RetroGaming

I feel like I almost completely missed out on PC gaming from the late 80s to the early 2000s. I played a few mil-sim games from Novalogic and Jane's but that was about it.

I wasn't exposed to an FPS until half-life was a few years old. My first real gaming PC was built for Half-Life 2.

I totally missed Doom, Quake, Descent, Diablo, System Shock, Deus Ex, Wolfenstein, Fallout. I didn't even know about Elder Scrolls, Myst, Riven, Maniac Mansion (or any of the other Lucasfilm or Tim Schafer games like it).

I did catch some lower spec games like Sim City, StarCraft, Worms, etc., But it seemed like none of them really caught my attention longer than a few hours. I was mostly interested in SNES and PS1 around that time I guess.

I found an SNES Mini on eBay that they stuffed with EVERY ROM from Atari to SNES (and then some). My wife and I just beat Donkey Kong Country 2 yesterday. That's one I had missed back in the day. If you're interested in seeing what you missed out on, I HIGHLY recommend! So much fun!

Morrowind was earth shattering when it came out. It looks like ass compared to today’s games but at the time we’d never seen anything that looked that good, with that epic scale of a world, before. It was magical.

I wish i had Minecraft as a ten year old. By the time it came out my i interests were shifted to all the Call of Duty clones and action games.

Agree completely. Feel like I missed the boat on Elder Scrolls, but would have loved it as a kid/teenager.

While I think it would have been easier to get into FF7 at the time of release, I did try at that time, and actually never finished it until maybe 6 years ago. I had played 4-6 and subsequently 8 multiple times, but 7 never grabbed me the same way. I know it’s a bit of a “you had to be there at the time” game, but I don’t think being there at the time guarantees enjoying it either.

I played it as a kid using gameshark because my dad just got me one so I used it on everything I played..

Took the challenge out of it, but thinking back kid me would've been stuck somewhere somehow..

Didn't think it was all that tho, I liked Suikoden better still..

The one sure thing I've picked is my girl preference since then has been Tifa Lockhart like haha

My friend lent me his copy of FF7 PC, and I tried playing it -- albeit after I played earlier FF games.

There were two problems. First, it was...kinda weird compared to earlier games. Sure, the steampunk vibes began in FF6, but we didn't have Literally An Evil Megacorp and Literally Eco-Terrorists fighting over Something That Feels A Lot Like An Analogy For Nuclear Power. That was a whole nother level. Nothing wrong with this per se, but it just felt like something quite different. Neat, but just not the same FF I was used to.

But, perhaps more importantly, the game just kept crashing. I kept going as far as I could, but the game just wouldn't progress past the introduction to the Gold Saucer.

Earthbound is such a great game. I didn’t have a lot of snes games as a kid so this one kind of eluded me at the time but I just recently played it and loved it. I did not like JRPGs as a kid (still don’t but was able to still enjoy it as an adult) so maybe it’s for the best I had to wait to experience it

I went back and played (and beat) Super Metroid finally a few years ago. It was an amazing experience that I'm sorry I missed out on as a kid, but I don't think I would have had the patience to beat it then. I ended up on a Metroid binge after that. Played the Samus Returns remake and Dread, and am currently playing the Prime remake. I think Metroid has been stuck in niche consoles for so long a lot of folks haven't been exposed so I appreciate the remakes.

I think there's something to be said that there's a certain level of intellectual maturity that's needed to truly enjoy these games.

I grew up with NES Metroid, and despite having read the manual many times over, as a kid I never made sense of the game. I could play it, I could insert the Justin Bailey code, I could move around and do stuff, but I never truly understood what I was meant to do. I stumbled into Tourian one day and promptly got pwned by metroids, and then I never found my way back until I was an adult.

The second metroidvania game I played was Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. Maybe it's an easier game -- it's certainly less confusingly open-ended than Metroid 1 -- but I absolutely loved the experience. I deeply appreciated the narrative journey of being trapped in this castle, full of weirdness and twisty passages that were slightly off from each other, having the mid-game bombshell dropped on me, and piecing together a mystery until I was able to find out what was going on. I played it all night, and in a story I like to tell people, the morning after I beat it (and finally got the best ending), as the sun came out, I put on the Aloha de Chocobo music from Final Fantasy IX and it was the most glorious feeling. But this depended on me understanding that I was immersed in a maze, and understanding what I needed to do to find my way out of the maze.

And I've been enjoying this genre since.

I was fortunate to own Crystalis when I was young, but didn't actually beat it until I was a teenager. The GBC port was supposedly bad. Never played it. But the NES game is criminally not well known.

Take it from someone who was around back then, you didn't really miss much. The NES revitalized video gaming and brought the industry back from near-death, but the SNES/Gensis era was truly the golden age of gaming. Maybe because the tech NES was so limited or something, but most of the early franchises back set the stage for greater heights, but other than Super Mario 3 nothing is really worth going back to. Zelda, Super Metroid, Sonic, Final Fantasy, Mega Man X, Contra, Tetris, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Castlevania, Phantasy Star, Chrono Trigger, Mother 2/Earthbound, F-zero, Star Fox, Donkey Kong, etc etc etc etc all REALLY got their start, and became what they are today, in the 90s with the SNES and Genesis

I only remember that system having a cool looking racing game, and that game where the kid bonks stuff with his giant head.

Those games were super expensive back in the day too!

I was just the right demographic and everything for Halo. Had an Xbox. Had the game. Had 4 brothers to couch co-op with. Was a weird backwards military-obsessed family.

Played it a bunch. A BUNCH. But while I enjoyed it, it didn't really leave any kind of impression. I thought its story was shallow and its characters unremarkable caricatures even at age 13. Years later when I saw people going on about how DEEP its world-building was and how BADASS Master Chief was and how ICONIC the game was I was just kinda...nonplussed? Whole game was just mediocre to me. I mean, that's not to say I didn't like it or whatever, but it wasn't groundbreaking for me the way it was for (apparently) many others.

Make of that what you wish!

I didn't really grow up with it as others but I think I got into it enough that I can try and answer you.

So, the first one was the first game to figure out FPS in consoles that really took off (most likely the first one to do it, but you never know, I might stand corrected). Some people will point out to Goldeneye on the N64 but I really doubt any game was playable on that three pronged controller let alone an FPS.
I remember they did some trickery with the aim to compensate for the stick as an input method, and they also set up the two weapon limit which is now a staple.

Another aspect is the multiplayer, which was great both as a couch split-screen and online; you also had the forge so you could get creative with it.
You know, if you're having fun with your friends that's all it takes to fondly remember everything that came with it, and a videogame can play that role, whether it's actually good or bad.

As for the story, I'll admit the mainline story was just fine for me, not lacking for the kind of game that it is, but halo reach on the other hand really struck a chord with me.