For me, as this machine just blew my mind as a kid and i have so many special memories with it & it is probably the reason i got so into games from then on out, it has to be the PlayStation. The Original! The OG! The Grey Box of Play!
I remember vividly getting it as a kid from Makro which was a big cash and carry place and as money was tight didnt get a game, so the legendary Demo 1 disc was my savour for a few weeks until i got Tekken! This was no biggie as the Demo 1 disc had an array of classics on it for me to play (albeit only a level or 2 of each game) such as Ridge Racer Revolution, Wipeout 2097, Crash Bandicoot and Tekken 2 among others i can really remember!
But the excitement of proper 3D graphics, which were mind blowing at the time, on this machine that was pretty reasonably priced, was a game changer! I remember getting up early, wrapping myself in my duvet and sitting on a chair right infront of the tv just playting the various demos over and over and over and over......you get the idea. My brother got a Sega Saturn, hes older and was working and stuff so could buy whatever he liked but it was VERY Expensive compared to the PlayStation, which i think unfortunately didn't help Sega ship Saturns (ps i still wish Sega was in the hardware game, my first ever console was a Sega Master System 2!) but the PlayStation went toe to toe with the more expensive Saturn graphics wise and then won out on having a way bigger library!
I had so much fun playing classics like Gran Turismo, Tekken 1 to 3, Adidas Power Soccer, G-Police, Future Cop LAPD, Jet Moto (which i loved as it was the closest thing i could get on PS1 to Wave Race 64 haha well at least in my mind!), Rapid Racer, Resident Evil 2, Tomb Raider and then the game which took it to levels way beyond anything id ever played at that points.... Metal Gear Solid.
Metal Gear Solid is possibly one of the greatest games ever made, it was so far ahead of its time, the graphics were fab, the story was great, the gameplay was incredible and the boss fights were truly unique. In one boss fight, against Psycho Mantis he literally reads your mind by reading your memory card thats plugged into the system! And to evade his skills you must switch your controller into the player 2 port! Seriously WOW! What an experience and one I will never forget, I think this might be the first game that ever truly hooked me from start to finish that i played the whole way through!
Then there was the casual arcade fun to be had with the Light gun games! and ohh boy there was some good ones. One Christmas I was lucky enough to get Time Crisis and the G-Con 45 lightgun bundle! I really felt like the arcade was brought into your home instead of having to go to a bowling alley or something which was where arcades usually were when i was a kid! Then I also got Point Blank 2 which was non stop fun and felt like Mario Party for a light gun game. And just when i thought it couldnt get any better, what would become my favorite light gun game on PlayStation would arrive, Die Hard Trilogy. This was as the name suggests 3 games bundled into 1 neat package approved by John McClane himself - Yippee-Ki-Yay-M***********" (if you know, you know!) The second game in the trilogy, Die Hard 2 - Die Harder, was based on the second movie set in Dulles Airport and was an on the rails shooter, which for its time had a lot of environmental damage and blasting bad guys to bits was a ton of fun! This was the best Die Hard Game in my opinion and was even fun playing with a controller if you didn't have a light gun, thats how good it was!
Now lets jump back a moment to Gran Turismo. This game really was jaw dropping on its launch and it really was the "real racing simulator", all my friends and I were hooked on this game, a which had a cool feature that you could save you car to your memory card then take it your your friends house and race them! Which I remember getting schooled at when I did this exact thing... let me explain. I had been playing for ages and unlocked a Subaru Impreza Rally Car and tuned it up to the max thinking I would be unbeatable, I then saved this on my memory card and took it round to my buddies house thinking i was going to destroy whatever car he had in a race... also mine looked so cool. So I got to my friends house and there he is waiting, ready to duel, he shows me his car, its a Mitsubishi GTO twin turbo ........ "ach it looks nice but im gonna win easily, lets go"... I hadn't seen the stats for his car, just how it looked, so then we got set up and raced. I GOT OBLITERATED! LOL His car was tuned up to just over 1000bhp and was 4 wheel drive so it put the power down, i literally was like a lamb to the slaughter, we still laugh about this race to this day! Great times! Later on I got a steering wheel which didn't come with pedals so i would put my controller on the floor and use it as the accelerator, it was magic, even though its something people nowadays would probably scoff at! I also vividly remember an arcade racing game from Makro yet again as it was cheap so I was like yeah if I can get it i will take it, so my parents bought me it and Oh My God it was intense! That game was Ray Tracers (no not the kind of ray tracing lighting effects you hear about all the time these days from high end graphics cards lol) from Taito! This was a pedal to the metal arcade racer were you would smash bad just off the tracks and then face boss battles at the end of each level facing off against giant tanks and the like! I really miss simple, fun arcade games, the PlayStation had a TON of them!
Now you probably see a theme here that I really enjoyed Arcade style games, and you would be right, that also means I love playing fighting games, which were ALL OVER the arcades at the time, and the PlayStation was home to a TON of them! Firstly I got hooked into Tekken, I played 1 to 3 as I just adored the fighting mechanics which were easy to pick up and play alongside a fantastic storyline revolving around the Mishima family! Seriously someone needs to turn this into a good movie! Then later on Soul Blade arrived, which was also from Namco who made Tekken so I was interested. I was not disappointed as this game had weapons this time, which added a whole new dynamic and ring outs so you could knock you opponents out the ring to win, also the graphics looked something else when it was released! I know these last ones are not tradition lighting games like Tekken but lastly for me being a big wrestling fan, the WWF / WWE Raw and Smackdown games were so much fun, having no holds bared or hell in a cell matches with your friends was top banter!
Oh and the Demo discs each month with the official PlayStation Magazine, what excitement and buzz that was to play some upcoming games each month! I built excitement and buzz like nothing else as you had to wait for these things unlike this digital constantly connected world we now live in where you can download whatever whenever you like, it was a special time during that generation, not just owning a PlayStation but everything else around it too.
Other cool things for its time were it was probably the first CD player for a lot of people, you could put in your music CD's and just listen away! There was also randomly a tech demo of a T-Rex walking on the demo 1 disc, which i think was just to show off the power of the PlayStation, which it definitely did as i remember thinking "They will never get better graphics than this"... how wrong I was lol!
As I moved on to the PS2 when it was launched the PlayStation found its way to the back of my cupboard to be forgotten about....of so I thought. Then when I was in my final year of high school we got access to the common room, which is basically just a room for the final year to hang out in inbetween classes, and the trusty old PlayStation got its second lease of life! We had a TV in the common room but not a lot else apart from some chairs, so i decided to dig out my old playstation and bring it in, some others brought in some controllers and someone brought in the G-con 45, so we now had out on Play-Station in our common room and oh boy did we have a blast! We all spent hours battling against each other in crash team racing using the trusty old multitap (if your too young for this its basically an adapter that lets you plug 4 controllers into the console which originally only had 2 controller ports) so we could play 4 player split screen and it was some of the best banter to be had inbetween classes! Another favorite was battling it out on International Track and Field, where the sprint races and swimming became a test of endurance to keep pressing the 2 buttons to make the character move, so much so that people use to wrap the bottom of their School shirts around there index and thumb finger to "rub" the buttons as quick as possible, this actually resulted in some shirts getting friction burns the competition was so intense.... but a great laugh to see your mates battling it out. If we put as much effort into studies as we did playing PlayStation we would have been straight "A" students but hey we all became pretty good at Crash Team racing which is a solid "W" in my book!
Now I could go on forever here as the memories of some of these games like the ones I've mentioned above or others I have not like Resident Evil 2 and Tomb raider and seared into my memory as they were such unbelievable experiences but I will leave it at that. Hopefully I have got across a taste of why the PlayStation is in my opinion the greatest console of all time as still to the day I have never had such a variety of mind blowing, fun gaming experiences all on one box. Thanks for Reading if you made it to the end! I love to know your favorite PlayStation game, let me know in the comments!
