I enjoyed video games as a child, just as I do as an adult. I remember my brother and I taking paper bags full of Nintendo 64 game cartridges to Blockbuster or Game Crazy, and turning them in for a whopping 13 dollars. I swear, the price of the games went up and down just based on the store clerk's inability to actually find the obscure games we would sometimes have on hand, so they would just come up with a number between 1 and 3 dollars.
Yes, obscure games were something we always had on hand, because our family was not rich. I'm sure the game systems we would purchase every year were what caused so many leftover spaghetti family nights at home. So that meant there was absolutely no budget for an actual game. We might as well have bought a TV with no electricity and just stared at the screen. But the way back time machine in my head remembers the days that Game Crazy, or wherever else sold games, would have these, like…bins of game cartridges or boxes (if it was the PS2 era), most of which had no box around them, and if it did have a box, it was one that only had the name of the game. Maybe a poorly printed picture of the game cover would be on it, but that was extremely rare.
With these games, we had to just pray and hope for the best. It was a game of Russian roulette as to whether the game was going to be worth $3.99 or a total stinker. You could try asking the store clerk if they knew anything about it, but chances are high they’d just say, “No, I don’t actually have any idea, even though I work here,” or straight up tell some huge lie about a storyline that doesn’t even exist in the game. You then wonder if they confused the game you bought with some other game that you might have left in the bin. Damn! That game sounded so much cooler!
A lot of off-brand, Mario-style games were played, many Japanese games with no English translation, or really bizarre fighter games that wanted to be Mortal Kombat, but had no storyline, and if it had been turned into a movie it would have ended up in the same hall as Warriors of Virtue (Look it up, if you need to. It's got kangaroos and a kid I always confuse for Elijah Wood).
Since video games were pretty much the only thing kids talked about, not being able to play relevant games to chat with other kids about was a bit of a pain and severely hindered my tactics for making friends. It's fine…I am who I am today because of these first-world problems…okay, back to the topic at hand…I wanted to talk to people about "Mystical Ninja starring Goemon," which was a 1997 N64 blockbuster hit made by Konami, but the problem is that Mario 64 came out around the same exact time. From 1997 to 2003, that game sold 5,943,556 copies in the U.S. During that same period, 54,703 copies of my Mystical Ninja game were sold. Let that sit in as to how relevant I was as a child, and where that's led me to now, as a semi-functioning adult.
Mystical Ninja was about a ninja (no duh) and a gang of other offbeat characters you collect, trying to prevent the Peach Mountain Shoguns’ gang from turning Japan into a Westernized fine-arts theater (thank you, Wikipedia, for assisting me with describing a game I played so long ago). I vividly remember saying things such as "Just like Mario…" quietly, to the kids I was trying to talk into playing it. Too bad for them, I had literally the only copy available—probably in the entire state.
We also can’t forget about Glover. Wait…I guess we really can’t forget about Glover…this game had sequels all the way up to current game systems? That’s insane. How far could you actually take a glove meandering around the world on various round objects? One wasn’t even round! I don't even remember the actual plot of this game, and I never actually finished it. But again…I was the only one playing it, so I don't feel like I lost out on much. This game did help strengthen my stubbornness by refusing to give up on finding the damn bouncy ball I would continuously fall off of.
Then there was Space Station Silicon Valley. The story revolves around a microchip that hops around like a little bug and can then hop in and out of living creatures. Its main goal is to find this spaceship that was housing “robot” creatures. That’s all I remember about the actual game itself. I gave up during this one level where you “hopped” into a penguin, and had to maneuver your way around the ice to get to this tiny hole in the ground. Ice in N64 was just a death wish for creatures on two legs, and those who were controlling them with a joystick.
There were a ton of these "off-brand", off-the-beaten-path-by-20-miles games when I had my PS2, but honestly, I don't want to get into all that. That was the era I thought I was into horror games and also wanted to visit Japan (still do), so there were a lot of "Fatal Frame-esque" games being played. They were made even scarier by the fact that the budget they had was far less than the real deal, and was glitchy AF, so trying to escape certain creatures was sometimes impossible by no fault of your own. Blame capitalism for your need for a bigger budget to play actual playable games on the console your family spent all their holiday money on.
These games were major parts of my childhood. The only big game I ever got to play was Ocarina of Time, which is the best game in the world. I spent all the money I earned from my bag-o-games on this title. I regret nothing. I had very little in common with kids back then because I was no “niche”…which is just how I'm describing being poor, but interesting. The friends I made were ones that stuck with me for some reason, and enjoyed playing by Shein-style games, albeit with lots of "Why the heck do you own this?!" judgments made. I wonder what those kids are up to now. I bet they're not thinking about any of these games, or the time they spent watching me show them how to turn the microchip into a racing dog and use rockets to go real fast.
Hannah One Cup can be found moving around objects into her newly acquired home (Yeah, we are now 30 years in debt! Woo!), or trying to figure out how to redownload her pirated version of Sims 3 because f*** EA. Keep it real! Real classy. Just like the end of this article.
