InTown Suites and Pacman World 2

From when I was one until I was about six years old, my family lived in an extended stay hotel called InTown Suites. It’s still there today, right off of exit 228 on I-70. I see it every day when I drive to class. My very first memory of my entire life is seeing that hotel for the first time and my dad saying it was where we would be staying for a while. What a long while it was.

One of my favorite memories of our time there is sitting on the queen-sized bed that took up most of the room’s already claustrophobic size, and watching my mother play Pac-man World 2 on my dad’s PS2 (Playstation 2). In that room, there wasn’t much to do. My mom did a lot to keep us occupied: we went to the library a lot and we played card games and we did bible lessons, but the highlight of our time at InTown Suites was watching my mother play Pacman. It was too long ago to remember how often she played, but my older sister and I watched her play through the entire game. My dad would play the PS2 too, but it was always football games, which we found quite boring. Eventually, my mom made it to the final boss, a ghost lord named Spooky. For weeks, we watched lose all her lives trying to beat spooky (usually yelling out one of her clean expletives like “doggone it!” when she died), then go to one of the easier levels to grind for more lives to fight him again. One fateful day, my mom faced down Spooky again and, after what felt like months of attempts, she finally beat him. My sister and I cheered, happy to celebrate with her. It is both one of my best memories of our time there and also my strongest.

I am very lucky to have gained a lot of passion from both parents. Both of my parents have passion for music, reading, psychology, philosophy, exercise, cooking, cleaning, and video games. My passion for these things is my own, but I appreciate my parents sharing their passions with me as I grew up. And as I got older, I began to play video games myself. I developed my own love for Pacman World 2, separate from my mother’s. The music is impeccable, the orchestral sounds astounding even my prepubescent brain. I could write a whole blog post about just the game’s music (and I probably will), but I want to focus on the game itself for this post. My love for Pacman World 2 came from this sense of adventure and openness. It is a 3d platformer, which means that you can move not just on the X-axis and Y-axis, but also the Z-axis. There are also plenty of movement options. The rev-roll and butt bounce (much better names than spin-dash or ground pound, IYKYK) allowed for movement that was more than just diverse, it was also fun. It was fun to bounce around like a spring, boinging to and fro, or to rev-roll around, speeding past enemies. There are also levels built around different methods of movement, like the B-Doings in B-Doing woods, or the submarine in Yellow Pac Submarine (I like this reference a lot. Once again, IYKYK). This allowed my sister and I a sense of adventure and excitement that we couldn’t get from our hotel room. We didn’t go outside too often and this imaginary world offered a level of freedom that we didn’t have in the real world.

This may seem like a complete change of topic, but I promise it’s related. Earlier this year, I was suffering heavily from depression. One day, I happened to see a photo of myself from six years ago, when I was sixteen. I suffered a lot from depression as a teenager too, but there is just so much more reason to be sad now. Back then, it was a lack of control, a lack of freedom, a feeling that there was nothing for me in life and there was no reason to try hard at anything—but I had no idea how much worse it could get. Seeing the photo, I cried. I cried because the Josh I was seeing in that photo had so much pain and suffering ahead of him. I wanted to warn him, to tell him he would get through it, to tell him that I was proud of him. He didn’t deserve what was coming. He deserved to be happy.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about grieving the living, but can you also grieve the death of your past self? Can you cry over no longer playing Pacman World 2 in a tiny hotel room? Can you mourn even the bad times, the times when you slept on the floor every night and you never had an inch of space to yourself? Things were simpler back then. Back then, Pacman World 2 was an escape, but you didn’t really understand what you were escaping. Now you understand the lack of freedom that plagued you, the claustrophobia that haunted you, the lack of privacy that besieged you. Now when you remember your neighbors buying you groceries, it wasn’t just because they were just nice people, it was because they didn’t want those nice little children next door to starve. Now when you think about eating hotdogs and pasta salad day after day after day, you don’t feel anger at the lack of variety, you feel heartbroken that it was all your family could afford. Now when you consider it all, you realize how much ignorance truly is bliss. And despite it all, you still wish that you could go back to playing Pacman World 2.