I'd like to take today's entry to just shut my brain off and instead reminisce about a happy time in my childhood. Back in the year 1997, Sears was having a competition for the Playstation, which was back then really started to gain momentum. The first place prize was a Sony Playstation, the second was three free PS1 games of your choosing, and the third was two PS1 games. I came in second and picked 3 games: Final Fantasy 7, Primal Rage, and Cool Boarders 2. Though I am often an enemy of nostalgia, today I want to talk about what that last game meant to me.
Good times.
I had chosen Cool Boarders 2 because my little brother asked me to pick it for him. We were kids at the time, and honestly I didn't know any Playstation titles, so this was my first pick. My father and mother bought me the Playstation that same day (later in my life, I would learn that they intended to buy it for me if I had placed below first, which I don't think they expected of me at all. The first place winner, by the way, was a 21 year old man who later sold his prize.) When we got home, we hooked up the Playstation and the first game we popped in was Cool Boarders 2. I was blown away by this intro:
I was a kid fresh off the Super Nintendo. My entire childhood was, up until this point, mostly cartoon graphics, completely two dimensional, save for Star Fox and some Star Wars games. And then, suddenly, I was seeing this phenomenal intro! The graphics were the most awesome thing I had seen by that time, the game-play was smooth, responsive, and most importantly, fun. My little brothers and I were in awe. Everything about this game was just perfection.
We spent many years playing this game, through many different phases. There was the "I gotta complete the game!" phase from when we got the game at first to when we first finished the game, a few months later (mom would never let us play on the weekdays), that was back in 1997. During mid 1998, we began a second phase, the "I gotta unlock everything!" phase, where we tried to unlock the hidden secrets of the game. We managed to unlock the secret characters, mirror mode, hard mode, a few secret courses, secret snow boards, etc. This took us a few weeks. We stopped playing by 1999, for a few reasons: my brothers and I were becoming more hooked on RPG's, specifically Final Fantasy. And then, sometime around 2000, we picked the game up again, for the "playing for fun" phase. This lasted a few weeks until the game disc got scratched beyond repair.
Cool Boarders 2 was the first game my brothers and I had equal fun playing, but not the last. To me, it also signaled the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adolescence. The Super Nintendo lay behind me, the days of cute 2D graphics were over, and now was the time of semi real 3D graphics.
I am aware that Cool Boarders 2 has not aged as well as many PS1 games of its time. The graphics are downright horrid in comparison to what can be made today; the backgrounds look like shoddy photographs pasted on a green screen, trees look like tooth picks with paper stuck in them, the boarders look like dolls and figurines in comparison to the lifelike avatars we enjoy today, like the ones in Grand Theft Auto 5, and the snow looks more like a floor painted white and grayish. The level designs are very linear with few, if any, obstacles save for some chasms and cliffs that would never, ever kill you, just set you back a bit (the game's most unrealistic feature, really) and trees that could knock you down, though only three of nine stages had trees.
In the year 1997: OMG Best Graphics ever!
In the year 2013: Man, this shit sucks donkey cocks.
The game, however, still holds sweet memories to me. I remember how many times I'd play the level Railroad Trip, just for its song, which in my opinion was the best song in the game. Cool Boarders 2 was also the first game I played with a rock n roll soundtrack, which really helped shape my taste in music for my adolescence. Sometimes my brothers and I would play the game together, competing against each other, sometimes we'd just watch each other play. Great times were had, indeed.
Cool Boarders 2 is a game that I remember fondly for many reasons. It is one of the three games that reminded me of my proudest childhood achievement. It is the game that my brothers and I would play for a long time together. It was the first game I played on the Playstation. It was the game we all had fun playing. It was the game that introduced me to pop punk rock. I loved this game, and I still remember it fondly.
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