Every time I opened a new Japanese import PlayStation game (which happened at a rate of around once per week when I had a student loan to naively plunder and the majestic expanse of a teenager's summer holiday to fill) I'd open the manual, press my nose to the staples and take a full breath.
The booklets have a unique scent (rounded, inky) and today, like the perfume of a bygone lover, their smell can instantly summon the colour and contour of that otherwise lost time. The trigger is particularly strong because these exotic games offered a refuge at a time when the rest of my life was chaotic. They provided a sanctuary and, in their systems, reliability that was absent elsewhere. After a while they began to smell like home, or the promise of it, at least.
I mention this because I'm not sure whether the PlayStation's library of games is necessarily the best of any video game console. But for me, it remains the most vital and fondly remembered. Even though so many of the PlayStation's games have aged terribly (debuting, as they did, on the frontline of 3D's emergence), it's a line-up that has, for me, never been bettered. Our favourite video games, like our favourite songs or novels, are often the ones that showed up at the moment they were needed; they helped, in some mystical way, and our gratitude endures. So it was with Einhander, with Xenogears, with Rival Schools, with Treasures of the Deep and all the reassuringly fragrant others.
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