For me it was playing Dungeon Master on Atari 520st in 1987. Well past midnight, deep inside the dungeon, I step past a corner and stand face to face with a giant scorpion and almost shit my pants.
I know this probably won’t get seen much now, but man that game has a special place in my heart.
Starting with the original Zelda game, my mother and I always beat them together.
We were very poor, but she always did what she had to do to get us the latest Nintendo console. She worked as a dog groomer leading up to the release of the Nintendo 64. She would be gone for 12 hours at a time, working for below minimum wage (under the table) just to get us that console.
She got Ocarina of Time for my brother and I for Christmas. She was just as excited to play it as we were, but there was no way my dad was going to let us open a Christmas present early. We only got one big present to share, and two small presents. Sometimes if my dad had saved a decent amount, we’d get the large present (usually a game), and then we’d get something that we really wanted that we didn’t have to share.
I begged my mom, she begged my dad. He wouldn’t budge. In the weeks leading up to Christmas though, she broke. She came to me with her plan. We were going to open it every day when he went to work and play it until an hour before he got home.
By the time Christmas rolled around, we were in the forest temple. He didn’t play games so he didn’t have a clue.
It was so much fun sneaking that game out with my mom and my brother. It was so much fun. Seeing how big it was for the time, we literally couldn’t believe our eyes.
Is OoT my favorite game of all time? Not anymore. It is my favorite memory of a game though, and by a long shot.
Edit, for fun.
It meant so much to me that the only boxes I still have from my childhood are my Zelda and N64 boxes.
Goated mom
As a kid with controlling parents? Fantasy and science fiction were always my escapes. When we finally got this game it was my everything. Little did I know the sequel had already been out for a while. I still have so much of the game memorized. Every few years I pull out the n64 and play it again…
What a wholesome memory. “Making do” can be really hard, but it also makes things like this feel that much more meaningful.
Haha I didn’t even notice that it was you again. Man.
Keep rocking, bro. Thank you.
<3
I got the master sword in TotK around release and wasn’t spoiled on the context of it. It was really cool.
god getting to the light world forest for the first time in link to the past was a dream. the way the shadows hit everything
then going up to the master sword area and seeing all the animals go across while it was eerily quiet <3
Take me back
I recommend Tunic if you want to be 8 years old again.
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Beats just having it handed to you by an old man!
What makes the OoT animation a bit cooler is that Link is older after the animation, like the beams hide him from your view and after the flash of light, he grew old (and everything else changed as well, but you only see that after leaving the cathedral)
Which seems weird when you think about it. Has he been passed out there for 7 years? How did he stay alive? Where did he get clothes that fit?
The sages used their advanced technology to send Link into a divergent timeline but had to massively simplify their explanation for refugee child living in the woods.
So does he have memories of the past 7 years or did he just take the place of the adult Link in that timeline?
I like to think that his memory is linear and if he goes from (a) young to (b) adult and back to © young, his knowledge goes from a ➡️ a+b ➡️ a+b+c. So, his age is sort of irrelevant.
And that is why he’s called the hero of time.
I’m with you on this one.
And why can he not use the Kokiri Sword as a dagger? It’s like he’s not even trying
I imagine he could, but why would he? He’s got a perfectly good sword right there!
Even as a silent GIF I hear something like this masterful rendition of the song play in my mind’s ear.
Mmmmmmmmmm
And OoT still holds up. Gameplay still feels pretty modern even if you play it today unlike most games on the N64 and PSX. Even the single analog stick controls with z-targeting hasn’t really aged much. Also OoT and Majora’s are still my favorite Zelda games, the non-Switch mainline games after the N64 era just feel derivative with gimmicks slapped on top to make it feel new even tough it still the same quests for the same items you gather in the same type of settings with the same kind of dungeons. Wish they just followed Majora’s Mask and completly mixed the gameplay up for every sequel, instead of rehashing LttP and OoT in a different theme. While BotW and TotK are a breath of fresh air and they are great games, they lack that Zelda magic and feel more like sandboxes where you can fuck around rather than an epic adventure in and they lack proper dungeons.
What’s the best way to play Majora’s Mask nowadays, PC emulator or like 3ds? I don’t have original hardware
TotK lacked proper dungeons
How?
The Ship of Harkinian PC port makes it even better. Free camera controls alone is a vast improvement!
The divine beasts and temples aren’t proper dungeons?
I liked them, but it felt like going to the same place over and over again once you were in there. (Which is why I’ve never finished Phantom Hourglass).
I absolutely loved the world around them though, and the lore of the characters.
I haven’t played Tears of the Kingdom.
I’m currently playing Wind Waker again.
There are some differences between BotW and TotK, but they are fairly similar. I’m still playing TotK, but I’m enjoying it. The biggest difference between the two was a great addition, imo.
I’m also replaying OoT. My son is excited to see the game that goes with the music he loves.
Half baked, maybe
Which is how I describe most Nintendo sandbox games in their entirety…
What makes a dungeon full baked?
Having more than five minutes worth of content.
Lucky you. I only had Lee Carvello’s Putting Challenge. I kept hitting the ball in the parking lot.
should have picked putter instead of power drive
Would you like to play again?
I have selected no
Meanwhile 8year old me with a ps1 seeing this for the first time and thinking I can never be happy again
playing aerith’s theme during jenova life T__T
Too soon
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/299/
Why didn’t you just use a Phoenix Down on her? Are you a monster?
i used the last one to one shot the cave of the gi :(
well, did you ever be happy again?
Yes, but only after I collected the Knights of the Round materia just to watch the minute and an half animation of them beating sephiroth’s ass.
Me, but when I gave the stripper money in Duke Nukem 3D.
Shake it, baby!
“I got time to play with you!”
“Uhh, shake it, baby!”
You wanna dance?
Me having my first ‘open world’ experience with TES Oblivion and not enjoying it until my inner monologue suddenly switches from “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do” to “I can go anywhere. I CAN DO ANYTHING!” and then I am slaughtered by the guard for trying to kill the nearest random peasant.
-Sometime in 2007
The chicken snitches you
First time playing oblivion, still in the tutorial/intro. Grab the first bow and arrow laying a few meter from a well. Of course the only targety looking thing is the well’s bucket. Hit the bucket, it swing, cool. The bucket stop swinging and behold! It is now tilting on the side where the arrow is stuck in. Coming from Morrowind I had lots of gripes with oblivion, but that first arrow in the bucket feeling has been in my mind forever.
I remember the bucket, but my moment actually came about a minute later. A skeever runs towards me and jumps at me. I put my shield in front of me. The shield shakes, the skeever dies and its body ragdolls down some steps. The bucket was an amazing technical achivement, but the shield thing made me immersed in the world.
Same but the 80’s and you picked up the first Triforce.
6 days after Christmas to find and beat the first dungeon without the internet? Sounds about right.
See, to me it was more like the first level of Panzer Dragoon in 95, because yeah, I was that guy.
By 1998 it took a lot to blow my hair back, though. I’m not saying it was a better game, but FFVII had been out for a year, and Quake 2, Half-Life and MGS had come out already. Things had changed.
But hey, the good news is by the time I did get around to OOT, later and through emulation, I still thought it held up alright, even if I’m not on the same “best game ever” boat as a lot of people.
Were you older? Might be that that if they were younger and didn’t have a computer to play they just wouldn’t have the same context.
Differing opinions between generations can be largely boiled down to nostalgia and someone’s age during that period informs greatly how much they could even experience prior to [thing] to compare.
Yeah, I was in my teens and by the time the N64 came out I had a gaming PC with a proper GPU in it. Between that and the N64 launching quite late over here (and doing pretty terribly) I definitely had a different experience than all the “Nintendo SixtyFoaaaar!” kids out there.
But there are levels to it. Coming at it dispassionately in those circumstances I still played through all of Mario 64 and OoT and thought they were great and good, respectively. GoldenEye, Turok and the Banjo games not so much.
Of course that opinion also has to do with controller support on PC being utter garbage until the Xbox 360 came out. For a long time the best playing 3D games on PC that weren’t shooters or RPGs were emulated console games with a PS2 controller adaptor.
Oof, sounds like you missed the whole space sim genre then. Took extra hardware for the best experience, but even with a cheap joystick it could be amazing stuff. I enjoyed first-person shooters and the like, but TIE Fighter and Freespace were 3D to me back then. I loved my Sidewinder gamepad in that era, too.
That may or may not be why fifth-gen console 3D does next to nothing for me. Until the Dreamcast came out, it all looked way behind PC, and almost no one was doing the amazing spritework that they excelled at anymore.
Well, yeah, OK, flight sims. We had flight sims, too.
And yeah, visually PC games were way ahead of the curve, but that was part of the frustration, right? You had all these super polished, advanced graphics and you were stuck on mouse and keyboard or trying to make do with a joystick or a remedial gamepad. Even when PC pads started including some form of analog stick they were so flimsy. I was on a PS2 pad for a good long while, both for native and emulated games.
hey i just did this for the first time last week!
Sweet! I’m glad people are still getting to experience it for the first time.
I wonder if there’s a timeline where Link is wearing flood pants when he first meets Rauru on that weird fountain platform in the Chamber of Sages
