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Number Five:
I sold every videogame I ever owned, except for Dragon Quest III and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, so that I could afford something I needed to afford. I also needed to pay for a trip back to Tokyo. That was a different matter, however. We won't get into what I needed the money for. We'll just say it was life-or-death, and not kid about it. Now on with the narrative:
I had seen enough of my games. I didn't need them anymore. I arrived at the end of a lifelong stint of collecting videogames with no desire to see them again. My basement-filling collection was the only thing in my possession that was really "worth" anything. I had six boxes, which had previously contained artificial Christmas trees, and they were all full of videogame magazines. Actually, an article about those videogame magazines will be appearing in a magazine shortly. Here's an excerpt:
"Why my family had six artificial seven-foot-long Christmas tree boxes is a question with five amusing answers. How I was able to fill those six boxes with a stone-sarcophagus' weight of videogame magazines is a question with one sad answer."
Looking over those magazines before sending them to my good paying friend Professor Frank Cifaldi, Doctor of Love, I was filled with a sick desire to take notes. So I whipped open my PC, and took some notes. Basically, I was looking for inaccuracies, or fact-checking errors that involved the stories of videogames. Some of the errors were graciously supplied by game companies themselves -- Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden's girl-in-distress' last name is translated differently in each of the three games in the series. I took these notes, and then I turned them into a long, ridiculous feature that no one understood. I called it The Insert Credit Cold Fifty: Videogame Icons.
As I wrote it, I couldn't help being fore-gagged by my own brilliance. This was a surefire sign that the article was going to get me lots of hate-mail.
It did. That wasn't until months later, however, and that's not the important part of the story. The important part is that I sold a videogame collection IGN valued at more than $15,000, a collection a friend had appraised as being worth closer to $29,000, for only $5,000, $2,000 in cash and $3,000 in IOUs.
I sold my prized copy of Dragon Quest I+II, for example, to a flamer of mine whose IP addressed I tracked to Tokyo. The guy had said he lived in Iowa. He came on to me for some six weeks as a "devoted fan," and he laid on the loving really thick. When my game sale came around, he ordered $400 worth of stuff no one else wanted, and said he'd not have the money for a couple of weeks, though if I wanted to send the stuff out to him now, he'd totally promise to pay me at some point. I told him an IOU was fine, and boxed up the stuff and sent it out that day, to an address in Iowa that might belong to someone the guy knows. The guy then disappeared from the internet, and I don't mind it. This is the sort of thing I do. If he thinks he was cheating me out of something, then he doesn't know what I know about life.
Nonetheless, I ended up in Tokyo, got what I needed to get, and ran so low on cash that I got kicked out of two apartments in a row. A friend and fellow punk-rocker named Kasugi allowed me to crash on a found futon at his place for a couple of weeks, during which time his roommate was arrested for health insurance fraud. The roommate won't be back for two years, so all his shit is belong to us. His room is now mine. His black Gameboy Advance is now mine -- to replace the one I sold for 2,000 yen so I could afford a train ticket up from Chiba one horrible night in October.
I'd not played a game in my own home for two months before two weeks ago. Now, I have Gameboy Advance. I have Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga. I have also reinstalled Baldur's Gate II on my computer.
And it's not just because of that Gameboy Advance. That was nothing. See, the damned thing was short a battery lid. Never trust a health-insurance scammer to take care of his videogames. I walked down to Ikebukuro and stopped by a Liberty used game and CD shop, with the idea of getting a battery lid for 100 yen. Why any given used game shop has so many battery lids at any given time THE HELL IF I KNOW and why I got a white one though my new GBA was clearly black IS MY OWN DAMNED QUIRK; the important part is that on the way up the stairs I spied something sitting on a shelf.
It was Sega's . . . Dreamcast . . . joystick. Never had I ever doubted it -- this was a piece of equipment forged in the fires of Mount Hori, and only there could it be unmade. Accompanying the Dreamcast stick were the Hori Super Famicom stick, the Hori PlayStation2 (standard, eight-button) stick, and even an old Hori Neo-Geo stick. I marveled at them, and as I grasped the shiny green ball of the square-holed Greatest Joystick Ever Made No Matter What You Say, I recalled my dream to one day own two of every stick ever made by Hori.
And pretty much just like that, I decided to start a game collection again. I'm debating, at the moment, which system to start with. I'm open to suggestions, and if you give me some good ideas, I'll be sure to mention them in an upcoming feature about "starting over" -- "inserting more credits," maybe, I can call it.
For the moment, my only idea is . . . a PlayStation? So I can get Goemon 5? And Policenauts? Even then, why don't I just get a PS2?
Okay, so I just bought Ridge Racer 4 again last week, for no reason other than that it was 100 yen.
Let it be known, then, that that's the first game I bought in this "new collection." We'll see where I go from there.
The hardest game to part with had to be Soul Calibur II, which I offered to the world for only $60 with the official Hori Gamecube Soul Calibur II stick. Someone offered $80, and I couldn't ignore that. I then slipped the game into the rock-solid joystick box, wrapped it all in brown paper, and squeezed it. It was airtight. Inside was a game I had spent more time with than any other game this year (150 hours, at least). It's also probably the only game I could say I got my money's worth out of this year.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, though -- I'd only acquired that game two weeks before I sold it to one Chris Kohler. I'd like to think that, if I had had more time to play it, it might have come out as my game of the year. It's a Star Wars game, to be sure. It also happens to be the best one I've ever had the pleasure of playing. Last year I lamented the current state of RPGs; this year, I salute a step in the right direction by BioWare, whose Jade Empire I'm looking very forward to. If I see more that I like, I might just get an Xbox again. A creative writing teacher once told me, many, many years ago, that a "popular technique" in "modern fiction" is to "defamiliarize big ideas." Hell if I know what he meant, then. Now, after some time with Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic, I think I understand. For one thing -- you can take the words Star Wars off the title, and it doesn't sound stupid to a person who doesn't know Star Wars. Go ahead, try it.
Now try the same with "Star Wars: A New Hope." Or "Return of the Jedi." (What the hell is a "Jedi"?) "The Phantom Menace" (Lost Hitchcock?)? "Attack of the Clones"?
"The Empire Strikes Back" -- that doesn't sound like a bad title. It also happens to belong to a great film.
"Knights of the Old Republic" is a title that belongs to a great game. For one thing, from the start, it intrigues us -- since when did republics have knights? Don't knights belong to kingdoms?
The game starts aboard a spaceship, and our hero's first weapon is a laser gun. After a crash-landing on a far-off planet, we might soon find ourselves wearing shining silver armor and carrying a glistening blade, in the disguise of an enemy soldier so we can sneak about on business for what amounts to an interplanetary motorcycle gang.
This is a Final Fantasy level of reinventive exuberance, and it all flies at us in the first two hours of play, before any "Star Wars" elements other than laser blast sounds can enter the picture.
When the game introduces a Wookie, it introduces a Wookie in a way that makes us look, and say, that guy's big. He talks crazy. We don't immediately make a Chewbacca reference. His name is "Zalbaar," after all.
When Jedis enter the picture, all we have to know is that they're these knights who have endured lifelong disciplined training.
Then there's the game itself, implementing essentially the Baldur's Gate pause-able pseudo-real-time battle system, plus excellent sound effects and lots and lots of jumping. As in lightsaber-wielding jumping. And lord knows I love to jump. I enjoyed that crazy jumping until the thirty-hour point, which I was playing slowly enough to enjoy with much screaming, before I had to let go of the game.
And then Chris Kohler posted on his site, saying, of KoTOR, "it ain't that great." Ungrateful son of a bitch.
Let's go ahead, though, and call it runner-up game of the year 2003.
And then continue on our quest to remember this year.
[next: four: americans do it too! (or, 'NAKA-ITABASHI, YOU SUCK!')]
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