Games that Dig Up Memories

[EvilRoy]

So, I've been playing a lot of Death Stranding lately, and I'm loving it don't get me wrong, but I didn't feel like going through the whole song and dance of loading it up and fixing the graphics again, and then waiting while it loads, and then climbing a damn mountain and taking a leak on the highest peak to mark my territory before the eyes of god and god alone - like I do every time I start up the game - so I started digging through Steam for something a little lighter to play.

As I was digging into the list and just going through title by title I kind of got caught up thinking about the times of my life when I bought this or played that. I was wondering if anyone else has this kind of thing knocking around their head - not necessarily nostalgia, just shit you remember for no reason when looking at your old titles.



First one I saw was Brink. Bought it before Yahtzee reviewed it, and startled myself by completely agreeing with him when I watched it after having been playing for a few days. Pretty unusual for me given I like his comedy but think hes a bit of a negative nancy. I was already too damn bored to struggle onward in the game. I bought it at a Best Buy, and it pissed me off because when I opened the box all I found was a steam key. Waste of plastic, waste of my very limited bandwidth at the time.



Found Spec Ops the Line too. Bought it because everyone talked about how artistic and intense and important it was. Made it 2.8 hours in according to steam. Dropped it and decided that "art games" probably just weren't for me. I had a whole bullshit review rehearsed in my head just in case someone asked me about it so I wouldn't embarrass myself by being low brow. Nobody ever asked.



Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Loved that game, and memories that span decades. I played it with my brother a lot when it was new - and then almost ten years later instead of working on my university bookwork because my computer was garbage and couldn't run new games. A few years after that when I was doing my masters I was in a group with this guy who would play this between classes. I would have to argue with him to open the damn spreadsheet and fix his shit so I could keep going on a portion of the work (a literal hundred hour project) when he was into a game.

So yeah. Anybody else have some weird disjointed memories connected to games of ages past?

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I remember binging on a bunch of Big Kings playing Rampage: World Tour on SNES. Maybe five of them? Those were the days.

For something different, foggy spring days make me think of Silent Hill. I think it’s because I played it a lot around that time of year when I moved out on my own.

 

[happyninja42]

So yeah. Anybody else have some weird disjointed memories connected to games of ages past?

I remember buying Homeworld, the original version back in the day. I remember it distinctly. I had just recently shut down my EQ account, and gone cold turkey with MMOs, but I still needed something to occupy my time back then during my 3rd shift days of "being the only person I knew awake at 2am-7am" So, I went to Wal Mart to see about buying some new game. I idly wandered the rows, and saw the box art for Homeworld. I read the back, it sounded interesting, but the RTS stuff was something I wasn't too familiar with at that time. But, it seemed to be the best option in the dregs of the WM shelves and it was on sale so I thought "eh, fuck it. why not?"

Got home, opened it up, saw it had an actual storybook in it. "Well that's odd. This thing is like 50 pages of stuff. " *flip through* "Huh, it's a history book style, telling the details of the world. Well, I need to poop, I'll go skim through it while I'm taking care of business." *get's completely engrossed in the presentation of the desert clans of the world, and how they came to learn of their apparent colonization of their world, not being native to it. How this fact unified the clans, that had been constantly warring, and galvanized all of them to work together, to try and escape their dying planet. They reverse-engineered the wrecked starship they found, built the Mothership, and made plans to launch into the stars." *suddenly notice my legs are asleep as I got done with business a while ago, and was just raptly reading this micro sci-fi story.* I hopped up and went to install the game, and found myself immediately engrossed in the story before the first frame of game loaded up. Then I heard the narration, and that guy's voice as he summarized what the book elaborated on, with the haunting still images as animation, excellent mood music. And then, the opening shot of the Mothership as it embarked on it's maiden voyage and test flight. With Adagio for Strings playing as the camera pans up the full length of the ship, and the various crew chatter from the dock ships and command. Just, all of it. I was hooked.

But I'll never forget, sitting on the toilet, reading the book that came with the game, completely forgetting to load up the game itself. So that's your weird memory connected to a game from my past.

I also recall playing Starflight 1 with my brother, at my dad's office. We didn't have a home pc back then, but he had one at work. So we would play the game at night, at his office. It was a fun bit of bonding with my older brother, before he went insane and tore the family apart. But, the time playing that game with him is a bright spot in my memory of him.

 

[BrawlMan]

Nothing further. I had many a co-op session with my brother.​

 

[EvilRoy]

For something different, foggy spring days make me think of Silent Hill. I think it’s because I played it a lot around that time of year when I moved out on my own.

I feel that, every now and then you get a really moody game that matches how real life can look and they seem to pull memories together. Sometimes I have to enter and review old buildings for work and I can't get Fallout out of my head when I do.

I remember buying Homeworld, the original version back in the day.

Says something for the game when you get nailed to the chair when you get into the lore, even if the chair is a toilet. How was the gameplay on that one? I definitely heard about the game, but that was before my RTS phase so I never ended up trying it.

 

[happyninja42]

Says something for the game when you get nailed to the chair when you get into the lore, even if the chair is a toilet. How was the gameplay on that one? I definitely heard about the game, but that was before my RTS phase so I never ended up trying it.

I loved it. The 3 dimensions of movement were pretty easy to control so, navigating obstacles via the Z axis was always fun, and sometimes mandatory to finish a mission. The squadron controls and how you could build/sieze fleets was very fun. The music was fantastic for the various missions to give you an unearthly, otherworldly vibe, which is fitting for a game about warping yourself into the unknown depths of space. I really don't have any negatives to say about the game. It's one of those games that is in my personal GOAT, for the emotional impact it had on me, making me care about those little ships and stuff.

You could cheese the combat system pretty easily though in the first game. Basically, there was a ship in your build roster that could salvage resources so you could build new ships, but they could also take over enemy ships and let you add them to your fleet. The larger the enemy ship, the more salvagers you would need. But they were pretty quick and easy to build, so it was never a big hassle to have enough on hand to basically play the Borg, and assimilate the enemy ships until you have a ridiculous sized fleet. Because while you had a construction cap, on how many ships you could build/control, captured ships, got around this limitation. So if you were patient, and meticulous, you could pick ships off from a group, like weak animals from a herd, and take over an entire cluster of baddies without killing any of them. It got really fun to make a fleet of enemy beam ships so massive, that it could just burn down the enemy final boss in seconds. The frame rate would just cry and run under the bed when you tried it though, but damn it was amusing to do They fixed this with Homeworld: Cataclysm, and HW: 2. Where captured ships counted against the cap.

But yeah it played really well. Like I said I was not a huge RTS fan back then, but my love of that game, and my enjoyment playing it, made me try out a lot of the popular RTS's of the time, specifically because I enjoyed HW so much.

 

[Worgen]

There is this old kinda meh game for the SNES called Xardion. Its at best just ok and probably closer to bad. But its one of those weird games that just comes to mind when I think of the SNES. Something about the graphics and sound just always make me think of it, probably because it was one of the earliest games I played, along with Super Mario World.