seemed too important when I was playing.
It was great to finally be able to play and enjoy the game and be able to advance forwards in the plot. I whiled away many hours going through the highs and lows of the story before polishing off the game once and for all. I was quite voracious when I was playing, not giving any screen time to any other games. All of my focus was on finishing, as I was so involved with the characters and the plot.
FFVII remains one of my favourite games of all time, and I have it to thank for introducing me to the world of role-playing games. I added many more to my collection as the years wore on. Breath of Fire III and IV, Grandia and Grandia II, Chrono Trigger, the Star Ocean series, the Persona series and most of the other entries in the Final Fantasyseries were all welcomed into my library, and I still look back to Square and thank them whenever I discover a new RPG to play.
While my PS game collection was piling up nicely, one of my older gaming systems was getting some new life breathed into it as well. This was thanks to the release of a game that would go on to spawn countless sequels and is still going strong today. Pokemon Red had got me hooked since I picked it up for my Game Boy, and when I wasn’t wrestling with PS games I was beavering away levelling up my Pokemon and earning my gym badges. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure a nearby child will be able to fill you in.
One of the best parts of playing this game was the fact I had a friend called Richard at school who had its counterpart, Pokemon Blue. So nearly every day after school we’d head to his house and have a battle against each other. He never beat me though, because I had a Level 84 Wartortle (believe me, it was awesome) and his highest level Pokemon was about 60. A grasp of simple mathematics should tell you that this made his task pretty difficult.
One day I felt sorry for Richard, and traded him my epic Wartortle for something a lot less impressive. So less impressive, in fact, I’ve forgotten what it was. He then subsequently went on to demolish me every week.
He went about beating me in such a way that would make some people hit that unfriend button. But this was before the days of Facebook so I had to keep putting up with him. I used to start with my strongest Pokemon and wipe him out, so he knew from the off he would struggle. His tactic was to put up five not quite that strong Pokemon against me first (you choose six Pokemon each in battles) that he knew I could beat. He would dangle that possibility of victory in front of me, but then out came Wartortle at the end to polish off any of my Pokemon still standing. Of course I knew what was coming, but it never got any easier to accept.
I never complained though, I was enjoying getting some multiplayer gaming done, and I’d like to think Richard still has that Wartortle. Although I doubt it.
Another game that kick-started a legendary franchise was coming into the public eye at the same time Pokemon games and toys and all other types of merchandise were flying off the shelves like proverbial hot cakes lathered with whipped cream and fresh jam. This wasn’t exactly one for the kids though. A little game had popped up and started stirring up controversy about violence in video games and whether there should be limits on the content. Ultimately, of course, that argument got bound, gagged, thrown in the back of a car and taken to the local crusher. Mostly thanks to the persistence of a company called Take Two Interactive and the legions of fans they gained with the release of Grand Theft Auto (or GTA as we call it to save on syllables) on the PS.
I’d read about it of course, it was hard to escape a game that received so much media attention. Even if I wasn’t an avid gamer, I would have seen the news tearing it to shreds without any of the people slamming it ever picking up a controller and actually playing it.
Perhaps because of all this negative attention, I was desperate to get my hands on it. There was one small barrier though. I was a few years shy of the rating. GTA was rated 18, and one of the very few PS games at the time to receive that honour. The Entertainment Software Rating Boardare the people who hand out ratings, and I was well versed in them all. There were games rated for anyone (3 and above), for 11-14, for 15-17 and then 18 and above. I could get away with sometimes buying a 15-17 rated game, but I didn’t even dare attempt to buy one that was classed higher. To put it into perspective, I still sometimes get asked for ID when I go to buy alcohol. So imagine how young I must have looked back then.
The best I could do at the time was convince my mum to take it to the counter at Blockbuster (Ritz had been bought out by them now) and rent it for me. I felt like I was breaking the law when I got that game home and surreptitiously popped it into the PS.
Now, there is a plot (of sorts) to be followed in GTA. There are missions to do, and as you complete them you make new contacts in the city and when you’ve done enough you can move on to the next level. But, as a 13 year old, the only thing I wanted to do in this open city environment was drive around and squash people. Which I did. Incessantly. For a good couple of hours.
I’d played violent games before, it was nothing really new. But this took it to another level. You have a whole cityscape to run around and create havoc in. You could yank anyone out of their car and go for a joyride. You could shoot random passers-by. You could get into a shootout with the cops, but it wasn’t advisable since the health bar on the game was brutally stingy.
The graphics were primitive compared to some of the stuff coming out on the PS, and the top-down view made the game a little infuriating at times, but as I
eventually got around to actually completing the missions, I realised that the game had a fascinating depth to it. I sensed that there was a big future for this series. Even back then, something told me that this would not be the only game to have the words “Grand Theft Auto” in the title.
Now, of course, would be the moment to bring up the argument about whether kids should be allowed to play games such as this one. My response is that it should always be at the discretion of the parent. The best way to gauge whether a game is suitable for your child is to play it yourself. Even if you are not a videogame addict like me, just rent it and give it a try. Or at least find some footage online, as pretty much every game now has an online play through posted somewhere. Only you know what you think your own child can handle. Don’t let the media panic about any game make a decision for you.
There is no one size fits all solution to this argument; it’s down to individual choice. And no, not all kids are going to go into murderous rampage mode when they play something with guns and violence in it. It always gets my back up when I see some elitist anti-videogame spokesperson demonising us all as dangerous psychopaths after some kid goes on a shooting spree and they find out they played Call of Duty or GTA. You know what, so do millions of other people, and they don’t go around deciding it’s time to kill everyone. Don’t tar us all with the same brush. The vast, vast majority of gamers are fully functioning, sensible and very sane people who know the difference between virtual reality and actual reality.
But if you’ve read this far into my story, I hope that you are already of that opinion and my little rant is something you agree with.
Sorry about that, I got into activist mode for a moment there. The butt of the story is, I played GTA when I was a young teen and I have so far not shot a single person in real life. Yeah, I’m pretty good at that differentiating between virtual and actual reality thing.
After my rental period was up for GTA, I decided to try my luck at buying a copy at my trusty video game store. I realise I’ve mentioned this store a few times but never divulged much about it.
It was called Chips, and they used to have branches all over the UK. Mostly in smaller towns, but they had a few city-based locations. My local hometown branch was where I would spend a lot of my time after school and on weekends, checking out the new games and seeing if anything good had popped up in the used games sections. The staff were friendly and knowledgeable, which helps when they recognise you and know what kind of games to suggest.
They also gave out free Creme Eggs at Easter.
A picture posted online by my cousin recently revealed that the store has now closed down. Another slice of my childhood has disappeared.
Well, one day I walked into Chips and casually browsed through all the games, noticing a used copy of GTA nestled on the second-from-bottom shelf. I picked it up and read the back of the case for a good five minutes before sidling over to the counter and plopping it down, trying to look as natural as I could. I probably looked unbelievably shifty and was probably also as red as a beetroot.
“What are you up to, buying this?”
I fumbled for words. For an excuse. For any reason to dash out of there without being arrested.
The young man behind the counter grinned a cheeky grin and said, “The Platinum edition of this is coming out early next year, why don’t you just wait and buy it brand new?”
That sneaky so-and-so made me panic for nothing! I allowed myself a huge smile of relief, and said I’d be back with Christmas and birthday money (I’m a January child) in the New Year. In the meantime I plopped GTA back onto the shelf and bought a different game instead. One that rewrote the book on next-generation survival horror that was penned byResident Evil.
The first time I played Silent Hill, it started off unassuming enough. Guy is driving along a road on a foggy night with his little girl in the car. Car breaks down, girl goes missing in the fog, guy has to walk to the nearby town to try and find her.
So far, so normal.
The game goes from relaxing to nightmarish in stunningly quick fashion. The premise is straight from classic horror movie lore. You lose your daughter in a desolate town which turns out to be full of hellish demons and crazy nutjobs. You have a couple of momentary companions throughout, who you bump into now and again to ease the tension. Any human interaction is a blessing in this place.
Every once in a while, you are warped into the other version of Silent Hill, which is even more demonic and insane. The enemies are tougher, and the background art and music get much more disturbing.
And that is one of the best parts of the game. The atmosphere created by the music. In some ways, the music is one of the scariest parts of the game. This is recreated throughout the Silent Hill collection. The second instalment was the scariest and deepest in plot, in my opinion. But the first one throws up lots of horror, an intriguing plot, and plenty of moments where you just don’t want to open the next door because the music is building up to a crescendo and you just know something bad is going to happen.
In essence, the gameplay is very similar to the Resident Evil games. There are locked doors and you have to complete puzzles to find the keys, there’s a lot of backtracking to previous locations involved to find items, but because of the warped nature of the enemies and the landscape, everything seems much more eerie than the world of Resident Evil.Silent Hill managed to differentiate itself by being on a different plain of horror. Psychological horror.
This is why the series is still running strong after all these years, with a new Silent Hill game currently in development with the help of Hideo Kojima (famous for his work on the magnificent Metal Gear Solid series) and Guillermo del Toro (famous for making some of the most ambitious and fun movies of our generation including Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy andPacific Rim). With those two names on board, it’s no wonder the build up to this Silent Hillgame has been the biggest yet. It’s got a lot to live up to, but the series is in good hands now after faltering a little over the last couple of years.
After mastering and completing Silent Hill, I browsed back through some of my old gaming magazines and came across a picture of the new console that Sega had in development. Back in that very first article it was dubbed Katana, and boasted 128-bit graphics. Looking at the magazines as the year went along, Japan already had these machines, and they had been renamed as Dreamcasts.
The pictures from the available games looked fantastic, and since Sega had abandoned the Sega Saturn (one of the few consoles I’ve never had in my collection), we were all waiting for this machine to hit our coasts. It would be quite a while before that happened though, which was lucky for me as it gave me plenty of time to save up for one.
In the meantime though, Christmas was just around the corner and that meant I would be receiving money from lots of generous relatives. Money that would be added to my games fund. The first thing on my list in the New Year was the Platinum version of GTA, and it was dutifully snapped up as soon as I spotted it pop up in Chips.
Not long after that, an add-on pack was released for GTA. This was highly unusual. Well, for console games it was. This new release was a short foray into London in 1969, which was unsurprisingly titled Grand Theft Auto: London 1969. Take Two may have been good with game development, but thinking up titles obviously isn’t their strong point.
To play the game, first you needed to buy it (that bit is always important), but you also needed to already own GTA. So you have to load up the GTA: London disc, then when that’s done you put your GTA disc in and then put the GTA: London disc back in again.
It was quite the rigmarole just to play a game a fraction the size of the original, but it was a fun little romp. There were some amusing British cultural references, and the game went on to do pretty well. I enjoyed it, but for me it was just a stop-gap until the proper sequel toGTA came out.
One thing I will say about the GTA: London disc is that I’m fairly sure it was the first time I noticed that you can listen to some PS game soundtracks by putting the game discs into a CD player. This wasn’t true for all discs, but that didn’t stop me putting every one of my game discs into my CD player to see if there was anything there other than the game data. To this day, the sound of the horrible squealing of the game data track is still more memorable than any of the songs I heard on those discs.
Once I finished playing GTA and GTA: London, I had another period of quiet time with gaming, where I spent more time outside and completely failed to get a girlfriend despite my (pretty poor, admittedly) best efforts. I always ended up being fed the line, “well, you’re more like a brother to me”. What is it with that line? Is it meant to make us feel better? Because to me it sounds more like, “I’m saying this because now if you try to kiss me it’ll be totally like incest and that’ll put you off, right?”
Anyway, summer romance heartbreaks aside, there were two games coming out near the end of the year that I was relishing though, and all of my money was put aside to buy them when they came out.
The first was Final Fantasy VIII (FFVIII). I remember taking the bus into the city (going anywhere other than my home town was a big deal when I was younger) the day it was released, and I was so excited. I’d read all of the build-up to release, seen all of the preview shots and then pored over the rave full game review in a magazine called GamesMaster, which was my gaming bible for many years. That was the same magazine I’d used to follow the development of the Dreamcast.
The magazine itself came about thanks to the Channel 4 show of the same name. GamesMaster was initially broadcast on Channel 4 starting back in 1992 and had a good run up to 1998. It was a visual feast for the eyes, with reviews of new games and a nice section where kids came and asked the GamesMaster (played by the legend that was Patrick Moore) for help on parts of games they were stuck on. Patrick Moore would deliver his lines with aplomb, as if he actually had played and completed all of the games he was talking about. Maybe he did. That would make him even more amazing than I had previously believed. Every series of the show would be set in a different environment, and I remember they were on a desert island one year and then in Hell another. It was crazy, and Channel 4 relished in delivering an alternative to mainstream television.
Another great aspect of the show was when developers made special levels of games to be played exclusively as part of the games competitions that took place. One great example is Shiny Entertainment, who made an exclusive level of Earthworm Jim.
I loved my weekly fix of the show, and I remember when it got cancelled. That signalled the end of quite an era. But even though the show had been taken out back and shot, I still had their company in a way once a month when the newest issue of the magazine came out.
So, with all of the hype whizzing around in my head, I bought the special edition of FFVIII,which came with a free memory card (just a cheap plain white one, no art or anything on it) and a t-shirt which was white with a cheap iron-on transfer of the game cover on it.
When we got home, I fired the game up and dived in. I knew the graphics were vastly different from the previous game; they’d gone for the Resident Evil style rather than the classic angular polygonal look. This was one of the things that put me off straight away, actually. They’d tried to make things prettier, but everything actually came across as a lot more clumsy-looking and blocky.
Next, the characters did not draw me in, their stories didn’t interest me. Everything seems to jump around from one thing to the next like an epileptic frog with a severe case of the hiccups. While trying to keep up with the character’s erratic hormones, emotions and relationships there is some kind of bigger story trying to develop but it never seems to come off.
I was hugely disappointed, and never finished the game. It was the first time I’d bought a game and felt let down by it. I am currently working my way
through it again, determined to actually get to the end so I can tick it off that huge list of games I need to finish.
Nonetheless, I never did quite forgive Square for this one, and I always approach new games in the series with a lot of trepidation. This might explain why I quickly lost interest in numbers X, XII and XIII.
Square burned me even more when they announced that number XI would be an online only game, when I was pretty late entering the arena of the online world (it would be 2005 by the time I lived in a house with an internet connection).
I did wear that cheap-looking FFVIII shirt until it dropped to pieces though, and like I mentioned earlier I still admire Square a lot for getting me into the world of RPGs. To me, though, they’ve never quite captured the same majesty and brilliance that they did withFFVII.
This could all be down to it being the first of the series I played, of course. My wife adores the sixth instalment of the game, and it’s still her favourite. And I am sure that somewhere out there are people who like others more than FFVII. This is one of the other brilliant things about being involved in the gaming community, there are varied opinions and everyone has their own personal favourites.
And that is fine. Because that’s what life is about and what separates us from the animals. Variety and differences of opinion.
Anyone that thinks any Final Fantasy game is better than the seventh one is wrong though.
After being let-down by what I thought was going to be a sure-fire hit, I got my hopes up again with the arrival of Grand Theft Auto 2 (stylised as gta2, which is a lot easier for me to write up).
It still had the top-down view, but the graphics had been smoothed out and the storyline was a bit more in-depth than in the first game. The basic concept of completing missions for various people still existed, but this time it was a gang warfare layout. If you completed missions for one gang and killed members of others, your respect levels with each gang would change accordingly. If a gang really liked you, you could go on to complete the top level missions for them. If they hated you, they chased you if you went into their territory. And the madder they were with you, the stronger the weapons they used. The flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails were the worst. There wasn’t anything more certain than death in gta2 if you caught fire.
The missions were more complex and fun, and the replay value was pretty high as well. There’s not a huge back catalogue of games I would want to go back and play again now, but that is definitely one of them. Actually, just writing about it had me hunting it down and ordering it online.
Another game I had not yet played but knew a lot about had recently been added to the elusive PS Platinum list. It’s a game I mentioned a little earlier, and it plays out like a top quality spy action movie. Now, our hero isn’t exactly suave like James Bond, he’s more of the rugged type who prefers wetsuits and camouflage to tuxedos and martinis. An infiltration expert. A man who can outwit guards and even wolves just by hiding under a box. Oh yes, Solid Snake. The protagonist of Metal Gear Solid (MGS), the first time theMetal Gear series had appeared on the PS.
It was another series that had made the jump from the Nintendo (the list of Nintendo casualties in this generation is a long one), and it propelled Hideo Kojima and his characters into a mesmerising and meteoric rise into the annals of gaming history. The series is still plodding along today, and this first PS instalment was so much fun to play whilst being equally infuriating at the same time.
As soon as it came out for cheap in the Platinum series I snapped it up. I was hypnotised by the opening sequence (it’s another example of a game’s soundtrack being absolutely stellar) and started putting my spy skills through their paces. Here’s a handy hint for you; spending a lot of time trying to kill guards in plain sight of other guards is not a good spy skill. I eventually got the hang of being sneaky and not charging in like Rambo, and managed to get into the facility where the brunt of the story takes place.
There’s one part early on in the game where you need to find the contact number for a certain character you bumped into earlier to progress in the story, with my hint being that the information needed was “on the back of the CD case”.
I hunted high and low. There was a computer room in the game with what looked like CD cases on it, so I ran around, hoping I would pick something up. Nope.
I backtracked through every part of the game I’d encountered so far, checking every corner and every crevice. Which resulted in me getting shot to death a few times.
Eventually I gave up for the night, turned the PS off and hopped into bed, bringing the case with me to have a read of the manual, which I had yet to inspect. I’m a man, we don’t do instruction manuals. Which is why we spend six hours trying to build a computer desk and end up with a bookcase.
Anyway, once I’d pored over the controls and read the character bios, I slid the manual back into the case and prepared to drop it on to the floor. Just as I did I had a peek at the back of the case. There was the character I needed to get in touch with, complete with the radio frequency required to contact her.
All at the same time I was annoyed and amazed. I thought it was a touch of genius, and when I played the game again recently I managed to forget how to do that part, so I ended up doing all the same things I did years ago.
The game was peppered with moments of genius like this. One of the boss characters, a psychic called Psycho Mantis, can read all of your thoughts. If you happen to have any saved games by Konami (the developers of MGS) on your memory card, he’ll mention them in the build-up to your battle. Mind-blowing!
He’s a tough cookie as well, using telekinesis to lob everything in the room at you whilst also knowing exactly when you’re about to give him a bunch of fives. Unless you cheat. If you plug your controller into the second port, he can’t read you anymore and you can beat the ever-living heck out of him pretty easily.
He even makes mention of it at the end of the fight if you do it this way, before doing what all the other bosses do when you kill them. He pours his heart out to you in (almost) Oscar-winning style.
There are so many twists and turns in the game, so many conspiracies to try and keep up with, so many characters you can’t trust that it makes for a rollercoaster of an experience that you never want to get off from. Mostly because you’d be too worried about being stabbed in the back on the way out.
While I’d been getting to grips with that slew of new games, Sega had unleashed the Dreamcast onto European shores. The price tag was a bit too hefty for me at the time, but I was determined to do what I did every year and keep my Christmas and birthday money to one side and buy one after that.
So I think this is as good a time as any to give you all a little break before we head to the year 2000, when the 128-bit generation and Microsoft started making inroads into my gaming life.
Greetings fellow humans! If you read the first part of my autobio, firstly I’d like to say thanks very much. Secondly, I hope you enjoyed it. And thirdly, if you did I hope you’re ready for some more.
© 2015 - 2024 MikeyBlighe
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