Advent Calendar 18: A Golden Shiny Wire Of Hope

Time for a personal story.

In summer 1997, I informed my parents that they would be getting me a Playstation. They could buy one for my birthday in September or wait until Christmas, but they were going to get me one. My mother, you see, loves giving gifts. This has sometimes been a problem; historically, she has a habit of using presents or offers of resources to get around boundaries she doesn't like. My parents are overall not very functional adults. But the Christmas blow-out, at least, was string-free and well-intentioned. We kids always got a big package and a pile of smaller things, and the "family" gift, as I mentioned way back on the 1st, was always a video game for us to play during vacation.

My mother is not super techie, and also not super good at listening to people, so we came to an agreement: I would just tell her what my big gift was going to be every year, and let her channel her unfocused, unfettered spending into candy and stocking stuffers. It worked surprisingly well. I got something I would actually use -- usually a PC upgrade or a newish Palm Pilot, because I carried a tiny distracting computer in my pocket way before it was cool -- and my mother got to enjoy running herself into debt.

Two important things were set to happen in Q4 1997: One was that I was turning sixteen, and the other was that Final Fantasy VII was going to be released in North America. My grandmother, who was a debutante when she was young and even worse at listening to people than my mother was, wanted to throw me a big birthday bash. Aside from having to explain to her that "coming out" meant a completely different thing than when she was a teenager, I didn't have any friends who would have shown up to something that involved formal wear. 

In a rare display of mercy, my parents somehow convinced her to divert the party money towards a games console instead. That set of grandparents were not completely computer-naive -- my grandfather had been an architect with a sideline in electrical engineering, and my grandmother was a high-powered admin of some kind in the computer room at Harvard, when computers took up an actual room and were mainly run by the secretarial pool. Still, when I unboxed the console and started playing a game in front of them (Discworld, rented from the local Blockbuster, because FFVII wasn't due out yet), they looked on in complete incomprehension.

I didn't care, because it was a Playstation, and it was officially mine. Aside from the annual Christmas RPGs, there were titles around that we kids could play on the other consoles; we weren't big on shmups as a whole, but the machines did come with some platformers and puzzle games. The biggest drivers of that collection, however, were my parents. After we finished the yearly RPG on the SNES, my father camped in the living room every weekend and ground through all 96 exits in Super Mario World so he could get a star on his save file. Twenty years later, after I'd convinced several of my university instructors to accept research papers on video game history, I had to patiently explain to my parents that most people bought video games for their children. They had no idea.

I dicked around with Discworld for hours, until the Playstation overheated and froze, which turned out to be the start of a new tradition. I ran I think three original-model PSXes into the ground (and finally switched to an emulator to avoid buying another one) before getting a PS2 Slim in 2004. Also courtesy my parents, who braved a Fry's Electronics on Black Friday to get not one, but two holiday launch bundles. I got the one with a spare DualShock2 and extra memory cards, and they got the one with a Logitech Cordless Action Controller, which they thought was the greatest invention ever. 

(The family dogs were prone to charging across the living room in pursuit of the family cats, and were the reason we found out that Nintendo consoles survive being dropped repeatedly onto parquet floor, and that most Playstation games will auto-pause if you yank the controller out of the front. The Logitechs are even RF, not IR, so the cat couldn't stop them from working by parking it on the entertainment center, either. I don't think my parents ever bought a controller with a cord on it again.)

My parents came through for me again at Christmas, when they coughed up $49.95 to get me the US release of Final Fantasy VII. I killed my free time that winter vacation finishing this game, with all its huge FMVs full of simplistic CGI, TV-Teen level plot threads about love, death, and tragedy, and its revolutionary (if mostly censored) shower of swear words that never would have passed Nintendo Quality Control. 

The moment was a little bittersweet. They bought that game for me instead of buying one for the family. I'm sure a lot of it was that they knew I wasn't going to put the controller down until I was done with it, but beyond that, my sister was getting pretty uninterested in video games (possibly because I was clearly into them, and everything I touched was Way Uncool). That was also around the age when I started getting fed up with a lot of the emotionally-neglectful and dysfunctional shit my parents did, and was not shy about pointing it out. On a practical level, that was probably the year family gaming would have stopped being fun, and letting me take it over was a good way to make sure at least one of us was happy. But in retrospect it's sad to realize that that was the beginning of the end of any possibility that I would have a good adult relationship with either of my parents, because I was growing up, and neither of them ever did.

They did keep getting me video games after that. Mostly the big gift was the actual electronics, but the next year, I got a stack of fat multi-CD cases: The recent release Xenogears, and the slightly lesser-known launch title Wild ARMs and Vandal Hearts. I started collecting PSX titles secondhand while I was in college, and one year I gave my mother a list of rare games that I wanted to play, but had failed to find at any kind of reasonable price. She managed to find a copy of Koudelka, which is the first game in the series that came to greater prominence later with the PS2 title Shadow Hearts.

If you're interested in playing any of these classic PSX RPGs, a lot of them are on the Playstation Network for PS4/5. If you can get hold of a rooted PSP, many of them were remade quite well for that platform, and backups of the UMDs or downloads generally work well on PPSSPP, a multi-platform PSP emulator that I've used across Windows, Linux, Mac, and Android with great success. Some also came out for Vita, but nobody bought a Vita, so I haven't kept track of which ones.