You Should've Met Me In The '90s

Remember the '90s? I do. I had the best time in the '90s. They were my thing. It was a time of baggy clothes and ludicrously large shoelaces. Mike will tell you how he loved the '80s, how all the best music came from the time of pink spandex overalls and big frizzy hair. I'll say the exact same thing about the nineties. Because I heart them and I want them back.

As with all decades, the '90s can only be said to have oficially taken off circa 1994. It is a well known fact that the first few years of a decade actually belong to the one that preceded it. It's like an acclimation period, when people and trends interiorize that the calendar has changed and that some major change is, in fact, required for evolution to proceed.

Having been born in 1985, I remember most of the nineties. Just the other day we were surfing the youtubes for old favourites we used to watch as kids. Bear in mind that these things reached us with a slight delay, rights having to be purchased and some things needing to be dubbed.

I remembered spending hours in front of my second parent, my old Sony Black Trinitron, delighting at the sight of this magical shows from foreign lands. Some lands were even more foreign than I could ever imagine.

One of the shows that made an impact on me was Gargoyles. I can't believe how I'd forgotten that show existed. It was so emotionally charged. These creatures, these stone-made-flesh men had been betrayed but they still believed, they endured and, every day at dawn, after toiling anonymously for our safety, they would return to their perch on top of that tower. Everything about this was totally completely fucking epic! Shows like this shaped our generation, shaped what we play and watch and listen to. You can't deny that. Well, maybe you can and you could even have a point but hey, I liked it. 'Twas awesome.

Other awesome things included several anime I didn't even know was anime until I sat down and actually thought about it a few years back. I also remember the music. It defines a decade, doesn't it? What young people listen to.

I wasn't very picky when it came to music, I'll admit. I'd usually just endure what everyone else was listening to and I won't bore you with the musical torture I endured growing up. But I did grow to like Simon & Garfunkel and Cat Stevens a lot during this period. My mom was upgrading her vinyl (or as I saw a young hipster say the other day "a vinyl CD". I stared at him, slack-jawed in horror) collection and when she brought these new CDs home I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. And I liked it. A lot. Pair that with my obssession with videogame music, a mild taste for Nirvana and my unbeknonwst passion for Smashing Pumpkins and a Sara had been reborn. People will ask me what kind of music I like. I tend to cringe because I can honestly say I love Ryuichi Sakamoto or Madredeus but also adore The Strokes and some Placebo. I will dance David Fonseca on my way home or drum my fingers on my legs to Iwasaki Taku. I'm all over the place when it comes to music and I have my experiences in the '90s to thank for that.

Also, I couldn't dance but, let's face it: nobody could dance in the '90s. Nobody. Just check the first season of Buffy, you'll see what I mean.

I could go on forever. But I better not.

Biobreak Games

I wrote earlier how I'm not feeling the whole new "arcade" concept (nice try with that Game Room thing Microsoft; was an interesting idea but I'm not paying real money to spend in my friends' fake arcade). That's not to say I disregard the whole genre of the so-called "shallow" games. Quite the opposite.

I call them my guilty pleasures. Mike would come home to find me wrapped in a ball of cloth in the couch, a controller and a remote hidden somewhere under the layers, an overflowing ashtray on the arm of the couch. I would grin mischeviously at him and he'd ask "have you been sitting there all day playing that instead of going to school?" to which I would reply with a sound "YESH!" and proceeded to throw my head back, stomp my feet and laugh manically.

They were (and still are) my guilty pleasures. Hours of my life were shamefully spent on both handhelds, consoles and desktops on games with -3 story depth, -1 learning curve, +9 replayability. Some of those I promoted to legends among our group, us eventually taking weekends off just to finish them and play them together.

Lumines

I played Lumines first on the PSP. I loved it so much I ended up buying it for the 360 as well. I played Lumines on the subway, I played Lumines at school. I played Lumines in bed, I played Lumines on a stool. Which reminds me: Mike likes to tell people that he once found me in the bathroom with a blanket over my knees and an ice cream bowl playing Lumines. I keep telling them the ice cream part is a lie. I'm not winning. I would play Lumines so often and for so long I'd have to pause the game to rub my eyes so I could see again. I would talk his ear off how there was this one stage that actually said "Ray Liotta" when you made a square and he'd roll his eyes at me disapprovingly. I conquered all the achievements for the 360 version in 2 hours.

Puzzle Quest

I first discovered Puzzle Quest when my PSP's battery died and I turned to one of our DSs. I was immediately hooked. Here was an RPG game that took pity of me and my lack of combat skills. "Here, have Bejewelled instead!" I finished it three times and renegated all other games for around a month or so. Mike would point and laugh at me for my poor taste in RPGs. I glared at him with that specific glare that whispers:

I proceeded to prove him wrong. "Try it," I said simply. One of our friends had too and he had become a slave to the gems just as I had. Reluctantly he accepted and he ended up finishing the game too. Puzzle Quest has a pathetic excuse of a story (there is bad guy trying to rule world! You have sword and kill things with puzzles kthxbye) but who the hell gives a shit. You had a little citadel to upgrade, minigames (which were nothing but variants of the battle system) to unlock new spells, train mounts and forge items. You could even make a few choices that affected how the game played out. It was a great bathroom game. It still is.

Honeycomb Beat, Polarium, Soukoban 2

The first two we went through as a threesome (sounds kinkier than it actually was), using our combined intellect to get through the puzzle modes. Soukoban 2 was played in bed, when we'd exhausted cat videos on youtube and were up to date on fails. We were going through a revival of games I had been dumbfound as a young girl by one of those Super 108 in One cartridges for the Game Boy. There were, in all honesty, only about 20 games in that thing and even those who featured a saving feature didn'te because, well, the cartridge was full with the other 107 copies of games. It has close to 10 versions of Battle City (my mom was the real Battle City player. Man did she go at it...) the only difference between them being the name of the file and how many lives you started with.

There were a lot of those games we tried, including Heiankyo Alien, but Soukoban 2 was a lost gem. Man, did we have fun back then, just pushing boxes on top of dots. It doesn't take much to entertain us, us or anyone for that matter, if you're in the right mindset. If your mind's legs are spread right open, ready to be entertained. Which ours were.

Nowadays I just play Governor of Poker. Not as exciting as Lumines or Phoenix Wright, but its just enough to keep me entertained while not addictive enough that I'll take dessert with me.

And while I've definitely played enough Rift lately to have a level 28 Cleric and a level 15 Mage, I don't have much to say about it, or maybe not just yet. Or maybe I just don't have enough screenshots to make me feel comfortable about the subject.

Why Silent Hill Almost Ruined Men For Me

I've always had this doubt. Are men and women really all that different?

There are the obvious answers: women are more prone to having boobies and warming up toilet seats, men are more likely to wake up with an erection.

But there was one game that showed me that men and women aren't really all that different. That game was Silent Hill.

Why, thank you.

For me, Silent Hill was and still is the king of all survival horror games. It was beatutiful without being pretentious. And it scared you shitless without even trying. You could just be standing there and you got scared because nothing was happening. The less there was, the more frightened you got. The feeling of complete loneliness and helplessness was overwhelming at times. Most of the time.

My boyfriend at the time had acquired it (legally even) and explained to me what it was about. He didn't have to though, the cover of the box was self-explanatory. According to Wikipedia:

"Played from a third-person perspective, Silent Hill uses real-time 3D environments and, as a result, the developers incorporated fog and darkness in the game as a method of hiding the limitations of the hardware."

What this means, in practice, is that you could, at any given time, see fuck all. You got out of that car and you could see probably two steps in front of you. It was terrifying. The first thing we all knew we had to do was get a pipe/crowbar. We call this "The Law of Pipe" and Silent Hill loved this law. If you wanted to get through the game, you had to rely on that trusty, rusty pipe. "No matter how big the weapon, it will run out of ammo. The pipe will not. No matter how big the enemy, the pipe will eventually down it" is the definition of this law that Mike imparted on me just now. It gets the point across.



Pylon Head, Pyramid Head's poor cousin

I once experienced a Silent Hill-like fog in real life. Mike and I were walking down from my mother's house and a thick fog had settled in earlier in the cold afternoon. It was a bit late and there was no one else outside but us. Not even cars or buses dared roam that wide street that wound down from a zone of derelict buildings and a private school. A bit further down the road we could see the lights of what we knew was a butcher shop. As we got closer we started to discern a shape inside the shop. I held onto his arm tighter and he did the same. Soon we could tell it had a humanoid shape, a fat man holding something above his hand. The yellow light behind him wouldn't let us see his face or what he was holding. A few steps later we realised what it was. It was a knife. I'm pretty sure I yelped as I felt him stiffen up. We both almost bolted. Instead, we froze. Upon closer inspection (and I don't know how we mustered the courage) we realized what we were looking at. It was the dummy they kept outside during the day that held the sign for the day's specials. They just moved it inside to stand near the window when they closed the shop. Oh, how we laughed.



But getting back to my first impression of the game. Boyfriend at the time liked to play games and have me watch. It sounds more kinky than it really was. So to set the mood I decided to close the shutters of his window and turn off the lights. He warned me not to do that but I didn't care. I was old enough not to be scared by horror movies or games. I could handle whatever Silent Hill had to throw at me. I was wrong.



Not anymore...

I started off apprehensive, cowering on his bed against the wall. He braved the fog, he picked up a pipe, he bashed the dogs, he even went past the fucking wheelchair. Something always goes bad in Silent Hill when you see a wheelchair. This is fact. But when he reached the locker cat he put down the controller, turned off the Playstation, turned to me and said "I can't play this anymore today". I couldn't blame him. I was hugging his pillow for dear life at this point.

Silent Hill had turned him into a big girl. But he wasn't the only one. A movie adaptation was eventually made of the game. I know of people that can't watch it withouth being completely wrapped up in something comforting like a blanket or their own shirt. I, myself, still cringe when my playlist throws anything from Akira Yamaoka at me when I'm in the subway.

Speaking of which, the soundtrack was one of the strongest points of this game. So good, in fact, that Yamaoka (composer) went on to become the producer for Silent Hill 3, the direct sequel for the first one, and the movie. It's moving when it needs to be and it's nothing more than pipe banging when you need to GTFO.



Don't worry, boys.
In the end, everything will be ok.



Silent Hill was what made me realize that men, behind all their gung-hoing and testosterone sweating, are as squeamish as women when faced with impossible odds against things with big knives. I could tell you stories of how they flee with broom in hand from cockroaches riding Batman bikes or how they squeal in horror at the sight of a grasshopper. But society demands they be the stronger sex, the gallant knights, the saviors of the day. So they put on a straight face and brave through the muck. This game let me see their softer side, their sweaty fingers fumbling with the controllers and their frowns at faceless nurses.

It could've ruined men for me but it only made me appreciate them more.

The Meaning of "Arcade"

I had very little contact with arcades growing up but, from what little I did, I must say I don't much like the use of the word for these console "Arcade" games. The feel just isn't there.

Let me explain.

According to Wiktionary:

arcade (plural arcades)

1. (architecture) A row of arches.
2. (architecture) A covered passage, usually with shops on both sides.
3. Establishment running coin-operated games.

But, to me, the meaning is simpler because to me there were ever only two arcades in the world, the one near my high school and that other one on the second floor of an inconspicuous building lost in the less walked streets of Tokyo. This will be a long one.



One is the loneliest number

 When I visited Japan a few years back I got to visit the afore mentioned salon(salon as in "a gathering of people for a social or intellectual meeting"). Me and my boyfriend at the time were touring the country with some japanese friends we'd made. Once we got to Tokyo we both immediately started pestering them to take us to an arcade, any arcade. Contrary to popular belief, or maybe just our own, not every japanese teenager is into that kind of thing. So they took us wandering about town for a while, trying to look like they knew where they were going. Eventually they found a gaming arcade running in the top floor of a small comercial building. They herded us inside and our eyes twinkled with excitement as they tried to explain that this wasn't really a good example of an arcade, this was just a small place to extort money from the neighbourhood kids. But we didn't care. To us, it was the holy grail.

They released us into the establishment, dividing their forces so they could have one of them translating (and more importantly, watching out) for each of us gaijins. No matter how awestruck we were, we still tried to keep a low profile because we were the foreign party here, me looking a bit more exotic than most. Pretty soon my boyfriend found a machine to play Guilty Gear on but I wasn't (and still am not) interested in that particular game. So I sat (yes sat; you wouldn't believe what a shock it was to actually sit down when playing something other than Daytona) next to him and, as fate would have it, it was a Soul Calibur 2 thingy. 

The proverbial "Kill you with a stick" move

Oh, I love Soul Calibur. I could have counted the ways but I chose not to. Pretty soon after I started dabbling with it lo and behold, a challenger appeared. I was pretty self-conscious already, being the only girl in there actually playing and not just escorting (in the most innocent sense of the word) and I was the only one of african descent. I gulped down hard but decided to pretend there was actually no one there. This is why japanese arcades were so alien for us. You could actually play a game against someone and not have to look at their face, not have to deal with the fact that they were a real person that you'd never met. So the embarrassement of losing or the cockiness of winning didn't ever have to be shared with this element so alien to your private life.

Wouldn't you know it? I won; Kilik never disappoints. I let out an excited girly giggle because that's what I do and I saw a face looking down at me from above the bench/machine thing. He was clearly amazed but he was japanese enough to not say anything even though he assumed I wouldn't get it if he did.

One other thing I found fascinating about it was a job I had never known existed. There was this young man, his back already hunched by the weight of his lot in life that was going around just emptying ashtrays and wiping down an arcade machine immediately after it was done being used. This was beyond everything I know and soon you'll get why.


My only other term for comparison was MC (wittingly spelled Émecê because that's how you actually say it), an arcade near the school I went to and, strangely, even closer to the maternity hospital where I was born. To a layman, MC was just a small hole in a wall that led straight down to a dark hole in the ground. It's a place that gets all its business from word of mouth but, if I'm not mistaken, its still open for business.

It was a dark place with little lighting and no windows which, in retrospect, isn't surprising because it was underground. At the bottom of the stairs the space opened up to a be a low-ceilinged jobbie with 3 pool tables and 2 table football ones to one side, watched closely by the dubious owner behind his counter where he supplied dubious candy and smokes. To the other side, behind the stairs, sat the dusty arcades with games that weren't upgraded in years. These were scarred by cigarette burns and the buttons had faded after countless years of mashing by grimy fingers. The centre piece of the establishment was, at least for us, the Daytona USA machine. Sporting two pseudo racing car seats and big yet-untarnished screens, it was where we the girls (all two of us) retreated to eat our dubious candy when the boys went to massacre the foosball. It must be noted that our foosball tables are made of sturdy wood, the dummies of solid iron and the rods are covered in an eye-sorish black grease. It's a manly game where boys become men and we would rather stay clear of it.

 

We would pop in a few coins from time to time, always resorting to the same cars and the same track. To this day she still nags me about that one time when she was winning and, at the last minute, I rammed her into the pit stop and came in first.



"Let's go away!"



This was a magic place. The smoke-filled cave to where we retreated when going to class was simply out of the question and we had no joints to smoke. We would lose ourselves there, hours we would never get back but would never regret because magical things happened there. Impossible shots in the pool table where you hadn't enough space to even place the queue and had to sit up on the green and worn cloth; bouncing, murderous balls from the feet of the iron foosball players. One of these magical events involved a hole in the far wall near a derelict pool table.

Me and a friend of mine were chasing a rogue ball and, once we found it and straightened our backs, we noticed a hole in the wall right at eye level. He looked at me and I looked at him. I'm squeamish about strange holes that may contain strange bugs so he went ahead and looked inside. He smiled back at me and placed his hand inside the wall. When it came back out he was holding a pack of cigarettes. It was full. For the longest time we were lost in debate about whether or not to smoke them. We were active smokers, quite professional at it and the prospect of free smokes was tempting. But what if they were spiked with something? Well, I was never one to believe people would waste drugs on random objects they would then deploy into the world without any certaitny where they would end up or sticking around to find out. What would be the point? Someone must've just stashed them there to smoke them later.

So that's the story of how I ended up smoking the most suspicious carton of smokes I ever came across.

And that, my friends, is why I take offense on all these variants of "arcade" games. Where's the japanese man wiping my controller when I'm done using it? Where's the hole in the wall with a pack of cigarettes? There's little arcade in them, except for the fact that you waste money on something not very deep. Which is not to say I don't like these types of games. But that's a story for another day.