It's either Parasite Eve 2 or GTA: Vice City.

My parents were super strict about violence and I hated it too. I used to cover my eyes whenever The Simpsons did an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon--though, uh, maybe that on my parents for letting me watch The Simpsons before I learned to talk.

Anyway, my cousin was wildly neglected as a kid and he had zero content restrictions, zero food, and that particular mix of violence-fixation and lack of boundaries that abused kids have. He used to come to my house to get food, bringing the most violent/horrific/pornographic games on the market to show off to me. Then he'd steal a bunch of my games, replace them with his, and claim we had traded because I was just so enamored with his games (I was not).

I remember when he showed me Vice City. If never played a GTA game before and didn't really get it. And I don't know if he did either. See, he played it like an arcade game: he'd enter a code to get weapons and then just start blasting cops and pedestrians seeing how long he could last before he died. And then he'd spawn at the hospital and do it all over again. For like a decade, I thought that's all the series was.

Around that same time, though, he also "gave me" (read: "stole something of mine and replaced it with") Parasite Eve 2. I'd never played a survival horror game before, so I loved PE2. I had no frame of reference for that game's issues. Aya was this cool witch cop fighting horse zombies, and the bad guy had a gunblade, and you had to save this dog, and Kyle Madigan sucked, but who cares when Rupert has THE BIGGEST FUCKING MAGNUM.