Gran Turismo 5
by Polyphony Digital/ Sony
for the Sony Playstation 3
So here I am, with a copy of Gran Turismo 5 sitting on this desk, and I don’t feel like playing it at all. I wish I did, but there are so many other games to play that when I want to play a game, I don’t want to play GT5. But I want to want to play it.
Why do I have that desire? When this game clearly fails to fill me with enjoyment, with the actual desire to whittle away my free hours by playing it, why do I feel this need to actually still feel like playing it? Part of it is merely buyer’s remorse. I plopped sixty of my own dollars down for this piece of software, dammit, I want a good game out of it.
It’s clearly more than that, though.
Castlevania II: Simon's Quest
by Konami
for the Nintendo Entertainment System
My parents didn't buy me a lot of videogames. This is no slight against them at all, since I know my dad at least would've loved to be able to. But money just wasn't always around, and when it was, they were good at letting me decide what I wanted to get.
Sometimes this worked out really well. I got Ducktales and Mega Man 2 on the same day. I bought both of them because the Capcom box convinced me that while the cover art of Megaman 2 looked stupid, the company that made it loved Ducktales so they were doing something right1.
Other times, this didn't work out as well. I wouldn't say it backfired, but it led to some otherwise problematic situations. My mom letting me pick out Castlevania II:Simon's Quest is probably the best/worst example of this2.
I was excited about this game. It had a guy with a whip on the cover. It had some vague castle in the background. Dracula was there, but I had no clue about vampires as a whole, aside from the blood-sucking/creatures-of-the-night thing. As a kid who loved Indiana Jones movies3, and who had a plastic castle full of die cast knights and working catapults4, this game looked like the honest-to-God shit.
Fuck, I was so wrong.
