RetroGaming

Sitting on a couch in the basement, table thing in front of it, little CRT on top, PS2 plugged in, playing Star Wars Battlefront ( either 1 or 2 ).

Either that, or being on a different couch in the same basement and playing Sonic Mega Collection, the game that turned me into the big Sonic fan I am today. That game, specifically if there is a marathon of one of my all time favorite shows on TV that I can switch from game to cable and back. Well, we had a weird CRT with radio, so press the button twice for game or whatever else you had plugged in, but that was a very minor thing. Happened once during a pokemon marathon middle of the day middle of summer vacation and never again since.

Definitely a tie between those for me. I don't necessarily try to reach that high because I know I'll never be able to recreate it unless I can find those exact couches, design wise, those exact TV models, and buy my childhood house and remodel it to make the basement look exactly like I remember it. That, or get a replica that is uncannily close to my memories.

13 All Clear

The physics in Half Life 2 blew me away, I would stop every few meters pushing stuff around and then in the water bike part and the gravity gun my jaws would drop. No we just have shinier graphics but still waiting for sor something like that to blow my mind again.

Also the slowmo on Max Payne 2, can’t count the times I’ve replayed it because of that.

The first game I ever sat down and played for extended periods of time and the first game I ever completed was Majora's Mask on the N64. It was and still is such a weird game from the town and the people living in it, to the masks, the Moon, and Skull Kid. I loved every little piece of this world, but the constant counting down to the end of the world and the reactions of all the characters when the end was near scared me. It made me anxious, stressed, and fucking terrified, but I would always go back to it. I honestly don't remember how long it took me to finish it, maybe a couple months, maybe the better part of a year, but eventually I did finish it. And it literally felt like the weight of the Moon was lifted from my shoulders, I was excited and relieved and... I literally cannot explain the mix of emotions lil 6 year old me felt in that moment, but it's what really made me interested in video games.

A couple of years later, a cousin gifted me a copy of Halo CE. Instantly became obsessed with it. My parents' computer at the time was absolute dogshit (we didn't really have much use for a computer anyway) and we only had dial up internet for maybe 2 years (we didn't have much use for the internet either lol) but that didn't stop me from playing both the single player and multiplayer as much as I could. Fast forward about 2 decades, and in college one of my friends starts playing Halo CE out of nowhere. It was also a cracked copy of the game so it very quickly got floated around to everyone in our friend group. We would have little lan parties to play games and in Halo we would play 3v4 or 3v3 matches, but everyone quickly started to see a pattern. Whoever played on a team with me would win, and I would always be on the top of the scoreboard by like 10 kills. Everybody decided to do me a favor (gang up on me) and humble me (wipe the smug look off my face) by tricking me into a 5v1 match. I won. We played two more games like that, cuz the first one had to be a fluke. I won those as well. I don't know if I held onto those Halo skills and muscle memory for that 2 fucking decades, but at the time I was also feeding a pretty bad CSGO addiction, but ya know. It's what it's. And that's why I can't play fps games against my friends, because I was playing at a completely different skill level and it felt like I was bullying them 💜

Finishing street fighter 3 on one coin in the arcade. Still play street fighter 6 daily but I'm not as good as an adult as I was back then.

I worked waiting tables so got lots of change. Some I would spend or cash in. Some was kept purely for arcade time.

When I was a young kid, I didn't understand that the NPCs and game world were essentially fixed. I genuinely believed they were just as alive as I was, and was participating in their world.

I would go around following NPCs, try talking to them and felt like I was really helping someone when I would do quests and such. The games I remember that feeling the best was Zelda OOT & Majora's Mask. Doing the couples mask quest line all on my own* and my little notebook I kept track of what people needed was wild. Man I wish I didn't lose that book so I could look at it again.

*Edit: My much older cousin would help me if I got really stuck. But he didn't pop my bubble.

TFC "Sillyzone" server. so many fun mods and oddities like the dj/lightshow nights.

The experience of a brand new game with a new computer build that upped the standards. Particularly from the ‘90s to ~2010. Games pushed ahead with more expansive levels, better graphics, better sound, larger worlds. All more incredible than what you’d ever played before. It was a joy just to see it and experience it on top of whatever storyline and toys were in the game itself. Every year there was a leap in some facet of gaming.

I haven’t really experienced that since. PC builds are just way more expensive for minimal gain, franchises are just rehashes of old games, and it’s hard to find storylines and worlds that are fleshed out enough to make me want to invest the time.

On an individual game level, Battlefield’s Gunmaster mode is a real rush. Success can be ripped away instantly, you’re on your own skill, PvAll, and it’s a race to the top. Intense AF to win, got my heart rate up.

Not really a thing I’ve been chasing but I did really enjoy the time I was home sick from work and spent all day playing Super Mario Odyssey back when it first came out. I really felt like I was a kid again and hadn’t felt that before or since.

Middle of the road millennial for age context.

Two that come to mind:

• One that I still remember from high school. It was just a simple Counter Strike match. But it was down to me and one other guy. I switched to knife, turned the corner, there he was, going the other way. He didn't see me. So I followed him, riiight behind him, around several corners, while chat spectated. Still never noticed. I finally knifed him in the back, chat erupted, I felt like a god even though I sucked at Counter Strike.

• Winning my first Rocket League tournament after years. It really felt like I'd done something that mattered.

I’ve had a few over the years. In high school I got all stars in Mario 64 and I beat Quake 2 without getting shot for the lulz.

In college I went through and beat all of the Adventures of Lolo games. I played hundreds of hours of FFXI but the real gem was later on when I could solo almost anything, including legendary Pokémon that normally take a party of six.

Portal and portal 2 are great experiences I’ve been through a few times.

I was obsessed over Pokémon Y. It was the first time I got into breeding perfect Pokémon with egg moves, hidden abilities, and perfect or zero IVs. I also tried for weeks to get 100 consecutive victories in Battle Maison but the third time I failed at 99 because the game cheats I threw in the towel.

In Pokémon Scarlet I really got into shiny hunting and have 200+ now. I also tried Masuda method for the first time but dang is that slow.

Ragnarok Online. Before the third jobs, and without donation items and high rates. I played on the kRO server for a while and afterwards for many years on a 5/5/3 private server. I still remember how it felt, the first time I played it. Never found anything like it again.

Now, I've played a lot of amazing games and some of them really hit me in the feels, but this was the first MMORPG I played, ever. I was like what, 15? when I started playing and I played this game with the same people, for years. In the same guild, over Ventrilo, I knew these people. From all over the world, we'd even set alarms and such to make sure people were there when WoE started and half of us were sleeping due to time zones, or to make sure we could keep the MVP boss schedules. Some of us even met in real life, we talked off-game as well. We grew up together, quite literally, from teenager to adult. It's not surprising it left such a mark, I guess. Nowadays.. well I've tried MMO's but it just isn't like that anymore.

I only have to listen to the soundtrack, music from Prontera or Amatsu, and boom, nostalgia!

When Myst first came out and then me and all my friends carrying our controllers around with us for spontaneous (but constant) quake 3 arena battles on the Dreamcast. Those were the days I'll always remember but never be able to relive.

LAN party 2012ish. Playing Farcry 2 team Deathmatch multiplayer on the Clear Cut map. First team to 100 kills win. I got 60 of the 100 kills to win and from that point forward I was no longer permitted to use the 50cal sniper rifle.

The early days of Asheron's Call. One of the earliest MMORPGs with a 3d game world. It was cool being in a giant world with thousands of other people who were all trying to figure out the game and explore the world. There were monthly updates that were adding all kinds of new stuff all the time. I don't really care for MMOs any more but it was a cool experience at the time.

I still chase after the first playthrough experience of Okami. It was a time before novel ways of interacting with the game world were the norm. Everyone I knew at the time was playing CoD (some even just played Zombies mode and nothing else), Battlefield, Halo, GTA, Pokémon, Mario, Zelda… all titles that “everyone” played at the time.

When I saw Okami on a commercial, I knew I had to own it. There was nothing like it at the time and the way it pulled from Japanese culture was such a new concept to me. The way you can stop time at any point and paint shapes on the screen was just too cool to pass up. Not to mention, the almost hand-drawn aesthetic was still one of very few at the time.

I will admit, I can’t stand the experience on Wii. I can only enjoy it on controller because of how awkward painting with a 6-foot brush is.

Dragon Quest Builders 2. I'm not entirely sure why, but that game was crack to me from start to finish. I pretty much never bother platinum-ing games, and I went out of my way to for that one. It's especially funny since I'm not a fan of Minecraft at all. The game just had all the right ingredients to inject dopamine straight into my brain for the duration. The lack of a 3 sucks (and I tried the first one but didn't really like it that much).

Not sure which one I would pick. Pokemon Blue, Oblivion, Star Wars KOTOR, Warcraft 3 or Super Mario 64 maybe. All of them were amazing and had a lasting impact on me.

More recently I played Enter the Gungeon, Slay the Spire and Return to the Obra Dinn

In Cookie Clicker when you manage to stack 3 fortune cookie modifiers. Numbers going up so fucking hard.

Gael from Darksouls 3 and Orphan from Bloodborne were really cool and intense fights, those probably gave me the greatest rushes in Fromsoft games but I havent played Eldenring yet.

Getting a crit with Paladin in DnD is always amazing. I dont know if the updated 5e rules ended up removing the crit on Divine Smite but I'd elect to ignore that

I dunno if it was a high per se, but I used to love playing Dreamcast with my friends at lunch every day in high school. I dunno if I long to do it again, but the memories are nice.

Not retro at all, but Destiny 2 Forsaken. I’ve always loved the Bungie game feel and gunplay, and I finally kicked my D2 habit right after Edge of Salvation week one. I’ve tried many single player shooters since and have yet to find something that comes close to scratching the itch.

Metal Gear Solid V: Mission 16.

Also most all my friends and co workers getting on Vent to play WoW regularly and leveling up characters shortly after Burning Crusade released. Gaming hasn’t been the same since.

Next best would be COVID era playing Red Dead Online and drinking IRL and fishing in game until IRL dawn with a friend. Sunrise in that game is such a good representation of a sleepy sunrise.

In Division 2 before NY expansion:

So, for some reason they have set their maintenance 30minutes after reset time( so if reset is at 10am, maint was at 10:30). So, in their discord we gathered a random group and decided to challenge ourselves to complete it before maint hit. During the run we were all talking how somebody will get the unique AR right before the servers go down... Lo and behold it happened to me(sad the clip is gone after gfycat went down and I fried my old HDD) but we laughed for good 5 minutes and thinking if the AR will be there or not after maint.. It was.

Arma 3 Exile

Hearing that we were missing half the game in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

This one IS a bit of a spoiler... but not much. For one, everyone knows it. Two, the game came out in the 1990s. That's why everyone knows it. So anyway.

So you play this game. It's like a Super NES game, but it's on the PlayStation. It has CD quality music and voice acting (actually pretty shitty voice acting, but, I mean, it's CD quality audio). Actually, let's qualify that with a 45 second video. Aside from Dracula's final line in the exchange, the lines are poorly read from a poorly written script and it shows. And yet, it's still awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tV33Ewf_hw

Anyway, it's a fairly long game as far as Super NES games go. You go through the entire castle, you eventually confront the bad guy (who isn't Dracula — he's dead, and has been dead, you kill some other guy) and the credits roll. You won. Fine game. However, shortly after the game came out — it didn't really take that long, but we weren't all on the Internet then, so it took longer to get to some people — that if you did a few very specific things, you would instead see this ball above the last boss. Attack that instead, and the last boss is revealed to be a puppet, and he lets you pass... into the inverted castle. It's the whole ass castle, but it's upside down and has harder monsters. And take a wild guess who you fight at the end?

Its Game Boy Advance sequel, Aria of Sorrow, attempted a similar thing. Beat the last boss and you win, but do it with three souls equipped and... well, I'm actually not gonna spoil that. A cool thing happens. And you can go to this final area, it's not a long area. If you win, you win the game harder... but if you lose in that final battle, you get this awesome cut scene that calls back to the video I posted above. So while they reused the gimmick, they did it in the best possible way.

None of the Castlevania games have captured that magic since. Bloodstained, the spinoff by the creator of Symphony of the Night, kind of does a similar thing in a couple spots, and it does have the false final boss, but I think it's more clearly called out and I think you're meant to know it's not the end of the game. And I feel like it's not a win if you take it, the game kinda laughs at you. Another game that poked fun at this was Shadow Complex, the shameless ripoff of Super Metroid on Xbox 360/Live Arcade. (Great game though!) After losing your girlfriend to paramilitary thugs in the Pacific Northwest and exploring a bit of their compound, you eventually get back to your car (Jeep?) and you have the option to leave. Credits roll and you pop an achievement called "Plenty of Fish in the Sea." They knew you'd try it and rewarded you for doing so, but it's clearly not the real ending (it's too soon).

Playing Skate 2 for the first time on PS3 whilst blasting Fall Out Boy on my CD player.

In the dorms, we had around 8 players all play AOE2 all at the same time. It was glorious. One Korean guy came in, beat the shit out of us in a FFA. Its was so much fun.

I know its a stereotype but he was so good at the game it wasn't a content.

I also used to play smash brothers melee. And I was good enough to go to tournaments (but only locally). We rigged the game up to our projector in the university music theatre room (think huge on a wall) and had us all playing brackets. It was crazy having 100+ people watching cheering (or jeering) at the same time.

Alundra for PS1 perfected the Zelda genre and I haven't quite ever played anything like it.