Childhood Gaming Errors!

A guy on youtube started doing a "lets play" of Zelda: Links Awakening. This was a game I had as a child and lost. I hadn't thought about it for 15/16 years and suddenly It jumped back into my life! Watching the play-through is really really enjoyable because a) it is now in colour! b) It is bringing back memories, and interestingly c), I've found myself remembering my perceptions of the game as a 7 year old!

I never finished Zelda: Links Awakening, I have memories of having no clue what to do next and searching the whole map trying to find what to do! Based on these new videos I don't think I ever got past the second dungeon! There were a number of golden feathers that I had to collect and I cannot recall ever grasping that was what was needed! But either way I loved that game.

Thinking about other childhood games has brought up some other errors I made as a child that seem so dumb now. I had the game "Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins". I completed this one and felt like a boss...but I also remember the first time I turned it on. I got it for Christmas, started level 1, got the first 6 coins in the game and ran to my mum to tell her I'd already won the game! The rest of the game was just bonus, I had 6 golden coins...In fact I got way more. I was the mario king! It wasn't for a few months untill I got good enough to actually beat a boss and get an official "golden coin" that I realised the game may have more to it!

So anyone else got any stories from playing a game as a child and perceiving the game differently?

I remember getting stuck in Super Metroid because I didn't think to freeze the enemies and use them as stepping stones. The instruction booklet and the game clearly told me this but it didn't cross my mind for quite a while.

When I was younger I thought that C&C Renegade was a great game. That was clearly a mistake.

I also got stuck on Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, because I couldn't get past the goat in the Ireland Castle. Took me two years to do it. But, I can't count that as an error. Fuck that goat.

I remember not working out to go through doors for a while in Wario Land 2, and then getting stuck on the fourth level because for some reason I didn't realise you could crouch and jump.

But then at some point I worked out how to get though that bit, and now Wario Land 2 is basically my favourite game ever, so that's cool.

I loved Renegade back when it came out! The multiplayer was kind of fun with capturing bases and such.

In the 7th Guest I could not get past the cans arranging part, it was too confusing, we sat down with the whole family and still didn't figure it out. Myst too, you have to be some kind of genius for some of those puzzles.

There was also the strip poker part in Leisure Suit Larry 7, I had no idea how poker was played.

I remember thinking that the parts after the 8 bosses in Mega Man 3 was just a bonus thing. Beating the robot masters is where it's at.

Thats called early bullshit pixel hunting.

there was a spider-man game, where in the very first screen you had to climb and swing across to another area, and i couldn't for the life of me get it. thankfully we only rented it, but i couldn't do shit with it.

I remember getting stuck in Croc 2 as a kid because some character asked me to find his sandwich and I didn't know what to do.

That was because I was only just learning English back then and I thought he was asking me for a "sand witch".

I think that childhood errors added to the mystery and awe of early video gaming. I remember I would always assume bugs and obtuse design were built on purpose, and trying to wrangle those into something cohesive (in my mind) was always a bit of fun. I miss the times when I would be exploring something massive like a Zelda overworld, being completely lost, and having a blast. Now it's just a chore.

I got stuck in the majority of games I played as a kid.

I couldn't finish both of the Zelda: Oracle games, couldn't get passed one of the later levels in Mario Bros. Deluxe (which had saves) with Lakitu dropping spike guys, I didn't finish anything on Game Gear ever, I also remember never being able to jump over the gap in Battletoads, you have to move to the back to make it smaller.

I used to try and get Sega Channel to work on the TV in my room even tho it did not have a cable outlet thing. I would just watch the Sega man flying through space for hours hoping it would connect.

I wish I remembered more about Sega Channel. What a crazy idea at the time that was.

Never beat any NES or Game Gear game. Closest I came to was Bubble Bobble and that's because my brother and I would Co-op it, and you'd get codes to jump to that level if you lost all your lives.

I had no fucking idea how to play Mario is Missing. I remember being Luigi and running up alleys and jumping in warp pipes but never felt like I was making progress. Just running in circles.

My brother and I also sold Goldeneye for $7... That was pretty dumb.

Voldermort is almost impossible to beat in the first Harry Potter game, that wasn't an error on my part, fuck that!

When I was younger, back when Pokémon Ruby came out (I was about 10 years old), I had no idea how to figure out the puzzles in the gyms....Thank god I had friends who could help me!

I LOVED Zelda: Orcarina of Time.

So of course it bought the direct sequel, Majorias Mask.

I popped it in, did the first stuff, spent a whole bunch of time exploring around, then the day cycle changed and everything i just did reset, so i was like "FUCK THIS GAME!!!!!!" and never played it again.

Me too, god damn it was basically Time Limit: The Game

We rented Zelda LttP once and I thought the save file screen was a character select.

I couldn't tell if there was any particular goal or progression system to the game, it just seemed like you just go around and explore and that was the game.

When we bought a new copy of the game it was sort of an eye-opener. :p

First time I was up all night playing a game was with Willow for the NES. I was around 9.

I later came to pull all-nighters with Zelda 3 and many early Final Fantasy games so I tried raising my standards.

There is a door in the forest temple in Ocarina of Time that requires you to hit a switch that is frozen over. The actual solution involves you firing an arrow through torches on a rotating platform, but according to the kids who helped me get that far I needed Din's Fire, and since you can't go back to childhood until you beat the forest temple... yeah. I thought I was stuck.

I also once bought Baldur's Gate II under the illusion that it was like Diablo (because Diablo was M so my mom wouldn't let me get it, I believe I was around 10 or 11 years old at the time because I distinctly remember getting Diablo II and KotOR for my 12th birthday). Of course, it's NOT ANYTHING like Diablo other than the isometeric perspective, so that was a bit unfortunate and I returned it not soon after. What did I buy with the returned money, you ask? Shrek 2. It would be another few years before I would really get into RPGs, at which point I picked up BG2 for real and solidified it as one of my favorite games of all time.

I'm sure there are more that I could pluck from my vague childhood memories, though these are two that really stuck with me. Man, I was pretty stupid.

Funny thing, C&C Renegade was probably one of my first online multiplayer experiences ever. It might have actually been a terrible game, but it still has a place in my heart. And I got pretty good at it at some point.

My childhood gaming error, coincidentally around the same time as Renegade: actually getting into The Sims Online. I played it enough to become a regular at a location or two. Then I realized I was really on an online chatroom with some terrible grinding mechanisms. I DON'T KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING!

I got rid of the copy of skies of arcadia for the gamecube I had. What the fuck was wrong with me.

I wasn't actually a child but while playing Jak 2 I could not get passed the whack-a-mole level with Daxter. I thought it was just plane busted so I gave up. I ended up replaying it a year later and the game felt different. Turns out I had turned on mirror world (flipped screen) as soon as I unlocked it in my first play through. >_<

@equitasinvictus: You were ahead of your time with that line of thinking. Because, that's what the future looks like. A better-looking The Sims Online.

Thanks but I really shouldn't take that much credit; I'll admit there's probably a lot of hindsight bias in how I framed how I quit The Sims Online in that post. I don't think there was that much of an epiphany there and then, but there might have been this empty feeling of dissatisfaction that eventually manifested into my current line of thinking in hindsight now that I'm older and more experienced in life.

On a lighter note regarding childhood "gaming errors" -- boy do I miss the days when there were "Cops and Robbers" servers in C&C Renegade. At the very least I will look back on those days without any regrets shamelessly, as opposed to how I'll be looking back at The Sims Online.

When I was a kid, I didn't realize that Final Fantasy VII was the seventh Final Fantasy game. The PlayStation was my first proper home console. Well, I had a CDi, but the less said about that the better. Pretty much all of of my gaming prior to the PS1 was on an Amiga. I never had a SNES, or other 16-bit consoles like other people. I'd never played, or even heard of the Final Fantasy series.

So Final Fantasy VII comes along. I love it, but I just assume it's got a weird name with a number at the end of it. Like Blake's 7 or Deep Space 9. A number that is nothing to do with a sequel numbering. I figured it was the same for FFVII. It just didn't cross my mind that it might be the seventh Final Fantasy game, because the idea that there could be seven games in a series was crazy to me.

I only realized when someone wrote into a gaming magazine I read asking why Final Fantasy VII was called VII. They explained it was the seventh game in the franchise and my mind was blown. Looking back on it, I was a fucking idiot. But evidently I wasn't the only idiot. There was at least one other person just as confused as I was. Confused enough to write into a magazine to ask about it, too.

When I was 7 I played pokemon (Gold Version specifically) for the first time. It took me over half an hour to figure out how to get outside of the house.

When I first played Pokemon Yellow when I was 5, I didn't know how to save my game so every time I played, I would try to see how far I would get but I would always lose to Brock since I usually didn't have pokemon that could beat him. I eventually figured out how to save and it BLEW MY MIND.

I then didn't know how to get pokemon from PCs so as soon as I caught a sixth pokemon, it was in the PC forever. Until one time I went to Sea World in California because my Dad had a conference there and I went with him to a party there and had pokemon with me, and this older kid saw I was playing pokemon and he gave me some pointers and told me how to get pokemon from PCs. That kid is a hero!

When I was small I had a game called F22 Interceptor for the Mega Drive. Every day I would fly to the end of the runway, hold up to soar upwards and then proceed to crash into the runway. Several months later I figured out that the y-axis was inverted. Didn't feel too smart! I have played with the y-axis inverted ever since.

Come to think of it, I never did beat Croc 2... Time to dig that out of the pile and beat I guess, I remember loving that game. But I got stuck after beating the ice-world boss, if I remember correctly.

When I first played Wind Waker, I couldn't figure out that you were supposed to use water on the bomb flower to open the path to the second dungeon. I felt really dumb when I figured it out because I was ten-ish at the time and generally was beyond that level of stupidity. (I think it might actually tell you to do it...).

You embraced the abuse you received?

You should renounce inverted Y-axis not celebrate it, it molestered you.

I thought Deadly Towers was awesome when I was a kid. It's not awesome now. I tried it out a few years back for the sake of nostalgia, and it sucked shit. A lot of the early NES games don't hold up.

I played way too much Bible Adventures on the NES.

In Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, you could transfer items between characters the way I did, by walking back to the time machine with character A, dropping the item into the machine, switching to character B, walking back to the time machine with character B, taking the item out of the machine, walking back to wherever character B originally was. OR you could simply play as character A and drag whatever you wanted to transfer onto character B's portrait.

My inefficiency probably made my run through the game like 60% longer than it needed to be.

I had a sega genesis as a child, but the only two games I ever had for it were Frogger and some racing game i can't recall the name of. I also remember playing a metroid game on my game boy color, but not having enough perspective to realize what it was and I never played much of it. The only games of worth I had enough sense to play were on the N64 and Game boy advance.

I only really got into gaming around 2008, around the time this site launched, hmmm. I've had so much fun going back and playing the multitude of games I missed as a kid. I'm currently playing through Super Metroid for the first time. I sure missed out.

Now that I think back, I don't think I realized that you could actually win a game - as in complete it, reach the credits, game over sense - for the first few years as a gamer. I got a NES at around age 3-4 or something like that and quite a few games to go along with it over time. Super Mario Bros was the first, obviously: which I still haven't beaten by the way, as a kid I always got stuck on that infinite level where you need to follow different paths in a set sequence, as an adult I've yet to get around to it. Probably never will - that elusive White Whale can stay elusive for nostalgia's sake. Maybe that set the tone on how I viewed games: had some third party games I beat around age 7-9 or something like that. I think the first game I beat was "Chip 'n Dales: Resque Rangers" which was child friendly enough, and even that was years later, maybe age 6 at the earliest? I think the second might have been Mega Man 4 at age 7. I think those games were helped by having a clear progression and narrative while the previous games, including SMB, was more about looping similar looking levels and gameplay that I could easily have felt might as well go on forever.

@jouseldelka: It is too late for me. I am stuck in my inverted ways. Maybe I could play with my tv upside down?

Considering the ludicrous release cycles and naming schemes the Final Fantasy series underwent in its earlier years, you really couldn't be blamed: after all, Final Fantasy was released way back in 1990, II and III never saw a release outside of Japan. Then it got even worse: Final Fantasy IV was released in the US as Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy V was never released outside of Japan and as a consequence Final Fantasy VI was released as Final Fantasy III. Then Square said "fuck it" and released Final Fantasy VII as Final Fantasy VII in all regions for the Playstation.

Since you're British, and not a single previous title in the series saw a European release until 2002 as part of an anthology, for all intents and purposes, Final Fantasy VII was indeed the first Final Fantasy and you would never ever have had any kind of reason to think otherwise, this largely being in pre-internet times. It wouldn't even have helped if you had been a loyal American fan: you would have ended up being completely clueless as to where Final Fantasy IV through VI went.

I played Ocarina of Time for ages thinking the three young dungeons were the whole game, my mind was blown when time travel happened.

I played Decap Attack.
That's an error, right?

Most memorable is one particular screen in King's Quest (Sega Master System). On this one screen, there is a wizard or enemy or something, i don't remember. Anyway, this enemy can freeze you. When you are frozen you cannot move until you thaw. I thought this thing had instantly killed me. I cried and cried. T__T

Funny thing is, that game is notorious for cheap instant deaths. The one thing I encountered that was not, in actual fact, an instant death, was the thing that broke me.

A kid who lived up the street from me had a Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cart. We always assumed Duck Hunt was broken. I realize now in my old age that we just never had the light gun for it.

@bbalpert: I never owned Maniac Mansion, but that sounds like exactly the sort of thing that I'd do as a kid...I feel like there was a game where I did something like that, but it doesn't quite come to mind.

The New Zealand Story when I was 6-7 years old comes to mind. The first boss of the game is a flying whale that I just couldn't beat. So I did what you did back then: ask a friend at school the next day. "Oh, you're not supposed to beat him normally. You gotta jump into the whales mouth before you can kill it"

You have no idea how much time I wasted, trying to get into that stupid whales mouth. And remember, we're talking 8-bit style check pointing (i.e. not good) and finite lives here. I eventually beat him after abandoning my friends advice, and chalked it up to him fucking with me.

Don't ask me why, but I got to reading up on the game some weeks ago. There was apparently a bazillion versions of that game, with small differences across platforms. Like how you killed that whale: in the SMS version you just shoot it to death. In the Amiga version you have to jump in it's mouth. I think you can figure out where I'm going here, right?

I remember I kept turning off the NES every time my brother tried to play Metroid because I thought he was going to screw up my saved game(which was that long code you had to write down and you couldn't screw up a save game if you wanted). As I recall he punched me and made me cry.

It seems like a lot of stories here are of the "I didn't realize" variety while mine are more of the "Dude, what the fuck are you doing?" kind. I had severe mental disorders as a kid and had trouble focusing on schoolwork, but for some reason I could learn a game perfectly and memorize every aspect of it.

Crash Bandicoot 2 was the first game I ever owned, so when I came across my first enemy I was hesitant to push forward.

Using only Pikachu on Pokemon Yellow. I somehow managed to beat the game with only a Pikachu, but let me tell you, that is a terrible strategy that depends greatly on the fortunes of the RNG gods, especially when you face Brock.

Giving all my Game Boy games to my sister, who then proceeded to accidentally throw them away.

Refusing to play Ratchet: Deadlocked for a while cause you couldn't play as Clank. I got over it. It's a fun game.

Somehow after playing Mega Man for the first time I got it in my head that the "you just blew up the boss" light orb things would do damage. Refused to play the game for a good while after because it was so stupidly unfair. Yeah... no idea.

Thankfully I was the stupid one and love me some classic Mega Man.

When I was 7, I got stuck in Super Mario RPG when you had to solve the riddle in the pirate ship. I never thought what the word could be until about 3 years later.

PEARLS. Fuck me.

Playing through Hogs of War as a kid I would always get to the final skirmish and get destroyed, eventually I figured out how to emerge victorious after only 2 moves. Pretty much the pinnacle of my achievements so far.

Not an error in a specific game, but an error in judgement related to gaming.

I had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid. I was eventually given the choice between either an Atari 7800 or a NES. The 7800 was backward compatible, so I could play most of my 2600 carts, as well as any new 7800 carts. I regretted picking the 7800 until the following year when I got a NES.

Super Mario RPG's Pirate ship level's password haunted me for years when I was a stupid child... GOD DAMMIT it bothered me.