no curating. pfft. as if any of my years were cool, let alone my teen years

1. FF8. this one gets to be top of the list, every single time. while it's not my favorite FF anymore (have you heard of the critically acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy XIV?) it is still the one that lives in my heart as The Game that made me realize what video games really could be.

My brother was always a huge gamer. He had a Commodore 64 back when they were new and cool, he had an Atari 2600, a Sega Genesis, a Sega Saturn, but then the Dreamcast came out and it was just unimpressive, so for some reason instead he turned to this nifty little console, the Playstation. It was a simpler time then XD

He bought FF8 technically for my cousin, but this was the 90s, so he always opened up a game and played at least an hour or two of it to make sure it actually worked before giving it as a gift

We, uh... we played the entire game. Sorry, Jarrod

I think my brother bought us our own copy by like disc 3

but yeah, I spent HOURS over at my brother's house (he's 15 years older than me) and we did everything there was to do in that game. I've since played it a half dozen more times over the years, got my PC version signed by Nobuo Uematsu, just. I love this fucking game

2. FFX. my brother and I also played this game, because he was the one with the PS2, but we played the demo (remember demo discs from magazines?) around the same time we were playing FF8. it was SO COOL. Got us both so hype on how powerful this new game system was going to be XD

Now I've got a PS5 and the PS2 is a literal potato, but I still remember that feeling

3. Ecco the Dolphin (am I sufficiently uncool yet? Just wait for #5) This was the first game my brother bought FOR me. I'd been playing on his various game systems for a long time, but he bought Ecco for me specifically because it had a dolphin on the cover and looked fun. Now I have war flashbacks about prehistoric crabs

I was really bad at that game XD I used to load it up just to play around with my dolphin pals in the tutorial level because the actual rest of the game was too hard. thankfully, with cheat codes, we did manage to see the final boss, went wtf, and kind of gave up

I looked up the story years later and I'm still wtf

but talking to whales was cool

4. StarWars Racer. That was the pod-racing game that came out right after Ep1 made it look so cool. That was the first game I ever bought for myself. On PC (I got the PS2 version years later when my comp couldn't play it anymore but it's a shadow of the game. terrible port). my family PC was Win95 at the time XD so it couldn't play the game

my sister (20 years older than me, so already had a house/husband/kid of her own by then) let me install it on her computer (Win98!!) so I got to play it. Maybe I'll figure out how to do up a Win98 virtual box some day so I can experience it and X-Wing vs TIE again

5. Are you ready for ultimate uncoolness? Here it comes. My final most important game is actually multiple games: magazine demo discs

both Playstation Mag and PCGamer used to come with monthly demo discs and my brother was subbed to both, so we would open them up and carefully play through every single demo on the discs (see above re: FFX). We didn't really have the money to buy all those different games, so it was such fun to experience them

the FF8 demo, btw, was hilariously different to the final game. You had a team of Squall, Seipher, and Rinoa the whole way. Still, it obviously got us interested enough to go for the main game. But yeah, game demo discs back in the day were the best thing and while I enjoy playing demos now, it just can't compare