Handsome Phantom Holiday Tales
For those who play video games, the holidays are a time of big ticket items (did you think I was going to say peace on Earth and good will toward man? Hah! That too…) For a kid, video games are often too expensive to afford with one’s accumulated summer lawn mowing cash and the odd leftover birthday money. So there’s no choice but to visit game stores and stare slack-jawed as the latest new releases taunt you from the display case from October until December. Luckily, a lot of the big releases of the year are timed to come out just in time for Santa (or Mom and Dad) to pick up the bill.
This means that the holidays and video games are forever linked as formative moments in our lives. We at Handsome Phantom would like to share some of our most memorable Holiday tales with you. Enjoy and see you in the New Year!
DUSTIN’S TALE
I’ve thought long and hard about my best gaming memories from Christmases gone by. I played Left 4 Dead probably six hours straight in high school. Another year my mind was blown when my whole family pitched in to get me a used PS2. We didn’t have any games at the time (they were coming on Christmas morning), but it came with Armageddon on DVD, so that was cool. For some reason though, the gift that most sticks in my mind was getting a brand new copy of Dragon Ball Z: Budokai on PS2. We didn’t grow up very wealthy, butneither were we poor. A lot of times the gifts we got were used games. We even got a used NES one year (which is super cool in retrospect.) So getting a brand new game meant a lot. I never expected it and it blew my young mind when I opened it. To me, it wasn’t even in the realm of possibility. My parents really knocked it out of the park, and though it’s something as simple as a new game, it meant the world to me.
DAVE’S TALE
2007 was a pretty damn good year for gamers. We were treated to the likes of Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy, Assassin’s Creed, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. But being the contrarian I was at age 20, I put a lesser known game on my Christmas list, a game that fewer people were talking about, Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. Bad idea. I’m still amazed that Square Enix had the nerve to produce a sequel to that piece of hot garbage. I also had the nerve to put a second full priced game on my list -and luckily that game was Uncharted: Drakes Fortune. Low and behold, both were waiting for me under the Christmas tree on the morning of December 25th, 2007. What made Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune a lasting Christmas memory for me was my dear sister’s reaction to the game.
Now my eldest and only sibling is not a gamer. She would dabble in the likes of Crash Bandicoot and Mortal Kombat when we were growing up but neither were able to hold her interest for very long. However, when I booted up Uncharted for the first time that morning, her eyes lit up. The production quality was as close as a video game had ever gotten to a feature film at the time. The story telling was captivating, provocative and full of characters we quickly grew to love and others we grew to hate. The grand scale puzzle solving was engaging even for an onlooker. My sister would sit there with a fixed gaze as if she was watching a movie. She would help me with many puzzles that had me stumped by saying “try this” and “do that,” pointing out little details of the level that I had overlooked. At one point in the play session, my mother walked into the room with a confused look. “David – I thought you were going to play your new game?” I replied in a boastful tone, “Mom, this IS a video game.” She had confused a cut scene with a live action movie.
My sister quickly instated the rule “you’re not to play Uncharted without me!” She was treating it like my play sessions were weekly iterations of a TV drama that she couldn’t miss. And I didn’t mind at all as it was a fun way to spend time with her. Christmas morning of 2009 played out similarity with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. This has actually turned into a cherished little Christmas memory for me and my sister. Family, video games, and the holidays!
BOO’S TALE
Merry Christmas! I’m transgender! Yay… Who cares?
I’m only making a point of telling you, the Handsome Phandom, because it matters to the story I’m about to tell. Although I was by all appearances a little boy, I was actually a little girl who wore a boy suit she couldn’t take off.
Oh the tragedy!
On the plus side, I got to do whatever I wanted and get dirty and have adventures without a fancy dress (like my older sister wore) getting in my way. On the negative side, my world was bereft of sparkles, outside of some puffy stickers that I had put in the “girly” section of my sticker book that I told the boys I kept merely to trade. When the truth was that you would have had to pry my pink, puffy, glitter pegasus out of my cold dead hands. Feel me?
So imagine my delight when on Christmas morning, I tore the wrapping paper apart to reveal The Legend of Zelda and first saw the blinding glint of its sparkling golden cartridge!
I actually carried the box, the manual and the cartridge with me all around the house that holiday. If I wasn’t playing the game (because my game time was limited by my parents who wanted to me to go play outside with my cousins (no, thanks,) I was sneaking off to the bathroom with my sparkly treasure to pour over its every ridge with the attention of an archaeologist uncovering a delicate fossil. I would write detailed notes about every new discovery I made or mystery I’d yet to solve in Hyrule, and then bring them to my friend’s house to compare. I completely filled up the “notes” section in the manual on the first day.
“Oh, you can use bombs to open a cave there!” I would squeal and then applaud that catchy jingle that indicated a secret had been uncovered.
But like every girl who grew up in the 80s, I was still dissatisfied that I was playing a boy in the game. A weirdly asexual, gender queer elf boy, but a boy nonetheless. No, it wasn’t until 1988, when I begged my parents for a new PC, so I could play the latest graphic adventure games from Sierra and LucasArts, that I, at last, got my wish for a game with a female protagonist not named Ms., Mrs. or Miss. That was King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella and it was my fantasy come true in stunning 16 color EGA graphics!
No game before it had let me be a princess, let alone one on an epic fairy tale adventure!
Rosella wasn’t just a girl dressed like a boy. She had a fancy dress! She slept in a canopy bed! She got to ride a unicorn! All things I was locked out of the further into boydom I slipped. My parents must have shaken their heads when they bought this girly game for their son. Sensing this, I played up the legacy of the series, “Oh, the latest King’s Quest game! I’ve heard it’s a very popular series that absolutely everyone is playing,” I would exclaim to absolutely no one.
The computer room ended up being directly across from my bedroom, at the top of the stairs on the opposite side of where my sister and my parents’ bedrooms were. To get to it, you had to make two hard right turns so I always had an inkling of when someone was coming to check up on me. When I was with Rosella, I was her and I would take that rare opportunity to type in every repressed desire I could think of. I wanted to live her life and didn’t dare risk missing out on any part of her world. This made me abnormally self conscious about playing the game because heaven forbid my father come in and catch me typing in, “apply makeup” or “try on glass slipper.”
Of course, they all came to see the shiny new computer. It wasn’t strictly mine after all, and every time they’d find me in the midst of Rosella’s perils (some of which were absurdly obtuse) I would find a way to pause it or feign a manly activity like typing “throw rock at frog” (despite that there was no frog to speak of,) so as to allay suspicion. Still, for one magical winter, in between screaming bouts of frustration with the difficulty (climbing the whale’s tongue comes to mind) I got to be a pretty young girl in a fairy tale world, albeit one who was often brutally beaten and dragged away to be cooked by an ogre. What’s with me and ogres?!
BEN’S TALE
“My most vivid Christmas memory was also the Christmas I received my first game console that was truly mine. Well, mostly truly mine.
My family traveled from Florida to Ohio to spend the holiday with my grandparents. I had several hand-me-down systems, but not one of my own at this point.
The gifts I got that Christmas are still rather unclear to me. They all paled in comparison to what was to come.
Early that year, my family had gotten our first CD player. It was a portable one that came with a converter to a cassette player so that you could listen to CDs in your car. My year had been filled with lusting after overpriced CDs I had wanted since I now had a way to listen to them.
My parents handed me a CD shaped gift as, what I assumed to be, the last gift of the season. I opened it and, to my confusion and surprise, it was a sealed copy of Namco Museum Volume 1. I did not realize it was a game – I assumed it was a collection of songs from the soundtracks of these classic games for the family CD player. My dad asked me, “Don’t you think you need something to pay that with?”
It took a second to sink in before seeing the “Playstation” logo and the gift being a bit of a disappointment to me. Was I getting a present I couldn’t play with? Was I expected to save an insurmountable amount of money (especially for a kid) to buy the console? Was I supposed to play it at a friend’s house?
“This last one is for you and your sister to share,” dad said as he opened the closet door and pulled out a wrapped box, approximately the size of a game console.
I freaked out, and tore the paper off of my new PlayStation. Well, my and my sister’s new PlayStation. It would only be a short time before my younger sister would lose complete interest in the console and it would be all mine.
The gift was great, but the biggest thing that made it special that day, and special every time I’ve thought of it since, is how my parent’s acquired it. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and a new PlayStation wasn’t cheap. My dad’s employer let people gain points through a merit based system all year and, at the end of the year, bid those points toward a variety of products. He had spent a large sum of his points on a gift for my sister and me, and that made it all the more special.
PHIL’S TALE
Video games have always been a part of my DNA. For as long as I can remember I associate important moments in my life with video games. Those feelings tend to be amplified for me around the holidays. My love for video games began the Christmas I received my first console, the Super Nintendo.
I’ve told that story in our tribute to the SNES around the time that Nintendo released the classic so I won’t bore you again with the details. However, that’s not the only Christmas that a video game played an important role. Christmas 2013 would be the last holiday that I would spend with my grandfather.
It had become a tradition that each year they (him and my grandma) would give us a little bit of money for Christmas. Since that money was the gift I always took great care when choosing what I bought with the money. With my precious dollars that year I finally settled on NBA 2k14. I don’t often buy sports titles, so I wanted to choose a game that would stand out. I was not disappointed, at the time that was perhaps the best sports game on the market and I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent with the game.
I haven’t bought any of the games in the series since and 2K14 will always hold a special place in my heart as the last present my grandpa ever got for me. Over the years I’ve received a lot of games as gifts, but that one will always stand out over the rest.
Happy Holidays everyone! May your days be filled with video games and the memories that will last for years to come.
