Moments to me are almost exclusively self-contained within the game itself. What happens in-game takes precedence over external factors.
Memories, on the other hand, are heavily influenced by outside forces so that the external situation and its circumstances are as, if not more, vital than the video game-related material itself.
I will try and keep that topic bumped for awhile, maybe even until I am finished with this one.
I am going to be handling memories a little differently than what I did with the moments. When I came up with the list a few months ago, I had a slew of both bad and good memories. I decided that I would just do both and clearly state which side that fall under. Also, there won't be any sort of ranking. I will try to save some of the more "significant" ones later on though.
The Bad - Lessons Learned From Racking Up a Phone Bill
I don't know what it was exactly called, but Nintendo had this helpline that you could call where people would help you through tough stretches in whatever game that was giving you trouble. The catch was that the cost was pretty steep on a minute basis.
I used it frequently for Link's Awakening in the late '90s. Some of those later dungeons were a pain for me and having no internet at the time, I turned to the helpline to solve all my problems.
Sometimes, my question was simple enough for it to be answered in less than a minute, but there were occasions were my call lasted nearly 10 minutes. I remember one time that I called when the guy on the other end said, "You know that we have been on the line for 8 minutes right?" His words of concern fell on deaf ears I'm afraid.
As I said, I knew that it cost money, but I was oblivious to the amount of time that I had spent on the helpline throughout that month, almost all of it exclusively with Link's Awakening. When my mom got the bill in the mail, she couldn't hold back her frustration as she showed me $117 in phone charges from my calls to the helpline.
My mom could have withheld my allowance for a long time. Unfortunately for me, I didn't have one. My mom came up with a creative plan to substitute for cash payment and it was one that I would never forget.
There was a small space between our yard and our driveway. This was due to an massive amount of pebbles making it impossible to grow grass there. My mom made me remove all of them on both sides of our driveway so that grass can be grown there. What started out as ok turned into a tedious affair that drew me crazy. It took me the entire summer to do that, and I don't even want to guess how many hours.
I have to give my mom credit because I never called that place or any other phone line that charges you to call them ever again.
One of my best friends, B.J., loved to mess with his sister all the way until around middle school. She was a no-nonsense girl at such an early age, and she would cry at the littlest of things. He was never physically violent or called her names, but he would mess with her belongings and mind on a daily basis, if my visits to their house or time with them during school were of any indication.
Her favorite hobby, according to B.J, was playing on the computer. She didn't play the same kind of computer games that I did, but when you are ten years old and ask, and receive, for Christmas a Mavis Beacon Typing program, it's hard for anyone your age to have the same taste in computer games. Her favorite was The Sims and would spend hours on it each day to perfect her dream community. That's where B.J. decided to strike.
He didn't know much about The Sims, so he would spend time fiddling around with things whenever she wasn't home so that he could understand how things worked. After a couple of days or so, he had a plan in motion and invited me over to see his plan in action.
He demolished, or whatever, one house and in place created a home for a family called the Oogly Booglies. He had them enter the homes of the other residents and barricade everyone in their homes while still allowing the Oogly Boogly member to leave. He set off fireworks inside a home so that the house would catch on fire and eventually kill everyone that was trapped in it.
The plan was successful, so we went to play some N64 in the nearby room and waited for her to get on. We could hardly contain our laughter as she walked past us on her way to the computer. It wasn't a guarantee that she would even get on, but it was obvious that she did because she screamed out, "What happened!? Who are the Oogly Booglies!?"
That was our cue to leave the room, but we had a hard time ascending the stairs due to laughing so hard that we could hardly see. We ran out back knowing that B.J's sister was going to be following us and ran straight for the woods behind his home and hid.
She desperately tried to find us but to no avail. Lucky for me, I didn't have to go back in their house but B.J did. I don't know what she ended up doing to him but seeing that he is alive, it couldn't have been too bad.
I forgot to post the "warning" from the first topic, but there will be a lot of silly memories, both good and bad. In fact, I would say they make up the majority
When I was in the 1st grade, our individual daily activities were decided via a poster board full of everyone's name and clothespins with the type of activity. You could only do an activity a maximum of twice a week. The most popular activity? Math Munchers. Most kids didn't have video game systems in their homes so this was their first exposure, and sometimes only their only available option, to this sort of thing. Thus, computer games became very popular among all the students.
During the 2nd and 3rd grade, Zoombinis were the craze to play on the school's PCs. That was supplanted by Oregon Trail II in the 4th grade. Unlike Zoombinis, nobody could seem to beat the game though. A lot of people screwed around and solely hunted and only took a break to buy gunpowder and shotgun shells. For many of us though, we were determined to reach the final destination, Willamette Valley.
Lucky for us, we didn't have to beat in one sitting. The computers had more than enough space to allow for plenty of files to be saved, so we all had one and did we need it. We all died, a lot. We were too hasty in trying to travel across a river or some other body of water, we figured we could live solely off of the meat of the animals we hunted, and we essentially told sick people to walk it off.
One day though, I just happened to boot up my file and started playing without putting my heart or head into it. I was dumbfounded when a screen popped up with the word "Congratulations" across the top. I actually was the first succeed at something that seemingly half the students in the school were trying to accomplish.
For the remainder of the day, I was the talk of the school.
Due to the nature of my mom's profession, I often went with her to visit her patients before I was in kindergarten. One house in particular actually had a brother and sister who required her services. While she was working with the sister, I would always play SNES games with the boy. There was one that I loved above all the others, Biker Mice From Mars.
My efforts to acquire that game over the years were unsuccessful. Not even FuncoLand carried it. I had essentially given up before talking about the game with a schoolmate, and he said that he was willing to sell it to me for $5. He just needed to have his mom bring it with her when she picked him up from school.
Now this was five years after failing to find it anywhere, so you can imagine has ecstatic I was. The seven or so hours the following day took seemed to take forever as getting that game was the only thing on my mind. I kept feeling for the $5 in my pockets to make sure it was still there. Finally, the final bell rang and I waited for my friend to show up with his mom in the hall. I waited and waited and waited, but they never came.
What really sucks though was that it was the last day of school, and I wouldn't be able to see him again because with the way our school system worked at that time, he was going to be going to middle school (he was a grade ahead of me).
After being devastated from not getting Biker Mice From Mars, I called off my search. I already had an N64, so I focused on that plus the SNES games that I already owned.
It was shortly after my birthday that I decided to go shopping with all the money and giftcards that I received. I went to a notoriously crappy mall when there were better alternatives for reasons that I don't even know. I remember having already bought a pound of gummis and a Pokemon VHS when I entered some video game store.
I scanned the list of SNES games when I saw Donkey Kong Country 3. I already owned the first two and loved playing the third when I had rented it. It was like $25, so that would have wiped out the rest of my cash, but I thought it was going to be worth it.
Just as I walked up to the register, I saw something in the glass case that caught my eye. It was Biker Mice From Mars! If I had no decency, I would have just chucked the DKC3 cartridge backwards and punched through the glass case to claim my prize.
Things went a lot more civil though, and I paid $10 for a game that I had desired for more than half my lifetime, up to that point.
Before nearly everyone in my neighborhood became lazy, the park in our neighborhood was actually utilized, as opposed to now, and having decently sized grassy areas allowed us to play full games of football and baseball. Most neighborhoods around us didn't have such a thing, so it was an attractive location for our friends in nearby neighborhoods to come over to play some sports
It was winter and me plus a bunch of kids from various neighborhoods played football for several hours before calling it quits. The kids who were from other neighborhoods had nowhere to go, so I offered them to stay at my place until someone could come to pick them up.
Most of them sat down to play some Halo 2, and being the fine host that I am, I gave them priority over me. With four people occupying that left me and two others. I took them up to my room where one of them, Willie, saw my copy of NFL Street 2 and challenged me to a one-on-one matchup. I said that I had one condition: No use of Gamebreakers. He agreed to those terms.
Gamebreakers, for those who don't know are a temporary mode that all of your players can go into when you rack up enough style points. When you are on offense, you will be tough as nails to take down and fumbling is nearly impossible. When you are on defense, your men will be surefire tacklers and are far more likely to force some fumbles.
He was actually a far better opponent than I thought. He started with the ball first and scored. We kept trading touchdowns, but he slipped up and threw an interception in the middle of the game. We went back to trading touchdowns until I was one touchdown away from winning. We were tied at the time, so I couldn't afford to make a mistake. However, he must have felt more pressure as he violated the only rule we had in place by using that Gamebreaker.
Sure enough, I fumbled the ball on that drive and he scooped it up and ran it back for the winning score.
My friend that I mentioned earlier, B.J., and me would always go to the movie theaters together in middle school. He was always the one who chose the movies. We saw some crap like one of the Scary Movies, average to above-average films like S.W.A.T., and some pretty damn good ones like Master & Commander. Though the quality of the movies always varied, there was one constant, playing Gauntlet Legends in the arcade.
At first, we just kept making different characters, but we realized that we could recover our old characters by remember our three letter name and three digit password. I was always an archer and he a valkyrie.
Over the course of two years, we kept going at it and going at it. At some point, we beat the game, but our main goal was always to get the top score. There were times when B.J. would forget his password, putting our objective in jeopardy, but he would always remember in the nick of time.
Eventually, we were the reached the second and third positions. We weren't far off from our goal, but with B.J. being a member of the band, he had a lot on his schedule as the end of our summer vacation loomed. We wanted to get it done fast.
The next time we went to the movies, we started up Gauntlet Legends, it surprises me to this day that it was never occupied when we went, and we were so engrossed in it that we completely forgot about the movie we were supposed to see. Luckily, we never bought the tickets, giving us an extra supply of cash if needed.
About two hours later, we decided that we had enough and decided to see where we placed. There in the #1 and #2 spots were KCF and BMB, respectively. After a countless amount of hours and who knows how much money, we finally got there.
I don't know whether or not those at the top were actually players or fake players that the game's program made up in order to get people, like me and B.J., to spend a bunch of quarters trying to reach the top, but goddammit we made it!
We never played the arcade version again, but I bought the N64 version and we ended up with level 99 characters there as well
thank you for your patience most_games_r_ok, Bartz, XIII, and any other person who is reading but not posting. I should be resuming this tomorrow once I get my project done/after class and lunch
Before having the internet and subscribing to any magazines that weren't Ranger Rick or Highlights, I had to place a lot of reliance on mailed advertisements from stores to know what kind of games that were out there.
One game from a Blockbuster ad caught my eye, Snowboard Kids, and I ran into our laundry room to tell my mom about it, but I was met by something sinister, vinegar.
My mom used it as a spray for a disinfectant or something, and she happened to press it when I caught her attention. As a result, she accidentally sprayed it in my direction and went straight into my eye. It was very painful, and I was down on the ground for quite awhile writhing in pain.
After regaining composure, I promptly called Children Services and was eventually placed into my grandparent's custody (this entire sentence is a lie outside of regaining composure at one point).
I always give her hell about that, but we both know that she didn't mean for it to happen.
I always had to accompany my parents when they went grocery shopping when I was young. Me and my sister never cared for it, but we had no other choice but to go along. Kroger came to our rescue by implementing a thing called Pepe's Playhouse.
As the name suggests, it was a play area named after Pepe, which was Kroger's mascot or something. Here, parents would drop off their children, after signing them in, who wanted no part in the grocery shopping process and let them play until they were done checking out.
It was nothing more than a somewhat large cubicle with various toys and such, but the best part about it was that it had two Sega Genesis consoles. One always had Sonic the Hedgehog, and the other had either Bubsy or Earthworm Jim.
Surprisingly, they were neveroccupied when we went, so me and my sister always had the systems to ourselves. We would trade off every so often, but our parents would come after an hour or so. We would be sad to go, but we looked forward to shopping again at Kroger.
If it was just our dad who took us, he would often prolong his shopping so that we would get more time in Pepe's Playhouse. I don't remember how long we ended up doing this, but I want to say that we stopped when I was 7 or 8.
I went grocery shopping at Giant Eagle a few weeks ago and saw that they have something called The Eagle's Nest, or something like that, so I casually glanced over at it trying to not look like a pedophile. They had an N64 and a Gamecube, and I saw one kid playing Super Mario 64 and another playing Mario Kart Double Dash.
I guess the Genesis has been phased out now in places like that, but it still takes me back.
When I was in my early teens, I worked as a landscaper and an animal caretaker. Every week, I would pull in enough money to buy a $50 game if I wanted to. Unfortunately, I wasn't the person who did an extensive amount of research before buying games at that time, so I had my fair share of poor decisions. Nothing was as bad as the choice I made during the first few weeks of my freshman year of high school.
I had been looking forward to getting Pikmin 2 for quite some time and when it finally came out, I had my mom take me to Toys R Us. It should have been that simple had it not been this one game next to it, Amazing Island.
I don't know what drew me to it. Looking at the box at this moment makes me think it was the comparison to Mario Party. It was $40, so I decided it was worth a shot. It wasn't.
The best part, and only good part really, about it was the monster creation aspect, I had a reptile with a chain gun strapped to its chest, but the games were vastly underwhelming. I spent $40 and had nothing to show for it but this lousy game.
I ended up buying Pikmin 2 a few weeks later, but my awful decision forced me to make better buying decisions.
For the Christmas of 2002, me and my sister received a Gamecube. The two games that she ended up getting were Super Monkey Ball 1 + 2. Though she played and enjoyed them, I was the one who primarily played them, especially the second one.
The single-player aspect, for SMB2, was fantastic as the stages were genuinely creative and challenging. It was the mini-games that shined though. They were mostly refined versions of those from the first game plus a few new additions. The star of the bunch was Monkey Target.
Here, you control one of the four monkeys from the game as you roll down an incline with your ball, and then open it up to form a set of wings as you soar the skies as you approach the target at the end. You then need to close your "wings" in hopes of landing on a spot that has a high point value. This goes on for several rounds, with several types of targets. It's surprisingly addictive and is more so, in addition to being very competitive, when playing with other people.
That spring, some of my friends in the neighborhood came over and we played various mini-games from SMB2, but as I expect, they took a liking to Monkey Target and we ended up playing that for four hours straight. Four hours of four 12-14 year-olds screaming, sabotaging, and teasing while controlling monkeys in a ball.
That wasn't a one-time deal though. We did it for seven days in a row. We didn't all go to the same school due to age and other reasons, but whenever the last guy was available, we would all gather at my place for a Monkey Target marathon.
My dad wasn't too happy about it since it screwed with our dinner plans. I forget what my mom and sister were doing, but they were out of town for the week. Me and my dad ended up going to Skyline Chili for dinner that entire week because he worked the night shift and didn't have time to make me dinner that late and get to work in time.
After that week was up, we never played that game the same way. We still played it on occasion but certainly not longer than an hour a session.
The summer that followed the spring of Monkey Target sprung a new obsession, one that lasted the entire summer.
Like the Super Monkey Ball games, Mario Party 4 was a Christmas gift along with the Gamecube. I had only played it by myself of with my sister for the next several months as me and my friends generally stuck with SMB2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee. Once summer vacation began, my friends wanted to try something new and they had their eyes set on Mario Party 4.
50 turns of Toad's Midway Madness. Due to having already played not only plenty of MP4, but also a ton of the series, I had a great advantage. I held the lead for the majority of the game until the last five turns where I landed on a chance space. That pinball game always screwed me over, and I ended up having swap my stars and massive amount of coins to someone who obviously wasn't the leading player. The beneficiary, if you could venture a guess, was ecstatic. I wasn't able to come from behind in such a short amount of time.
I had plenty of opportunities to win again though as my friends became hooked with that game. We would go all over the neighborhood, often sneaking into some homes without gaining the parents' permission, and though the venue changed, the in-game settings did not. It was always 50 turns of Toad's Midway Madness. I think we tried Goomba's Greedy Gala once, but everyone complained, so we reverted back.
The games were, more often than not, more or less the same. I would take the lead early and hold onto it until a late chance time screwed me over and forced me to hand the victory to someone else. A few times though, I never had to deal with a chance time, or I lost everything from a chance time and got everything back a few turns later via the same thing.
In all, there were about a dozen of us playing the game across three months. We probably played close to 30 games. Though, I ended up losing a bunch to unlucky circumstances, I got over it after the first time. I was having so much fun hanging out with everyone that I honestly didn't care if I won or lost.
Back in the third grade, I lent out my copy of Game & Watch Gallery. It was one of my favorite Game Boy games, so I was hesitant at first to let someone borrow it, but I did anyway.
The person I lent it to wasn't exactly a friend, but I had known him all the way from kindergarten. He wasn't a role model among his peers by any means, but he was good at heart and someone I felt that I could trust. As the title suggests though, things didn't turn out well.
I was in class when I was called down into the principal's office. There was my dad and the kid I lent the game out to. Apparently, the kid's Game Boy was stolen, and it had my game in it.
Because we both violated the school's student policy, we had to be disciplined since bringing video games and video game devices were not allowed. We were dismissed from school for the day.
Back then, I really cared about school and didn't want to get into trouble there, so I took that almost as hard as losing one of my games.
I never brought the subject up with that kid ever again, not even high school (we were in the same school and grade for all of our academic career until college). I don't know the exact story or if it was truly stolen or not.
The good thing is that I can buy another copy online, but I don't know why that thought never crossed my mind until I was typing this up.
Me and a select group of friends enjoy playing games that allows for 4-player cooperative play. Those have always been hard to come by, at least quality ones, so for quite some time, we played the same few games whenever we wanted to do 4-player co-op. That was until I bought X-Men Legends, and we all thought that would have fantastic 4-player co-op.
The game had a few bugs that annoyed us right off the bat. You could get stuck on stuff and you could jump and not land, as if there was an invisible ledge or something. At one point, we inside of something made of metal and there was water beneath the walkway we were on. We all jumped off thinking that since it was normal water, we should be fine.
We all died. We went outside and played basketball.
I reserved Tales of Symphonia for the sole purpose of playing it with my friend. I even invited him and had him sleepover so that my mom could take us to Gamestop as soon as it opened and we could play it all day.
The first part went according to plan, but we hit a snag with the final part. The manual, to my knowledge, didn't explain how to set up co-op at all. The beginning of the game didn't ask for the amount of players, so our problems weren't solved then.
Once I had full control of Lloyd, I scoured the menus, and I still saw nothing that looked like it could allow my friend to play. I also did a few things during battle to see if he could get in on the action, but nothing would work.
I made it all the way to the ruins in the desert before we both decided to just give up and play something else.
The way to get co-op to work is probably very simple, but it should have been included in the manual!
ok, my undergraduate career is essentially over. I still have an exam on Monday, but I am done after that until I graduate. I was swamped with academic related stuff the past few days, but that is over. I can finally get back to this, but it likely won't be until tomorrow
The Xbox received a port of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero that was essentially Xbox Live-only. To fix an obvious problem that the platform presented, the port didn't allow for a player to speak through their mic when they died. For those who don't know, you can view the present whereabouts of any player when you die.
Me and my friend, Jon, decided to circumvent that by calling each other. Our favorite maps were Miami and Office. In those maps, there are lots of rooms and objects to get cover from. In other words, the terrorists, since those were hostage maps, would often hide and wait for counter-terrorists to appear and attempt to save the hostages.
If either me or Jon died, we would just tell the other one where the terrorists were hiding so we could get the jump on them. It worked most of the time and we couldn't help but laugh at how much we loved being jerks in that game.
We only did it for about a week, but it was fun while it lasted.
So many of my friends had Xbox Live and were encouraging me to get it too. I finally bit in the fall of 2005. When I went to Best Buy, I decided to get one of those starter kits since it included a game and a mic for maybe $10 more than the year-long subscription myself.
My choices were Project Gotham Racing 2 and Crimson Skies. Despite being a racing game fanatic my entire gaming career, I had my reservations about PGR2. However, I was even less sure about Crimson Skies, so I went with PGR2. Let's just say I made one of the best gaming purchase decisions in my life.
When I finally got around to setting up Live and playing the game, it was early afternoon. Instead of checking out the single-player portion or even just testing out how the driving mechanics were, I jumped straight into the online portion.
I picked a room at random and could instantly tell that it was full of British people based on the accents and terminology they used. They were friendly to me though, even said I sounded like John Malkovich (took that as a compliment), and helped me understand the rules of a game they were playing called Last Man Standing, which I explained in my first topic.
Though I could easily grasp the game and the game within the game, I was taken by surprise with the British. Though I have had conversations with international people through school, this was the first time that I was the only American in a conversation, had a conversation with an international person without a physical presence, and talked to half a dozen international people at one time.
It wasn't just the terminology (I can't tell you how long it took me to realize what they meant by "boot" for example), but how they carried a conversation. It was almost a perfect blend of being uncouth and refined. Over time though, I got used to it.
They were the first people that I added to my friends list that I didn't know from school. We played on a near-daily basis and always played the same two modes on the same two courses. It never got boring though because it was almost as if we just used the game as an excuse to talk to each other.
I eventually understood them to the point that you could almost say that we were close friends despite not even knowing what each other looked like (well, plenty of them knew each other in the UK, so I really mean me and them).
That experience really helped me out with understanding, working, and becoming friends with international students in my academic career. Some of my best friends in high school were from Mexico and Somalia. I helped tutor some French and German girls in high school. I lived with guys from the Congo and Brazil in college. I have volunteered to be in semester-long group projects with people from Panama, Spain, South Korea, China, Germany, Canada, Bolivia, Italy, Portugal, Morocco, Ukraine, Russia, India, and possibly more countries. I have had these kinds of opportunities because of my college's focus on international students and the fact I have taken a lot of international-based courses.
Though the British people I gamed with eventually didn't renew their subscription and have yet to see them have a profile on Facebook or anything, it was one of those short-term, for the time being, experiences that made such a lasting impact in my life. This was all because I chose the PGR2 package over the Crimson Skies one.
During my senior year of high school, I pre-ordered Mario Kart Wii. As with any pre-order I had done with anyone in the past, I expected to be able to pick my item up the day. Gamestop had other plans though. When I went to the counter to pick it up, this was roughly what our conversation went like:
"I have a copy of Mario Kart Wii on reserve."
"I'm sorry sir, but we just sold our last copy in the past few minutes."
"But I reserved a copy of it."
"I understand, but we no longer have any copies of it."
"How can you run out of copies for a game that I purchased the right to have a copy on its release date?"
"All of our release date games are available to anyone, so they snatched up some of them. We should be getting new copies either tomorrow or the next day, so check with us then.
"What was the point of me pre-ordering then if I can't get it the day it comes out?"
Silence. There was nothing that could be done, so I left. I did get it the next day, but that left a bad taste in my mouth. Less than a year later, Gamestop struck again.
I wasn't planning on pre-ordering Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts because of my previous reservation problem, but they were offering a bonus that was too good to pass up: A code to download Banjo-Kazooie. I already had it for the N64, but I wanted a backup copy. It should have been simple, but it wasn't.
I picked up my copy just fine, but as I was in my car, I opened it up and didn't see the download code insert that was supposed to be there. I went back in the store, and told them what the problem was.
At first, they had no idea what I was talking about. After talking for a bit, they decided to check it out on their computer, and they were surprised to find out that I was telling the truth. They refused to open any other case to see if they had one, so they told me to contact customer service through e-mail.
I did that night, but it didn't get resolved. They told me that all codes were already distributed in the cases of the reserved copies and that they wouldn't do anything on their end. They said that I had to contact the manager of the local store and resolve the situation with him. I reluctantly did that and the manager was of no help either. He wouldn't open the case despite the fact that they do it anyway. Knowing that the situation was a lost cause, I left and didn't bother to do anything else about it.
That was two straight times that something could have been easily prevented, but Gamestop failed to have preventive measures or resolution protocol in place. I haven't shopped at Gamestop since.