The start of the affair: Harvest Moon

[Editor's note: nintendoll tells us how Harvest Moon started the affair for her as part of June's Monthly Musings. -- CTZ]

As a kid of divorced parents, my beginning relationship with videogames was a pretty casual one. My dad bought my sister and I the Super Nintendo, but we only were able to play it when we visited him on weekends. My mom refused to let us have a game system in the house.

Since I was only allowed this short amount of time to play videogames, I never really got into them that much. Sure I played SMB2, but I didn't know where all of the warp pipes were or anything crazy. Probably one of the only games I actually finished on SNES was Aladdin (which isn't much of an accomplishment) and I never got into a lot of the classic games on the system. The games I played were Animaniacs, The Lion King, Mario Kart, and Out to Lunch (which no one else I know has ever played). Other than that I played a little bit of an old Windows dungeon crawler (I wish I could remember the name), Jewel Thief, Thief, and System Shock 2. I also didn't finish any of these PC games; I really only played for a couple hours before losing interest (though I watched my dad play through most of SS2 because the plot was so amazing). The first games I played as a kid were out of the influence of my sister (console games) and my dad (PC games). I don't think I picked out a single game for myself for the SNES.

However, things changed when we got the N64. I don't remember my exact age but I had grown out of idolizing my older sister and started developing tastes of my own. So while we together chose games like Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64, I decided to try something new. .