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Posted: May 03 2010 08:29 pm

As I'm sure many of you in this forum can relate to, Video Games significantly effected my childhood. As far back as I can remember (for me the NES days) I've always had Games in my life. My first "curse word" came from Video games. Watching my Father and Uncle play Ultima: Quest Of The Avatar (NES) and hearing my uncle state "You better pay the shopkeeper what hes asking or he'll be pissed." (if your not familiar with Ultima: QOTA, some shopkeepers are blind and you can pay them whatever you want.) Me being a young child, I repeated it during our next game play, then found out what Dawn Dish Soap tasted like. Playing Final Fantasy 1 was my entire motivation on learning how to read, even though once I could comprehend the words, As a Child, I still had no idea what the hell was going on. Another big one was the Adventure game Uninvited. That damn woman in the blue dress that has her back turned, and if you decide to perform any action on her, turns and puts a huge skull face on the screen, SCARED THE SHIT out of me. I ran and hid under my bed holding a plastic Ninja sword until my mother dragged me from under my bed. Still to this day I won't play uninvited. Just loading the ROM and hearing the music freaks me out. Did games effect anyone else's childhood like this?

Posted: May 03 2010 09:23 pm

Wolfenstein 3D used to scare the shit out of me only because of the random appearance of the Nazi's and it was the first introduction to human like characters that had to be killed.

Posted: May 03 2010 09:58 pm

Slayer1 wrote:

Wolfenstein 3D used to scare the shit out of me only because of

First boss.

Posted: May 03 2010 11:45 pm

Video games had a massive effect on my childhood; my parents taught me how to read, but all the text I read in video games helped improve my reading skills immensely.

This might sound absurd, but I played/beat Ultima: Quest of the Avatar on the NES when I was eight, and I honestly think it's a good game for teaching kids How To Not Be A Douchebag 101.

Video games can be pretty educational. I felt like the smartest nine year old ever because Parasite Eve taught me what mitochondria is.

Posted: May 03 2010 11:53 pm

Any time I would watch my brothers play Shadowgate on the NES and they would die, I would have to leave the room.

The music they played, and the visual of the Grim Reaper was just too much, it scared the absolute shit out of me.

Posted: May 04 2010 12:41 am

I cried when Zak McKracken died.

Posted: May 04 2010 03:29 am

I used to reset the game whenever I reached Abubo on my Master System copy of Double Dragon. I always assumed that he was going to flat out murder me because his sprite was a lot bigger and bulkier. Of course I eventually overcame my fear of that but I still felt kind of intimidated by something with such a freakish face.

Link's Awakening was the very first game where I ever actually forced myself to read all the dialogue. Of course I was around four when I got the game so words like "vittles" flew right over my head but I remember listening to the owl and thinking about how wise he seemed for an owl. I have many good memories of that game and the Ballad of the Windfish never fails to send a shiver down my spine.

I can also recall spending many hours playing my copies of Dick Tracy and Vigilante for the Master System. I beat Vigilante after numerous attempts however I gave up on Dick Tracy because it seemed like the levels looped. After beating the ugly guy in the warehouse for the fifth time I called it quits, I always loved the music though. Sometimes I even catch myself humming the main stage music. As for Vigilante I always hated that the common thugs used strangling as their main form of attack. I always felt a little intimidated with each new level for some reason when I was younger. I really miss my old Master System, I spent many hours playing it with my cousin for hours into the night.

Posted: May 04 2010 04:20 am

Games that scared me...man, I remember spending the first two weeks of playing the original LoZ in the overworld. I found Level 1 (and some of the other mazes) of course, but the music and weird way the rooms shifted freaked me out. I just couldn't make myself play it. Armos, too...god those statues were scary. Mostly because they could kick your butt so fast.

I played tons of games as a kid, like we all did...Wolfenstein 3D was a big one (speaking of things that used to scare the shit out of me, those fucking SS guards and their laugh...still makes me twitch.) Also played a lot of the original Flight Simulator, Wolfpack (a lovably terrible WWII U-Boat game) and a helicopter sim called Comanche: Maximum Overkill on my dad's PC. That's where I started learning about computers, really, learning how to navigate the DOS menus to load the game I wanted to play. Good times.

The most iconic game of my childhood though was Final Fantasy. Even more so than Zelda, Mario, Dragon Warrior, or any of those. I sunk SO many hours into that game, and I still could write you a script of every dialogue box in the game if you gave me enough paper. The thrill of getting the airship and class change for the first time is probably still my favorite moment as a gamer. It was also the first game I ever beat.

I love Final Fantasy <3.

Posted: May 04 2010 04:57 am

I was the same way when it came to Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy 1 was the first game I ever beat, as a young child (probably 5-6 age range) looking back, that was one hell of a game to take down. I spent COUNTLESS hours on Final Fantasy II and Zelda Link to the Past. Those were (and still today) hands down my favorite games. Don't get me wrong, I love FFIII as well (come on, my name is even Atma) but I never really played to too much as a Kid. Maybe one run through. I forgot to mention Shadowgate as well, same thing, I wouldn't play it, but if anyone else who was died and the reaper/music started, I freaked out. I don't know if I'm just a pussy, but I still won't even mess with them today. Some kind of Childhood Terror Syndrom or something.

Posted: May 04 2010 08:54 am

Surprisingly the random encounters in Final Fantasy scared the SHIT out of me when I was like five. The only other RPG we had at the time was the legend of Zelda and that wasn't as scary as the random monsters.

Posted: May 04 2010 11:38 am

Atma, I think we can all agree that Shadowgate deaths are a universal (and universally traumatizing) rite of passage for anyone who grew up in the NES era.

You know, FF 1 random battles never bothered me. I guess they just happened so frequently it was hard for me to be surprised by them. The thing about the FF dungeons though is they all had really cool music. (Well except the Marsh Cave tune...that gets really annoying pretty quickly). LoZ dungeon music was just plain CREEPY, and when you're what, 7, hear that, and then walk right into a room of skeletons...eep!

I did play some SNES as a kid, but I didn't own one til I was much older. So as much as I love games like FF VI and Zelda: LtP, they didn't have nearly the developmental impact on me as the original LoZ or FF.

Zelda II and Batman for the NES were two others I remember spending a ton of time on...Bart vs. the Space Mutants too, although I still have yet to get past the dinosaur in the museum stage...hrmph.

Posted: May 04 2010 12:51 pm

Only thing that ever scared in FF1 was when I would encounter Mad Ponies at the beginning. In my first playthrough of the game, my third random encounter was 4 fucking Mad Ponies. They raped me to death, and after that, I would run whenever I saw Mad Ponies in my pre-Garland adventures.

And of course there was always panic in Final Fantasy, as opposed to outright fear. That panic you felt when you'd been hammering a boss forever and they weren't dead and your guys almost were. Would you win? If you did, did you have enough healing items to reconstitute your party? Did you have a tent or a cabin? Had you long ago depleted your MP items, leaving your Black Mage completely fucking useless? The Marsh Cave was notorious for this. The Hole in the Earth was pretty annoying too.

The first time a statue shot a fireball at me in Zelda, that scared the hell out of me. Was not expecting that at all.

Posted: May 04 2010 01:19 pm

Marsh Cave pissed me and my brother off beyond belief. Those damn wizards guarding the crown was what sealed the deal and stopped me from playing until I brought it out of retirement when I was 12.

As suspenseful and freighting as it was supposed to be, I wasn't terrified of Friday the 13th other then dying. I'd turn off the system right before Jason would kill the conselor so I'd be like "it never happened, they are all safe and the kids are fine and my friends aren't dead. I'll call them right now"

My SNES games when I was young consisted of ZAMN, Buster Busts Loose, Super Mario World, Super Mario All Stars and SpiderMan and X-Men. Spiderman and X-Men was actually one of my favorites and had my favorite X-Men in it which greatly pleased me...

Joined: Oct 01 2009 Posts: 5316

Fucking Wizrobes man....

Joined: Dec 06 2007 Location: Connecticut Posts: 11244

I enjoyed video games very much, but my fondest childhood memories have nothing to do with them.

Looking back Gemstone III and WoW drained a solid 3-4 years of my life and I am glad to be done with them. Still, I enjoyed many classic NES/SNES RPG's and the NHL series by EA on Genesis. Those were good times.

Posted: May 04 2010 08:22 pm

One name:

Pyscho Mantis.

Pyscho mantis knows the truth Pictures, Images and Photos

Posted: May 04 2010 09:01 pm

both with and without the mask he's just creepy as fuck

Joined: Mar 01 2010 Posts: 126

I spent so many hours playing the original Prince of Persia.

My dad had a friend who gave me lists of hundreds of games that he could copy for me. I used to pick random stuff off the list and I found a lot of sweet games. I used to play a lot of the King's Quest type games back then. My favorite was Conquests of Camelot, though I never finished it when I was a kid. I did get pretty far, but I eventually got lost. And then recently I downloaded it and finished it in a day.

I did play a lot of Space Invaders and Zaxxon (I had those games as cartridges on Spectravideo) as well. Those games are so simple compared to the ones that are made nowadays, but they're still a lot of fun to play.

Posted: May 05 2010 12:50 am

GPFontaine wrote:

I enjoyed video games very much, but my fondest childhood memories have nothing to do with them.

This, kinda. My best childhood memories aren't from playing the games themselves, but the real-life games they inspired me and my (then) best friend to play. We used to run around outside from sunup to sundown on weekends pretending to be prisoners escaping from Castle Wolfenstein (a midday trip to the pool to cool off doubled as "a secret underground tunnel," while the jacuzzi was a healing spring where we could rest and recover.) We also LOVED casting ourselves as the heroes of Final Fantasy. (My best friend Brad was always the Fighter/Knight and I was naturally the Thief/Ninja.) I seem to recall acting out scenes from Legend of Zelda too, but that was never as much fun for whatever reason so FF/Wolfenstein were definitely the order of the day. We had a great big grass park right next to our apartment complex (which was a ton of fun to run around and play in in its own right; trees to climb, alleys to hide in and run through...man.)

That all stopped when Brad had to move away, sadly. Sigh. If I could go relive any part of my life, it would be the summer I was 10, and all the days were filled with nothing but those games, trips to the 7-11 for pogs and ice cream, playing video games, and reading comics and chose-your-own-adventure books. I'm sure it wasn't quite as idyllic as I remember it now (nothing ever is), but it sure was a happy time. Remembering it still makes me smile.

Posted: May 05 2010 01:41 am

Chrono Trigger and A Link To The Past had the most profound impact upon me. I still can't play any of the first few Final Fantasy games because the static battle system irritates me, and my first memory related to video games is from Zelda. God, I fucking hated the room in Turtle Rock where you needed to light all the torches while on a moving platform, it took me forever to get. I beat the game around when I was six.

You know what else scared the shit out of me? The scene in Earthbound where Poo undergoes the final stage of his Mu training. As if the floating spirit head didn't scare me, seeing a new character's HP being reduced to zero, whilst describing the removal of his arms and legs, then the sound and screen cutting out entirely as his ears and eyes were removed fuckin' scared me.
Moonside too. Moonside was just plain freaky, from everyone talking weirdly to the graphics.

Earthbound was far from being one of the first few SNES games I played, but it definitely had a huge impact on me later on

Posted: May 05 2010 02:31 am

Funny thing about LoZ, I've always referred to diagonally pouring rain as "Zelda rain" after the beginning of LttP. I also remember using the sheathes of my various toy swords as the energy beam for being at full health (swinging them hard enough to fling the sheath off and hit a friend. usually in the shin or the gut).

I paraphrased the events of one of the Castlevania games for an elementary school story and won $5 for getting the highest grade.

I'd say the one game that sucked more money out of me (outside of the cumulative spending on the pokemon series) would probably be Secret of Mana. I remember digging around for enough spare change to rent it for "just one more day" on multiple occasions.

Posted: May 06 2010 12:24 am

SoldierHawk wrote:

Atma, I think we can all agree that Shadowgate deaths are a universal (and universally traumatizing) rite of passage for anyone who grew up in the NES era.

Most definitely this. There were a countless amount of deaths in the game that scared me as a kid...a few that come to mind involve the room of mirrors, where if you smash the wrong one you either get a whole bunch of glass shards ripping through your body (with graphic description) or you get sucked into a portal into space and suffocate (with a creepy description describing the grim reaper waiting to embrace you). Also, the orb room with the levers where you try to enter the hole in the middle of the room and HOLY CRAP WHITE HAIRY DEMON THING.

Crazy_Bastard wrote:

You know what else scared the shit out of me? The scene in Earthbound where Poo undergoes the final stage of his Mu training. As if the floating spirit head didn't scare me, seeing a new character's HP being reduced to zero, whilst describing the removal of his arms and legs, then the sound and screen cutting out entirely as his ears and eyes were removed fuckin' scared me.

Also this. The concept of basically being a limbless torso with a head, sans the ability to see or hear, while being damned for the rest of your life to have nothing but your thoughts, blew my little mind (in a bad way).

Posted: May 08 2010 09:35 pm

If I spent half the time studying in school as I did playing video games, I'd be a rocket scientist by now.

Joined: Mar 18 2010 Location: Tuonela Posts: 299

I learned to play Nintendo, before I leanerd to read. Thank you Jesus! No really, thank Jesus: the day care where my parents put me was owned by very religious people. (A puzzle, why my non-religious parents chose that). Anyway, they had fucking Ninja Gaiden.

Posted: May 09 2010 02:09 pm

If I could name one NES-related thing that creeped me out as a kid, it was the Password theme for Simon's Quest. Always sent a chill down a spine.