/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9778263
My first experience with 3D gaming was on a PC demo that was set up at Walmart running Descent. It was pretty crazy. When the N64 came out a few years later and they set up the demo with Mario 64, that was straight up mind blowing. Up to that point, I had fantasized about what a 3D Mario game would be like, but I couldn't imagine how control would work well in a 3D space until I actually played Mario 64. I got an N64 for Christmas the year it came out, with Mario 64 and I believe that I also got Shadows of the Empire and maybe Pilotwings (my birthday is only a couple of months after Christmas and I know that I got some N64 games then as well, and I'm not sure which ones were for that or for Christmas). They were all pretty incredible at the time, even though people dislike Shadows of the Empire in retrospect. I sunk dozens of hours into it, often just playing that final space battle over and over again.

I got a PS1 the following year, my first games for it were Final Fantasy VII, Tomb Raider 2 and Monster Rancher. Again, an incredible time, though by that point 3D wasn't new to me. FFVII's pre-rendered cutscenes were nuts at the time though, and Monster Rancher's monster generation was obviously a big thing. My parents actually gave those to me the night of Christmas Eve, as I was a tween by that point, and I stayed up a good chunk of the night playing FFVII (I got to the train graveyard that night) and generating monsters in Monster Rancher with my CD collection. I remember that Black Sabbath's Paranoid generated a Boxer, which was very powerful.

Over the course of that generation I came to enjoy how experimental developers were at the time. The PS1 in particular was filled with really strange and unique titles that were never replicated. The sandbox-like freedom of games like Mario 64 and OoT felt very new as well, and I could often just sit there screwing around for hours on end in a way that I could not with 2D games.