/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.1421498]

What got you into retro gaming, /vr/?

I was a child of the N64/PS1 generation (born '92), but when I was in 1st or 2nd grade, I played SNES at a friend's house and I really liked the graphics/2D gameplay (I didn't understand that it was older). My Grandparents got me one for Christmas that year. Not too long after that, Super Smash Bros. came out and I was intrigued reading the character bios and seeing that all of those "N64 characters" had originated in SNES or NES games. I got an NES the following Christmas. A few years later, the Sonic Mega Collection game out, and I decided I wanted to get the real deal so I got a Genesis not too long afterwards.

>pic related: the game that started it all

[Anonymous No.1421643]

Back then it was just called gaming.

[Anonymous No.1421745]

Contra. I never really looked back but after beating Contra I pretty much reignited my love for retro games.

[Anonymous No.1421749]

I got a hand-me-down NES from my aunt and uncle along with SMB/Duck Hunt, Mario 2, and a copy of Batman NES that didn't work.

But it was cool, because my other cousins had Batman NES and River City Ransom.

[Anonymous No.1421791]

Now this is the story all about how
my life got flipped turned upside down
and I'd like to take a minute just sit right there
I'll tell you how I got my Nintendo Entertainment System out of thin air

In europe born and raised
in the living room where I spent most of my days
chilling out maxing relaxing all cool
and all shooting some lasers outside of the nintendo scope tool
when a couple of parents said "We're up in no good"
started making trouble in my childhood
I needed to redo one little school year and my mom got scared
and said "We're moving without your nintendo and that's all fair"
I begged and pleaded with her the other day
but she packed my backbag and sent me on my way
she gave me no games all I got was a school bus ticket
I put my glasses on and said "I might as well kick it"
first years yo this were bad
but then came emulation and everything started getting rad
is this what the people without a console are living like
hmm this might be alright

[Anonymous No.1421820]

I mainly got handed down hardware and only got a handful of newer games that couldn't even run on my own computer. Older games were cheap/free so I generally stuck with them.

[Anonymous No.1421840]

>>1421498
>When I was in first or second grade
2000 or 2001
>My grandparents

Wow I feel old as fuck - and this guy's the same age as my wife.

Wait now I feel cool again. Whew. Close one.

[Anonymous No.1421853]

was born in 79, family had a 2600 as far back as I can remember, first game I remember playing is Pacman for 2600. got a NES close to it's release. the newest system I've owned/played is a Wii. don't even own a HDTV.

[Anonymous No.1421886]

A combination of being older, from a poor-ish family, but also just tech savvy enough to learn how to use emulators back in 1998. Plus I was never into the PS2 or XB or their successors so I got more or less left behind to play my mostly old Sega and Nintendo games when everyone else was gushing over Halo and Grand Theft Auto.

[Anonymous No.1421905]

I grew up on the games my dad used to play. I have a huge collection of NES games and SNES games and a decent assortment of PS1 games. Some of the games like Final Fantasy 6 and Earthbound and Chronotrigger I never play because they still have my dad's original saves on them, and he loved those games.

[Anonymous No.1421990]

I got a SNES for my 3rd birthday in '92, and I just didn't stop playing it. It saddened me greatly when I could no longer get SNES carts outside of yard sales. Then when I was 11 or 12, I learned I could just download most 2D games and play them on my PC for free.

When I was 15 or 16 I spliced a USB cable onto a couple Xbox controllers and started taking an old IBM laptop out with me so my friends and I could play games wherever. Had some great times just out of highschool, driving around in a van, finding secluded spots in the woods, smoking a bunch of pot, and sitting indian-style in the back with my friends playing 2D fighters for hours with the laptop plugged into the tape deck in my '95 Safari. I had been into 80s/90s games or most of my life at this point, but I never had quite the same bonding experience with them. Whenever I bust out the laptop for some MAME at a party, the friends I was hanging with just out of highschool, to this day, always say something like "Dude! I miss the van days."

[Anonymous No.1421991]

You know actually looking back I got a Sega Genesis mid to late in the console's life and only had that and a Pentium 90 Dell for gayman until the Dreamcast came out. Haha fuck man was that a huge leap. But yeah I wonder if I still resent the bleeding edge all these years later. Also I'm a shooter guy mostly and I hope we'll all agree FPS passed some kind of peak not long ago and is a degenerating genre. It's a slow collapse but I can't really think of any soon to be released FPS games I'm excited about. CS:GO is world class IMO, and Deus EX: HR was able to kinda meet expectations but if you go back and look at the first and it's multiplayer contempories like Quake III it's kinda clear it just isn't there anymore fellas. The state of the FPS genre, and how it got to where it is so we're within the rules, would be a great topic for another thread.

The general nostalgia you feel when you boot up some old PC game is some real misty eyed shit, for me at least. Not even specific nostalgia for my childhood cause I was playing kiddie shit until I was a teenager but just for the time and state of the technology industry in general.

[Anonymous No.1421996]

>>1421991
cont.

Yeah I know there was no 4chan and porn took forever to download but it really felt like back then there was this overarching excitement that's gone now, collectively we were all so into these awesome new things, as a society. I like to imagine it was similar to the early days of flight, when Charles Lindburgh landed EVERYONE came out to see, he had his picture in every newspaper in the country and people were just INTO it. Those who couldn't afford to fly still looked on and cheered as mankind strode into a new age. Think back to the dotcom boom, the rise of Microsoft, Napster, before Google was creepy, we were really living in a very different phase at that point. Those old games are probably the best way to viscerally relive the starry eyed first days of The Computer Age. Not to shut yourself away and grumble about how much better it used to be, but to remember that spirit, remind yourself of the incredible novelty of technology as not to lose sight of it in the face of the feminist assault on the tech workforce, the NSA, tablet computers and all the other shit that makes you wanna say fuck it I'll go be a mechanic.

[Anonymous No.1422013]

Uhh... Nothing? I've always enjoyed good games and good games don't suddenly become irrelevant when they reach a certain age.

[Anonymous No.1422020]

>>1421498

Woah, are you me? Very similar story, born 91 had a n64 & gbc by the time i was in first grade. Moved into a new area and invited around by a neighbours kid who was into gaming as much as me. At the time i was stuck on one of the parrot levels on DKL2 he goes "oh, ive got that game on super nintendo that levels easy" He beats it for me, pushes his n64 aside, pulls a snes out of his closet and sets it up with DKC2. It was the first time i had seen a snes or a 2d game on the tv. I had no idea it was older and thought the games (smw,yoshi, & dkc's) were way better than the n64. Some time that week, i picked one up at a cash convertors with a tonne of games for $25AU. Then a little bit later i got a nes.

Thanks Tom

[Anonymous No.1422131]

Thanks for making me feel old as fuck, /vr/

[Anonymous No.1424540]

>>1421643
This.
It's not retro gaming to me, it's just gaming. Retro just happened over time. Modern age of gaming pretty much meant there was no reason to bother newer consoles anyway since they're pretty shit (the games not the consoles, not that the consoles are amazing hardware or anything)

[Anonymous No.1424570]

I've never entirely stopped playing old games. For a while, during the 2000s, the only old games I replayed were 16bit JRPGs, but now I'm back to enjoying old platformers, too. My skills are now even superior to what they were, though I'm still not great.

[Anonymous No.1425737]

Well, when I was little my parents were always playing NES games. We got a Super NES when it came out. We got a heck of a lot of games back then.

But then I became an adult and buying games was up to me so after a PS2 (which I bought because I could also play PS1 games on it) I haven't gotten a new console because I can't justify spending money on games. So I replay my old games by default. They're fun so I'm okay with it.