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Gaming Memories Thread

mopspear

Gold Member
Post your gaming memories.

Guidelines:
- They can be good memories or bad memories. If they are important to you, then they are worth posting, even if you have shared them elsewhere.
- If you write a long memory, include a title.
- Mark your spoilers.

NO BRAIN INSERTED
 
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Good:

- How I liked the PACING of Horizon Zero Dawn Main quest, the information dripping was enough to never forget that main quest was important not enough to make me stop and doing some side quests... something that no other game was able to (even with better stories, i think the way this story unfolds to the player is equally important).

- The great surprises of PS Plus many years ago, good lord, Just Cause 2 was a blast.

- The sense of reawrd whe you explore Elden Ring's map... i had no idea what to level up, focused on int and dex, dont remember why.... and found Moonveil :-D and them i focused on arcane... and found Rivers of Blood... on v1.0.5! Good lord, great times...

Bad:

- When I discovered that Dragon Quest XI would have time travel and all the characater development would be thrown aways becasuse of that... i gave up completely on the game, dont even remember all the characaters!
 
Something I can never forget.

In Final Fantasy VIII after the intro and you wake up, Quistis comes to get you and as you walk out of the infirmary you have a beautiful FMV that you can move in and it shows the Garden students, the garden itself and the song AMI(Balamb Garden) plays. It to this day
is one of those magic memories I can't forget.

Also, just walking around talking to people in Balamb Garden is always so relaxing. There something very comforting to me when I play Final Fantasy VIII.

Final Fantasy VIII is my favourite game of all time. I have played through it so many times and still play through it once a year.
 
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Playing vanilla WoW 2005 - 2007 during my teens. I was so absorbed into the world that basically I didn't care about IRL in those years. Just school, friends, and playing games, strong nostalgia for those carefree times.

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Must be trauma at around 8 or 9 years old. I always remember it.

Went to a variety store to buy candy and play some games. They had a few at the back. One game said press start so I thought it was a free play someone forgot about. It was Asteroids. I press play and an older kid (maybe high school age or college kid) comes by and says thats his game and was kind of mad.

I only had a dime on me I think. My friend had some change and we game him 25 cents back. Since I started the game already I was still able to kind of play it but was rattled. lol

But on the plus side, it was the same era you could buy packs of Pac Man game cards that came with a piece of gum!
 
Positive memory. Going 2D to 3D was nuts. Playing Mario 64 for the first time was the most magical.

Negative memory. Choosing the 32X (which sega killed off a few months after I got it) over the Super Nintendo. I don't think I ever felt more burned in my life when I went to go buy virtual fighter at a target and the clerk told me the 32X was dead. I was still a kid so I wepted... Started reading gaming magazines after that so that I had a better idea of what I should buy and it led to me becoming a bigger nerd. The horror.

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My negative memory is getting Xbox One instead of PS4. Because I had invested hundreds of hours into Destiny 1 upto Taken King in Xbox 360. Destiny 1 still has no cross save. I wanted to play Uncharted 4, but I got a Xbox One to continue playing Rise of Iron and then Destiny 2. As someone who likes Japanese games, that was the worst decision.
 
Way back getting a NES.

My parents are a weird bunch since they can be strict in terms of being cheap and nagging to make sure you do well in school and dont do dumb shit like smoke or get drunk etc....

But if you nagged them enough for money to buy video games they'd always eventually give in. Might take a month or two. But eventually they'll cave.

So at some point I must had whined to my dad enough that he bought me a NES. Those were happy days. Then my older bros all chipped in and bought more games. I dont even remember all of the starting batch of games I had aside from Mario. But for sure Double Dribble and Kid Icarus were a couple of them.
 
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Starting OG FFVII and being so impressed just for the game to freeze right before the reactor explosion. It took me weeks but a friend of mine got the memory card and saved right at the first opportunity so I could continue. For years I never saw what happened when the reactor exploded right until the part where Barret, Cloud and the others are on that exit and about to split.
 
My FF VII preorder from Electronics Boutique came in 3 days early on 9/4/97. I had to work until 10 that night at my first job, so my mom drove to the mall and picked it up for me. That's probably the most hyped I've ever been for a game.

Worst memory: getting Ocarina of Time for Christmas, opening the package, and finding that some asshole Best Buy employee stole the cartridge, replaced it with a large pack of gum, and shrink wrapped it. Silver lining: by some miracle, they had a copy in stock on December 26 so I was able to get it replaced.
 
Final Fantasy VII

An OVERWORLD!?

Breath of Fire was my first RPG (7 years old, Windows 95 PC, ZSNES) and I played 8 and 16-bit games before but when I finally bought a copy of FF7 when I was around 15, I was able to actually play it long enough before having to return it. That meant I could make it out of Midgar. I exit the last Midgar map and wind up on the overworld and I still remember the "What the heck!?" moment. "OH YEAH THIS IS ONE OF THOSE GAMES" like I had never considered there would be an overworld. I guess I thought the game would just be pre-rendered backgrounds the whole time. I know people have that moment of amazement but mine was more of a "I had never considered it!" kind of shock. This was like 2005 by the way.

My Older Siblings Kept Stopping Me From Playing FF7

Around 1998 I go into our local semi-rural Georgia video rental store, Vide-O-Rama, and see FF7 on the shelf. My older sister is with me and she says "That game is dumb. The guys at school talk about all the time." so I don't rent it. Sometime after that, I walk into the living room, and my brother is watching a VHS tape that his friend Josh (what a 90's-ass name) recorded. It was on like a 27-inch CRT in a fake wooden stand with three drawers for VHS tapes. On the screen, Cloud is running through that curved bend right before the tower that holds up the plate. That's the first gameplay of the game I ever see. I think of it whenever I pass through there. Anyway, I end up renting it that May but I have to stop early to go to my older brother's high school graduation and I remember being really annoyed that I had to stop. I know my brother didn't care to go. I didn't care. I didn't even want to go to my own high school graduation and just didn't go to my college graduation. I'd rather be home playing video games. Many, many years later I had him print me out a Buster Sword model I ripped from the PS1 version and then I painted it.

Learning about Korea

This one's weird but I can kind of tell when I learned about the existence of Korea. I know when I was 10 years old, playing FF7 the first time, I didn't know what "Korean BBQ" was when I ordered it in Wall Market. In the 10th grade when I played the game again, I go "OH! That's what that means." so somewhere in that ~6 year period, I learned what Korea was.
 
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