For my 18^th birthday, my friends pitched in to buy me a baby pink Nintendo DS lite and a copy of Animal Crossing. It was a match made in heaven, and the introduction to portable games that weren’t Pokémon. I’d been so out of the loop that I hadn’t had a current console of any kind for nearly six years. The idea that I could finally go out and buy new games blew my mind. I had a very small collection of DS games, I was just basically playing through and trading them in towards a new game each time. It’s through this process that I got to try a range of titles I’d never even considered before. Games like Contact, Resident Evil Deadly Silence, and the Final Fantasy IV remake…the list goes on. It was exciting, I was trying so many different series and I was constantly blown away by all the cool things the system could do.

Then I stumbled upon Hotel Dusk Room 215. Well more specifically, stumbled upon the Touch! Generations portal site for it. It’s still up, by the way. You held the DS like a book! There were puzzles! You could even fuck up the puzzles!

I remember paying $69 for a copy of Hotel Dusk and walking out of the store with an ear to ear grin, and then played it on the bus home. Then I played it for two days straight until I finished it. Continue reading