#peachy-kun

But most of my game playing as a kid was somewhat obsessive -- the hours I sunk into various Zelda games, gen-1 Pokémon, Final Fantasies, all sorts of stuff, they were all often obsessive, marathon play sessions, losing entire days.

6. Ever buy strategy guides? Sure, I had a few, mostly for completionist reasons; N64 Zeldas and the Kingdom Hearts guide come to mind, and I loved the Myst narrative guide (never owned, but I borrowed it from my local Library multiple times).

The most *memorable* one, though, was actually a weird print Importers’ Guide for Pokemon Red/Green. See, I had a friend whose grandparents in Japan spoiled him by sending him the latest Nintendo games (which was rad af; it’s how I got exposed to superfami and a bunch of other neat Nintendo stuff, in Japanese; it’s also when my love of Picross was born), and they sent him this crazy game called Pocket Monsters Green.

A week after he showed it to me, my family went on a vacation to Hawaii, where, in a tiny book store, I randomly found this Import Guide for Red/Green. Full color maps, Pokedex entries in the back, a really nice production to be honest. My parents bought it for me and I was nose-down in that thing for most of the rest of the trip. Came back knowing more about the game than my friend did, showed him where to get all the secret stuff and told him what the totally-not-faked/guessed-by-the-author English names of the Pokemon were. It was awesome, and totally gave me a leg up when Red/Blue came out a year or two later. Felt especially cool because I knew all this stuff about the games before Nintendo Power had even freakin’ mentioned it.

7. Any games you have multiple copies of? Plenty, but digital multiplat releases is kinda cheating. Bastion I’ve bought and played on multiple consoles, same with Dust: An Elysian Tail, Super Meat Boy, and Spelunky. Ori and the Blind Forest I own both the original and Definitive editions on XBone + Steam, because I had to get the DE at XB1 launch for speedrun tech exploration. No regrets on any of those. Probably plenty of others I’m forgetting.

Physical copies-wise, I think it’s limited to Melee (I think I somehow winded up with a friend’s disk?). At one point I had like, 5 copies of CoD: Black Ops because I was helping with a tournament and then they never repaid me. Weirdly, that turned me off from the game and I never ended up playing it (and I haven’t played a CoD game since, despite really liking the series tbh). Those eventually got pawned off to people at lower cost (no good deed goes unpunished, etc).

24. First Pokemon game? Blue was my gen-1 pick at first (felt unique and special, after playing my friend’s aforementioned Green). Put a couple hundred hours into it, and later got Red to fill out my ‘dex.