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)
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