It's Christmas' Eve 2009's night, Grandma's house: as always my family is reunited to exchange some presents. Since the rules say that you can't open your presents until it's Christmas we are all chatting while waiting for midnight. I've been asking for only one thing in the past 6 months (God knows how I managed to know about the game so early considering the total absence of advertisement for it in Italy): Pokémon Platinum. A few months earlier I managed to get my aunt to gift me a DS lite with 4 games probably bought for 4€ each at GameStop (I still have them and they all still have the same pink sticker saying "GameStop " on them as a sign of "bought used/at low price" but as a 10 yo boy of course I can't tell, and, even if I could, I wodn't have problems with it ): the games are bad. Not that kind of bad that we see in some of nowdays games due to bugs and glitches, nothing about that, they are just... boring. I think I only played them for like 2 days due to the excitement of the new device before throwing them on a shelve and using the new console to play my beloved Pokémon Emerald.
Now back at Christmas: Midnight finally arrives and, since I'm the youngest in the house, adults decide that I have to give everyone THEIR presents before I can open mine. I silently accept the aditional waiting and try to give everyone their presents ASAP while watching the moderatedly big pile of presents remaining under the tree that I know are mine. The waiting ends. I blast to my beloved pile of presents and start openig them: lots of planes, legos, books (pfffffffft), clothes (wtf am I ? a 14 yo ? I'm 10 man, give me the toys). The presents end. There's no sign of Platinum but then I spot her: my Aunt, that one aunt that gave me my DS is sitting on the sofa, watching me with a suspicious smile on her face. She gets up and goes in the other room, after a few seconds she is back again, holding in her hands a giant golden box moving toward me. I open the box swetting because I know there is NO WAY a DS game is in a box that big, but then... HOPE: the box is full of newspapers,placed only to give a sense to such a big box, but still I'm underwelmed: I slowly pick up a shoe box from the golden box and I imediately spot something wrong: the shoebox is pink and covered with Winnie the Pooh characters. My aunt says : "Oh no, I guess we accidentaly bought two presents for Lisa (my sister ) ! Well, I guess you can still wear them..." . Tears can not simply start overflowing under my eyes, in fact I'm just shocked. I don't move, I just stare at the pink shoebox asking myself why. After a couple seconds while my family apreciates my shock reactin aunt says: "Come on,open and see if you like them !!". I'm tempted to throw away the box but luckily I manage to stay chill and open the box: more newspapers, this time in tiny rectangles. i put my hand inside the box and start searching: there it is !, a plastic square I recognise the shape of:I pull it out of the box and there it is, in my hands: Pokémon Platinum in all of it's greatness. I can't even open it, I'm just staring at that mighty creature on the box,trying to find every single detail while beeing amazed by the shiny poligons that surround it when I move the box. At around 1 AM I, my parents, my brother and my sister get home, I go into my room and close the door, I take the DS and finaly decide to open the awaited box: it's time. I play the game until I reach the third city in the game when "surprisingly" I fall asleep. The Ds though is still on and it's battery slowly goes away. I lost the first save data, but I really don't care, it'll end up beeing the first Pokémon game where I complete the pokédex, it'll end up beeing one of my most played games in my entire life.
