Christmas Memories Part 3 – Sony PlayStation 2, 2003

2003 would prove to be one of the most, shall we say, interesting years of my life. I’ll spare the details but it was chaotic, to say the least, and at a point during it much of what I owned was stolen. Not a great start to your adult life, but I learned quite a bit from the experience.

That’s not our focus, here, though. Let’s move to the end of the years. Christmas day. My first Christmas as an adult, but like most people, my family still wanted to get me things. Hell, my mom still goes out of her way to get me things I might want or need — to a point where she has to make sure I don’t already have the item in question.

Naturally given what had happened to me over the past year, my family wanted to at least try to help me recover some of what I had lost, in one way or another. Through high school I had gone through not just one but 2 PlayStations, the one I got for Christmas of 1998 and the PSone I had gotten about 2 years later when the original one broke. That PlayStation and most of the games I owned were part of what was stolen, so I was generally without gaming. My NES, SNES, a later re-purchased Genesis and the like, had survived, but at this point in my life they were stored away, not easily accessible and not even on my mind, as best I can figure by this time.

This being 2003, of course, the PlayStation was at the end of its life, and the PlayStation 2 was just getting going. I seriously wasn’t expecting this Christmas day to be anything spectacular but that day would be a bit of a surprise – my family had gotten me a PlayStation 2!

I seriously wasn’t expecting it. I felt I didn’t deserve the thing, honesty, given how the year was. Still, my family cared enough to get me that, and a nice assortment of games to help replace what I had lost. Unlike the situation with my PlayStation back in Christmas of 1998, they did remember to buy a Memory Card, so I had that going for me, and I still did have some of my PS1 games and a few of the Memory Cards for that, so I was able to play those games again as well as the new collection of PS2 games they had gotten me. Sadly my main PS1 memory cards were part of what was stolen, so I had lost much of my data from the previous 5 years. Such is life, though.

Needless to say I played the PS2 pretty much nonstop, much like I had the PS1 when I had gotten it 5 years prior, and the Sega Genesis 10 years beforehand. I didn’t realize at the time that such a pattern had even formed – the 5 and 10 year spans between what I would have considered the best Christmas days I had. You don’t think about those things when you’re younger — even if you’re me and you love finding such odd patterns and coincidences.

Unlike the other two stories, where my Genesis and my PlayStation both broke and were trashed, the PlayStation 2 is still working to this day 15 years later. That’s actually an accomplishment given how notorious the lasers are for going out on PlayStation 1 and 2 consoles of all types. It’s been upgraded with a 40 gigabyte Sony hard drive given to me by a friend (he wanted to buy another copy of FFXI to have more characters and gave me the not needed hard drive that came with the game.)

It doesn’t get played nearly as much as it used to, although I am planning on getting back to Final Fantasy VIII soon enough, and I’ve got a nice backlog of games I want to play again after that. I got somewhat burned out on PlayStation 2 gameplay thanks to it being my primary console until, well, 2014 or so!

Yes, my PlayStation 2 served as my primary gaming console for over a decade, being there through many more rough years and being with me through my 20’s, a rather rough part of my life on its own accord. Again, sparing details, I can say the PlayStation 2 shows the signs of a somewhat rough life, but it’s never given me any trouble and to this day has a prominent spot in my gaming setup, a battle-scarred veteran of the chaos of both my real and gaming lives.

With that, the story ends. Fragments of a decade of my life, the years between 8 and 18, a bit before then and what would follow. Originally I just wanted to write a simple article on the odd pattern of these 3 game consoles being given to me at the years they were, but this eventually proved to be much more – a bit of a chance for you, the reader, to learn more about my life, and a chance for me to have some personal retrospective, if in a bit of a public way.

One thing I didn’t expect was for these articles to be a chance to remember what my family did for me growing up – 5 years is such a short time as an adult, but as a child it’s an eternity, and I don’t think any of us really appreciate the effort our families go to to make us happy. It really puts some things in perspective, doesn’t it? Maybe nothing too important, but what is life without fun, right?

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading. I know it’s a bit after Christmas, but that’s how time permitted me to write it. At least it’s still in December, right?

You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here!