When I was five years old I was at a pizza place with my family and I asked my dad what "pool" was and if I could play. He told me that he didn't want me to play, and something to the affect of "it's for grownups." I held onto this kind of mystique about billiards and the overall atmosphere of the game itself for years after, and I only ended up playing my actual first game of pool at a summer camp when I was in high school. After that, some friends and I would very casually play billiards in my friend's basement every so often. I was never any good, but there's something very special about the iconic sound of the billiards hitting each other and sinking into the pockets.

Side Pocket nails atmosphere and brings me right back to that pizza place when I was five, complete with a small animation of a woman wearing a pearl necklace smiling at you after every level and a pair of floating lips next to the words "Side Pocket" making me think that maybe my dad was right about pool being a game for adults. However, it's stinky to actually play, and there are better billiards video games out there nowadays.

Anyway I'm pretty sure the reason my dad didn't want me playing pool was either because my arms and legs were too short and I wouldn't have the hand-eye coordination to successfully play, or because he didn't want me goofing off and whacking anyone with the pool cue, which is absolutely in my character to do.

Playing Multiplayer Free Roam with my older sister, I felt like I got to have that classic "screw around in a video game with your older sibling" experience; I've played Mario Kart/Party and Animal Crossing with my sisters, but never had this very specific archetypal video game experience in the crassness of GTA, cracking up as we shoved people to the ground and blew up a helicopter. At one point another player appeared on the back of the moped I was riding into the Liberty City equivalent of Central Park. We rode across a bridge listening to Jazz and utilizing the cinematic camera, it was honestly kind of romantic. We popped wheelies and rode into civilians, all the while the other player never moved. When I finally got killed, they immediately disconnected. Later on I sped a car across the same bridge at night, the lights blurring as the skyline opened up before me. It was such a pure and beautiful experience to end Christmas day.

I felt a profound feeling of melancholy just revisiting this old save file: further ahead in the story compared to my current playthrough of the PS4 port yet far less progress in the side content, “enhanced” graphically and in content, yet more sluggish on this old console with a slow controller and its sticky buttons compared to the lower fidelity of the PS2 release yet played with a controller 3 generations ahead. I am 10 years older than this “enhanced” port, yet going back to this unfinished game with all my progress abandoned, I feel so much smaller than it.