Getting my PS1 was a pretty significant moment of my life.
That was not because I had always wanted one (which I did), but because it was the first system I had ever bought with my own money, feeling like an important step into adulthood.
Because this was long after the system had made its mark (and because of how common it was), I didn't actually pay a lot for it, and it came bundled with a bunch of games that the seller had thrown in as a way of getting just a little more money out of what otherwise would have been a pretty cheap transaction. Rummaging through that pile of games proved to be extremely fun, and a reason to bug my PS1-owning friends, inquiring about some of the most outlandish titles in there, things that people in the business just didn't tell me about. Of course, the real fun came with trying out all that stuff that WAS talked about, the games that filled entire magazines and webpages. Legendary stuff like Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot, the latter being the subject of a pretty hilarious interrogation scene, as my friend L was a true fan of that game and pretty much freaked out upon learning that I finally had my own copy, demanding to know what my first thoughts and experiences were like and giggling like crazy when I commented on all the rookie mistakes I had made upon playing it for the first time. She even gave me a full-toothed smile when I told her that I finally caught that one Simpsons reference, stating that I "now understood why Lisa would ditch school for this!".
I remember just how much fun it was playing all those games as soon as I got them, and how weird it was to finally be playing a bunch of 3D games attached to analog controllers when I all I had ever known was the digital world of 2D games and D-PADS. Turning poor Tony Hawk into a parody of himself by making him fall off the board every three steps was hilarious in a sort of embarrassing way, as was getting killed by the first enemy I had encountered on Medal Of Honor: Underground. I just couldn't quite get the control scheme yet, and my characters paid dearly for it. I also wasn't used to 3D environments, failing to judge depth and distance on a common basis.
However... my most enduring memory of the system came straight from the discarded pile, and it involved a semi-famous game that I just couldn't quite like at the time: Army Men: World War - Land, Sea, Air.
Quite a beautiful game, really... too bad I was facepalming way too often to appreciate its graphics.
I actually liked the idea of the game, and was charmed by it upon playing it for the first time due to the strong Toy Story vibes it gave me, but it was also so quirky as to result annoying... and I do mean quirky (it could have been its own My Hero Academia character, really). With so many games to play, I didn't give this much thought and I vanished it to the back of the pile, leaving it to hang out with the movie tie-ins and inferior ports. As far as I was concerned, this one wasn't worth getting the already-worn laser of my PS1 wasted on it.
But... life's funny.
Around this time I briefly befriended someone who fancied himself a "Game Master", and was always inviting himself over to people's houses to challenge them to games, often betting money on whether or not he could beat them. He was already getting on my nerves by the umpteenth time he tried to come over, so I caved in and told him that yeah, we could play his stupid bet.
Nothing to add here. I'm just a sucker for BIOS screens, and this one is only second to the Dreamcast's for me.
To my infinite surprise he didn't pick any of the "usual suspects" of the PS1 library: we played no King Of Fighters, no Marvel vs Capcom, no Street Fighter, not even Winning Eleven... instead, he took a look at my collection and picked out the aforementioned Army Men title to play. He said that it was a great multiplayer game and immediately placed a $10 bet on himself as we sat down to play.
I was dreading the moment because I had zero experience with the game (except for those brief minutes I played it when I first got the console), and $10 was a lot of money back then. Still... I couldn't back down, could I? And so, we played.
I know I already said that the game was quirky, but I wasn't quite prepared to see exactly just how quirky it truly was.
For whatever reason the game handled respawning in the stupidest way possible, and set the spawn points (or at least the spawn points for the map
we tried) in the exact same spot where the player had died last. That meant that I only had to get lucky once (which I did), and then I could continue to kill my friend over and over by vaguely aiming my weapon at the same point time and again. I almost pitied the guy, really... and how could I not? All he could ever do was watch in agony and powerlessness as his $10 evaporated in front of him while his character was getting killed over and over before he even got a chance to move out of the way. But, to his credit, I will say that he didn't demand a rematch or anything, taking the L with dignity.
That masterclass of tomfoolery endeared me to the game immediately and made me want to keep on playing, but I soon learned that this wasn't so much a PS1 disc as it was a digital Monkey's Paw designed to make my life miserable.
This was a pretty hard game (at least for me), and it pissed me off just enough that I didn't want to give up entirely. That meant that I would commit much more time and energy than necessary to it, studying the maps and trying to come up with tactics and strategies that wouldn't be out of place in an actual war room just to not let it win. It was so bad that at one point I even wrote my own walkthrough of the thing by placing my Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter next to the TV and hacking away at the keys as I documented enemy patterns and locations to make a clean run later. It was maddening, but I found that the mechanical sounds of the typewriter complemented the digital gunfire sound effects of the game and button presses of the controller quite well. It was a symphony of nerdy madness that I had since come to really enjoy.
The ultimate gaming peripheral!
That one game actually pissed me off so hard that I even resorted to following ambiguous online instructions to give myself an edge by modifying the save files or whatever (exactly how this was done, I can't recall). Those instructions had to be translated on-the-fly with my incredibly rough understanding of the English language (that didn't extend much further than COLORS) and so, they obviously didn't work. Still, I followed AVGN's advise and just F*** did it, completing the game a few months later. And, let me tell you, seeing that ending cinematic was so cathartic that I openly wooed before flipping off the screen and tossing the disc aside (yes, I was THAT invested on the whole thing).
Of course, being a late comer to the console came with the tremendous advantage of giving me almost full access to its vast library of games right from the get-go, as well as many pointers on which games to get. I also had the added bonus of getting my system two generations too late, which meant that the prices of those games had been slashed repeatedly by the time I got my hands on them. It should have been a pretty great deal, but this experience actually planted the seeds of doubt in my mind, making me question the gaming press for the first time... if those guys failed to acknowledge seriously great stuff like Threads Of Fate, Brave Fencer Musashi and even Harvest Moon (which I didn't even know was on the console until many years later), were they really trustworthy sources of information? I liked the games they recommended, but they didn't really explore the system's immense library beyond some experimental stuff released by a big studio that could afford to do so, and it all felt hollow as a result.
Greatest game on the PS1 (at least according to me), and those magazine nerds couldn't even mention it...
Still, I knew from the start that I couldn't really afford to deviate too much from the "path" the press and my own friends seemed to recommend the
most (not as a kid handing flyers on the street!), and so I doubled down on whatever proved to be fun and functional, making my own fun as the system just watched... which was hilarious. At one point my friend came over for yet another round of Winning Eleven goodness and immediately groaned upon learning that I had spent the entire afternoon making a team of living towers with the speed of cheetahs and cannons for legs. Needless to say, my friend banned me from using that team against him, but I just adored the fact that the game would just let me do that without batting an eye.
That very same afternoon we cycled through a bunch of my games and ended up coming up with a challenge for Medal Of Honor: Underground... we called it "The Super Mario Challenge", and it consisted of going through the maps hopping around like idiots, trying to bypass as many enemies as possible whilst getting to the end of the map. It was a complete riot, particularly when we came to the secret Panzerknacker map and laughed our lungs off as these mean-looking, oversized toys tried to murder us while we made a mockery of the whole thing by hopping across the mob, which included dudes on medieval armor. I don't even know how I survived the sheer laughter that came when a bunch of them came together and cluttered the screen, pinning us to the spot as the camera kept flying up and down with our relentless jumping. It was truly great, and something that I deeply miss in gaming these days.
You look trustworthy enough... I'm definitely not going to be looking over my shoulder from now on.
But you know what the weirdest thing about my PlayStation 1 experience was? My console didn't come with a single RPG, despite being bundled with dozens of games. I had no Final Fantasy, no Vagrant Story, no Chrono Cross, no Breath of Fire, no Legend of Dragoon, no Lunar, no Xenogears... no nothing. Hell, it barely even had a single Gran Turismo game in there. Whoever the previous owner of my system was, I'm kinda fascinated by them.
I mentioned at the beginning of this article that getting that console felt like my first step into adulthood, and I stand by it, but I just didn't know the true meaning of those words at the time. Indeed, buying that console as a 17-year-old part-timer doing incredibly low-pay work was monumental, but it also marked the last time I was actually free to play games with as much joy and freedom as I wanted to. Every single console I got afterwards saw increasingly less playtime, as the demands and responsibilities of adulthood grew to the point of rendering my PS3 into a glorified text editor... the one I'm typing this on.
I guess it's fitting that I was only able to move on to the next big chapter of my life after crossing the last item off my list: owning the famed PS1.
What about you? What were your memories associated with Sony's little juggernaut?
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