My parents were somewhat sceptical of video games when I was growing up. I did have a SNES and then an N64 as a child, but I was allowed to play them only at weekends, so on Fridays I would come home from school and binge on Mario 64 with a huge pack of Haribo Tangfastics. My gaming horizons didn’t broaden until I was a teenager, when I started earning enough of my own money to buy myself a PlayStation 2 and I started hanging out on forums with other nerds whose gaming worlds were significantly broader than mine.
And the PlayStation 2 had some weird games. The N64 did to an extent – I nurture an enduring fondness for Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon – but not like Sony’s console. There was Dark Cloud and Monster Hunter, Yakuza and Mojib-Ribbon, God Hand and Ōkami and Ribbit King, which is still, as far as I know, the only game about frolf (frog golf).
