We play a lot of games in our lives. They’ve been around quite a while, after all. Since the 1980’s, gaming has been a massive industry that has only grown bigger and bigger, and so most of us have some strong childhood memories associated with them. We all have our favorites, the games we just can’t forget.
Except for me. I remember my youth sporadically at best. I have games I love, but a lot of them are fuzzy images and vague memories. So please join me in doing my very best to recall the favourite games I played growing up. I will be ranking them from most to least remembered, so the detail I give will absolutely be influenced by that.
In the interest of fairness, I looked as minimally into these games as possible before writing this. You are witnessing pure, raw bad memory.
I remember the day I bought Kingdom Hearts, a discount bin in a local shopping centre, excitedly waiting in a family friend’s car to be home and boot it up. I had no idea what it was, but the Disney characters drew me in. A note to this, and as you’ll pick up from this list, I had never heard of Square Enix, Final Fantasy or the like at this point. But did I love the idea of a keyblade.
This is maybe cheating a bit, since I am a massive Kingdom Hearts fan and have played the whole series multiple times over in the last few years, but I do remember exactly playing it as a child. Specifically, I recall getting to the Tarzan world and not being able to figure out how to beat Clayton and his invisible Heartless. I actually did beat it once, but forgot to save the game. In frustration, I stopped playing the game for around 12 years, whewn I finally beat it for the first time.
The very first Ratchet and Clank game I played was the third one. Which would maybe be a forgivable excuse if I lived in America, but I don’t. It had a bag ‘3’ right in the title, and I still decided that should be the first one I played. It did entice me to play some of the other ones though, so I ended up playing at original at a friend’s house, and then picking up Ratchet Gladiator myself. Still haven’t played the second game.
I remember loving customising Ratchet’s ship, and I was a big fan of the sections where you got to play as Clank by himself. I also recall changing Clank’s form a lot, alternating between the jetpack and helicopter. The guns were pretty cool too, I think.
I always found it odd that it was called ‘Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal’ in North America despite that, to my awareness, simply not being a slang term there. And why it doesn’t use numbers in the title.
I loved Crash Bandicoot growing up. He was a little weird, and chaotic, but that made him very enjoyable to a hyper-active child, and the big poppy colours helped a lot. Once again, I do believe Twinsanity was the first Crash game I played, though I got around to plenty more afterwards. I distinctly remember loving the joint moves with Cortex and getting to use his head as a hammer. It’s the little joys.
It starts getting a lot fuzzier after that, but I do recall running from penguins and I feel like a massive walrus? And also that the classical song ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ plays during a section where you run away from wasps or hornets or something. Close enough.
Really, I shouldn’t have been playing this as a child. The big 18+ on the cover was a giveaway, but I guess that’s what you get with a parent who is fairly tech-illiterate and calls every console a Nintendo. So I played Mortal Kombat Armageddon as a child, which probably wasn’t a great idea. I did actually play Mortal Kombat Deadly Alliance and Deception before this too, so it wasn’t my first 18+ game either.
What I remember the most though is the campaign mode where you played as a brother trying to take down his significantly more evil brother. I think dragons were involved. Can’t recall their names. But what really sticks out were the brutal deaths from traps. In an ice level, I think. They genuinelygave me nightmares. I still pushed through the game, though that did put me off playing it for a few days.
However this may reflect on me, Shrek 2 is one of my favourite films. It is a yearly tradition that I must watch it. So of course I had the PS2 tie-in adaptation. It even had couch co-op! I think. I did think it was odd how much stuff went on in the game that specifically did not happen in the film, but as a child I didn’t quite realise that if you just adapted the film, the game would be over in the span of a day.
Now being honest, I do not recall much of the gameplay. The Pied Piper was there in Far Far Away, and Shrek could do a belly flop attack. I remember this because I was enamoured with the move, and my friends and I would do belly flops on my trampoline. One of us lost teeth doing this, so I suppose Shrek was a bad role model for us.
Colour me shocked when I learned that this game did not have the Overdrive part of the title internationally, and that the PS2 version only released in Europe. This was brand-new information to me while writing this. I don’t think anything was different in the European release, so I guess they gave us an extra word for no reason.
Now the funny thing here is that I bought the HD version of this game on PS4 out of nostalgia, so most of my memories are coming from that most likely. I recall there was a brain character, who I think was called Brian? There was a devil, a vampire.It was cel-shaded. Yeah. Someone was called Flemming, that rings a bell for some reason. That’s about it.
Continuing a tradition from my childhood, Jak 2 was the first Jake game I played. I did eventually move onto Jak 3, though Jak X and the original Jak and Daxter has still eluded me. I was incredibly surprised when I grew up and learned that the original Jak is, for the most part, pretty child friendly. It’s actually pretty funny how much they swear in Jak 2 in hindsight.
I remember the city of Haven. I loved the weapons. I actually used to draw pictures of them. Bad ones, but it still inspired me to make art. I recall the punch attack was very funny because of how gooey Jak looked during it. There was a very cool hoverboard. I actually can’t remember if I ever beat the game. I got the Peacemaker, the big explosive weapon, so I might have? Who knows!
I have to be honest here, I remember next to nothing about this game. I don’t even remember where I found it. It had anime portraits I’m pretty sure, and it was about discovering the secret behind the eponymous Tokobots. You definitely got more forms for them, but I don’t remember how. I feel like you used them in puzzles too.
There was definitely a lot of sand. I absolutely know there was sand. Maybe quicksand? Funnily enough, I can’t actually remember what the protagonist looked like, or who the antagonist was. So I’ll just stop here.
2XII Stag
Literally Remembered This One Today
So I remember this game visually, but I had to look it up today to actually find its name. I literally searched the words ‘ps2 2d plane top down shooter’ (yes, written just like that) and remarkably found it from just the blurry image sin my head. I thought it had WW2 planes at first, but I was clearly wrong in that regard.
So XII Stag is basically a ye olde top-down shooter,a bit like an arcade game. Lots of ships, funky explosions. Nice art. I did remember there being aliens, though I haven’t actually checked that since looking up the game, so I could just as easily be misremembering that.
When I was younger, sometime after I got an Xbox 360, all of my PS2 games were given away to a local fair without my permission, save for Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2. There were almost 100 physical games! It breaks my heart just to think about it. Not pointing fingers at who did it. But in all the years since they were cruelly taken from me, I have been using the vaguest memories to try recall this game in particular.
Bujingai. I cannot guarantee it is the game in my memory. I got it around 2005-2006 in a local shop that really had no business selling video games, so it had to be older than that already. It was not brand-new. But I recall you had a lot of free movement, it had action combat, dual swords. It was definitely a Japanese game. There were skyscrapers right at the beginning of the game, and I am certain you could run up them, at least a little bit. Bujingai ticked all the boxes, but my memory was blurry enough that I still can’t say I’m right.
Bujingai also has GACKT in it, which would have made this my first exposure to him.
