Family & Friends places and gaming memories growing up

[Xeogred]

Thought this might be a fun thread, particularly with the timing of the holidays and the passing of another year coming up. Does the thought of a particular time or age in life, a specific person, home or area, spark any fond memories of iconic games in your life?

I kicked this off in another thread that dipped into a Zelda discussion:

Back in the day when you only had a few games at your disposal and families members had their own set of random games, I remember my dad's father and their family having Sonic 1, Metroid, and Zelda 2. It was an amazing combo and I always played those three when I was over there. I remember my uncles having passwords for Metroid so that was cool. I guess a perk to passwords is that you can't really mess up their playthrough or anything. But yeah I got lucky and was exposed to both the original two Zelda games right out of the gate before the SNES.

For whatever reason I don't remember being able to rent Metroid much, it was always out or something. I did a few times. Sonic 1, I have no idea why but I never saw around and like nobody else owned it, but everyone else and their dog owned Sonic 2. I think that was the only place I ever played Zelda 2 at until later when I started emulating and such. So all three games were this allured mystery until years later when I finally had access to them again via emulation or when I finally had my own money to spend.

I think Ocarina of Time was one of the first games I ever bought with my own allowance. I still own that gold cart and box to this day. Also kept the Majora's Mask complete box in great shape as well over the years.

I actually think... the two friends my parents had briefly when we lived in Tennessee, were the couple that introduced me to Zelda 1, then Star Wars, then Link to the Past the last time we saw them before we moved. Crazy tiny brief memories that set my whole world in motion haha.

The other two I can add to this are other Tennessee memories (for living there for only a year or two I sure do have so many great memories, maybe because I was 5 and started to develop awareness as a person or something? haha).

But I seemed to be one of the only kids at that age and for a long time that actually had an SNES. Just about all of my friends had a Sega Genesis instead and I remember one neighbor had Altered Beast, Ghouls' n Ghosts, and Golden Axe. Played those a lot over there (I don't remember playing with the kid much though? The kid ran into my face with his big wheel and knocked my front two teeth out, so I didn't like him much). Then these people disappeared and left a disastrous mess behind them in their rental home, like it was a rush to get out or they were on the run. The whole block was checking out their place and just in awe wondering what the heck happened, my parents and I took a look too. Maybe I should add that I lived on a military base back then.

Doug and Kenny were my cool neighbor friends, their parents were into X-Men, I crashed my bike with them and didn't ride it again until years later, and they had some of the best games ever. Kirby's Adventure on the NES... I remember getting up before them whenever I stayed the night and their mom would let me play games haha. I was generally really good at games back then so my friends would go to me to beat things. I beat that. But the best game they owned... was Shinobi 3. To this day it's the strongest nostalgia bomb in my data bank and the game has aged so damn well, I still freaking love it, it looks gorgeous, plays like perfection, and is my favorite Genesis soundtrack by miles next to Thunder Force 4. Any given track from that game takes me back instantly to being 5 years old in Tennessee, playing and being blown away by how epic this game was at the time. I remember briefly playing with Doug and Kenny at another kids house who had Streets of Rage 3, that was really awesome. I still liked my Super Nintendo more, but man I was exposed to some of the best of the Genesis early on.

Sadly Doug and Kenny moved, but then came Jay. Despite being in 4th grade when I was in Kindergarden, we somehow became friends for a brief stint haha. Jay actually had an SNES and Genesis, but the only SNES game I ever remember playing with him is Jurassic Park 2 The Chaos Continues. He owned Streets of Rage 2 though, and together with my help we were able to beat it. Jay was also the one who exposed me to Doom... there I was playing Doom at 5 years old, and absolutely loved it. Though we played with a roller mouse ball, hilarious to think about now. I remember the Spectre creeped me out a lot. I am guessing we were actually maybe playing Doom 2, because I remember us getting a few levels in (which was very far for us kids, playing on a mouse roller ball haha) and then there was some red bricks... and Chaingunners, took down Jay and it was over.

Moved to Missouri somewhere after that. But my love for Streets of Rage, Doom, and Shinobi 3 never faltered, along with Altered Beast and some other random ones. It was also in Tennessee where I got Donkey Kong Country and rented Super Turrican. I couldn't recall what Super Turrican was until many years later, because I forgot the name... but I never forgot the music and what the actual game looked like, and the awesome cover art. So it was cool when I pieced that together again years later with the help of the internet or something.

Ooops, post your novels here.

[Gunstar Green]

I have so many but one that comes to mind right now was playing Final Fantasy Tactics with my friends as a teenager.

I don't even really care for the game that much when playing it by myself, but we had this thing where we each had our own "character" on the team and we got to individually decide what that character did in the battle. We'd sit around goofing off and making up little stories about our characters like we were running some D&D campaign, just going on random battles and missions and ignoring the actual story for the most part.

It was so dumb but we had so much fun doing that.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Oh, I will be visiting this thread a lot! Love the stories so far so keep them coming!

A fond memory of mine was Christmas eve one year, my mom allowed my brothers and I to open one gift and one gift alone. We, of course, picked the biggest gift that was addressed for each of us from our rich aunt out in Rhode Island. It was a Gen 1 Sega CD packed with some music, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Vol. 1, Sol-Feace and the Genesis collection that had Golden Axe, Streets of Rage, Columns, and Revenge of Shinobi. My mom allowed us to hook it up and play for an hour before going to sleep. The first thing we fired up was Sol-Feace and were going crazy at the graphics and music.

After we packed everything up and went to bed, my brothers woke me up in the middle of the night and we snuck back down to play Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective Vol. 1. As a young kid, I was freaked out. The first case was about a, "Mummy," that murdered people. One of the people you interrogate is attempting to revive a dead monkey and of course failed miserably. In my dreams, that night he succeeded and I remember a mummified monkey dancing around in wrappings screeching to some Egyptian music. Horrifying!

[fastbilly1]

I have dozens I could type up, but the one most appropriate was in December of 1997, between Christmas and New Years. My older brother had a friend who lived around the corner who had just beaten Goldeneye and called us to come over and play with his cousin (since we had two controllers). Despite my brother having a fever, we went over. We got to his house at around 1830 and came in a window to his basement playroom/hangout space. They had three cushioned chairs and a metal folding, I got the metal folding, facing a 22inch TV/VCR.

They picked Bond, Trevelyan, and Oddjob as their characters. I was told I can only play a ? character so by chance I picked Siberian Special Forces. The first few rounds are a blur, I had never played it before and did not know the weapons. My brothers friend was, and still is, a dick in games and always chased me around with whatever the tier 6 weapon was. Then, after a match of Automatics in Stack, it all clicked.

Around 2300 they decided we should play a match to 100. So we started up Temple (my brothers favorite stage) with proximity mines. I figured out I could put them on the ammo boxes and they would disappear. Around kill 50 they outlawed that and placing them on spawns. Then I figured out, putting them on a gun someone dropped when they died and picking it up, just left an invisible mine. I got to kill 105 around 0100, the next highest was 85. I was told to never come back. Now that I think about it, that was the last time I played the N64 with that guy. On the walk back my brother was stoked that I beat him, since he was apparently undefeated before that.

Now, 20 years later, I still enjoy playing Goldeneye at Christmas/New Years, but I no longer play it competitively. I still fire it up with my older brother every once and a while, but he prefers Mario Kart 64 since we can play that with his kids.

[Xeogred]

It's so funny how similar Goldeneye stories are, despite the internet not really being a big thing quite yet. Proximity mines on the temple was something my friends and I always did too haha. Or with grenade launchers since it was so fun bouncing them off the walls in that level.

Stack was my favorite level all around I'd say. Or maybe it was Library that had both the upper and lower levels, whichever one had both. Always had some crazy Man with the Golden Gun matches on that level.

[fastbilly1]

I can go through so many Goldeneye stories, but I dont want to flood the thread. I would share some escapades from College with Ack, but hes not here right now to appreciate them.

More from my childhood. My mothers family goes on a big trip every year to the same beach. We have gone there pretty much every year since her father got back from WW2. We stay in the same condo place and it is a family reunion for the 80ish of us spread around the country. Back in the 80s, my oldest cousin had more NES games than anyone else I had ever heard of (which was probably like 20). There were many rainy days or nights where we tried to beat Metroid, Mario 1, Contra, Three Stooges, 1942, Spy Hunter, Mikey Mousecapades, Double Dragon, RC PRoAM, or Zelda. In 1988 I got Zelda as my birthday present as we were going down for that trip. When we got there, he helped me through the first and second dungeons. Those times will always be baked into my memories, like the first time I got to use the boomerang to pickup a rupee. I accredit the Zelda series as to why I love the Fantasy Genre, those times with my cousins only cement that.

This year we were down there when the NES classic was announced and stories were all shared about NES escapades at the beach. Like when the oldest cousin let me borrow Spy Hunter and I dropped it outside of our condo and it fell into the palmettos below. Or when the bulk of the kids were trying to beat Double Dragon with the new Advantage that the oldest cousin just bought the week before the beach. When we tried to play Three Stooges but one of the adults wanted to watch the Olympics. Sadly, Hurricane Matthew hit land at that condo complex and my older brother, who now lives in nearish it went by and alot of it was damaged. Its not ruined, but itll be different.

[ElkinFencer10]

I've got three great gaming holiday memories.

When I was a little kid - probably seven or eight years old - I got a Gameboy Color one Christmas. My mom got me the teal model and Pokemon Red Version. I vividly remember lying on the floor of the living room in the house we lived in at the time playing Pokemon, and the Gameboy kept turning off. I was so confused; in my small child mind, "the batteries are dying" never factored in. I asked my mom about it, thinking it was broken, and she said "Sweetie, you've been playing for hours; your batteries are probably dead." I was horrified, afraid that a "battery" was some integral part of my Gameboy that couldn't be replaced. Of course, when she went to the kitchen and got two AA batteries and replaced them for me, all was right in the world, but I remember vividly being so confused.

A year or so later - by this point, my mom had lost her job and we were in HARD economic times as a family - my mother, grandmother, and I were in Sarasota, Florida spending Christmas with my aunt. This Christmas had me CONVINCED that Santa was real. When I woke up on Christmas morning, I went into my aunt's living room to see a brand new Nintendo 64 sitting under the Christmas tree. My mom never let me know just how close to homelessness we were every month, but I did know that she had been without a job for eight or nine months and that we didn't have very much money. Of course, it never occurred to me that my aunt and grandmother would split the cost of my big "Santa" gift that year, so in my mind, my logic was "Mommy's really poor, and Nintendo 64s are expensive, so Santa HAS to be real!" It was basically the best Christmas ever.

Christmas of 2003 was the last GREAT Christmas for me for majorly significant gaming gifts. Unfortunately, I accidentally spoiled my Christmas surprise. About a week before Christmas, I was looking tirelessly for my slipper. I had just turned 12, and I had these awesome Homer Simpson slippers. I had one, but I couldn't for the life of me find the other one. I usually spent the latter part of the evenings before I went to bed watching TV with my mom in her bedroom, so I thought "Maybe my slipper is under mom's bed." Sure enough, there it was. And right behind it was a brand new indigo Gamecube. I immediately went back to my bedroom and pretended not to have seen anything, and I tried hard to make myself forget. Who would want that kind of an awesome surprised spoiled by pure happenstance? Well, I did remember, but it was still an AMAZING Christmas. My mom didn't realized that memory cards were a requisite thing by that point, so I couldn't save any of my Zelda progress (it came with the promo disc with the two NES games and two N64 games), but I got really good at the very beginning of the original Legend of Zelda.

[Niode]

Goldeneye was such an amazing experience I remember being forced to take turns using a racing wheel controller because we only had 2 real controllers and shitty third party controller that had a broken analogue stick which my Granddad helped 'fix' by filing a golf tee down fitting over the metal spike that was remaining of the analogue stick.

Our favourite mode was always Facility, Licence to Kill, Slappers only, no Oddjob. Nothing was as intense as that mode. Also remember playing a lot of Automatics and proximity mines on Temple. Strange that.

One of my favourite memories of video games growing up was playing Super Mario Bros on NES with my best friend at the time. We spent weeks playing it in 2 player mode beating it. I can still remember it vividly in my first house I remember growing up in, on the Sony Trinitron we had in the living room. My mother would play a lot of games on that NES, her favourites were Pinbot and Zelda. I remember there being something to do with holding down reset before turning the NES off otherwise it would wipe your save game sometime. Well my mother was pretty far in Zelda if I remember correctly she had just beaten Ghoma (I think) she left the NES switched on and went to make some food for me. My father turned the NES off to watch some TV. My mother went ballistic when she found out the save had wiped, practically chased him out of the house waving a frying pan. Moral of the story. Don't mess with my mother's Zelda game, especially one that had many hours put into it.

[Gunstar Green]

The only Goldeneye story I have is of my friend trolling his little brother. He'd put his health all the way down and put everyone else's all the way up and tell him we were playing "Left Eye Mode" and that the only way to kill someone was to shoot them in the left eye.

Needless to say everyone else was better at "shooting him in the left eye" than he was.

[foxhound1022]

Ahh, GoldenEye. Our thing was Pistols only - License to Kill, at either the Facility or Complex.

I remember we used to play a game with my one friend's little brother. We would give him the +10 health and we'd all set ours to -10. Then we would play a 3 on 1 where he was the "tank" and we would all have to try and kill him.

We would all die with like 1 or 2 shots and he'd take forever to kill. It was actually pretty fun, plus it gave us practice evading gunfire for when we played regular matches against each other.