I remember a friend coming over to my house back in about 1985 and bringing a copy of The Heist for Colecovision to play. I recall it being pretty fun, very much in the vein of British and C64 8-bit microcomputer action games… except I’m pretty sure it came out before those platforms took off.
You run, evade traps… actually, I guess it’s more akin to Pitfall! than anything else, except you’re stealing art and stuff. I think.
I was intending to borrow the game from my friend, but I did something my parents didn’t like (I have no idea what; it’s all lost to the mists of time) and they sent him home along with his game. Who knows? Maybe this game would have changed my life, and I was denied a radical upheaval by a quirk of fate. Probably not, though. I should probably play the game again and decide for myself.
Do other people have near-miss experiences with dumb life ephemera that nags at them years later? Surely you must.
I rented Vagrant Story once, but it was so scratched up I could barely get it to start. Later, after saving the appropriate funds, I had a choice between buying that, or Wild Arms 2. Yep… went with the latter. Hey, I’ll be the first to defend the Wild Arms series, but I’m a huge fan of Ivalice/Matsuno, so not playing that game is a pretty big oversight. I purchased it on PSN recently, but…. life.
Many years before, I had a similar experience: after saving up months’ worth of allowance, I was set on purchasing FFVI from Funcoland (yeah, remember those?). The worker tried to convince me that FFIV was better, but nope. I wanted FFVI. And now. some 15+ years later, I’m a huge FF fan and IV is still the only major game in the series I’ve never played. And lord knows Square keeps giving me more options to try it…
These are the two that stick out in my mind, but it was normal for my limited allowances/money earned to force me into choosing between two games, some of which I’ve probably forgotten entirely.
I asked for Final Fantasy VIII for Christmas ’99… and then changed my request to Ape Escape at the last minute. I did play Final Fantasy VIII years later, but I think I would have appreciated it more as a 13-year-old.
That’s interesting. I tend to hear people “get” the game’s inner workings better when they’re older. Or do you mean the story?
One of those, I already wrote about in the Sega-Gamespite-Book – a friend wanted to get Thunder Force III from a rental place, but mixed it up with Phantasy Star III. He was hugely dissapointed and didnt really “get” the game. I was hooked (probably in large parts thanks to the awesome title-music) and offered to pay and take it of his hands. And so began a long love-affair with JRPGs.
And another one, although thats less spectacular:
I saved up the money to buy a used copy of the first Phantasy Star – I was ( and still am) a huge fan of the series. It was used, and it was cheap – in todays money, I guess, it would be about 20 Dollers. However, before I went to the story, I went to another place that was closer and saw, that they had Shining in The Darkness for pretty much the same sum. So I let myself be persuaded to buy that one instead. And so, I played my first dungeon crawler and drew my first own maps – a skill, that would be very helpful when tackling Phantasy Star I a few months later.
I remember being a very little kid at my cousin’s house, i think it must have been Thansgiving 88′, and I was hidden away in the basement with the other kids, natch.
In the corner there was a little color TV and the greatest thing I had ever seen: a Sega Master system playing OutRun ( I only found out what the game it was much later thanks to the internet).
My mind was blown. Truly blown. I had no idea games could look that REAL!
“Unfortunately” OutRun and I did not meet in time, as my mom had already purchased an NES as my Xmas present.
Bullet: dodged ^__^
Aw, Master System wasn’t bad. It just didn’t have the library to match the NES.
The game I wished I would have played as a young’un was Dragon Quest III and IV. I played the original tons of times and was the only one in my family to beat it (my brother, who’s character was a full 5 levels above mine still couldn’t do it), but I never moved past Dragon Quest II. I moved on to Final Fantasy I and then IV for the SNES, but I eventually played it when I started collecting NES games during the N64 days. At that time, the whole “retro” thing wasn’t in full swing and I was able snag NES games for $1-$2.
Anyway, I played them and loved them. Now I’m hooked and can’t wait for the next installment to come out. DQ IX was the only reason I bought a DS!
I had The Heist on the C64. It was one of those types of games I played as a kid where I would play it over and over again and really enjoyed myself, while at the same time never really making any progress. I probably never made it further than a minute or two into it. Awhile back my dad gave me an old C64 along with all the games we used to have, but it’s been packed up in a closet for a few years now. When I finally hook it up again this is one of the games I plan on loading up.
Let me know how it goes when you finally play it.
The original Zelda was one of mine. I’d wanted Zelda II, but I naively didn’t understand much about gaming at the time. When I heard the original had a “Second Quest”, I decided I wanted it, instead. Mom and Dad had already gotten Zelda II, however. I’m actually quite thankful for that, as it instilled in me a love for the game that perhaps would not have been there otherwise.
I did find the original some time later, and played it to completion. I never did finish that Second Quest, though.
@jparish (Sorry, I can’t figure out how to reply directly to your response) Yeah, in terms of the story. I had just gotten around to playing FFVI and VII and they both blew me away. These days I play RPGs for the mechanics, music, and general “vibe” but find it hard to pay much attention to the story unless it’s really something special.
Not quite the same, but this reminded me of the time I visited cousins of mine and they told me about their friend who had an imported copy of Super Mario Bros. 3. This was at the time when Nintendo Power was giving us little glimpses of the game but it wasn’t going to come out for some time. This friend was not home, he was on vacation with his family or something. So I was like “We could go into his house and play it, he wouldn’t mind, right?”
Main one I can think of is Saga Frontier 2. Loved the first one, warts and all, but consistently got stuck in 2 right at the beginning, for some reason. Eventually gave up and sold it, but that has bugged me for years, no idea why I couldn’t make any progress. Finally found it at a retro shop last month and bought it for too much money, put a few hours into it without any trouble, still not sure what my deal was. Stupid teenage version of myself, costing me money.
To this day, I have never played a Suikoden game. I almost bought a copy of the first game I saw at a pawn shop well over a decade ago, but I bought the PS1 Persona or Beyond the Beyond or some shit instead.
I can (and should) rectify that with the original game on PSN, though I’m afraid if I fall in love with it, I’ll be disappointed/annoyed when other games in the series cost a lot more on the aftermarket.
If I were to make a list it would number in the hundreds. . .but seeing as you went all C64, I’ll stick with that. I really want to go back and play Agent USA. Its still somewhere boxed up, I have to unpack my C64 and look through all my disks.
MetMan, Suikoden 1 & 2 are two of the finest RPG’s to grace any system, another gem is Vandal Hearts 1.
Way back when Suikoden II came out, a friend of mine convinced me not to buy it when I saw it for sale, arguing rather validly I had already purchased some other game the same week and won’t have time to play it. Fortunate for me I still found a new copy at the same Electronics Boutique months later for about $30.
Maybe more in line with this thread is the time my brother and I traded our copy of Bionic Commando for a used copy of Master Blaster. I have never sold or traded any of my game since then.
Earthbound. I chose Megaman X3 over Earthbound back when I was a teenager, and although I love the hell out of X3, the Great God Internet has convinced me that I would possibly have made an even better choice by spending my hard-earned cash on Earthbound lo those many moons ago.