My First Time: Crying Over a Game

I've been playing video games basically for all of my life. My first time was when I was 2 years old and my dad brought home a brand new SNES. Super Mario World was my life and I played that thing for hours. Although I did have to share the SNES with my dad who was a hardcore gamer so I mostly enjoyed watching him play. As a child I was very calm and collected when it came to gaming, not like I am now of course, so I never cried out of rage or frustration like this story led on to believe at first. No, my first time crying over a video game was actually when I about 6 or 7 years old.

*Spoilers*

After re-watching these videos to see how good my memory was, I'm actually surprised I understood the ending as a child since these confused me so bad just now.

So the game is Lufia 2: Rise of the Sinistrals and one of my favorites that I actually have yet to go back and complete. The game has an interesting love story between the main character and one of your companions and just as you defeat the last boss, your wife is heavily injured and you have her die in your arms. Then you have to do a last mission of destroying the flying island you are on before it crashes into the earth. You complete the simple mission and your wife's spirit shows up and I'm assuming being drained by the task you just completed, you become a spirit and the 2 of you fly away. The clips it shows of your friends saying you'll be home is what confused me as to if you actually died or not but in the end it shows your spirits fly away so it became pretty clear.

Now I didn't cry right away when this happened, I don't really remember how I reacted to it. I do know that during that night I just couldn't sleep and I actually did end up crying, replaying that whole ending over and over in my head. I think this ending actually heavily impacted my life, I've always been a sucker for love stories, especially ones that are broken by death and this game may be the reason for that. It's not the happiest of childhood memories, but it is definitely one that will likely stick with me forever and I'm not going to lie, watching this ending again just now, I still cry a bit over it.

My First Time: Hearing hiphop

Nelly - Ride Wit' Me

 

Yep. Grade 5, ironically introduced by our student teacher for a gym group project we had to do but god damn did I fall in love.Growing up I had always this strange dislike of basically all music.. I remember we had to do a survey style test before we saw this and I actually cheated off my friend because I was so out of the loop of music at that age that I didn't know what to put down. After we watched this video in class, the teacher popped in Eminem's Real Slim Shady and I was completely confused at what I just heard. 

Shortly after all this my group decided that we were going to be dancing to another Nelly song, Country Grammar. (Dancing to a song was the gym group project by the way.) This time the song was dirty and gritty unlike the TV edits we heard in class and that sealed it, I was hooked from that moment on. That Christmas I dropped Nelly's 'Country Grammar' CD on my wishlist and when I finally got it, that thing was on repeat all day every day. I still wish that I had gotten into hiphop much earlier in life, and also possibly with a better entry than Nelly, but I think when I first started listening to hiphop, it was more for the dirty and rebellious feeling it gave me at that childish age of 10 but I will never forget what it did to me. Hiphop definitely changed me as a person, hopefully in a good way, but I know for sure that I was never the same after that day and I will always love Nelly for it.