PlayStation 10th Anniversary (U.S. Flavor)
I missed the U.S. PlayStation launch, because frankly I didn't care. The Super NES was winding down and I was having a grand old time with Chrono Trigger and Yoshi's Island and didn't really see the need to buy new hardware to play good games. Besides, I could get by with just Square and Nintendo games, so if I was going to bother to invest in a next-gen system it would be an Ultra 64 by crackie. Then Square had to go and defect to Sony's camp, meaning I'd have to buy two systems if I wanted to play both Mario and Final Fantasy, and that was just ridiculous. I'd be skipping the next gen, I decided, especially now that there were these new things called emulators that would let me play my favorite NES games on my PowerBook.
Then I had to go and give the N64 demo kiosk at Toys R Us a try and Mario 64 suckered me in. I wasn't planning to mess with the next generation... but man, Mario 64. I dropped twenty bucks to preorder a system and game on the spot.
And a few months later I'd mined all there was to extract from Mario 64, played Wave Race for a few hours, reached the jumping bit in Turok and beaten every track on every setting in Mario Kart 64. Then it occured to me: There's nothing much happening in the foreseeable future with this here N64 thing. Yeah, OK, Zelda. But really. So I sold the N64 to my roommate and bought a PlayStation. And life was good, even if I was about 18 months behind the early adopters. Which wasn't entirely bad, since it meant there were actually a few games for me to play without settling for something like Toshinden. Instead, I snagged:
Tomb Raider
Frickin' Lara Croft. This was actually a hard sell, because I had seen the box back when the game was first released and scoffed all the way home at the transparent attempt to sell the game with a really horribly disfigured woman in a tight shirt. "It's so much better than Mario 64," slobbered the revolting human being who ran the local gaming shop, which did even more to drive me away. But people kept saying good things about it, and the used copy cost less than half of what a new N64 game would have put me out... so I gave in and to my surprise it turned out to be not too bad.
Sure is clunky and ugly in retrospect, though.
Suikoden
Thanks to my incredible powers of bleeding edge-ness, I was an RPG doofus long before it was socially acceptable. So 'natcherly Suikoden was the other game I picked up with my PS1. My other options were Beyond the Beyond, whose reputation preceded it (and justifiably so), and Blood Omen, which I eventually picked up in time to discover I really hated it.
Suikoden was a breezy, lightweight RPG despite the fact that creepily smothering man-servant Gremio got himself offed midway through. (Oh, shut up, it's been 9 years; you've had plenty of time to learn the spoilers for yourself.) Despite the presence of a whopping 108 party members (more or less) there was next to no power-leveling and inventory management, and you really had to make an effort to spend more than 20 hours completing the game. Much of that was due to the brisk pace of the action and the super-fast battles (both in terms of loading time and command execution). I'm pretty sure the reason I hate the past two Suikodens basically boils down to how slow and tedious the battles are. Way to miss the point, Konami.
Too bad about the cover. I trashed the double jewel-case within a day and decided to start using the manual as the cover in a single jewel-case. And all was well.
P.S., still trying to find a reasonably-priced copy of the U.S. version of Suikoden II. Help a brother out?
Mega Man 8
I also picked up Mega Man 8 straight away, although it may have been a few weeks after I acquired the PS1. College student budgets and all that. It made me happy to see the Mega Man series animated so lavishly, even if the gameplay was more in keeping with the clumsy and generally annoying Mega Man 7.
The roommate who bought my N64 saw me playing this and scoffed. Apparently it wasn't up to his exacting technological specs, although he had no qualms about playing the stultifying Donkey Kong Country 3 ad nauseum. Pfeh.
Of course, my PlayStation addiction didn't really kick into first gear until the beginning of June of that year, when I had my system modded so I could play a shiny new import called "Dracula X"....
Anyway, here's to ten years (more or less) of time probably better spent doing other things. Rock on, PS1.
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