the biggest game related gripe of your childhood

[thespyisdead]

At around 9, my step father bought me my first lego set, which happened to be star wars related ( it was the craft from Hoth, that took the walkers down). sometime later i really got into lego, and decided, that i wanted a lego star wars game, but to my dismay, there was none at the time. several years later there was one released, but i grew out of the phase, and thus wasn't that interested in it


which brings me to my gripe that i have with my gaming childhood: not being able to enjoy the lego star wars when i wanted to

with that said, what us your gripe?

 

[MajorTomServo]

My dad had a playstation, but no memory card. I had to play everything from the beginning every time.

Plus, I was only allowed an hour at a time. I've played level 1-1 of Blasto so many times...

 

[SomeLameStuff]

That I never got past world 1-2 of Super Mario Brothers.

Not because I didn't know how to play, mind you. But because the music freaked me out and I was terrified about making jumps over pits...

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

I've had a couple of gripes during my child and teen years about games that I was interested in, but was unable to purchase them because I chose not to be a spoiled brat and earn my own money. Obviously, things like school, friends, and girls came up, so I ended up spending a good chunk of my money and purchased games that I was truly interested in playing (i.e. Jak 3, Kingdom Hearts 2, Pokemon LeafGreen, etc.). So there were a lot of games that I wanted to purchase, but did not have a fixed income to do so.

Now that I'm older, I still have the desire to purchase and play all those games of yesteryear and I do so now. The only problem is that some are ridiculously hard to find or incredibly expensive to purchase, but I'm a patient man. If I can get a nearly mint conditioned complete set of Legend of the Dragoon for under $30, the others should be a piece of cake.

 

[WoW Killer]

That so many quality SNES titles didn't come out in Europe.

 

[jbassic]

The one level in crash bandicoot where you have to run away from that massive boulder...

 

[Swyftstar]

I don't think I had any back then. The rest of my life sucked so bad I was just happy I could play games.

 

[Dragoon]

I didn't get to play a handheld Pokemon game until I was 10 despite being a massive Pokemon fan, the Christmas I got both Ruby and Sapphire was the best in my young life

 

[GTwander]

I has a game for the NES called Startropics, one of my all-time favs, but it had the first incarnation of security devices (pre-DRM and serial keys) where you had to answer a question about a security code HALFWAY through the damned game. If you don't have said code (which is universal, but only printed in the booklet), you can't progress. This was to force rental users to buy the full game, because they usually didn't come with the booklets - or they'd end up missing... like mine did.

So at some point I even had to call one of those hotlines where you pay my the minute (a nintendo one) in order to ask for that code. This was all pre-internet.

 

[Doitpow]

Sticklebrix...
assymetrical motherfuckers

 

[Rawne1980]

E.T.

Ask anyone who had an Atari 2600 why...

It's too painful to talk about.

 

[Diablo2000]

Never being able to play DnD with my older brother and sister... Fucking sucks being the youngest.

I don't really had any videogame related gripe in my childhood, now I have a ton of them.

 

[SonOfMethuselah]

When I was about 5 or 6, I got a Sega Genesis for Christmas. Not too long after that, I bought a copy of Shining Force from a local pawn shop with tooth fairy money I'd been saving. It was the first game I ever purchased for myself. The second would be Majora's Mask.

Anyway, there was something wrong with this particular cartridge, and while it had saves already stored on it, presumably from whoever had owned it before me, and would PLAY just fine, you couldn't actually save your game. I never managed to make it past the first half-dozen battles. In fact, I played through them so much that, when I bought Sonic's Sega Genesis All-Stars Collection for the PS3 a couple of years back, I still remembered word-for-word every line every NPC would say in that first stretch of the game. Everything after that was totally new to me. Which, in a way, was nice. It was almost like playing it for the first time again.

But yeah, any situation where, for whatever reason, you can't save your progress? I feel your pain.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

I'm Australian. Growing up, not only was EVERY game obscenely overpriced ($100 for new Super Nintendo games) but we didn't even GET half the good games that we heard about coming out overseas (the PS1 era was particularly cruel if you were a JRPG fan).

 

[II2]

Let me risk posting against the grain in a complaining thread by only stating positives.

When I was a little kid, my tastes were not discerning. I enjoyed videogames because they WERE videogames and videogames were fun to play. Everything was novel and even lower quality titles I still found great enjoyment in, both for lack of broader exposure and my wild young imagination nicely complimenting the limitations of the graphics and gameplay.

Interestingly, I was able to conceptualize as a child many types of games I WANTED to play, but didn't, or couldn't with the technology of the time, exist. Most of the imagination existing by way of either taking a game that I liked and developing the idea further, IE from Tanks and Scorched Earth to (now) Worms and Cortex Command, or, by thinking of something I wanted to be able to DO in a game, that I couldn't.

It's been an incredible ride and I've lived to see many of my desires realized in ways I'd never have expected.

<3 Games 4 Life.

 

[CannibalCorpses]

Well i grew up on the Vic 20 and commodore 64 era of gaming and my biggest gripe is that the games were so hard they have made playing modern games seem far too easy.

Another gripe is that Rockman is impossible to find and i want to play it again damnit! I never did manage to finish it and i want to sort that out...boulderdash just isn't the same!

 

[Z of the Na'vi]

"Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! Hehehehehe..."

[sub]These little bastards were the bane of my childhood, playing Spyro the Dragon way back when.[/sub]

 

[Veylon]

Biggest gripe? The physical architecture of the NES. Every other cartridge system before and since had cartridges that went in the top where the wires on the system and the ones on the cartridge could scrape each other clean. Even the Japanese NES had that feature.

But no, the American NES's had a springy setup where the cartridge would very gently interface with the system and the slightest film of grime would make it inoperable. So there was a never-ending amount of blowing into cartridges (because we knew no better), flashing multicolored screens, and teary childish pseudo-cussing.

Nintendo stamped out something like a hundred million of these frustrating gray boxes before they (finally!) made a sanely designed NES available in my country. But I never got one.

 

[scorptatious]

"Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! Hehehehehe..."

[sub]These little bastards were the bane of my childhood, playing Spyro the Dragon way back when.[/sub]

For some reason, I found myself enjoying chasing those guys around. Not sure why.

One of the worse things about that game to me was probably the Toasty boss level. The music creeped me out. And the dogs. Dear god the dogs. I founded myself freaking out whenever they pounced on me.

The living trees and blue frogs from that one swamp level also freaked me out as a kid.