RetroGaming

FF IX. I’ll never get that again.

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.

So just shy of 10 years ago me and the dudes were playing a lot of Dota 2, we had played since early Beta. At this point in time the game was still young and hip so the ratio of casuals to sweaty mlg was much more forgiving, which was great because it put me and the dudes in the upper bracket especially when combined with shenanigans, nowadays we'd probably only be in the top 60 percentile at best.

Very few people knew about this or utilized it but you could put your level into stats instead of an ability, so I would find weird builds to focus on only 1 skill and stats. We discovered this build called Sand King Jesus where you could use a character called Sand King to sit, invisible, in sand storm AoE DoT effect on the lane and just never leave but the tradeoff was the inability to move without cancelling, items focusing on regen and armor items as well as utilizing another little known mechanic where you buy 2 stout shields: they used to have a 50% chance to reduce damage by 20 (almost all damage a creep can do) and it would run that 50% check for each individual shield. At the time there was an exploit where if you move, cancelling the Sandstorm ability, but recast it before the particle effect dissipated... Uh Oh! The particle stays put but the Sand King and the AoE radius both moved. That made him not immune to non-targeted stuns or hooks but it did make him extremely hard to hit with them. It also made it difficult to avoid the DoT if you couldn't see where it was. Now there is an immortal, invisible, constantly damaging enemy on the lane, but sure you can still buy wards or keep firing shots in the dark until something hits: but Sand King has another ability called Burrowstrike. Burrowstrike is suppose to be used to instantly travel in a straight line towards enemies and stun them momentarily. But instead, you can burrowstrike away from enemies and then cast Sand Storm as soon as it comes off cooldown, and this ability allows travel up and down ledges and past trees. All of this culminates in "Sand King Jesus" because much like the mythical Jesus it would take forever to try and kill him and often still fail.

Now this is silly at best but the true greatest gamer high for me was this one match where I used this strategy to dominate middle lane, cutting off the creep waves with a well placed sandstorm to both take out an early tower as my creeps poured in damaging either the enemy mid or the tower, chipping away, and I get all of the last hits uncontested, started roaming and ganking with the boys, and buying up hearts, assault cuirrass, vladmir's offering, refresher orb and for added AoE DoT a Radiance, and I became so tankie and my team had me covered on healing and providing DPS that I was able to enter the enemy fountain, where players respawn, and sandstorm in there for another 10 or 15 minutes before we had even taken down any towers before barracks. We were all laughing so hard at these real human beings on the enemy team reduced to NPCs unable to leave their own fountain and unable to do anything about it.

Awhile later they completely reworked the character.

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.

Man, I was playing Borderlands (1) on PC, playing as Roland with the support gunner class mod. I had a couple of Tediore legendaries, I believe it was the revolver and the combat rifle, and I just reached this zen state near the end of the game, shooting at these seemingly endless waves of enemies just coming from everywhere. thanks to the guns and class mod I never had to worry about picking up ammo, it was just constantly spitting lead in every direction, and it just clicked, it was golden and beautiful.

The only console I had exposure to as a young child was the Gameboy.

At a birthday sleepover with some friends, we all stayed up late into the night playing the original Nazi Zombies map from COD: WAW. Nothing has ever beat the sheer joy and fun I had with that initial playthrough.

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.

Katamari Damacy

EDIT: I could add a few more--

The original Legend of Zelda

Final Fantasy IV and VI; I was one of those people who bounced off of VII because of battle load times (I tried twice and both times that was what drove me from it)

A now-obscure Atari arcade game called Rampart

Another arcade game, an action RPG from Taito called Cadash, which could be played by four players on two linked cabinets (no emulation, even official ones, currently support this mode)

The last time must have been when Valheim released. That shit got me hooked. Now I am waiting for the Deep North biome to finish development before I play it again.

Now that I think about it the last time was when Schedule 1 released.

Mech Assault 1 & 2, particularly 2. The two most memorable boss fights for me was the mid game one where you fight some giant robot bull thing in a tiny exosuit while Getting Away with Murder by Papa Roach Plays, and the final fight where you fight a half built giant mech again in the exosuit while Right Now by Korn plays.

Also I really liked Halo 2 for the banshee dogfight with Follow by Incubus in the background and the big Mausoleum fight at the end of Gravemind with Blow Me Away by Breaking Benjamin plays; the part where the doors open and the bell starts to toll chefs kiss. Oh and the whole level where you drive a tank up the bridge chasing down a Scarab too.

Also, why has there been no remake of Crimson Skies yet? That game was so much damn fun. I miss the dog fighting and crazy guns.

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.

Being in the zone, utterly focused at defeating ~~glock~~ Sword Saint Isshin. Doing it so many times that trouncing Genichirou pre-Ishin was a given, a warm up even, before going for the main dude.

Nine balls and more nine balls and more nine balls in Armoured Core Q_Q.

Penetrator from Demon Souls.

Malenia.

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.

Rhythm Doctor boss stages. Each one is an amazing showcase of visuals on a rhythm game with the simplest control scheme ever. And the game's final stage, the full release is in December 10.

With each stage exceeding my expectations by a long shot, I can't wait to see what they'll do this time.

Two different things:

I was infatuated with Halflife and unable to function in life for a certain amount of time. I would say it did a number on my first run at college, but there was a lot going on there.

As a teen, I was the annoying kid that didn't have their own games at home, or at least any of the good ones. I would go over my friend's house and they would be stuck on a boss level only for me to win when the controller is passed over to me.

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

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.

Total Annihilation on a LAN

Red Alert cut-scenes

Halo on a LAN

Battlefield online with voice comms

Couch co-op gears of war, and Army of 2

Finishing Mass Effect

Worms, hot-seat

Instagib. Oh fuck, instagib is pure adrenaline

Just one more turn

Last 5 in Battle Royale, never yet finished last!

You have died of dysentery

Hitting that last alien

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

My Arma 3 Antistasi server. it was so fucking dope

Saints Row Co-op over systemlink with a monitor each up on the sofa table (also a bong each on the sofa table).

Star Wars Galaxies before the horrible updates and Jedi inflation.

As a '90s kid, I was a little old for Pokemon, so I did need the explanation.

I guess for me it would be finally beating The Legend of Zelda, mostly because you had to start over again so many times after your saved game got wiped.

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!

13 All Clear

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

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 💜