Have you ever played a game that few peo💜ple have heard of, and even less have actually tried?
Today, that might be a difficult claim to make since virtually all games are available for digital download across all platforms. But in the mid 1990s following Sony’s daring entry into video games with the new and strange 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:PlayStation, this was not the case. Games were being developed and cancelled at various levels of completion, and everyone once in a while, these would find their way into the hands of eager, young players, as was the case with , a four player free-for-all fighting title wit🦩h some of the most violent gameplay of its time.
Swapping For A PlayStation In The Classified Section
The Sony PlayStation was something new and exciting when it first launched in North America in 1995, but I was no early adopter. As a broke Nintendo fan, I had a NES, then a SNES, and continuing in that trend, a Nintendo 64. There was hardly money for games, so I played Super Mario 64 for well over a year (it never got old), and then, GoldenEye 007 for all about a week. It was bittersweet, working so hard to save for a new game, only to discover it gave me terri෴ble motion sicknes♏s.
Acquiring a Sony PlayStation occurred totally by accident. One Saturday morning while browsing through the classified section in my newspaper, long before Facebook Market or Craigslist existed, someone posted the following ad𓄧d:
“Sony PlayStation with Resident Evil 2, Final Fantasy VII, and Spawn, will trade for N64 with GoldenEye.”
I had never played a Final Fantasy game before, but I had played Resident Evil enough on my friend’s PC to know that a sequel was probably a good time. A quick phone call and a drive across town, and the swap was done. Looking back, I got a great deal, and the guy must have really wanted to play GoldenEye.
Modding The Original PlayStation In Chinatown
Not only was Resident Evil 2 amazing, but Final Fantasy VII became my gateway into JRPGs, as I devoured every game in the genre I could get my hands on. Spawn was absolute trash, and to this day remains one of the worst games of the console. I was still broke, so new games were never really an optiꦆon, but those first two games had so much replay value, and extra challenges like speed runs or knife only challenges, that there was no reason to complain.
One weekend my mother, sister and I were at a grocery store in Chinatown, and as usual I was wandering around the back where they had all sorts of amazing import games for various consoles, none o♑f which were in English. I loved seeing the alternate covers and art style for games I recognized. Taped to the glass counter display case, which was also the counter where an employee was working, a poster caught my eye. It was a badly photocopied picture of a Sony PlayStation, with something written in a language I did not understand, and a price of $40.
The guy working the counter was only a few years older than me, no more than 16 or 17, so I asked if they we🐬re꧂ selling PlayStation consoles for $40.
“No,” he laughed, “but everyone asks that. $🍸40 is the price to mod yoꦍur console.”
He went o🍒n to explain how regional protection worked between North American games and imports from Japan, and my mind was ❀blown with each passing word.
“A lot of people just get it to burn their own games on a CD,♐ but that’s n𒅌ot really legal.”
At this point, he tapped his nose, and w🍒en𒀰t back to working behind the counter.
The next weekend , I was back with my PlayStation nervously tucked into my backpack, cash in hand, excited and terrified that my console would be wrecked. The whole thing took less than half an hour, and when they were finished, they handed me a CD, with Thrill Kill scribbled in marker.
“A free gift, tell your friends about us!”
Thrill Kill – Too Violent For Its Time?
Back home, I tested my PlayStation with my three official games, even Spawn, just to make sure it still worked. Then, I dropped in the “gift” and booted up the console. Deep down, I knew it was going to work, that was the entire point of trekking across town and giving a stranger my PlayStation to break open and fiddle with electronics in a way that I did not understand. Still, when Thrill Kill successfully booted to the main menu, I꧟ was floored.
Created by Paradox Development, Thrill Kill was a game with a tremendous amount of hype due to its ground-breaking feature of having four players face off at once in a fight to the death. The characters were sent to Hell and pitted against one another, featuring several gory ways to finish an opponent, not unlike Mortal Kombat.
Supposedly, the game was cancelled for being too violent and oversexualized. One fighter, Belladonna, is a sꦦadistic dominatrix armed with a cattle prod who derives pleasure from killing her opponents, moaning loudly after each kill.
The extreme amount of violence might have contributed to the cancellation of the game, but the truth is that Thrill Kill simply was not that great of a gam♚e. There was little skill involved compared to other fighting games, and it was simply a shallow experience.
Still, there was something to be said about the effect on🅠 your friends in seeing a game that would never reach the mainstream market. We played the game often and in short bursts, both because the novelty of playing was akin to something forbidden, engaging with something that should not exist, but also because we would get bored pretty quickly and return to newer, more exiting games. Since the console was now able to play pirated games, my collection began to swell, but that's another story.
Thrill Kill might not have been anything special to write home about, but it was th🌜e first bootleg game I ever played, and certainly not the last.