Don’t be afraid to admit it. We all played games we shouldn’t have when we were young. Either we snuck them past our parents, made up some elaborate lie about how they were fine to play actually. Maybe your parents just didn’t care, or felt you were mature enough for it. Some variation of all that, anyway.
For me, I played a lot of games. The PS2 was the console that defined most of my childhood, and I had nigh 100 games on it, more than I reasonably had the time to play between school and homework. But you know what? I really should not have been playing some of them, and now I’m going to make that everyone else’s problem, too.
Let’s just deal with the obvious one first. I have an older brother who himself was also playing GTA too young, and so I picked it up from him, and then picked up some of my own to the point that I attended the midnight launch for GTA 5. But should I have been playing any of those games at my tender age? By god, no.
From poor treatment of women, unrealistically large pockets, and a generally bloated sense of self-importance, Grand Theft Auto wasn’t exactly the strongest role model for a child. Sure,it was all framed through satire, but it’s a bit hard for a child to pick up on all that. It was for me, anyway. The one silver lining is I now get to tell my nephew he’s too young to be playing GTA.
Obviously, there is a lot to be critiqued here. The support of the military complex, the lack of original ideas, it becoming the second Fortnite with the absurd number of collaborations that make it lose any semblance of it’s own identity. However, so many of those issues were exacerbated with time, which was not so much of an issue when i was younger.
Plus, shooter games were a dime-a-dozen back then, so what’s makes Call of Duty stand out? It was the damn voice chat. Unless you have an obscenely thick skin, it’s hard for a child to come out unscathed from the types of things you’d hear in a Call of Duty lobby. Honestly, I still don’t feel comfortable going into voice chat, and I can specifically blame Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) for that. Even having to type that name out is stupid.
Admittedly, I don’t remember a whole bunch of Postal, other than it just being a guy going around and, like, killing everyone he could see for no reason. ‘Going Postal’ wasn’t a phrase familiar to my mind, a child growing up in rural Ireland. So colour me shocked when over a decade later I learned that going postal was a means of expressing excessive violence from workplace-related stress.
A thoroughly unfamiliar feeling to me, truly. I never really cared for the game, it was just in my periphery growing up, but being exposed to such a high degree of violence was maybe not the healthiest thing for a child to see.
Right. I mean, I feel like I don’t need to say much here. Leisure Suit Larry are games that (personally) no one should be playing, though absolutely not a child. Frankly I don’t even know how I came into possession of a Leisure Suit Larry game. A leftover from my brother, or something he bought me on his way home from work.
I have not ever touched a Leisure Suit Larry game since I grew up. Maybe they’re somehow incredibly subversive and Larry is not the slimy pervert that he’s framed as. I am not willing to invest the time to find out in a game that has sperm mini-games.
Yeah this is the other big one. I know I wasn’t the only one playing this for two reasons - worldwide obscenity around such a gory game even existing, and the fact that all of my friends were very keen on playing it with me. And I turned out pretty well, I think. Aside from the nightmares.
It’s funny, in hindsight. Fatalities and the like were so over-the-top that I don’t think they ever felt like something humanly relatable as a child. Like I should not have been playing something so gory and bloody all the same, but it definitely hasn’t had as extreme an impact as it was made out to be. Even the nightmares stopped eventually.
4Adiboo And The Energy Thieves
You might not have ever heard of this game. I hope you’ve never heard of this game. This is not a good game. I mentioned earlier thatI had a lot of games on the PS2. People tend to believe that it’s OK to make media simple and without much depth if it’s for a child. I am here to tell you otherwise, so more games like this are not made.
Look, I know this game was meant for children as a kind of edutainment games. But it was also really bad, enough that I knew it was incredibly bad as a child, too. It let me know that games this bad existed out there, and for my own better view of the games industry, I wish I hadn’t played it.
This one is a double-edged sword. On one hand, Hitman games are about killing people, and finding the most creative ways to do that. Obviously not the most pleasant message for children, as you can imagine. However, if you abstract the whole being a Hitman thing from it, they’re actually games all about planning.
And I like to think I’m pretty good at planning things. I keep to schedule well, most things don’t tend to take me by surprise. I would argue that Hitman probably taught me some of that. Though there probably were better ways for a child to learn management skills that didn’t involve being a Hitman.
I love a good racing game every now-and-then. I feel like most people too. While the games industry can often feel like a rat race towards who can make the most pointlessly bleeding edge tech, racing games feel like they reached that plateau long ago. They look very good! Even for me, with very little interest in automobiles,I can admire a real shiny carand its moving parts.
But also, I can’t drive. And I absolutely think games like Need for Speed imbued me with an utter fear of cars. They make it seem so easy! All this drifting, tight corners and the ability to swiftly change lane and turn narrowly avoid collisions. They never told me cars had to be put into different gears! I hope you were built different, but I’m blaming Need for Speed for my inability to drive.
It didn’t help that I watched a lot of Fast and Furious growing up, where cars seemed to have like 11 different gear settings.
I have not finished Dino Crisis. I have barely even played Dino Crisis. Yet despite that, I have very distinct memories of Dino Crisis. I remember very clearly the opening. You are inside some large enclosure outside at night. You’re with some other man, and then he goes through a door, leaving you by yourself.
There were no dinosaurs in this room, but there were so many noises. Roars and crickets, rustling of leaves and the sounds of footsteps. I had no idea what tank controls were. I barely knew how to move, let alone aim a gun. I walked out of that door, came across a velociraptor, got terrified, and quit. So in a sense, you could argue I actually never really played Dino Crisis. But I never should have tried. I scare too easily.
