Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 Video Games
Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 Video Games
A brief history of some the video games I’ve played. This post will be about PS1 and PS2 video games.
Previously, I talked about consoles before 1998. On this post, I will talk about Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 games . Eventually, our house got a Playstation 2, and that was when the gaming really ramped up for us. The PS2 was great because we could play Playstation 1 games as well as Playstation 2 games. For me, this was a crucial time for video games. I can’t list all the games we had but I will list the most pivotal in my memory.
Playstation 1
This was how I found one of the most pivotal games I have ever played: Harvest Moon: Back to Nature. Basically, all other games fell by the wayside. I was obsessed with this little farm simulator. I liked that you could romance different women and create friendships, while also farming and go fishing and taking care of animals and go mining. I played a lot of other Harvest Moon games, and I will get to them later, but none of them have been the same to me since.
Another one of my favorite games from PS1 was Board Game Top Shop. I love board games, and this was a less competitive version of Mario Party. Board Game Top Shop was similar to Monopoly, where you would buy locations on a map, and get income from other players. It was really fun, I even played by myself (when no one else wanted to play).
Playstation 2
Now, onto the Playstation 2 games. Our PS2 came with Jak and Daxter. Now, again, I was not good at this game, it involves platforming, and I am absolutely trash at platforming, but I loved exploring, I loved little Daxter dancing, and, because of this game, I am still afraid of sharks coming by to eat you if you travelled too deep into the water. This game holds a special place in my heart.
Dark Cloud was an RPG where you would fight in dungeons to get back parts of your village, including villagers. I loved exploring dungeons but I especially loved rebuilding your little village. It was so much fun making the city looked the way I wanted it to. I was not very good at this game, it was an action adventure game, so you would be fighting monsters in real time, which I was never good at. But, the exploration and the city building was the best.
Around this time, my friend Rebecca and her family introduced me to a wonderful genre: otome games, which are basically story-based games, aimed to women. I watched them play the Harukanaru Toki no Naka de (English: Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time) series, and fell in love with the visual novel aspect of it.
These were all good games, but when I reminisce about Playstation 2 games, I think about Jade Cocoon 2. I almost immediately fell in love with Jade Cocoon 2. I played this game as much as I could. It was sort of like Pokémon, where you collected monsters and had them fight for you. I still think about the little victory song (is it technically a song if it’s a couple notes long?) and dance and that the main character Kahu does when he wins the battle. I never finished this game, and just thinking about it makes me want to dust it off and start playing it again. You know what, I think I’m gonna go play that now, in fact.
Miscellaneous and Honorable Mentions
Now, of course, we also had the classics: Final Fantasy VII (Final Fantasy 7), Final Fantasy IX (Final Fantasy 9), Final Fantasy X (Final Fantasy 10), Kingdom Hearts, Tony Hawk’s Underground, and one of the Yugi-oh! games. We didn’t own Dance Dance Revolution, but I had friends who owned this and we definitely played. I recently also played Persona 4 on the PS2, so it technically wasn’t a childhood game, but it was great.
What games did you have for the Playstation 1 and Playstation 2, and which games would you count as your most pivotal?