/vr/ - Retro Games

i grew up with ps3 but my grandfather had one of these at his house. rip grampa.

>>6429572
LOL fuck you

I did. My best friend had an SMS, so we got the best of both 8-bit world's. It dominated schoolyard talks for awhile and was perfect for rainy summer days (otherwise I was out on my bike at all hours). Fantastic co sole with many great games. Nintendo Power and the various cartoons just added to the whole "scene". I miss those days.

>>6429564
>The NES came out 47 years ago

>>6429579
How many games did you own? And for anyone else reading, how many games did you guys own? It seems like a lot of people only owned a couple games and the rest they rented.

>>6429564
I did. I don't think it must have been significantly better than growing up with a PS2 or whatever. The biggest difference would be we were experiencing the expansion of what games could be from Pong and Pacman to fully fleshed out adventures. And there were more genres. Other than that it's all about the particular games that resonate with you.

It was really cool for me to grow up right along side console gaming but all of the gaming platforms back then were expensive. Arcade gamers were feeding quarters that were worth I think $4 each in 2020 dollars. Computer gamers did get to pirate pretty easily but they had to come up with the upfront cost they could have bought a Ferrari for.

It's so cool now as an adult too, having an essentially infinite amount of games to choose from but it's funny how even though kids have that they essentially all play the same four or five games, half of which are free.

>>6429564

Yeah it was great. I don't know how it compares to newer things. I'm sure those are great for kids too. I started on the Atari 2600 and there have been lots of good games to choose from for as long as I can remember.

>>6429591

We probably had like ten or twenty (varying with time of course), and we rented many as well. I tended to get about as much value out of rented games as from owned games, except in certain cases where you had to spend a lot of time with a game to progress but didn't love it enough to binge it for many hours straight (SimEarth for SNES, say) or where the game would never really be finished (Mario Paint, say).

>>6429564
>>6429591

It was awesome. My friends and I all had around ~10 games in our collections at peak. Typical MSRP at Wal-Mart, Toys R US, etc...was around $40-$50 for 3rd party games, $50 to $60 for 1st party games.

After you adjust for inflation, these gems weren't cheap. Rich kiddos had the 30 or 40 piece collections with the coveted accessories like the power-glove. Rentals were they way to do it and not break the bank.

>>6429729
Bang on accurate. I even had a friend who was rich enough he could have had more than ~30 NES games but he didn't, he was just also into computer gaming. Interestingly, he wasn't allowed to go to the arcade at all. Rich parents are more protective I guess.

>>6429729
>power-glove

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AacoxHFYvZw

>>6429564
SNES boy but played Contra and the Mario trilogy on it. I'm more of a Master System guy.

>>6429564
First console I got was a Sega Mastersystem when I was like 3 or 4, and then an NES when I was about 5. Space Harrier and Ninja Gaiden I are the first games I remember ever playing

>>6429581
Only if you count the Famicom. NES wasn't released until '85.

>>6429564
Grew up with a SNES, but my one of my friends older brother had a NES. Played some Cobra Triangle. That’s about it.

I grew up with SNES and it was comfy as fuck. I played the shit out of all my games, and even cherished shit like Mohawk and Headphone Jack.

Then when I was 12 my rich best friend offered to trade me his NES and about 45 games for a copy of GTA 3. Played the fuck out of those games, and his mom found out and made him return my copy AND let me keep his shit.

I was a kid when the toaster was current, but didn't get a console till Genesis because "we had enough shit laying around." But most of my friends had it, so I was pretty good at Mario and Duck Hunt since they all had it. Enjoyed Punch Out, but never had enough time to sit and figure out every fight.

>>6429564
>How many of you grew up with this and its predecessors at the time they came out?
me. i never really had an interest until my aunt rented a system for me. then we bought it
>It seems like it must have been a lot of fun.
IMO, it was fun, but the drawbacks:
>other kids made fun of me for playing so much, for some reason.(fuck you, im having fun)
>it became my parents' key to not have to raise me
>social skills didnt develop too well

>>6429564
I was 3 when it came out and we got one in 1988 when I was 6. It was a great time to grow up for sure, though I really feel a stronger bond with the 16 bit era, I played the fuck out of NES as well. Also colored all over the top of ours with crayons which my dad was not happy about.

>>6429581
37

>>6429819
>NES + 45 games for GTA 3
Damn, that is one lucky trade

It seems to me that the fun part about growing up during those times was the total mystery of games. If you or your friends didn't have magazines, you had to rely on rumors most of the time to figure certain things out. You didn't know what might be ahead of you in a game, how many more levels you had to go through, what types of things you would find. That air of secrecy was there even when buying games, since you didn't always know exactly what you were getting. This sounds so amazing to me, and I'm wondering, is it actually true? Was it like that?

>>6430040
He was a normie and his other brother also had an NES with more games. (They were that fucking rich they bought multiples of consoles and games)

Wasn't a bad trade since he never played his and hated video games that weren't FOTM. Still talk to his brother who is a insane autist gamer who spends every waking moment playing vidya after work

>>6429591
I owned about 10-15 games maybe? Somewhere in between there probably. Otherwise, it was trading/borrowing from friends or renting from my mom-and-pop video store up the hill.

Man, borrowing games was a whole phenomenon in itself. Such a great way to experience games you never got. Trading was serious business and you had to think hard about trades (always possibly risky, people move, etc.).

>>6430056
Yes it was. You bought a game by word of mouth or boxart/screenshots. Occasionally you'd see something in a gaming magazine that would catch your eye.

I remember Toys'R'Us had the boxes behind plexiglass, front and back, and there were little slips of paper you brought to the register and they would get your game from a cage in the back. Sometimes you got burned.

>>6429564
It’s before my time, I was born in 88, and am the oldest sibling in my family. So no older brother who had one or whatever. Genesis was my first system, got it for my birthday in 92.

>>6429578
Kids who grew up with x360 & ps3 are in their 20’s now. Obviously the grampa bit was a joke, but the former is believable.

Me and my two siblings begged cruelly for the NES, but my mother was adamant that we wouldn't never have one in the house. Dad went along with it, because compromise is part of love.

Then, in the summer of 1990, the Gulf War began. My father had been discharged from the military in 1986, but had remained in the Army Reserves. He must have envisioned a future in which he was called to duty and killed in combat, because he caved can bought me and my siblings the NES Entertainment system complete with Super Mario, Duck Hunt, and World Class Track Meet. Dad was never called, and instead faced the wrath of my mother.

Thank you for gassing your own people, Saddam! My happy childhood rests on that pile of corpses!

>>6429591
I can’t recall how many but I do remember keeping my carts in old shoe boxes, I had 2 shoe boxes of carts, so however many that is.

>>6430056
Yeah when I was a kid I wasn’t subscribed to any game magazines and didn’t have any tv shows about games, so I just asked my parents for whatever games my friends liked or I would pick based on box art when at funcoland.

>>6429564
At the time it was almost like having an arcade game at home. That changed by 1988, but those first two glorious years were really something.

>>6430056
This. I actually remember hopelessly longing for that fucking godawful Jaguar fighting game Kasumi Ninja as a kid because I saw a feature on it in a game magazine and it had blood, ninjas and digitized graphics so I assumed it would be as good as Mortal Kombat which I was obsessed with. I never actually saw it in motion so how was I to know? I even begged my mom for a Jaguar, which she thankfully said no to since I already had a Genesis and a Sega CD.

I did end up playing it about a year later at the only persons house I ever met who had an Atari Jaguar and realized it was total dogshit and screenshots could be quite deceiving.

nostalgia

>>6430201
Legit heartwarming.

>>6430207
>>6430215
>>6430229
That's so unimaginable to me in this age of internet. I really feel happy just thinking about it, it sounds so mystical. I would've loved to experienced that.

People who grew up playing 8-bit games: If you had a time machine and could travel back and show kid you newer/current gen games, how do you think kid you would react? Would it be exciting and awesome, or would it be too too strange for you to connect with the concept of games you already had? I keep wondering if today's games would be viewed more like movies to people who had not experienced the steady shift towards them, or else as something different to "games" as the word was understood back then.

>>6430430
I think I'd be blown away.

I remember some early screen shots from the SNES and losing my shit at how many colors it had.

>>6430430
I'd probably be in awe. 3D gaming was only hinted at and rarely seen. Younger me seeing something like Skyrim in action would be blown away.

>>6430040
>>6429819
>>6430131
I assume this was all because your friend wasn't allowed to have an M rated game or even GTA3 specifically

>>6430430

It would have been exciting and awesome.

Like anon above, I was blown away by the shift from the NES color palette to the SNES palette. Super Mario World amazed me primarily because of that, at first. It's not even a super impressive game graphically, but I perceived it as a whole new world of possibility, solely because of that change in color count. Crazy.

When the "Nintendo Ultra 64" started to be promoted by Nintendo Power I felt similarly. I intuitively KNEW that 3D games would be amazing. (These days I prefer games that are fundamentally 2D, regardless of whether they have 3D graphics - like say Civ IV, which has 3D graphics but a 2D game world - but back then I just "knew" with my silly childish mind that adding another dimension could only add more awesomeness.)

If I'd seen a clip of some modern game, whether it was an action game like Overwatch or a story game like Life Is Strange or a "retro-styled" game like Streets of Rage 4, I would have been viscerally stimulated in that same way by the vague idea of all the amazing possibilities of what such a game could be. I would have been very impressed. (But I can't say what I would have thought of something both "retro" and crude-looking like The Binding of Isaac or Undertale. I would have been 100% open to the idea of these games being awesome too but you might have had to at least sell me on it a little.)

> I keep wondering if today's games would be viewed more like movies to people who had not experienced the steady shift towards them,

As an adult I strongly prefer interactivity in games to linear storytelling. As a kid I hadn't yet developed that sensibility. I was deeply impressed by the opera sequence in Final Fantasy "III". I enjoyed Dragon's Lair. On first look, I would have imagined awesomeness in today's movie games that may or may not actually be there. Maybe after extended exposure, I would have developed skepticism about the value of modern cutscenes and handholding... maybe.

I used to play through Contra and Guerilla War with my oilder brother on a regular basis. He used to tease me by mixing my name into the ending credits "planning by Ichiru Anon, and Scenario by Anon Matsumoto" It used to annoy me to no end, but we were kids doing stupid kid things. now I'm grateful that I had a brother to share this shit with.

>>6430430
When I was first shown FF7, I asked "can't someone just skip to the end of the game by using the third disc?"

>>6430430
I would have been absolutely blown away. It takes hundreds of hours playing them to really understand their shortcomings compared to retro games. There's no way child me could have gotten past the initial shock and awe. Let alone that we play them on thin, flat high definition displays that can hang on the wall or be held in our hands - and the easy availability of online multiplayer? Wirelessly? And many of them are free? Forget about it.

>>6430430
I'm sure I'd be impressed as fuck if it was during the actual 3rd gen era. To be honest, if you showed me a N64 game in 1990, I would be mind blown already.
But if you show teen me current gaming, I'd probably be impressed by the new graphics but not much, and if you showed me today's world and tech in general, I'd be disappointed that in 2020 the best we can do is phones.
Portable internet was something that was already in the works, and notebooks were already a think in the 90s, smartphones would probably impress me a little bit but I'd still wonder what the fuck happened in 20 years if all humanity could come up was that.

>>6430201
Lel

>>6429564

i actually caught the edge of the video game crash and the Atari was pulled away from me. after that for a few years, video games had become this phantom of personal computers (which were still a unicorn in the wild in homes), and a relegated special room in the mall that required quarters to play.

In fact, i missed the NES launch and the first time I even saw Super Mario was in an arcade. Soon after that, I was gifted a 'control deck' which was the cheapest package that had super mario, and 2 controllers.

I still have the unit.

There's so many anachronisms from that time... trading games at school with other kids (temporarily of course), game rentals, realizing you could run it through the VCR and record the game playing, absolutely no guides so you better have fun just playing it, getting a nice TV with those red and yellow jacks and saying goodbye to channel 3, I even had a dinky Casiotone keyboard and was playing some of the game's music.

And the cultural shift at the time, Nintendo was actually advertising on TV, and many people were still burned out of Atari's nonsense. Game magazines with pictures of games which forced you to imagine how they played or even what they were...

Can you imagine a time window where it was actually possible to know every video game that had been published?

I got one in the mid 90s, and only ever had one game for it: Mega Man 1 (still one of my favorite games). Someone traded it in for an SNES and some games like MMX1 in 2000, though. Before this, I had and daily played and rented for Sega Genesis for the few years I was alive prior.

>>6429564
By predecessors you meant the atari 2600, intellevision, and colecovision; they were fun but primative compared to the NES and Sega SMS.
>>6429572
Not retro or the same generation dumb millenial.
>>6429591
I had 75 games for my Atari 2600.
Alot less for my NES since they were so expensive.
>>6429605
Jannies ban the ban evader.
>>6430198
Zoom Zoom

>>6431029
To be fair, Coleco Vision was closer to early Famicom than it was to Atari 2600.

>>6431034
The controlers were shit with all those buttons, and the graphics wern't close to 8 bit.

>>6431036
>The controlers were shit with all those buttons
It was actually kinda cool in a funky way, but anyway most games didn't use the numeral buttons other than maybe for some option, you still used it as a regular joystick with the side buttons.
>graphics wern't close to 8 bit
I'd say they were. Have you actually played both Coleco Vision and Atari 2600 to compare?
Coleco Vision was using similar hardware to the MSX.

>>6430304
Sometimes I envy people who don't know what it's like to have to dial in every time and wait minutes (or longer) to load a fucking jpeg. In hindsight, it really was a magical era.

>>6429564
It was ok. Nowhere near as fun as the snes and n64 that followed

>>6429564
Serves you right being a thirdworlder so technically I didn't grew up at the time when NES came out worldwide.

>>6430304
My family was poor, so I had to cherish every NES game I had, even if it was movie tie-in garbage or sports shovelware. I still love Wizards & Warriors to this day even though it's clearly a clunky, barely playable mess. I was excited about a new game with the same name coming out in 2000, but that turned out to be unrelated.

>>6429564
I upgrew with it since my family was poor and couldn't afford newer consoles. We also got it in 1991 and was the only console we had until miraculously my parents got better wages and we could get the N64.

>>6430201
Saddam did nothing wrong.

>>6431036
Is this post a joke?

>>6431621
it's one of rare's first games. not that bad.
the music was annoying though.

>>6431810
Rare started out life as a company called Ultimate: Play The Game in the 80. If you check out their Sabreman and Filmation series of games you can see how they were adapted into Wizards & Warriors and why it feels very different from other NES games.

Born in 88. Grew up playing double dribble, life force, Jackal(love this fucking game), TMNT and SMB.

>>6429564
As a child I got a 2600 in '84 and an NES in '87. The difference was huge and Atari was forever doomed. The only games on the 2600 I return to are River Raid, Pitfall 1& 2 and Bezerk.

Another question for you guys: how many games did you actually beat? Many NES games are notoriously hard and I can't imagine the average kid could beat them.

>>6432660
As a kid I beat half my games. Now it's more like 75% beaten.

>>6432667
What's the hardest one you beat as a kid? Anyone can answer this btw

>>6432672

TMNT was a sensation for boomers similar to Pokemon for zoomers. So when this baby dropped most of us snagged it up. It is considered one of the most difficult NES games of all time like Battletoads.

I finally beat it playing it retro. I know to this day not one of my childhood friends have ever seen the technodrome in it.

>>6432660
I beat all of my NES games including Ghosts n Goblins and Castlevania II

>>6432667
Now I dump a game the instant I stop enjoying it so I only beat maybe 10% of the games I start

>>6430625
lel i made that pic

how many games did you have stolen from you, from kids who asked to borrow but never returned?

>>6430304
Yeah man it was just a different time... We couldn't instantly look up all the info and reviews on something, we just had to go by word of mouth, game magazines and the box. If you had internet you could maybe get some opinions on usenet or maybe early review sites but I didn't get dialup till 1997 and even then it was basically the same experience as reading the game magazines except it took way longer for everything to load. It would still just be text and pics you were looking at, there would be no watching videos unless you wanted to wait forever for a 1 min quicktime video to download.

Speaking of gaming magazines and magazines in general, that is another things I desperately miss from the era. You would have fuck tons of different gaming magazines for every system and genre you could think of on the racks at the grocery store. Same with comic book and toy magazines... I went and looked the other day when I was shopping and I didn't see a single game magazine, and the only ones besides stuff like Time or whatever was car magazines and celebrity or pop culture centric ones, all on super slick high quality paper and like 15 or 20 dollars a piece. There were like 3 bucks back in the day and they would be hundreds of pages. I remember when EGM went to 4.99 and being pissed about it.

>>6432969
*they were 3 bucks

>>6432660

I tended to finish the easy ones and the medium-difficulty ones... if they weren't extremely long. With the hard ones I could go either way. TMNT I almost finished as a kid - I reached Shredder exactly once, with barely any health left, and then would not see him again until maybe twenty years later. I'm sure I could have finished Castlevania III (came pretty close I think) but we only rented that one so I didn't get around to it (until, again, twenty years later). I would usually finish lengthy but medium-difficulty games like Adventures of Lolo if we owned them, but usually not if they were rented.

I don't know what the hardest game I finished was. I was an excellent player compared to people I knew but compared to all players everywhere I was probably just slightly above-average or something. And if I finished a game then I wouldn't be inclined to think of it as being hard anyway. I mean they generally aren't REALLY hard if you're a decent player, except in a few cases where there are obscure and unfair secrets blocking essential progress and you're expected to either share hints with friends or bang your head against every single metaphorical wall until one breaks. A decent player can reasonably be expected to finish almost any old game, given the willingness to practice and learn and spend a substantial amount of time. It's mainly a test of the endurance of one's motivation.

I remember finishing Wizards & Warriors as a kid... it was a big deal then for me to sit for two hours playing in a single session. It was NOT a big deal to find the gems and fight the monsters. I would become fatigued and stop having fun long before the game's challenges became too great. And if you're not having fun then you tend to stop trying, which means you'll start failing. Wizards & Warriors III would have been even worse. But the second game was easy compared to those two, even though its challenges are at a similar level... because it has a password system.

>>6432672
>What's the hardest one you beat as a kid?
I beat a ton of hard games as a kid, some of which people don't consider hard, but as a kid, they were.
among them:
>Robocop
>Faxanadu
>Ninja Gaiden
>1942
>Splatterhouse 2
I Ninja Gaiden pops out as the peak.

>>6432660
I beat most of the ones I owned, unless it was an arcade conversion with no ending, like Galaga. I would eventually quit and move on from some, like No ja Gaiden. This "nintendo hard" games eventually stopped being fun after being stuck in the same spot. I don't like super hard games. Not fun to me.

>>6429564
My older brother and I split the cost with our allowances ($50 each). I was in 6th grade I think and he was in 7th. Ours came with a copy of Dragon Warrior (which I played to death) and my brother bought Ninja Gaiden which was the first game since Combat on the Atari that we both competed against one another with over and over. Later that year we got Contra and I borrowed TMNT from someone in my class for a while. It was a ton of fun and friends would come over to play. I remember going to one of their houses to play Final Fantasy and on a Genesis (Super Ghouls and Ghosts) until morning. None of that compared to when the SNES finally came out though. A bunch of us got together and played Super Starwars on a huge projection screen TV (which you weren't supposed to do but we didn't care, it was just too awesome).

>>6429572
I miss my grampa too.

>>6429564
I grew up with the Wii
good old times

>>6430430
They kept promising that high-def 3D was right around the corner all throughout the 90s. I remember seeing an incredible 3D rendered pic of Spiderman in 93 or 94 in a computer mag. Of course the first 3D Spiderman games came out on the PS1, DC and N64 in the late 90s but the games didn't really catch up to that pic I saw until Web of Shadows on the PS3 in 2008. Yes, I waited that long to play a game that looked like 3D computer concept art in the early '90s.

>>6432660
Tons. Looking back, I have no idea how I had the patience to beat half of them. Milon's Secret Castle and Fester's Quest were my crowning achievements. I think I beat each of those in 11 or 12 hour straight sessions. I could never even dream of doing something like that today. I'd probably literally die trying.

>>6432672
Wanderers from Ys III, hands down.

>>6432672
I beat my head against Castlevania III for a long time.

>>6434346
Same here. Never beat that one but still love it and plan to one day.

>>6434360
I had problems at Dracula for some reason. I remember I spent a summer afternoon and finally got through it. Never touched it since!

bump

>>6434316
I grew up with Wii and NES, SNES and N64 thru emulation

>>6436037
>I grew up with [the N64 thru emulation]
You poor bastard.

>>6436510
well it played mario 64 and the zelda's good enough

>>6437338

>ignorance is bliss

>>6429564
I had one in 89 when I was 4.

>>6429591
I only remember having SMB+Duck Hunt and TMNT.

>>6430056
If you didn't have access to Nintendo Power or any other gamimg mag, all you had to go off of was the front and back of the box. Unless you're renting from some mom & pop store, then all you had was the name and the label picture on the cartridge.

>>6432660
Just SMB1-3.

>>6432794
I never even made it to Splinter.

>>6432959
None, but I still remember the punk that stole my Zapdos card.

>>6429564
I am super old, but only with the NES. Played its predecessors only via what my older cousins had. Felt good bringing the NES over there for them to enjoy the games for all sorts of fun. The NES was my launching pad and foundation for the games I continue to enjoy. I do hold the NES, Transformers, Sega, Ghibli, etc. responsible to my warped young mind associating Japan as where the best stuff was made from as they all had the "made in Japan" label.

>>6430056
Yes, and it was amazing. The whole experience of video games as a hobby was arguably much better and more substantive back then. If having cheat codes enabled in a game makes for a poor experience, it also applies to the entire hobby. Have everything available all the time really makes it harder to enjoy games.

>>6432660
Several. You usually might get a game on your birthday or christmas. Sure you could borrow/loan with friends or play at their house. Rentals were a thing, but that was usually weekends only at most. Basically 5/7 of the time you had a few games to play, so you got gud. Really, you had time as a kid with no distractions like internet/smartphones/cable tv so what else was there to do besides playing outside?

It's hard to grasp, but even kids can beat hard assed games if it's all they have to play.

>>6440334
rich-poorfag, you really need to get a famicom salamander. No excuse to not have one with that bad assed artwork and clear blue shell. It's sorely missing from your collection.

>>6440996
I wish I were rich. I do have that for the famicom. It is in my top 100 games for one of my top 15 consoles.

>>6441236
>Crisis Force
>Akumajou Densetsu
>Over Horizon
>I'm not rich

I'd kill for Crisis Force, dude.

>>6430430
I was too young to really experience the 8-bit era (born in 1988, didn't get a Super NES until 1994), but even growing up with 16-bit games I was already impressed as fuck the first time I played an N64 in 1997. I would have had my mind blown if you showed me something from the PS3 era. Even coming out of the 6th gen, I thought "wow, these graphics look almost lifelike". Of course, my opinion has changed over the years. Now I think that N64 games are largely clunky relics, and PS3/X360 stuff has a sort of unnatural uncanny valley look to it. I prefer the sprite-based games of the 4th generation and the smooth polygons of the 6th generation. The 5th and 7th generations feel like awkward stepping stones in comparison, but both looked incredible at first sight.

Thanks for all the interesting answers, guys. I grew up with the SNES and N64 in the early 2000's and I could barely beat any of the games on them when I was a stupid kid, so the idea that there were children plowing through NES games back in the day is crazy to me. It certainly sounds like a fun period in VG history

>>6429798
The Famicom didn’t come out 47 years ago, you fucking halfwit.

Another experience I assume a kid won't have now: getting to know the weirdo nerds at your high school, finding out that one of them can play GAMES on his CALCULATOR, and then struggling through whatever mysterious incantation was needed to link up your calculator with his and copy over the hacker-built shell program that'd let you run Tetris or whatever behind your desk while sitting in English class. It was hard to choose what games you could have on there because you could only copy them from people who already had them I think? I mean unless you had the special cable and software that'd let you copy things directly from a PC, as well as an online source for the actual games, which you probably didn't. So it was some kind of weird Pokemon-type thing where instead of trading in-game characters you were trading actual games, and ones that weren't even supposed to be running on that hardware at that. It's pretty cool to remember it. The games weren't even great (all homebrew'd, and they did not play any sound) but things like Tetris and Boulderdash and Sokoban work fine on that kind of hardware and can be pretty entertaining when the only other option is listening to your teacher lecture. And the mysterious, underground way in which the platform was developed and spread added a cool feeling to it as well.

For more info about the shell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_shell

>>6442161
Drug war was the shit on my TI-83

>>6441791

I started on the Atari 2600 and went through various Nintendo consoles after that... still, I think I probably feel kinda like you do about people who were playing stuff I didn't ever know, whether it was older stuff (Intellivision, ColecoVision, Vectrex, or whatever else) or Sega stuff or games for general-purpose PCs (Amiga, C64, etc.)... at some point you internalize the fact that there were people on different paths from yours who had experiences that were possibly just as good as yours were, but with completely different hardware and software, and it's sort of mindbending and profound even though of course this is basic and obvious information.

>>6429564
>>6429591
I can still vividly remember getting it for Christmas in like 1986-1987. It was a pretty big deal. We got the light gun pack-in with it which was also pretty cool. The interesting thing about the NES though was that it had pretty universal appeal. My dad loved playing Tecmo Bowl and Tetris, my uncle loved Duck Hunt. It was kind of similar to the Wii in that respect. People not into computers or games could pick it up easily and it had something for everyone (sports games, rpg, etc.). The software library was pretty robust.

As for owning games, we owned quite a few (most of which are still in a box in our storage unit). Typically, we only bought the "big name" franchise games like SM3, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc. However we rented a ton. I know I mentioned earlier that the amount of games available was robust but that doesn't mean they were all great. There were some truly shitty games that came out for NES but that was the beauty of renting. I don't know if its nostalgia or whatever but I recently played a few old NES games on my son's Switch and some of them are still as fun as I remember, like Double Dragon II.

>>6441236
Nice to see you're still a man of taste.

>>6429564
I was born in 80. We got a 2600 when I was about 5 from a garage sale. It was very long in the tooth at that point, but you could literally buy games for like 25 cents at garage sales or a couple bucks at some old drug store with stock that had a dozen markdown stickers on the boxes. It was fun and having probably 30 games meant you had many games to swap when bored. I think it was 1989 when I got an NES with Mario/Duck Hunt. I got it for Christmas and I distinctly remember my dad hooking it up to our old console TV. He had to use the spade connector to RF port adapter even. My dad was a really smart dude, worked on and with machinery of all types and even did inventory things with computers over telephone lines back then, which was nuts to me. He was paranoid as fuck that the NES would somehow fry the TV. TVs then were something you bought a really good one, and kept it for years and years. TV repairmen were a thing (which we took my 2600 to a few times when it stopped working). Just some background there. Anyway, he read and re-read the manual and was still hesitant to not mess something up, again, TVs were a major purchase back then and if you were going to have them for decades, you didn't want to fuck them up.

Anyway, I loved my NES and played the absolute fuck out of it. As a kid who got into playground fights a lot back then (usually defending some nerd getting their asses kicked by popular kids) I fell in love with Double Dragon II, Ninja Turtles, etc. All this was supplemented with actual outside play and going to the skating rink at least 3 nights a week. Dad was friends with the owner, so he would bullshit with him a lot. At said skating rink, there were arcade games, maybe 25 games total. Hella fun and I could usually bum a couple dollars of quarters over the night.

While NES was still THE thing, another friend's dad would rent him a Turbografx about twice a month for weekends. Continued...

>>6442468
I just lost a huge fucking novel here. The synopsis, played SMW at walmart (new in 1990, not the cesspool it is now), friend got a genesis with sonic, speed of the game was mind blowing. Cousins got a genesis, many years of fun with that, from toejam and earl to shining force to even sports games, it was hella fun. Got my own in 93, didn't get a snes until 95 or so once I had a part time job. Playstation came out and blew our minds again. Jampack demo discs were amazing, getting to try 10 games and watch videos of others was really novel at the time. Twisted metal, MGS, RE, all heavily played by us.

Sorry for the non detailed post, but was at limit and somehow fucking lost everything.

>>6429748
I wasn’t rich but I was also not allowed to go to the arcade. Too many fights and kids smoking cigs I guess. Played a lot of NES baseball at a friend’s house

>>6430056
>ms to me that the fun part about growing up during those times was the total mystery of games. If you or your friends didn't have magazines, you had to rely on rumors most of the time to figure certain things out. You didn't know what might be ahead of you in a game, how many more levels you had to
This is why it's so funny to us older folks when people bitch about "bombing every wall" "burning every bush". That shit and discovery was what made a game fun. It felt like all games had secrets and by finding the correct one you could somehow be transported into the game in real life. Of course this was just kids using their imagination, but discovering secrets was so rewarding. Finding a new warp pipe, hidden 1up, "negative world", Infinite 1up on level 3-1 of SMB was just so rewarding as a kid. Couple this with the fact that we actually used to socialize and talk about said stuff on the playground made for a really unique time.

To this day I don't use wiki unless absolutely necessary as I'd rather not "experience the whole game" aka min maxing and shit and actually just discover stuff on my own. I went through a period of reading guides and wiki whoring but I'm glad I realized how detrimental it was to gaming. Even figuring shit out on your own in fucking minecraft is part of the fun.