The lengths one goes to play their favorite video game

In 1992, I drove 40 miles to play on the nearest Street Figher 2 arcade cabinet. After playing for 2 hours, I found that my car wouldn't start and I had to call my mom to explain why I was 40 miles away from home at 10 PM on a school night.

I lied of course...

Not a physical length like yours. More of a hassle.

When I was in college during the height of my Guitar Hero days, there was a brief period when I had two monitors with no speakers and no TV for whatever reason. I had a 360 which had the AV input right next to the HDMI inputs? (Maybe it was a different type of cable, I'm not 100% sure now) With my setup, I needed both cables to be plugged in so I could get sound and video, but they were so close together they wouldn't fit.

So there was a stretch where I had video to one of the monitors, but no sound. However, I had a docking station where I plugged in my iPod that was filled with songs from various Guitar Hero games. So I would synchronize the Guitar Hero notes with the song on my iPod.

Later I either read about or just decided to crack open the casing on one of the cords with a butter knife, which allowed me to wiggle both of them in there. Although I remember parts of the cord were loose, so I had to line stuff up to prevent the cable from falling to pieces. If I remember correctly, this weird setup came back to bite me, and at one point I had to navigate a 360 with no video and sound for some reason. So I had to pull up YouTube videos to map out the dashboard so I could get to wherever the hell I needed to go. (Thinking about some of these stories makes me wonder the 360 was just weird or if I was an idiot who made things 5 times harder)

I’ve always admired people that took days off work or did some insane shenanigans to get at them. As someone that is pretty heavy into video-gamin’ I’ve never actually been able to make the sacrifice to real life priorities. I’ve played way beyond reasonable hours when I had class or later work in the morning but that’s about it.

The closest I’ve come is when I found out a small mom and pop store was breaking street date on Phantom Pain like a week ahead of release and I went across town to get it. Playing that game so early felt incredibly good but all it took was a few subway transfers.

I skipped school and went to the mall during that window where the mall was open, but the stores were all still closed for the day.

I waited there for EB or Gamestop or whatever to open, and asked if WCW/NWO was in, yet. It wasn’t, but UPS was supposed to be in with today’s shipment in an hour or two, and there might be some copies coming.

Now, this was in the 90s, when new games just sort of appeared when they felt like it. You couldn’t walk into a Best Buy 10am on launch day and just get a copy. You basically had to go to game or toy stores, and they’d USUALLY have a copy of the game some time that first week.

Anyhow, I waited, others showed up asking, too...maybe 3-4 other kids. I believe it was too late to pre-order, so it was just this calm chaos. The UPS guy gets there with the box and the Gamestop or EB guy cuts it open and starts unpacking.

I decided to seize the day when I saw a copy in the box and just grabbed it. It was the only copy in that box. The employee didn’t really want to get into it, and really just wanted us out of the store, so he rang me out and that wS it.

A bunch of us played that night and all weekend. No regrets.

A recent one, earlier this year i spent over £120 regaining the ability to play Time Crisis 2 on a large CRT, and a full day testing one for all tv remotes to find one that works.

I wouldnt say it's my favourite videogame (far from it) but I skipped school to get Prince of Persia: Warrior Within on launch day (loved Sands of Time) and they didnt have it because of course they didnt. (no huge loss, my teen nu-metal urges were satiated elsewhere)

I'm not sure if this qualifies but one of the main reasons I bought the Vita was because I had Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus on Playstation Plus and the idea of being able to play one of my favourite games anywhere was worth the £120 at the time. (I also still view the Vita as the best handheld gaming device because it doesnt require a bag like the Switch or even the Switch mini)

Possibly the dumbest thing I did (yes dumber than the Warrior Within thing) was dropping a grand on a gaming rig to play Crysis on high (not even max!) settings, to be fair that rig got me through most of that generation but Crysis kind of sucks.

Earthbound is the most perfect game ever made (it is known).

After playing the game on the SNES in elementary school, I discovered the joys of emulation in high school and (yadda, yadda, yadda), I found myself playing Earthbound on PC! But something didn't feel right, and it wasn't that I was playing with a keyboard. Something in the flavoring felt...off. So: I got on eBay and bought a copy of the strategy guide, written as an in-universe travel guide, for around $25. Because it just felt RIGHT to play the game with the guide, even if I didn't actually need it.

I still have that damn strategy guide floating around ~20 years later.

I've had a ton of small instances of me going just that little bit too far in trying to solve an issue in playing a game. Arguably I enjoyed the troubleshooting more than playing, but that's not all that relevant.

The first two that come to mind however is that I bought a high end CPU, specifically because I couldn't run Monster Hunter Tri on an emulator. I spent hours doing configuration to try and make i playable but in the end, money solved it.

I "had to" use a hex editor to fix a bug in vampire the masquerade bloodlines. It couldn't understand what 8gb of RAM was and looped back to thinking I had -1 memory. So it put all the UI at the worst possible resolution it could manage. It was unfixable with regular patches or even by having my PC pretend it had a lower amount of RAM, the only way I found to fix it was opening the .exe in a hex editor and locating the "feature" so I could disable it.... God that took a while.

It was for one of my favorite games, Dragon Quest 8. I loved playing it on my PS2 when it launched, pirated, but only got half way before I got distracted with some new games. Then my PS2 stopped reading discs. I said I would buy whatever system it got ported to in the future. Even though I had a Backwards Compatible PS3, my local Gamestops didn't have it for PS2.

The 3DS version when it came out, and I started on my quest to get it. I bought an old 3DS XL from my friend used for $150, and went to buy a physical copy. The store which carried it was 40 km (25 miles) away from my home, and I drove there after work to get it. It worked perfectly for the most part.

I played through most of the game till I got to the final boss area, and I spilled water near my 3DS. I opened it up to clean it, and thankfully there was little damage to the hardware itself. However one issue came up, the Right trigger always thought was down. After investigating fixes for the trigger, I simply unplugged it and finished the game without a right trigger. To be fair the triggers were to only control the camera, so it was more of an inconvenience.

Recently I got a new wire to fix it, so I'm not loading some games for a trip to play my 3ds.