Welcome to the first installment of my new ongoing series: Games of Yore. What I want to do with this is look back at the games I played a ton when I was really young, maybe too young to know better. I know I endured some pretty bad games simply because I was broke, and made myself like them. The thing is, I’m not sure if these games were bad or not, I’d rather not tarnish my fond memories. There were the good ones too, I played Warcraft 2 and Descent and Doom and Commander Keen and Sonic the Hedgehog and at least two others. I want to look back at the games that kept me indoors on those summer days, let me develop this mole-person like aversion to the sun and sickly build. These are the games that, for some reason, stuck with me years later, and sometimes taught me a thing or two.
my house
Anyway, the first game is Megaman Legends. I had a friend Mike who was obsessed with it, I went to my local family owned video rental place next to Eagle foods. We started going there after some family friends told us they had sega games for $2 a week. I spent great times with Clay Fighter and NBA Jam: Tournament Edition. Boom shaka laka. Good times. I graduated to PS1 later when the family sold the house for scrap (above). I’ll always remember it, although not by name, for it’s Bambi scene and Final Fantasy 7 poster hanging in the window, Thumper fading away with careless window cleaning of the staff. Where was I? Oh yeah, I rented Megaman Legends one day. I never had a NES or SNES, and I missed all the classic MM games until years later when I masochistically played them while choking myself. It was a dark time. I enjoyed the X series because the ZSNES emulator lets you save your state, so you don’t have to go back to the beginning of the level when you die. There is nothing wrong with ROMS. MML was my first prolonged experience with Megaman, besides the cartoon I saw a few times. That said, this isn’t weird to me at all, considering he’s a toddler that can destroy terminators with his arm-gun:
robot killer
Despite my lack of familiarity, I still found it a bit weird that a treasure-hunter/miner would have an arm and a gun, instead of two arms. Apparently, mining in this world is somewhere between the soul-sucking bleakness trap of October Sky and the carefree whimsy of Zoolander.
ill-advised whimsy
The game has you looking for treasure, then something happens and suddenly there are a ton of robots that need to be taken down, MegaMan-style. There are also some kind of pirates, which might also have been robots. Also there are Lego people and some woman in a giant mecha suit.
my house had a lot of asbestos
What the hell? I’ll be honest here, my memories of this game include walking a big gray maze looking for some kind of keys, you know, for the stones that were locked, and kicking a can behind a food court shop in a mall to get money to upgrade my gun-arm. The real reason I remember this game was a pretty bad ass-scene where the town square was under attack and there were big ground robots beating on everything, and flying robots shooting on everything and smaller robots shooting other stuff too. This was the first time, in a video game, I was faced with an encounter that actually required me to think about the order of how I do things. I failed countless times trying to shoot the ground units first, only to get killed by the air robots. After some tries, I realized that by quickly dodging and constantly strafing on the ground, taking out the air units first would make the ground units a piece of cake. The aforementioned smaller robots might not have actually existed.
This experience always stuck with me, I feel it matured me quite a bit as a gamer. I learned that sometimes, it’s best to push pause and consider what’s going on, instead of running around pretending to know.
Hamster Gaming 