share your fondest gaming moment

[Mouth for war]

As we all get older...getting a new game just doesn't feel the same anymore. When you were a child though it was the best thing ever when you got a new game for your birthday/christmas/whatever. One of my best memories is when i had traded in a few snes games in order to get the almighty "The legend of Zelda - A link to the past". I had to send my games through mail to a company in order to get Zelda. It took a looong time to get it. I almost started to think they ripped me off.

On a holiday in the winter time my mom wouldn't trust me to be home alone when they were going away so i had to stay at a friends house for a few days. When i came home...Zelda was laying in that classic brown bubbly plast envelope. At that time, my grampa was a salesmanager (sales boss?) at a huge candy factory here in sweden called Cloetta. Mom and stepfather had stopped by there before driving home. So not only was zelda waiting for me, there was also a bigass box if chocolates for me as well.

With snow "pouring" down outside and a shitload of candy next to me, I popped in the cartridge and went to heaven for a while. OK then! Anyone else who has a nice gaming story they'd like to share? I wish for those good ol' days sometimes

[CaptainD]

My fondest memories are often linked to getting a new adventure game on the Atari ST and playing it with my sister - we have very different ways of thinking so we make a good puzzle-solving combination

Battling Zak McKraken for 2 YEARS before finally completing it (albeit ending up with a massive sense of "oh, so... we're not going to play this any more??!? ) is a strong memory, but spending an entire day playing and completing The Secret of Monkey Island (without hints - but I think we solved a couple of the tougher ones more by luck than judgement) was a particular highlight, as was (later on in the PC years) playing Curse of Monkey Island and Escape from Monkey Island.

Come to think of it, all of my best memories are really of multiplayer games - from Feud on the Speccy to Supersprint and Rampage on the ST with my niece and nephew, multi-event sports games that could be played with the whole family (Winter Events on the C16, The Games: Summer Edition on the ST and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games on the WII) were great.  DynaBusters+ was an Atari STE exclusive DynaBusters game and was absolutely phenomenal in 4 player mode.  Gauntlet 2 was great fun in multiplayer too, although mainly because of the IT monster and the sound samples ("Blue Elf needs food, BADLY!").

Other memories include going round a mate's house and playing whatever new game he'd rented for his SEGA MegaDrive (Genesis outside the US I think) and just playing it until we completed it, playing other AG's with my wife (Lost Horizon a particular favourite), and being secretly jealous of the Amiga A1200's abilities when I went round a mate's after school and played The Chaos Engine.

For single-player experiences, nothing quite beats finally getting to the end of a really epic RPG, or winning everything in sight on a footie game (I like both FIFA and PES for different reasons, love taking Liverpool to domestic and European domination in any of them) - from Jon Ritman's International Match Day and Match Day 2 on the Speccy through Microprose Soccer, Kick Off 1 & 2 and Player Manager on the ST, FIFA and PES on the WII and New Star Soccer on the PC, footie games have a life of their own.  Haven't played one in ages though, just can't get the time.  Although thinking back playing Elite 1 & 2 on the ST, and Freelancer on the PC, was also very cool.  Plus two of my all-time favourite games, Pirates! and Populous on the ST, which were AMAAAAAAAAAAZING single-player games, although like most others my sister and I somehow managed to turn them into sort of 2-player games as well...

Nowadays, my best gaming experiences are actually seeing / hearing / reading other people enjoying games that I've designed or been involved with making.  I just can't seem to get into actually playing games very much at all these days.


I'm gonna stop before I remember more games, you've really set me off here!

[Mouth for war]

Haha damn you had a lot there. Great! Thanks! I have more too of course but that zelda thing really stuck with me all these years. Remember it like it was yesterday

[nihilyst]

My latest fond memory is actually not more than four years old. I had passed my final exams and had a lot of spare time which I spent sleeping, taking walks, preparing meals, watching TV and playing games. I had bought a game called Dark Souls, which I had heard nothing about back then. I popped it in, not knowing what to exspect, got killed a few times, progressed very slowly, got killed yet some more times, and before I realized it, hours and hours of me playing Dark Souls had gone by, me lying on my couch, controller in hand, forgetting time and experiencing a world which invited me to explore it more so than any other game in the last years. A masterpiece.

And for my childhood: Playing Zak McKracken or Monkey Island 2 with my sister.

[Mouth for war]

Ah nice one! I never played it but have heard very good things about it :-)

[shaun9991]

A memory that sticks out for me is finally managing to get the Green Fur in Quest For Glory. I just never thought to ask the meep. This took MONTHS

[Mouth for war]

Haha oh yeah when you finally solved a puzzle you felt great. I think simon the sorcerer 2 is the only game i ever finished as a youngster without any kind of walkthrough. Those older games could have brutal puzzles sometimes

[Danvzare]

I have oh so many fond gaming memories. So many in fact, it's hard to pinpoint one.

So instead I'll just share my most recent one.
First though, a little backstory to give some context.

Many years ago (probably close to ten) I started playing games with my mother. Most notably Timesplitters. I'd show her how to play the game, and in turn she'd play the game with me.
We played all three Timesplitters games, and even completed the third one countless times. But of course you can only complete the same games so many times, and Timesplitters is rather unique in regards to the way it approached the FPS genre.
Two years ago I found out that before Timesplitters was made, the people who made that game worked for Rare and made Golden Eye and Perfect Dark. Both of which were very similar to Timesplitters, and the latter of which had splitscreen.
Natually I downloaded an emulator and a rom, and asked my mother to play it with me. We did, and boy did we enjoy it. So nostalgic for both of us.
We completed the game three times. The first on easy, the second on normal, and the third on hard.

Now we're getting to my fondest gaming moment.
We were on the last level on the hardest mode. Now this level had been an absolute nightmare on the other modes, and so this time we were coming prepared. We made sure to really abuse the save states just to get to the final boss without losing a single bit of health, just because we knew we'd need every last bit. (We usually tried to avoid save states, and even completed all of easy mode without save states, well except for the final level, which is what started us off using save states to begin with.)

We had gotten to the little corridor just before the final boss, and we both had full health, and had the game saved.
What made this really hard, was that our controllers were pretty crap. It was almost impossible to aim with the analog sticks. We literally needed to strafe to be able to hit anything! I suspect that if we were on a real N64, we wouldn't have ever needed save states.
But I digress, we had decided that since I was the better player, I would go in first, fight as good as I could, and then when I died, I would use my mother's character as my second life.
So I ran in and began shooting. And you know what... I didn't get hurt once. As a matter of fact, I was so accurate, I somehow stopped the boss from summoning other monsters! I was somehow getting it's shield down, and hitting it, so quickly and accurately, that it didn't get a chance to summon its minions, which were usually what ended up killing us.
Somehow, on the hardest mode, I managed to easily defeat the final boss on my first try. And the way I played, I was like a bloody action hero!

What's more, that pretty much ended our final run on Perfect Dark, since it marked the completion of hard mode.
Definitely the best way to complete the game, once and for all.
Funnily enough, it didn't seem as though I needed those save states after all.