RetroGaming

I dunno if it was a high per se, but I used to love playing Dreamcast with my friends at lunch every day in high school. I dunno if I long to do it again, but the memories are nice.

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.

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.

Playing Skate 2 for the first time on PS3 whilst blasting Fall Out Boy on my CD player.

seeing the world of DOOM Eternal. It's just so detailed and SO DAMN FUN!!

Wing commander 2. Full voice acted dialog running on a sound blaster at 16 bits and midi soundtrack, pre-rendered 3d graphics, in box loot, printed manuals, and a full on dramatic storyline. In terms of impact, nothing even came/ comes close. Truly the golden age. Now it's a game of diminishing returns. And $99 plus gacha and microtx, really? Really?

Ah, I also got Blue then Silver eh

Getting called out by my name in the literature club, or being told about how I could have used my superpower better in that other game. Two get-up-and-take-a-walk moments for me.

On a different tack, the introverted but social Unreal Tournament clan nights, Instagib with Relics. Played that to absolute death, clan nights with pizza and beers. Worms, too, with four people sharing a keyboard.

Lands Of Lore, Eye of the Beholder, BG1 and 2, etc. when solving a puzzle or finding a secret after being lost for hours.

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.

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).

Dragon Quest Builders 2. I'm not entirely sure why, but that game was crack to me from start to finish. I pretty much never bother platinum-ing games, and I went out of my way to for that one. It's especially funny since I'm not a fan of Minecraft at all. The game just had all the right ingredients to inject dopamine straight into my brain for the duration. The lack of a 3 sucks (and I tried the first one but didn't really like it that much).

Beating Battletoads on the SNES. So much time invested

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.

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