#im sure those would've also had weird esoteric games on them but im most familiar with the digimon worlds

[antirepurp]

not to yap about my ocs but mallard's relationship to her ps1 games would've been anomalous when she was a kid. not in the sense the games are haunted or anything but rather the way she interacted with them was unintended and weird in many ways

she only had a handful of games and the crown jewels of that collection were digimon world 1 and 2, games almost esoteric in their design that is often unfriendly to the player. she loved those games. had notebooks full of scribbles and notes written as she tried to deconstruct the games and figure out what was going on. strategies crafted over months on how to get specific digimon near certainly in 1, which items to bring into specific dungeons in 2 and floor patterns that repeated from time to time. hundreds of hours of playtime in both individually. she never would have beaten 2. might have gotten close in 1 but never actually made it. she thought they were infinite and perhaps even ever-expanding experiences. she might have had a spyro game as well but would not have much cared for it because she managed to finish it. there was an ending she was able to reach, and that was more disappointing than anything to her. so she returns to her digimon games, chipping away at them, months of her childhood sunken into ps1 games as new consoles come out until she finds other things to do that start cutting down that time

of course she eventually reaches a point where she realizes that games having endings is a standard practice and that the digimon world games always had endings, she just played them like a child and never got to see them. not that it wouldn't have been a kind of formative childhood experience to her and shaped her relationship with games (and things beyond games) down the line