Current Events > How did you pick your games as a child?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I've been listening to Scott the Woz's new video on his childhood game collection and this man literally had the GBA and a GameCube in their prime but managed to miss most of the actual good games on all of those consoles in favor of licensed SpongeBob games

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ibi0XcyvxXg&feature=share9

But it did get me thinking about my childhood... growing up I managed to play the heavy hitters on my consoles either by chance, word of mouth from my friends or seeing them in video game magazines in the grocery store

My favorite game of all time, Banjo-Kazooie was literally just a game with a cover I thought looked interesting sitting behind a glass pane at a KMart that I got my parents to buy me

Magazines like Nintendo Power and sometimes reading the back of the box.

Series recognition or the cover art/title of the game. Sometimes I'd read about it in a magazine or hear from a friend

Sears/Wards catalog. Word of mouth. Rentals.

In my NES days it was box art at the local rental store. SNES days it was gaming magazines.

I only had like 5 NES games and 5 SNES games because of the cost. In the PSOne era I could work and buy whatever.

Renting games helped a lot

Mainline Nintendo games were usually pretty obvious.

Neighbor I grew up next to was a big time gamer also so he also got some Nintendo power mags.

I got a lot of the top tens from gamefaqs.

Though as a kid / teen I would play whatever the f*** my parents bought me even if it was that lame ass monsters incorporated game for game boy color

Since my childhood was during the Atari 2600 days back then all I had to go on was the back of the box and word of mouth from the other children in school.

Gaming magazines didn't exist back then.

Looking at magazines in the stores mostly. EGM/PSM/Sega Visions. Sega Visions was either free if you bought a game or was very cheap for bi quarterly issues. I don't entirely remember how Sega Visions worked. Actually to be honest I was usually a system behind each cycle except for when I got the Sega Genesis when it was still poppin' with Sonic 2. That was my first game with Sonic 1 and NHLPA '93. So I did often have an understanding what games were already good since they had been out for awhile. I do know I went to Toys R' Us with a more affluent friend of mine and picking out some NES titles. I am sure we wound up with some duds.

Before that I had an Atari 2600 that eventually broke and a NES but not until it was more or so on its way out to make way for the SNES.

I wasn't super into gaming as a kid so I played whatever my mom bought me for my Gameboy which was almost entirely licensed stuff. When I got a console later I mostly played whatever I thought looked cool in the store. So i missed out on pretty much every major title of the time. Still could not give less of a shit about any Nintendo games because i didn't grow up with them. It wasn't until the 360 that I really got into gaming and started following news and releases.

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