twiztor

Jurassic Park (SNES) must have been hugely popular. i grew up with the NES version, and whenever people would come over, that was one that they'd always point out and want to play. Once we got going, they were disappointed. I have always assumed it was because they expected the SNES game (or a reasonable port) and what they got was something completely different.

@Tabonga wait, what's the story on this? i am super interested: good interview as always, @Reed Rothchild. thanks for doing these!

gritty reboot

same result as @RH but different circumstances. we didn't grow up with many games, so what few we had were precious. that led to be very stingy with lending stuff out, usually only doing "trades" for a week or some other specific amount of time. the first time i didn't get something back, that all ended quick.

sad to see, even if i stopped using Netflix dvd by mail 4 or 5 years ago. it was a hell of a good deal for a long time, and i thought it (and it's later streaming service) were the best thing ever. finally found myself holding onto those discs for over a month at a time, then forcing myself to watch the movies just so i could send them back. now i live by the "one streaming service at a time" house rule. And since Disney+ has Marvel and Star Wars, it wins for the time being. Qwikster. lasted less than a month IIRC. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/qwikster-netflix-mistake_n_1003367

i'm not familiar with Trip World at all, but i think i'm in for that DX GBC cart.

Is this a joke thread piggybacking off the SMB3/SMW debate? agreed with @Tanooki. It is neither a long nor particularly challenging game. Per HowLongToBeat, Little Mermaid takes <45 minutes to complete, start to finish. (https://howlongtobeat.com/game/10052) i played through it for the first time in a couple decades last year or the year before, and can confirm that i breezed through it.

for destressing games, i can always pick up either the Legend of Zelda (NES) or Diablo 3 (PC). i've played through Zelda so many times that i could practically play it by feel. it is one of the few games i've purchased multiple times (NES x3, GameCube "Collector's Edition", Wii-U VC, Game & Watch). have beaten it on all of those systems multiple times. Many times i will sit down for a NES de-stress situation, start a new game, and find myself in the 7th dungeon before i know it. Diablo3 is a little bit of a different story. it is my go-to game to have too many drinks and just sit down for 4-6-8-10 hours and click away. It's a pretty easy game, but *just* engaging enough to keep me invested. Until i get too drunk and can't focus on the screen. for stressful games, i agree with @TDIRunner: underwater Sonic still freaks me out, even in the later games when they've expanded the time a lot. Hell, even in SMB when the timer gets below 100 and the music changes creates a small amount of panic in me. And whoever mentioned the EMMI sections of Metroid Dread are close (i would call it more tense than stressful, but YMMV) other than that, i don't really play a lot of stressful games. Frustrating, sure. But that's part of the charm. i could play a stressful part of a game, but if i found a game itself stressful, i probably wouldn't be playing it. just not what i'm interested in.

My brain is kind of done with video games right now. i haven't played one in about a month (outside of some Mario Kart with the wife) because i just can't seem to get interested in them. I had been going through Tomb Raider, and it started to wear on me. Tried switching to a couple different games, but just couldn't find the motivation. Hoping to change that one of these days- i want to complete my 2023 Backlog before i lose my life to Zelda TotK.

yes @AirVillain you're understanding correctly. the Virtual Console was for the Wii/Wii-U/DS/3DS systems. You could pay to download whichever individual titles you wanted to play. On the Switch, they introduced "Nintendo Online" which is a tiered, subscription-based system. You get access to a few dozen (not sure exactly how many, i don't subscribe) games and can play them anytime as long as you are connected. And yes, Nintendo Online is required for any online gaming.

holy shit, i never knew about that! awesome!!

@phart010 just an FYI, Nintendo extended the deadline for eShop codes until April 3rd, so maybe you can still get this after all? Not sure if it's relevant in this case, but wanted to make sure you saw the update. https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/03/nintendo-extends-code-redemption-deadline-for-wii-u-and-3ds-eshops

i always used to recommend "Alfred Chicken" for the NES when it was an easy $20 pickup. Now the price has climbed up around $100 and it is much harder to suggest. But since we're only picking one, that's my answer.

my personal rule was that i didn't want to be that old man. I had a kid on my little league baseball team whose dad was early/mid 50s when we were in grade school. i told myself that if i was going to have kids, i wanted to be <50 when they graduated high school. seemed like a reasonable enough (yet still plenty of space to work with) timeframe. Side note, i told the wife that i'd get a vasectomy at 40. what was i thinking? now i have to schedule that sometime in the next 6 months.

i turned 40 at the end of last year. it was a moment i had been dreading for over a year. Like, i seriously realized i was close to turning 39, which is almost 40, and i just had a hard time accepting it. At 40, i feel like you are officially old. you can't fool yourself into thinking you're young anymore. You are old. You just gotta deal with it.......Then i turned 40. Any my life proceeds just like it did before that date. I feel much better about the whole thing now. All that time spent worrying about it, and the result was no big deal. I've been together with my wife for 15 years and married for ~10. I was that guy in his 20s that was single while all of his friends were getting married and pregnant. I didn't necessarily want kids, but always assumed that i would end up with the right woman and we'd have some. Either way was fine with me. Met my future wife, she was 100% adamant about not having kids. Told me that very early on in our dating- she wanted to make sure that we would be on the same page so there would be no regrets or "what could have beens" in the future. I was fine with this, but also would have been fine if she had changed her mind (spoiler: she didn't). Not having kids has been great. i have plenty of friends and family around, so i was usually the 'cool uncle' who would play with the kids, get them all riled up, roughhouse with them, all that jazz. And when i was worn out, i could go home and just relax. Did i miss out on some of those moments like 'first words' and 'first steps' and 'watching them play baseball' and 'playing Mario with them'? obviously yes. but i'm totally fine with that. life is give and take. i've had plenty of fulfilling experiences that i wouldn't have gotten if i had kids. as for the "nobody to talk to" part, it's kind of up to you on how you want to handle that. Having real, good friends is a very solid approach. My wife uses this approach, with the added bonus that she gets along with her family well. Joining clubs/social groups/volunteering is a great way to kickstart some relationships. I've met some pretty awesome people over the years due to this. But online friendships are real too. Whether that be on message boards like this one, or online gaming, or other forms of social media, i rarely see this brought up. Don't overlook this option.

OMG this is amazing. huge Diablo fan here since the first game. i would be very interested, but like Gloves said, i would likely not be able to pay the price this would ultimately reach. Something like this doesn't have any sort of set price. It can vary based on popularity of franchise (good timing now, with D4 about to release!), uniqueness of item (1 of 2 is pretty damn unique), condition (looks like one of the points has chipped off, but otherwise looks good), and other factors. Whoever ends up owning this (whether you are able to keep it, or sell it off to a lucky collector) will be legendary. It doesn't look like you've followed up on Reddit? r/diablo and r/gamecollecting would be my starting points. if you're just trying to offload it, Facebook marketplace would work. eBay is always an option. If you're able to authenticate it somehow, heritage auctionhouse might be able to raise some awareness. Then again, if you have a number in your head, feel free to PM me here or on reddit (twizt0r)

first 3d game i remember playing was Doom. It was in my school's computer lab, so while i enjoyed it, i never really spent all that much time with it. pretty crazy that we got away with playing it at all. I remember it getting uninstalled and deleted multiple times, but somebody kept reinstalling it. i'm sure the teachers were none too happy. but, the first 3d game that i owned was Mario 64. and it blew my mind. You see, i mainly skipped over the SNES/Genesis generation at the time, so i was jumping from NES to N64. it was unbelievable. OOT was a similar experience a year or two later. i never got that same feeling from the early PS1 games. i knew i wouldn't be alone in this experience, but reading through the thread really made me realize what a communal experience this was.

my dad loved liver & onions. but his wife hated it, so he only got it once a year. i had to have it at one point. i think he was just hoping to have an ally. didn't happen. nasty. i have never tried to eat liver again, nor will i ever, and i'm still not a fan of onions.

beat my first Virtual Boy game today! Wario Land plays very similarly to Wario Land for the Game Boy, but is its own wholly different game. same style of platforming, focus on coin collecting, and a similar level of difficulty (that is to say, fairly minimal). this being the Virtual Boy, however, adds 3d effects- which largely just means that you play on two planes: the foregrand and the background. this was later used on one of the newer Donkey Kong Country games. anyway, fun game. i'm liking this series so far. for those keeping track at home, i collected all 10 treasures, about 13,000 coins, and it took around 4 1/2 hours.

i really wasn't familiar with the game at all. i just kind of assumed it would be pretty easy due to it being such a flagship title that everyone seemed to have. nowhere near the hardest game i've played, but certainly more difficult than i expected. caught me by surprise as much as anything. i feel like if i had this growing up, i would have been able to beat it by sheer determination (and a lot more gaming time than i have now!) but it's hard to say because i was never a great gamer as a kid.

@MegaMan52have you played Mighty No. 9, and if so, what are your thoughts?

Crash Bandicoot (PS1) for a 1st gen 3d platformer, this is a very innovative and engaging game. it was fun to play and exciting to see how it pushed the ps1 to its limits. that being said, this game is fucking WAY harder than i expected. based on its reputation and de facto spot as Sony's console representative, i expected a straightforward 3d platformer. I WAS WRONG. this is challenging in a lot of ways reminiscent of the NES. plenty of trial-and-error, leaps of faith and straight up aggregation await you. play to win at your own risk. the saving/password system is amongst the worst i've experienced. i'm not ashamed to admit that i beat every level legitimately, but used passwords i found online to bypass the bullshit saving mechanism. has Crash become an icon of ps1 gaming? yes! but any gamer who can beat this game has earned his or her accolades as well.

my PC, the one i'm typing on right now, still uses these. had to replace the mouse a few months ago and moved to USB, but i'm still on OG keyboard. damn, now i had to research what computer i have is. Gateway DX4860 Windows 7 Date First Available, November 02, 2011

but from this argument, is there "one single person on the planet who doesn't already know that" Super Mario Bros 3 is Super Mario Bros 3 (aka Super Mario Advance 4)? like, the entire name is still in the title of the re-release.

count me as the exact same audience as @RH. while i like and appreciate what F-Zero is (and the more years that go by, the more i appreciate the series, even if i'm not great at it!), my first exposure to this type of racer was Extreme-G, which i immediately fell in love with. that said, i do wish the series would continue.