Year 12, 2005 ~ We Love Katamari (PS2)

 

It's March Break, and my parents are out of town for the week. They know I'm not responsible enough to look after my younger brothers and myself for that amount of time. So they call in my cousins Emily and Sarah, and Emily's boyfriend (now husband) Nick to look after us. And they bring a PlayStation 2 and videogames. Boy, do they bring videogames. Videogames that will change my life forever, including Guitar Hero, Katamari Damacy, and We Love Katamari.

Here's the thing: growing up, I didn't play a lot of weird games. I was just never exposed to weird games. We were a Nintendo house, mainly just Mario and Pokémon. We didn't know about all the cool, experimental stuff going on in Japan and around the world. And then the cousins bust in with some weird fuckin shit all about cousins.

Did you know the Katamari games have a story? It's hard to notice the first time you experience it because you're too busy experiencing the rest of the game: you're just a little guy, you got a sticky ball, and you gotta roll it so things stick to it. The more things it accumulate, the bigger the ball gets. The stuck objects also change how the ball rolls: if you roll up an eraser, you have to contend with the sudden rectangular hump on your otherwise spherical ball until you roll up enough tuff to make the ball more or less perfectly round again. But the more you play, an eraser can go from a serious contention to a miniscule spec on a ball so big you're rolling up pets, humans, cars, houses, skyscrapers, clouds, islands, countries, even gods, all to make new stars in the sky. Stars your drunk ass father, the King of All Cosmos, destroyed in the first game and made you rebuild by rolling up the people of Earth and all their possessions.

Somehow, Earth's survivors all became huge fans of the Katamari experience and wanted MORE BALLS. The King, a deeply broken man not used to feeling wanted and adored, upon the receiving the first words of encouragement in his life, sends his son, you, the Prince, back down to Earth to keep fucking with the humans while the King relives his childhood trauma. Also your cousins are there.

Also, my cousins were there, and it was the first time I'd ever had adults around me for a long period of time who didn't just like videogames, but had games they wanted to show me. Neither of my parents liked videogames, so I wasn't used to feeling supported in what I really liked. Videogames were always something my parents begrudgingly allowed in the house, so it felt really good to not just have adults around me who supported that love, but actively encouraged it and expanded my ideas for what a videogame could be. In turn, my cousins have their own kids now. Just a few weeks ago and talked with her son for hours about what he was playing.

This experience kicked off a lifelong obsession with games that went against the grain, like the works of Suda51, Hideo Kojima, Daniel Mullins, Toby Fox, Davey Wreden, the Frog Fractions series, Tim Schafer, and Sam Barlow. I would have never played games like Chulip or Okami either. This is a wide swath of creators and games of very different genres, and I don't know if I ever would have wanted to try them and expand my horizons if not for the best March Break ever.

I think more than ever these days, especially these last few years, I'm one of the luckiest people in the world to have the family I have.

Other games I've loved from 2005:

Star Fox Assault (NGC), Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (PS2), God of War (PS2), Lego Star Wars (NGC), Burnout Legends (PSP), Jak X: Combat Racing (PS2), Ratchet Deadlocked (PS2), Soul Calibur III (PS2), Guitar Hero (PS2), Shadow the Hedgehog (NGC), Sonic Rush (NDS), Need for Speed Most Wanted (XB360), Super Mario Strikers (NGC)

Year 11, 2004 ~ Need for Speed: Underground 2 (NGC)

 

One night at a sleepover, a friend broke out a game I'd never seen before. It was a racing game, but it wasn't like Mario Kart. I'd only ever seen and played Mario Kart games. It was gritty, it was loud, gone was the fun goofy Nintendo music and the chaotic power-ups, it was all super speed boosts and a Much Music Big Shiny Tunes hard rock and nu-metal soundtrack. You could blow up gas stations and crash through buildings. After seeing this game at midnight in the basement of a rich kid who liked to cosplay like he was poor, my middle school brain was officially off its skateboarding phase and all-in on street racing. And that game was Need for Speed

...Most Wanted.

Yeah we're not talking about that game. That game is much better.

After experiencing NFS Most Wanted in the company of someone I would simply not tolerate as an adult, I immediately went to Jumbo Video and Blockbuster and rented the only other Need for Speed game I could find, NFS Underground. It wasn't open world, but it also had a cool soundtrack, nitrous boosts, and a little bit of customizing. It was cool, but it wasn't what I was looking for. Then one day at EB Games we were returning an Action Replay we couldn't use because it had no Mac compatibility and I found Underground 2 in the GameCube section. So I... "convinced" (bullied, sorry guys) my brothers into going in on a game only I was interested in. And it did have an open world! It had body modding! It had a cool soundtrack! But it stunk!

NFS Underground 2 was the first Need for Speed game to feature an open world. It did not handle that change gracefully. You end up repeating a lot of the same races over and over again, and in a lot of cases when you find a race in the world it jumps you to somewhere you just straight up don't have access to as part of the main game. In a lot of ways the open world feels superfluous, like it artificially extends a game which relies on the formula of the arcade racing the series was known for up to that point. This was truly a game that walked so its sequel, Most Wanted, could run.

I never actually beat NFS Underground 2 as a kid. It did become part of my regular Saturday routine. I'd do my paper route, bike downtown and get samosas at the farmers' market, come home and boot up the game. And you know what? It made playing Most Wanted and its sequel, Need for Speed Carbon, all the sweeter when I got my own copies.

Other games I've loved from 2004:

Sonic Heroes (NGC), Drakengard (PS2), The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (NGC), Mega Man Anniversary Collection (NGC), Burnout 3: Takedown (PS2), Katamari Damacy (PS2), Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (NGC), Ratchet 3 Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)

Year 10, 2003 ~ The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (PC)

 

My dad and I don't share a lot of interests. He's a baseball guy, I'm a professional wrestling girl. He's a Beach Boys guy, I'm a Pink Floyd girl. He writes non-fiction, I write poetry. He hates videogames, I clearly love them. These are differences cultivated over time. We love things in a lot of the same ways, particularly in their histories and contexts, but our interests don't always align.

But when I was a kid he did that thing dads do: introduce their favorite things to their kids so they could connect. Baseball didn't land, but Star Wars did. One of the earliest memories I have is watching the original trilogy on VHS on the couch, without all the new scenes and re-edits, introduced by Leonard Maltin's interviews with George Lucas. I also remember him taking me to Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace at a movie theater that doesn't exist anymore. If there's anything we do share, it's a taste in film and TV. He would much later get into Twin Peaks, and I would in turn get him into Dune. Arguably he likes the Dune franchise way more than me; I've read the first book and he's read most if not all of Frank Herbert's run.

Likewise, Lord of the Rings.

These are my dad's favorite books. Dad took me to see all these movies, he took me to a local theatre production of The Hobbit, he gave me a chess set using figures based on the Fellowship and the orcs, and he told me everything he knew about J.R.R. Tolkien's world. He had every book and he wanted me to love the books too. I have tried to read the books, but I've never really made good progress. I did read Tolkien's essay "On Fairie Stories" during my undergrad and I liked it very much! I have found his prose easier to digest as an academic rather than a fiction author. Maybe it's time to give it another shot. And more than anything I'm just happy to have this connection with Dad.

The Return of the King game is pretty good! It's a fun little 3D hack-and-slash. Good single-player, great co-op, cool game. Broke one of the keys off Dad's work laptop playing it.

Other games I've loved from 2003:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (NGC), Soul Calibur II (NGC/PS2/Xbox), The Simpsons: Hit & Run (NGC/PS2/Xbox), Ratchet & Clank 2: Going Commando (PS2), The Hobbit (NGC/PC/PS2/Xbox), Mario Kart: Double Dash (NGC), Need for Speed: Underground (NGC/PC/PS2/Xbox)

Year 9, 2002 ~ Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 (Mac)

 

So, I come home from school one day, and the furniture has been moved around a bit. The computer is missing and the desk has been moved. There's a big white cube with a silvery keyboard and a see-through mouse that's all one button coming from it. It plays CDs. It plays DVDs. It lets you make your own movies and burn them to blank discs. It seems like it can do anything. Mom says it's called an eMac, and it's our new computer. I had never seen anything like it. I was obsessed with all the cool things I could do with it and all the little ways it was different but familiar to the old Windows 95 we'd been using as the family computer for years.

But of all the things I could do with it, I couldn't install any of the PC games I had on it. I'm not sure if this is still really a problem, but back in the day if you bought a game for PC, it didn't work on a Mac. You had to buy a completely different version of the game to play it. I realized that it was kind of like the difference between a PS2 and an Xbox—a PS2 game wouldn't work on an Xbox even though they were both basically DVDs. So even though I had a bunch of games for the Windows 95 or my dad's work laptop running Windows XP, I couldn't install them on our new eMac. Mom was probably pretty happy about this; if I'm remembering right, she got the eMac because she was picking up more freelance writing work.

But just because we didn't have any games for Mac, that didn't mean the Mac didn't have any games for us.

For some reason, the eMac came pre-installed with two games. One of them was Deimos Rising, which I genuinely had to look up for this post because it is abandonware ephemera. My mom wouldn't let us play this game. After looking up gameplay footage I genuinely have no idea why. It's not particularly violent. There's no blood and gore. There's not even really suggestions of death. It's vertical shooter, often compared to Xevious. It's got funky 3D renders of sanitized spaceships for you to shoot down. It's the sequel to a shareware game called Mars Rising, which is exactly the same kind of game. I think my mom must have thought it was a Doom clone based on the title because upon reviewing the footage I feel like it's a step above being told not to play 3D Pinball: Space Cadet.

But the other game on that eMac was Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

Here's the thing: if mom was going to ban me from playing either of the two games on that eMac, letting me play Pro Skater 4 but not Deimos Rising was absolutely the wrong choice. Pro Skater 4 was effectively my gateway drug to Jackass, South Park, hip-hop, punk rock, ska, and even straight people porn. I played this game a couple years after it came out when I was in middle school so I was like right on the cusp of realizing I could google search the name of the porn star they got to record voice lines for one of the characters. For the crime of inadvertently introducing me to ska music, my mother's sins are truly unforgiveable.

That being said, Pro Skater 4 is both the best Tony Hawk game to on-ramp into the series with but the worst game to start from if exploring the back catalogue. Pro Skater 4 is where they ditched the strict time limit arcade format of the first 3 Tony Hawk games and entered the open-world era used for much of the franchise after that point. The open-world format is probably better recognized for the two games which came after Pro Skater 4, Tony Hawk's Underground and Underground 2. Gone were the two-minute score attacks and trick challenges, replaced with a series of parks with funny people with weird problems asking you to do crazy stunts for money. And I'll be honest, I think it holds up extremely well.

The thing about Pro Skater 4 is it's so big that I truly have to encourage you to seek it out for yourself. What it is and what it encompasses deserves a lengthy video essay which I straight up don't have time to make. Going through and replaying it again, I was so impressed with how expansive each level was and how much stuff to do there was. It wasn't all cheap thrills (unlike THUG2), it's still a highly technical game. It's a blast to just jump in, and it's accessible enough that you can fumble your way around this first level and more or less figure out how to play the game if you skipped the tutorial. But there's actually incentive to play the tutorial, because there's money there.

One of the things I admire so much about this game is how purposeful everything is. There's no abundance, no bloat, only exactly as much as there needs to be. This goes right down to the tutorial, which is its own unique area of the game with its own collectibles. You don't just get money in this game for completing missions and whatnot; you also have to find it scattered throughout each level. And there is exactly enough money in the game to buy and unlock everything, including character customization items, bonus characters, extra levels, bloopers and interviews, everything. If you want to have the complete Pro Skater 4 experience, you truly need to complete it down to its bones.

Luckily, I think the game does an excellent job of guiding you along that path. You will naturally get better at the game the more you play it. This is one of those games that gives you everything you need to improve at it, it's just a matter of dedicating the practice time. I think if the franchise had stopped here it would be going out on the highest possible note it could have.

Now, I actually played this game for this blog last year, but the thing is that shortly after I finished playing it, they announced Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 for all current-generation consoles. I thought I'd put off writing this post until it came out so I could experience what I hoped would be the best version of the game. And here's the thing: it's not a bad game by any means. But it's just not the same.

Not only are a good amount of maps left out of the Pro Skater 4 version, but the open-world mission structure has also been replaced with a score attack system comparable to the first 3 Pro Skater games. As many reviewers have noted, it's more of a re-imagining of Pro Skater 4 than a full on modern port. That's not a bad thing. They've also gutted the soundtrack and replaced it with more current music, with only a few songs from the original Pro Skater 4 soundtrack returning. I think what this signals is that you shouldn't approach this remake as the authentic Pro Skater 4 experience, but one built from the ground up into essentially a new game with familiar locals. If you really want to you can extend the score attack style timer to an hour long, which is more than enough time to meet all the stage goals. But because each stage leans more into the same overall pattern of goals, it loses a lot of what make the original Pro Skater 4 special. It's not bad, it's just not for me.

Other games I've loved from 2002:

Shantae (GBC), Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus (PS2), Ratchet & Clank (PS2), Metroid Fusion (GBA), Metroid Prime (NGC)