I've never got to play Warlords with a human being, so when I saw this for 2 stupid dollars how could I say no? I'd say this and Combat are the only two games for the 2600 which aren't completely borked.

I saw this cart on a shelf at an old games store. I approached and he told me I had enough Golds. Now I own this game. That I will never play. What's wrong with me? That was last week. I still don't know.

The version I bought didn't come with the letter you soak in the water. I'll never be able to beat it now! Maybe they'll patch it. I saw this for sale on a table outside of a movie theater. Crazy bastard selling this wanted 100 dollars for Shenmue. But 5 dollars for StarTropics. Ain't no yoyos in Shenmue. ... Wait a minute, maybe there is.

I have the complete box for this game, including the manual and fold-out map/guide thing. I love this; Hard-to-Master Magic, 120 MP, spell is called Elixir. "May be used in a desperate situation, but effect is not known." The effect is that it restores all your HP and MP, after you cast it. Which means it's permanent full life with no cost. This game has a robot who SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS AND PERIODS. And an alien. No one seems that perturbed by there being an alien in medieval times. Then again, he's hanging out with a robot.

I actually played Goddamn Bill Laimbeer's Goddamn Combat Basketball in 1996. I rented it from a Goddamn Blockbuster Video in my town of 4,000. It cost three dollars and fifty cents. Two weeks I paid three dollars and eighty cents, and now I own it. I feel sorry for myself in 1996!

This game is actually super cool! There's a bunch of different dudes, the tracks are ... for a SNES, the tracks are pretty cool looking. Dude it was 3D on a SNES. And actually, Slash's theme music is dope as shit. I rented this from that same Blockbuster video. Great times.

Yeah I bought this game back in 2000, I was 14. I got it on Saturday and got home, popped it in at about 6 pm. I went to school on Monday, got home and beat Lavos by 4 pm. I think I played 27 hours in less than two days. Also, the second time I played this game I played Battle of Los Angeles by Rage Against The Machine for the entire time. Calm Like A Bomb and this game are inexorably linked for all time.

I have a sealed box of this game. I bought it a couple weeks ago. I've never played F-Zero. Captain Falcon might as well have been Tekkaman when he showed up in Smash Bros. They should put Tekkaman in Smash Bros.

I had this game confused with Art of Fighting when I bought it. Now I have this game that is not Art of Fighting that I wish was Art of Fighting. Let me tell you a story about Art of Fighting. I rented Art of Fighting when I was a kid and played through it. That thing with King's shirt and holy shit she's a girl dressed up like a guy? Still something about King turns my crank to this day. Hit some weird budding sexual fancy in my adolescent mind.

I never got to play this when I was a kid. I didn't play it until the Playstation version included with Final Fantasy Chronicles. By then it was too late, I had seen the glory that is Final Fantasy VI and I would not be impressed by weird head-people. Tell you what still cracks me up; Captain of the Red Wings. So you play as Steve Yzerman.

I remember getting this, I was... 12? 13? Box version, wish I still had that box. I remember reading the manual, when I think about manuals, this is the one. Learning about the nonsense stats on the status screen. Strength doesn't do shit all, I've played it thirty times, it's nonsense. Reading about the characters I was going to meet, remember those days? Companies guard spoilers and characters who will show up like they're state secrets, back then they put them in the Goddamn manual. That Amano art, I had never seen that in a game. Game art was stupid nonsense like Mega Man and bad close ups on indecipherable pixels. Playing through this game... people use the phrase formative experience, but this truly was. This game affected me in ways I'm only starting to realize in my late 20s.

So I was at my friend's house, he was a year older than me and he had Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and I had figured out the basic ruleset for Ghostbusters on the NES. Something... I don't know, honest about that box art. Hell, the title. You can't do that now, everything is snarky and full of guile. Miss the days of like, hey kid go on a quest. A MYSTIC quest.

I had just played Final Fantasy VI and I had a massive hard-on for RPGs now. And here's this game called ILLUSION OF GAIA, possibly the coolest name for an RPG ever (oh wait, Infinite Undiscovery). It was inside this used games kiosk spinner thing at a local pharmacy. It was 40 dollars, which was 25 more than I had. So instead I bought Tetrisphere for 15 bucks. I recently discovered it on ebay for 28 dollars. Gonna find out what I've been missing. Apparently it's related to Terranigma? I played that on... mostly legitimate terms.

This is the best Zelda game. Come at me. I got this for Christmas when I was... 10? That would be 1996? This game is the best Zelda game. I had played hundreds of hours of the original and never got past like Stage 6. Everything about this game still holds up. The art design is just ... it doesn't look dated, it just looks like itself. This is exactly the kind of game that you should make your kids play. To learn about gaming as a whole. Like showing them the cartoons and Disney flicks you loved as a child. Mario is a weird world of eternal monarchy and inexplicable armed tortoise rebellions, Zelda is a game where your child can actually have something approaching wonderment.

I BOUGHT THIS GAME BECAUSE I WILL BUY ANY GAME WHERE YOU CAN PLAY AS DANNY GLOVER. Predator 2? Sign me up. The Color Purple? Sign me up. Operation Dumbo Drop? SIGN ME UP! God, playing as Danny Glover in the Color Purple would just be Punch-Out except you... you know what? Not even going down that road.

Why did I ever like this game? It's horseshit. There are fights every two steps, every 'story beat' is just a new thing you have to go get for no good Goddamn reason. It's less of an epic journey and more a series of aggravating obstacles. This game did introduce my 11 year old self to the word 'dais'. They said they took the elf girl to the dais and I didn't know what the fuck they were talking about. I rented this game from a gas station before I bought it. One time I rented a copy of Vigilante 8 from that gas station and left it on top of the car. They tried to charge me 40 dollars for it. I didn't pay and they went out of business in 8 months. Always felt like I was the cause.

This game and I... I don't know. I like my robot masters to be Mans, not Boomer Kuwangers. If he was Boomer Man, I would be there. Tell you WHAT though; Music in this game was mind-blowing. Who wrote all those Mega Man tracks? Guy has chops for days.

So I was like... nine years old. My mother rented me a SNES from the Food 'n Pop along with any one game. I was into hockey so I picked this Mode 7 banger. I played this game all that night. To like 4 in the morning because SNES games were mindblowing to a kid who only had a NES and a Game Boy. The next day, had to take it back at like 3 in the afternoon. I've barely slept and I haven't had anything to eat or drink. It's like a million degrees outside. I'm carrying their heavy SNES carrying bag on my bike. The obvious happens and I pass out from heat exhaustion right on the sidewalk, completely faceplant. Broke my front teeth, had to go to the hospital. Goddammit. Video games are bad for you.

HAHAHA I have no story about this. There was this brief period where I didn't think Aerosmith was all that embarrassing, because I heard Train Kept A Rollin' and that song's alright. But we all knew that. Because we all knew that MUSIC IS THE WEAPON! Hey you know that song Last Child's not too shit either.

I've never played Populous, but what I have played is Wetrix. Wetrix is basically the rudimentary water from Populous smushed into a puzzle block game like Tetris. The results are about as coherent as you'd expect. I was always awful at Wetrix. Now that we have technology that can actually do water physics, old Pete should get back on making Populous. But now he'd fill it full of fart jokes. Also, check out that badass old EA logo.

I remember standing on the playground in Grade 3, reading all the move lists for these guys and then running around imitating what I thought the moves looked like. Maybe I was a weird kid. I hope Delphine made all of the money for this one, you'd have to think so. Popular game genre + multimedia superstar, it's like how The Sims has Katy Perry. Holy shit. Katy Perry's The Sims is like Shaq-Fu for a new generation.

Hey you know this game. I remember playing this game in the living room while my mother was trying to talk up some guy she wanted to be her boyfriend. And I just wouldn't piss off. I don't think I was trying to sabotage her, I just think I wanted to be included. I don't know dude, I was like nine years old. I did accidentally learn the guitar chords for the after-race music like a decade later just piddling around.

There was a girl who lived across the street and I played this game as much as I could when I was at her place, because I didn't have a SNES and this game was way better than Mario 3. ... Maybe I should have got up to weird pre-teen sex explorations with that girl instead, but I was too busy amazed at all the colors and stages and overworld map screen. That pretty much set the stage for my teenage years. Fucking hell. Yeah, that says it all. Thanks a fuck of a lot Miyamoto-san. You stopped me from getting laid until I was 22!

I love this game. This game will never have shit made after it, no one will remember it except me, and that's fine, this game is Goddamn magic. There's so much of this game that is just off-the-charts creatively. And it'll never be reproduced again. This was one of the first purchases I ever made for my new SNES. It was 25 dollars at the used games store. I almost bought Ken Griffey Jr Baseball instead.

A roommate of mine took off owing me two months of rent. 970 dollars out of my pocket. But I got her copy of Tetris 2 so who wins now? Goddamn, I could buy a hundred copies of Tetris 2 and burn them in a trash can if I had that money.

I have a SNES version of this game that I bought because I didn't think it was possible. I thought I was having a stroke right there and might as well roll with it.

This is pretty much the same story. They put Wizardry games out on the SNES? Next I'm going to find out Flanders rules the world.

I just want in the board room meeting that led to Ballz. "Hey what if we took Clayfighter but instead of poorly rendered clay we used poorly rendered spheres?" "Goddammit Ed, kids love spheres. But how do we market it further?" "Make a bunch of bad testicle jokes?" "Goddammit Ed, you're promoted!" Sometimes I get Ballz confused with Vectorman, which is like getting Pit Fighter confused with Strider.

Between this, Shaq-Fu, and Bill Laimbeer's Goddamn Combat Basketball, I'm three fourths of the way to completing the Ultimate Basketball Set. All I'm missing? Michael Jackson in the Windy City.

I've never played Flashback. I was like six years old when it came out, I had just got a NES. I bought a Genesis cart last month, but I don't have a Genesis. Fate has conspired so that I'll never know. Cover art looks awesome, though. I'll always have that.

I was like seven when Mortal Kombat came out. So yeah, I played a lot of Mortal Kombat. I remember playing the SNES port of the original with my friends. It was so fucked up that if you started jump kicking immediately and just kept following it up, the guy could never fight back or uppercut you out of it. It's how we beat that game. Man, when you complain about ports, consider your history.

This is the only Phantasy Star I've ever played. I had played Final Fantasy VI already, and I was probably something of a console warrior (I was a teenager!). The only thing I remember from my hour with the game was that there was a hot alien girl with blue hair. That's it. And way too much black nothing all over the screen. 80% of the game was just black space.

So isn't this the one that you could have kids and die in? If I ever get that Genesis, this is the one I'm popping in. That shit sounds nuts. Yeah, I spent 25 dollars on this game that I know basically nothing about. One time I bought Stella Deus too. We all make mistakes.

I was always awful at Street Fighter, but I think after playing a lot of MvC3 I should go back. I understand defensive fighting now, I can perform a Z-motion 90% of the time now. Which is 70% better than before. One time I was in the Big Brother program, because my mother thought I wasn't socializing with other people enough (and she had to work). All I wanted to do was play Street Fighter with the guy. He thought we were going to play baseball and stuff he wanted to do. Looks like you thought wrong. Let's crank turbo up all the way this time. Where are you going?

Oh my God, this game is some kinda dogshit. Christ. This was absolutely the kind of game that must be played with an FAQ open. If you just try to play it like, you know, a video game, you will wind up with your party members dead. And they don't come back. Ever. When I first discovered this I had thought they had made some kind of mistake. Ugly, clunky, broken. I played hours of this because I was 15 and too stupid to stop playing games. And then I bought it because now I'm 26 and too stupid to stop buying games. Whatever, someone has to hold on to the cartridges. The truth must be carried unto the future!

I LOVE BEETLE ADVENTURE RACING! I LOVE THAT IT'S CALLED BEETLE ADVENTURE RACING! Goddamn, it's even got an exclamation point! Did you know this is an EA game? Yeah that's right, the next Goddamn Need for Speed could be Need for Fucking Speed Adventure Goddamn Racing. This game is raw fun in a cartridge. It's by the people who made Pilotwings 64, and then a bunch of racing games. They were so good at making racing games that they got handed a bunch of action movie licenses to make shooters with. So there's a precedent before Bizarre Creations.

Never played it. But...

I played a ton of Extreme-G 2, or XG2 for us in the know. Whenever Jeff mentions "sense of speed" this is the game I think about. I think about that sound when you break the sound barrier, which I remember as this overbearing thunderclap. I doubt it's as good as I remember.

I rented this game when I was twelve. I can't imagine how this stupid thing controls. I remember it being difficult when I was young and didn't know any better, nowadays I bet it's completely impossible with a single stick. Love the idea of post-apocalyptic space bike fights. Also think that girl on the cover is cute. Played the entire game trying to find her. Nope.

I played this when I was ... 13? Me and a friend rented it one weekend and were planning to stay up all night and finish it. But this game has nonsense controls and plenty of one-mistake failure missions. So instead we played Super Mario 64 and fucked around in that level with the Loch Ness Monster. Don't play Mission: Impossible.

Man, it's sad what happened to this franchise. I actually like this game way more than Goldeneye, it's got voice acting, it's got cooler weapons, it's got Joanna Dark. In the new versions, she looks too cartoonish and weird. She looks like a British librarian in the N64 game, and that's how I like it. I love Trent Easton, because he looks like John Travolta, and the actor is some British guy doing his best to do an American accent. Sounds like he's talking with marbles in his cheeks.

Rogue Squadron is my favorite Star Wars game, probably my favorite part of the entire Star Wars fiction (though KOTOR2 is better written). As I grew older I first realized that I don't care about the mysticism, or even the laser knife fights. They're a nice inclusion in the mythos, but not what really cooks for me. And as much as I like the crime syndicate and scoundrels hustling for credits part, it's the starfighter pilot angle that really gets me in. It's inbound fighters at ten thirteen, it's locking S-foils into attack position, it's that awesome screaming sound of the TIEs and X-Wings going through space. Shooting those tow cables and having to have 3D space perception like a madman to bring down those walkers. Why can't they make a good starfighter game like this? I don't want Digital Combat Simulator: Y-Wing. Though maybe I want to watch Drew try to shift his power differential in order to compensate for the draw and power bleed of the main ion cannons.

The dude's name is JEAN-LUC COUGAR. So my only experience with this game before I found it at an old games store was my friend had it at his place. This was that brief period after Metal Gear Solid when everyone was trying to do tactical spy action. I decided I was more into Syphon Filter because I read about it in EGM. Even though I had never played it, I decided that Syphon Filter was better, proving that kids and video game enthusiasts and me are all stupid.

Hybrid Heaven is probably the most hysterical game reference for the late 90s. Because on the surface it seems like it should work; action-adventure exploration bits, combat mixes fighting games and RPGs, with wrestling moves and limb damage that levels up with use. And a story filled with conspiracies and brainwashing and cyberpunk hooha all over it. I don't think you could have made a less interesting mix of fighting and RPG if you tried, the story is completely bugfuck (the character you start as isn't you at all, because you're actually a stereotypical Native American who has been following you throughout the game, also Snatchers!) and if it wasn't for Aidyn Chronicles, I would say this is the slowest moving RPG I've ever played. Then again, you can pick up genome soldiers and lickers and give them the tombstone piledriver. So it's probably Game of the Year.

Chrono Cross might as well be a synonym for disappointment. I remember before this game came out, me and my friends would lose our shit every time we heard the phrase Chrono Cross. They loved Chrono Trigger even more than me, and we'd hear stuff like "no grinding necessary!" and "46 characters!" and proceed to lose our shit even more. 46 new characters with all the life and personality of Lucca, Frog, Marle?! No, they're 46 portraits that spout the same crap as everyone else, just with a different nonsense accent affixed. You turn that game on and get ready for another thrilling adventure through time and instead you're... killing crustaceans on a beach for some reason. And then there's a pirate girl... and a ... lynx man. Instead of travelling through time you're moving between split realities that somehow affect each other... and the entire thing is a meditation on the butterfly effect... and then you switch bodies with the lynx man? I hear Chrono shows up at the end and spits made up time physics nonsense at you like James Cameron at an Ubisoft conference. I stopped playing this game ten hours in during an age where I didn't stop playing games unless they had to go back to the rental store.

This game so perfectly encapsulates the bold, stylistic vision that we love and the pandering shameful horseshit that we all sigh and put up with. This awesome cel shaded art design is great, but you just used it to inflate her boobs to Croftian levels. Cool cyberpunky Hong Kong crime action setting and yeah, she's an assassin because of course she is. Introducing a gay protagonist to gamers, bucking social norms but oh God you just did that for gratuitous lesbian sex. Gay, asian, female protagonist is a three-for minority in a sea of straight white males, but Christ dude. You know Eidos published Fear Effect. I wonder if they still have the license? Of course now having a female protagonist that isn't Lara Croft is commercial suicide.

I have never actually finished Final Fantasy VII. And I had played 8 before it. I remember seeing it in EGM and GamePro, the collective world losing its shit over it. I remember those awesome ads where they shit on cartridges and it got my eleven or twelve year old blood up because I only had an N64. Because I came late to it, it never really had the same mind-blowing quality to me. 8 is still my PS1 Final Fantasy of choice. But there's still a lot to enjoy. I remember sitting rapt in low-grade horror following the blood trail in the Shinra Building, exploring the old mansion in Nifleheim... the scene in the Jenova factory deeper in Nifleheim..! Being mouth agape at the reveal, the scene where Cloud gets stabbed but then just lifts the sword up from the blade end. I always preferred Tifa to Aeris, I always thought Aeris was dopey and Tifa was strong, so the way the game progressed worked for me. The game really succeeds where other JRPGs do not because it has actual plot twists, not mild curves that you saw coming five hours in advance. But I had played 75 hours and then lost my save. So I'll never know whatever HOLY is supposed to be. Can't even watch it on youtube, it's just kids making music videos for Linkin Park songs.

This was the first game I owned for the Playstation 1. I was fourteen when I played it. All Final Fantasy is teen fiction, that's why your favorite Final Fantasy was the one you played as a teenager. The problem isn't that the games 'became' immature, it's that you grew up. Anyways, Final Fantasy 8 is about a young man with repressed emotional affect due to childhood feelings of abandonment and helplessness that results in extreme introversion and antisocial tendencies. So yeah, maybe that struck a nerve in a fourteen year old me that I only figured out five (or ten) years later. The game itself is kind of weird. The junction/magic system is broken in both directions, the game can be impossible unless you know how to exploit it, and once you do it's faceroll. I played through my first time without understanding a lot of the systems and made it to the end boss ... to be stomped flat on just her first form. Many times over. I literally had to start a new game after reaching the final boss of a 50 hour RPG because I didn't have a walkthrough. Imagine doing that now. I'd probably go burn the jewel case in the street. Take it out to a field, Office Space style. Tell you what though; Triple Triad is bad as shit. That was the game that figured out how to make their stupid minigame gameplay relevant.

I got this game for my 15th birthday from my mother. Thanks Mom! When I played this game I didn't understand it was originally a throwback spin-off turned into a main series sequel, and I also had never played most of the games it was referring to. I was used to magitek and cities that could fly or go under the sand, when you present me with dwarves who say "Rally-ho!" and Antlions who live in whirlpools it just seems like a massive non-sequitur. Also someone used to the semi-realism of the previous few games could be easily weirded out by the art design; it's almost Pixar-esque in how it looks at characters through shapes and silhouette. Tell you what I remember and love most about this game; it used the text boxes artfully, placing them around the screen or affecting size or speed of the text to convey drama or comedy. Kind of a lost art.

Being North American and not completely crazy, this was the first time I had ever played Final Fantasy V. By the time I had found one of these (Anthology used to be surprisingly hard to get a hold of, now it's everywhere) I had already played Final Fantasy Tactics and been acquainted with the Job System. I never did finish it, I got to the Fire Crystal city, I think I had met Cid, but by then the whole thing got too damn hard and I never finished it. I just discovered recently that apparently V was a direct sequel to the original? Your characters are descendants of the four Warriors of Light? That's pretty crazy.

And this was the first time I had played IV! Because good luck trying to find a cartridge for less than 70 bucks back in 2001. IV suffered because I had already played VI, everything about it just seemed a little archaic and clunky in comparison. Kind of like how Phantasy Star seemed like it had too much black space on the screen, it seemed like all the screens in IV were covered by blue for no good reason. The version of Chrono Trigger here has full Toriyama cutscenes occasionally, and was when I first realized that the dude who made Dragonball worked on it. Man, back when Square + Enix sounded like a good idea.

My friend actually found a copy of the original at a garage sale for a dollar. FOR A DOLLAR! It started a summer of me visiting garage sales to find nothing but old worthless crap. Or they acually would have stuff there, but it would never be anything you actually wanted. It would be like "Check it out, we're selling this copy of Mario Bros and Duck Hunt for 20 dollars, in 2000! Why is it 20 dollars? Because it's two games in one!" I never actually opened up my copy of Origins, because by the time I got my hands on it I had already had Dawn of Souls for the GBA. Check out that Amano art.

My friend owned a copy of this, and it got passed around to our entire circle. It had this cool timed hits thing where you could do these combos based on timed button presses. Nowadays people go “Quick Time Events blaaahhh” or “rhythm game blaaahhh” but back then it was this big thing that we were all sure was going to show up in every RPG (something like it showed up in Shadow Hearts). Instead all RPGs are now real time and have auto-attack. I guess we were wrong on that one. My roommate's been playing it for the last month and now all things I liked as a teenager are suspect. If you think games treat women in a patronizing manner now, pop this sucker in there. I have a sealed copy I found on eBay about five years ago selling for one dollar. ONE DOLLAR! Shipping this one dollar game cost thirteen dollars! Now it sells sealed for about fifty dollars. Looks like I win this one, eBay!

I don't actually have the original Playstation jewel case, the copy I have came with the collection they put out before MGS4 came out. Which means I have a PS1 game in a DVD box which never fails to blow my mind. Specifically when I take it out and flip it over and it's got that sweet black underside. Why don't they still do that?! Playstation discs are so awesome. About the game itself, I was never able to finish it. My action reflexes and instincts were dulled by years of undemanding RPGs. I only ever got up to the part where the ninja scares Otacon and he poops the floor. The internet says it was pee, but if Otacon's pee is brown then he needs to see a dietician.

So here I am, I'm fourteen and I got a new Playstation and I'm going shopping for my second game. I have forty dollars to spend, and this interesting looking game is 29 dollars. Hmmm, why buy one game when you can buy two cheaper ones? So instead of playing this Square game I put down twenty dollars a piece for Master of Monsters: Disciples of Gaia and Magic the Gathering: Battlemage. Go look those games up. I'll wait. You know, maybe it was a good thing I never played it as a young man. It would make what's happened with it far more depressing. I finally played it earlier this month. This game looks exactly like my nostalgia tells me all Playstation games looked like.

“Rush!” I had actually played the N64 version of Rush back in the day, and I don't remember a lot about it. I remember the insane music that played as you put in your initials. I remember it having a specific trick mode (though that might have been Rush 2049). Most of all I remember a very specific jump where you went under a tanker truck and then off a side ramp up through a gap in a rooftop of a building, right before a finish line. I bought this Playstation version at an old game store, popped it in my PS3 and ... yikes, man. You can't go home. You also can't find that jump no matter how hard you look and it breaks my stupid heart.

I learned about Syphon Filter in an issue of EGM where they painstakingly detailed all the weapons, equipment, strategies and missions of Syphon Filter. This is where a thirteen year old me first heard of sarin and VX nerve gas. Thank Christ we didn't have Wikipedia in the late 90s, I would never have slept again. I never actually got to play Syphon Filter, but I did play a demo disc of the sequel... and I did not like it. Saw this in the same store I bought Rush in and picked it up. Even to this day, the narrative setup of spy action where you're trying to prevent chemical attacks on civilians is pretty good. Sony needs to do a Syphon Filter reboot the same way Eidos is rebooting Tomb Raider.

I was playing THPS2 yesterday and it's still Goddamn incredible. What I used to do was, I had the television cable going into the VCR, and then the Playstation going into the AV. I would take off the audio cable (and it was a singular cable, no stereo sound for me) and then listen to reruns of the Simpsons and 3rd Rock From the Sun while I tooled around. I must have spent a hundred hours in that game, a lot of it in the skate park creator, building these huge maps full of rail transfers. In an age of play.create.share, why the hell isn't there a Tony Hawk game centered around user-generated content? They would make ALL of the money!

I always thought Tomb Raider was hella dumb.

It will blow your mind if you go back and see what passed for control back then.

And yeah, I bought all three of them because ... I don't know. It's going to be an adventure.

So does this have like a “u Jammin' good” meter in it? I've only played Parappa, I had never even seen this in a store until I saw a sealed copy sitting on a shelf last week. But now that I own a sealed copy I can't make myself tear it open! I guess I'll just have to buy a copy on PSN. More money spent shrewdly.

I have maybe three memories of this game; really cool text bubbles done very stylishly, the guy's hair is ridiculous in a way that even Cloud would go “what's up with your hair, bro?”, and I got stuck in a fight with some guy that lasted two hours. I don't know if was I had the wrong weapon or didn't know how the “Risk” meter worked, but it was two hours of me repeatedly kicking a guy who was knocked down until he stopped trying to kill me. I also remember weird first person sequences. It's hard to say. This game is such a strange non-sequitur in Square's back catalog that it almost seems like it's due for a strange non-sequitur sequel (a la The 3rd Birthday).

I played the original Wild Arms while I was at some kind of county fair or Christian rock festival. No, wait, it was a school field trip. But why would I...? It's heavily shrouded in mystery, but I played Wild Arms at some booth for about 15 minutes. Wait, it was some kind of carnival, and one of the 'attractions' was they had Playstations set up in this tent and you could play for 15 minutes if you gave them like five dollars (what a deal!). So I played this RPG that someone had left running and ran through a weird brown dungeon. What stuck with me is that it had the same battle menu as Lufia, a sort of cross in the middle of the screen. That always stuck with me. Wild Arms 2 I played for about three hours and never went back to, because I thought all the characters were morons. But I lost the case, and so now the second disc is in the jewel case for an Andrew Lloyd Webber compilation. Meeeemory, all alone in the moooonlight..!

Friend of mine had this. Actually... I think this copy I have is his. Funny how that works. Anyways, Worms Armageddon was a pretty big thing with us for a summer. I made a team named Savoury Sweet which was full of worms speaking Finnish and all named after weird foods. I also have a distinct memory of playing it while watching Good Morning Vietnam. Throwing Holy Hand Grenades during that scene where Robin Williams is yelling in the clearing. “Sir? What does three up, three down mean to you, airman?” “End of an inning?”

I was going to start working midnight shifts, so I bought a DS. And then I realized it could play GBA games. So I went to a Gamestop and bought a bunch of stuff, this Fire Emblem game was in there. And then I never played it. Played Tactics Ogre instead. Probably a good thing in the long run; people who play Fire Emblem seem deranged.

I bought this on a trip to Minneapolis in 2008. They had two separate Gamestops in that stupid Mall of America. And the only time I played it was waiting at a Minneapolis airport on a somehow unrelated trip a month later. It looked pretty cool! I tell you what though, that airport has better food than the mall. Five dollar footlongs!

I never got to play the Four Swords portion of this, but man, that's some Zelda-ass Zelda. Except I got stuck at the sewer dungeon! Remember that one sign that tells you not to move it? Yeah you do!

Is this game harder than regular ass Super Mario Kart? I could crush the AI on fastest in regular Mario Kart but I could hardly finish any ghost track in the GBA version. Maybe it's just practice. Maybe the GBA isn't Mode 7ing the right way.

I played probably about 12 hours of Tactics Ogre and I don't think anything important happened. I crashed my ship in War Town, and then I went to war. Eventually I just stopped playing. After Final Fantasy Tactics, I couldn't get jazzed about tactics games. Even the Ogre series, which I was into. I played the first two levels of regular Ogre Battle several times, and I actually finished Ogre Battle 64 twice. I was invested in the setting, but just couldn't do that tactics stuff anymore.

So apparently this Arc the Lad stuff has been going on for like 12 freaking years. I remember seeing some PS2 game on a shelf in GameStop, and it said something like "newest in Arc the Lad series" and it was like Who the What? I bought this for no good reason, and I'll probably never play it. Maybe I'll play it 15 years from now when Arc the Lad has overtaken Final Fantasy. And then I'll go rip my neighbor's chip out of his head, and then get high on simulstims.

I never played Beyond Good & Evil. People have all the boners for this game but I just never bothered to pop it in there. I found a sealed copy for 10 bucks and then never played it. And then I bought it on XBLM and ... never played it. This entire PS2 section is going to be filled with shit I never played. I'm sure there will be more time later! That always happens with your 30s. Time just opens up for you, all those teenage and young adult responsibilities just melt away!

In 2007 I got a hernia from the age old danger of Lifting A Heavy Thing. So I got like two months off work, so I went to the GameStop and bought this, Kingdom Hearts 2, and ... Something else? I played this first, I was so pumped for my disability vacation of video games. And I kissed some girls and a boy once, I played that arcade machine in the nerd's base. And then it was like "fight these townies" and I was like "fucking townies" and I turned it off. Don't fight townies, kids. There's an unlimited supply of them, they're like Hydra. Fight one and two will grow in its place.

I bought this when I moved into my current apartment. I web probably 2 months without Internet, so it was a 'productive' time. This game is weird. It's actually voice acted extremely well, but ... You're a mechanic who takes objects and crunches them together to make other objects, and you're fighting an evil magical clown. And then you get locked in awful sewer dungeons until you quit.

After playing Persona 3, Atlus and their past games were now I thing I was aware of. Before that the only notion I had that they were a thing was that they published Ogre Battle 64, and I had seen screens of that Jack Bros Virtual Boy game in Nintendo Power. I found this wrapped copy in a Minneapolis GameStop selling for 20 bucks. Felt like I pulled a fast one on that clerk.

I know I got off light on the last one because the ugly yellow sticker on this bad boy says 38 dollars. Why do you got to put the stickers on the cases? Put em on the back, or put new cellophane on it. I got to get new DVD cases for... Goddammit, that's brilliant, new DVD cases! I've actually played like 4 hours of this. Thank God for Persona. Game is hella weird and might as well be Digital Dice Roll Saga.

I've never played the Playstation 2 DMC games. I watched the one cutscene where he fights a bunch of demons or bikers or juggalos or whatever while he's eating a pizza and decided that it wasn't stodgy and boring enough for 16 year old me.

My first experience with the series was the demos for DMC4 and I was completely confused. This was what people were going nuts over? This kind of clunky chop-guys-up game? I still don't like DMC4 to this day, I'm hoping I pop in these older ones and suddenly it all makes sense.

I saw this game for 15 dollars sealed at an HMV. And I knew I liked it because I had already played 30 hours of Disgaea DS, which is this game except (get this) on a DS. Climbing in swords, throwing those power triangles or whatever they were called around. I did enjoy all the jokes about the female characters being insecure about how flat they are.

Wow. So, this one summer in 2005, me and my friend Kane went buckwild for Dynasty Warriors and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. We would play co-operative games of RotTK8, which allowed you to control a single officer each. And then we would play Dynasty Warriors. It was never the gameplay that hooked us, it was the setting and the characters. It was beating the game and getting the crazy Sun Jian weapon and then tearing around making them all fear the Tiger of Jiang Dong!

And this is actually a super interesting tactics game (I know, right?!). It's really big on facing and directionality. I remember me and Kane split the cost for this game but I just ended up keeping it. I got about 5 hours into a game with Sun Jian (because he's a pimp) until my one kid got hurt in the forest and then that asshole Guan Yu showed up and I couldn't beat him. The guy who wrote the actual Romance novel attributed all of Sun Jian's victories to Guan Yu, and added a bunch of stuff to make Sun Jian look like a fool and an opportunist. But I know the truth!

This game marks the exact spot in my life when I began having more money than good sense. I had been saving money up for years playing World of Warcraft, and spending it on trips to Australia and digital camcorders. All that money got redirected into buying games to buff up my new dreams of a collection. I bought this from Amazon, 40 dollars on the day of release. Never even thought of opening it up. Started a bad precedent. Maybe that's the poison?

I like scary games now, but not in 2002. In 2002, survival horror just meant that this was a game I'd never be able to finish. I bought the three PS2 games on eBay last month. At this point my only relevant memories of this game are watching Brad from 4 player podcast lose his shit playing through it.

I've only got Fatal Frame 2 so far, and played about an hour. You know what sucks, this game is basically unplayable on my cheap LCD television. Got to move your grey Japanese girl through the grey houses surrounded in grey atmosphere while the grey ghosts chase you. I also find the radio transmission stuff to be hilarious. It's the most vague and boilerplate horror stuff. "The darkness is coming..! Darkness..!" They might as well go "BooOOoooOOOoo!"

This game has the coolest box art. If I ever finish Horror Night: Twin Age I'll play this.

I remember really having a bone to pick when I first saw this game. The guy bothered me, his voice bothered me, the bananas cold open and weird sub-Powerman 5000 song. I would play it at my friend's house because I think this was before I had a PS2, and I would just roar at the television whenever the main plot hook was about a stupid ball game instead of dramatic adventure. I began enjoying it more when I got out of the early Blitzball-heavy sections and got into the religious unrest. I remember finishing that end boss on a Sunday afternoon when I was supposed to be getting ready for exams. That final boss took 2 hours to bring down. What an odd throwback.

Yeah, I remember seeing this on the rental store shelf and me and a friend rented it to ridicule it. And man, God provided for us that day. I distinctly remember running around one of the early levels, and there's a door that requires a 4 digit code. You can find the numbers on stuff in the environment, but I found one of the landmarks before I found the door, so we just stared at each other when I talk to this big statue and it just says “4” at me. Once I got into it, the battle system is actually way, way better than X, but the plot is your typical Final Fantasy mystical horseshit.

I got a full time job about a month before this game came out, it was the first launch day games I had ever bought. I remember popping it in there and even then I could tell that they had wrung everything they could out of the PS2. I really liked the dry, medieval politics going on in this, and those judges sounded pretty hardcore in their Darth Vader costumes... but playing this game is no kind of fun. I played about 30 hours and felt like I was making no progress whatsoever, so I quit.

Now this game is my GTA of choice. They give you a main character you can sympathize with, the arc of the story is pretty good (though maybe it runs long by the time you get to Las Venturas), and when you're hanging around your new crib with your big family of associates, it feels almost as good as having a full Normandy or what-have-you. The Grove, the garage in San Fierro, they're places I felt like were my own. This was also the first GTA game where it didn't assume you were an amoral brute, and tried to give context for your actions. I played this game instead of doing schoolwork my first year of college. I'd do it again!

I don't like Vice City. I like the stations and I like the hyper 80s pastels, but I had played San Andreas before it, and the shooting and control just wasn't as solid. The whole Italian mob in Miami portion seems odd, seems like you should be Hispanic or a biker from North Florida. But people still thought that Italian mobsters were cool and stylish instead of fat hardons with the worst fashion sense in the world. Thank God for New Jersey.

Uh, yeah. Box art sure looks pretty. Don't even remember how I came about having this. I think I bought this at the same time as Odin Sphere, but I played Odin Sphere first. And then I bet I was too mad to even look at this game after.

I never watched Tarzan, or Hercules. I got no love for them. First two levels you can choose from are those two. Hercules is some crushing hard combat trials, and Tarzan... My most crystal memory of this game is sitting on a stool at my friend's house swinging on vines trying to get to the next area, and never making any progress. For hours. Just swinging back and forth while he played Final Fantasy XI and gave me such advice as "swing on the vines". Man, I had repressed that memory. Now when I see him I'm going to kick him in the dick. I don't like the original Kingdom Hearts. Especially the jump animation and landing. Jumping in that game is like the antithesis of fun.

Now Kingdom Hearts 2 I love. Even though this is where the real obnoxious quasi-philosophical musings on the symptoms of being and the nature of reality began. The game literally starts with a 3 hour non-sequitur that only begins to make sense 30 hours later. I feel like that narrative philosophy has been the albatross around that entire company ever since. And yet, when that game got swinging it was wonderful. Different art design, huge production value, great characters and moments, and fun controls. I played this game during recovery for surgery, and it saved me. If I'm interested in that series whatsoever it's because of this game.

I don't know why I bought it, it says Tactics right on the box! I've had two affairs with the grid-based Japanese tactics RPG, the original Final Fantasy Tactics, and then a decade later, Disgaea. And despite the qualities of everything else, it just seemed like a new coat of paint. Ironically, I would get into Dungeons and Dragons around the time I bought this game, which is essentially a manual grid-based tactics game.

Remember Lord of the Rings games? Yeah, neither do I! There were a bunch of chop-guys-up games, there's the MMO, there were a couple RTS games, there's going to be a DOTA game, and then there's this Final Fantasy X clone. Always kind of the problem I had with Lord of the Rings in the modern sense is that the entire world seems like it was made to be adventured across rather than a place where people live. It has that sense of wonderment and place, but the sense of scope or distance between them is all jiggered up. I guess having the entire east side of the world being controlled by Magic Hitler probably adds to it. In this game you can watch a dwarf kip up from his back. So I guess you should play it.

Near the end of the PS2's life, you saw a metric shit ton of these NIS games with anime art styles and myriad crafting and skill mechanics. They all had the craziest names like Mana Khemia, and Ar Tonelico, and Atelier Rorori, and despite that hitting the exact groove that 13 year old me was after, 23 year old me just couldn't play ball. However, 23 year old me had a full time job, so he would still buy the games, he would just refuse to play them. If I was going to blame anything, I suppose it would be either the writing or the localization; a lot of these games outside of Disgaea just lack a spark, or a life of their own. From the splash screen on it's just anime trope after anime trope.

This disc accompanied me on a trip to Australia. On this trip I discovered that eight year old me is crazy and so are Capcom designers circa 1989. Those disappearing block puzzles, the leaps over pits where an enemy spawns at your landing point, the sand monster boss. Needless to say, I learned to spend more time socializing and going off on weird adventures to vegan Vietnamese restaurants and weird clubs featuring Djs that sound like they're chopping Dillinger Escape Plan together with the ambient sounds of an autobody shop. I lost someone's keys at an alt-metal nightclub and it cost 37 of their crazy plastic dollars to replace them. All could've been avoided if Gemini Man's stage wasn't completely brutal.

I played a bunch of Metal Gear Solid, but was never able to finish it because I was in the middle of my weird JRPG I-can't-push-buttons-good sabbatical from action games. I'm sure I would've eaten up the plot because back then I had the stomach for anything. I played a game about a naked girl-god who lives on the moon travelling to earth to destroy/save(?) it, and my protagonist was followed around by a talking pink cat who lived in his hat. Nowadays I would get like nine words in before I was like “alright, hold on. Why is she naked all the time?” Turns out, because boners. Probably the first anime boners in my young life. Oh wait, the Sailor Moon costume change parts.

Couple years back, I decided I enjoyed Metal Gear Solid 4 so much that I would go back and check out Snake Eater. I actually don't mind a game being a little indulgent with the dialogue, but good Christ. And Kojima could learn something from RPG designers; let me skip sentences without suddenly turning off the voice acting. In Metal Gear you just have skip everything, read everything, or sit back and listen to Jennifer Hale rap at you about samurai movies. Even Francis York Morgan could drive and talk about movies at the same time, it's not like that game was technologically competent.

I didn't know what a NOLF was when it originally came out, because the only PC games I played were Half-Life mods and the Battlefield 1942 Wake Island beta, because me and my friends were too cheap to buy the actual game. I remember one friend of mine quit playing in a huff because he pulled up to me riding the main gun of a humvee and somehow missed killing me before I put a hot one in him. “Game isn't realistic enough!” I'll never forget that. Anyways, I've played like 20 minutes of NOLF. That dude's eyebrow is pretty hilarious.

As much as the PS1 was the birth and reign of traditional survival horror, the PS2 was when the pretenders were able to join in and try to get their share of the boogita-boogita money. You still see horror today, but it's very rarely the really brutal you-can't-do-anything-except-die stuff anymore. Probably a good thing, too. I'll give props, Amnesia is maybe the scariest thing I've played, but it's so Goddamn stressful that everytime I open up the file I audibly groan. It's like unlocking your door for an ax murderer who even shows you the ax he's going to use to murder you; why would you do it?!

Earlier I said that I quit Odin Sphere in a huff. I love the 2D art, and I love the weird 5 things at once story, and I especially love planting trees that eat souls that then grow meat that you eat to level up. I can't even remember why I quit, I think I got hit with a difficulty spike when I went to Ice World. But I remember opening the PS2 while it was still running and pulling the disc out, putting it back in the box and putting in on the shelf and walking away. I may have even said “Then that's the way homie's gonna play it.” I may have.

I just remember seeing the art on this and being like “Oh look how dumb action games are, feh! Now to play some RPG where a teenager expounds on the vagaries of the human soul!” I've actually played a bit of it recently. That's some Ghost in the Shell-ass Ghost in the Shell. So, 'Oni' is used meaning both a deceiving devil and a big brother. Big Brother. Get it? That's actually some clever ass shit.

I had just got back from my Australian vacation, I'm working midnight shifts but I'm still on my vacation high. I'm all thin and shit, I'm dressing well, and I'm horribly in debt, so I'm working 52 hours a week to catch up. I see a copy of Persona 3 FES and snatch it up. I remember coming home from work at 7 in the morning, playing for an hour, dying because Junpei is an idiot, and then quitting in a huff. I got about 25 hours in, but probably over 40 if you count wipes. God, next time someone says something about check pointing I'm going to summon the repressed Persona 3 anger. Game introduced me to Japanese honorifics and whatever a Sukukaja is. One of the leads at Atlus says he likes the AI controlled teammates because "you learn their personalities on the battlefield". Apparently my team is hateful idiots with death wishes. Every last one of them. Especially Junpei.

Earlier I mentioned when they would put the party members you'd meet in the game manual, this one put em right on the cover. The moment you see Naoto you're like "so when does she join? She's on the cover, either she joins or she's the culprit". Never was able to get out of Yukiko's dungeon on Normal. Wipe city. I set it on Beginner, and I don't know if it's any easier, just feels the same but with 10 continues. I quit around Void Quest because I was worried it would give me a nonsense ending and tell me to play it again on the real difficulty. Remember when games did that? What a weird medium.

I need new DVD cases, this one looks like it was tied to the back of a truck and dragged through the woods, and then like a mangy old dog found it lying in a ditch and went to town. I think for all these NIS games that I played for ten minutes I'm just going to say "you should play Disgaea, it's cool."

I never actually got to play through this all the way. I played my friend's copy when he was halfway through the game and I was under the impression it was the most difficult game ever because I had to learn the controls by trial in error halfway into these super complicated jumping puzzles. It was Super Meat Prince for an hour and I quit in a huff. I played the HD version for ten minutes and all I could hear was British Yosuke.

I'd actually like another go through Psychonauts, because I feel like the time I interacted with it before I was in no mood for whimsy or a Ratchet-like character action game. But yeah, it's absolutely super charming, people aren't just paying lip service when they say that. Sasha Nein! I just remembered that guy. Fighting through dungeons made from people's emoti... wait a minute, that's basically the gameplay setup for Persona 4. Huh.

This galaxy could be a little more roguish and a little less everybody-stand-around-doing-nothing! The idea of playing a game for 6 hours before anything interesting happens boggles my mind now. Now I realize it was all to try to stretch and pad the number that goes on the back of the box, because people make their purchasing decisions more on that number than the actual quality of the moment-to-moment gameplay or story.

I think the thing people forget about old Resident Evil, when they act like “oh they're just using action and pretty graphics to lure in the CoD crowd” is that Resident Evil was always one of the most slickly produced games out there, and it always had delusions of great action that it just couldn't execute. Go back and check out the reviews for the original, people didn't talk about how moving slow and awkward was great, they talk about how fun it is to blast creeps with the shotgun, or to blow everything to hell with the infinite rocket launcher on a second playthrough. We also forget that these early Resident Evil games were unbelievable looking, Resident Evil 2 was the Uncharted 2 of its time. ... Anyways, I haven't played Code Veronica, because I instinctively avoided all RE games without a number. Probably served me well.

No idea, dude. Another sealed game I bought out of some foolish desire to catalog this stuff. The back claims “no more grinding!” and that the entire game is based around S-Links. So instead of grinding fights, I'm grinding a visual novel. Also, make sure you subscribe to my youtube channel, where I post videos of me grinding on visual novels. So moe.

THIS GAME IS AWESOME. This game is so crazy and creepy and weird. It's in weird alt-history World War 1 Europe. The Catholic church is full of devil summoners and you fight Rasputin in One Winged Angel mode. Your party member includes an old man with a living(?) doll, a dog, a gay vampire wrestler (as in, he's gay, and a vampire, and a wrestler, he doesn't wrestle gay vampires), Anastasia Romanov, and a gypsy who shoots perfume at your enemies. You hang out with this dude Roger Bacon who is this creepy little bastard with insane eyes. Your gay wrestler learns new moves by wrestling a big oily naked shiek. You find new dresses for your living doll by trading gay porn to a pair of openly flaming merchants. Man, when you put it all out there.

So you're in Jazz Age New York, you're a 15 year old private detective, and then an eight foot tall Native American lady is magical, or summons demons, or... this game just didn't hook me like its predecessor. Come to think of it, there was far less gay stuff in this game. ...

Never played it. Suppose I should. I get unsure when I hear people talk about games like God himself in a DVD. I actually bought this the same time as Beyond Good and Evil, I think they both received a baffling reprint late in the PS2's life.

I remember seeing either a trailer or a commercial for this game that scared the crap out of me as a 15 year old. I think Silent Hill the original is probably the most horrific and 3 is the best, but 2 is absolutely crushing. Everything about this game is designed to depress you. Whereas 1 and 3 succeed because the Otherworld sections are horror incarnate, full of insanely effective art and sound design, 2 depresses you in the Fog World. It's actually least scary when the floor becomes bloody grates and the walls pulse with rotten flesh, it's effective when it's just a filthy rotten town that you are hopelessly, hopelessly lost in. The enemies are not threatening, they're pathetic and broken creatures who appear to be in constant suffering. Also making it effective is that it's by far the easiest game in the series. This reduces the amount the player has to think about exploiting the bad combat and more on just exploration and wallowing in the pointlessness of James' entire endeavor. And that's a dangerous goal, 1 and 3 make you feel like you saved the world and yourself, Silent Hill 2 invariably ends on a down note.

But Silent Hill 3 is the best game. The stupid cult stuff is back, but it's done far better than the original, where things were foretold by GYROMANCY! Heather is the first Silent Hill protagonist who actually appears to have an opinion and a goal. It both separates you from Heather and includes you with her in some really strange ways. Vincent has a strange false affect where one of his eyes is always on Heather, and the other looks dead on at the camera. Heather at one point says "I hate being in this room. Get me out of here." to ostensibly the player. I love this game. I think 2 is the more important game, because the story it told, the way it pieces it out is pretty landmark. But 3 handles better, looks better, is performed better, and is the most Lovecraftian of them all.

I've played the demo for Siren Blood Curse on the PS3 probably 3 times. And thank God. This is the problem; survival horror derives the suspense from the resource management and the cinematic elements; fixed camera angles, presentation of scares, use of sound. But everyone is focused on making your character incapable of doing anything a human would be capable of because Resident Evil's tank controls were cludgier than intended. When you build your game INTENDING to handle shitty, it's going to inevitably be even worse than you expected. I half expect the player characters in Siren to hurt themselves as soon as they get a weapon.

This thing. Ugh. For some reason this game was 30 dollars basically the week it came out, maybe one of those advertising misprint things. Shouldve kept on walking. I didn't even get to the thing that everyone else hates, I played 35 hours slogging through this awful medievil realm and killed a dragon in an endless fight. All the enemies I fought were complete fodder giving me no experience points. Then suddenly angels from the edge of the universe come to judge the human race, and judge me they did. I went from never taking damage to dying in one hit in every random encounter. That's how Star Ocean ends with me. Faceless angels from beyond man's sanity began the end of all things, and the main character, whose name is FAYT LEINGOD, died on the stupid moon. Fin.