Topic: Games we played as kids

Well, everybody loves a good nostalgia thread, so let's talk about games that were super-memorable as a kid, and have fun reminiscing about the first time we beat that boss, or blown away we were the first time we found that new area or world, and how overly frustrated we got at something that we could beat effortlessly now.

Personally, I remember how, every single day after Preschool, I would immediately turn on my Nintendo 64 and (SPOILERS) beat Rainbow Bowser. (SPOILERS END) Unfortunately, since I pretty played that same final level without giving the system much of a break, I broke my Mario 64 cartridge, as evidenced by how Princess Toadstool turned fuzzy and glitched across the screen every time I watched the end sequence. Now if I play that same cartridge, the game only wants to display the colors Yellow, Orange and Pink. Totally worth it, though.

The games I played as a kid was Super Mario Sunshine and Kingdom Hearts 2. Those were fantastic games.

@NightmareEater: Oh yeah, I remember playing a lot of Sunshine as a kid! I always liked to do that weird belly-slide thing that Mario
could do in that game, and cover as much of the map as I could in paint. After all, the internet always complains about how boring cleaning up the paint was, so why not do the opposite to achieve the opposite of boring?

Nice thread!

I never had a console, but used to have a Gameboy Color and still have a Gameboy Advance.
I had a good mum who apparently always researched carefully which games to buy for me, instead of going to a store and ending up buying something like Magical Pony Petshop Fairies.
I obviously played Tetris, I played Pokemon Red/Blue and later Pokemon Sapphire a lot, Kuru Kuru Kururin was one of my favourites too. On GBA I also loved Spyro pretty much. I played Harvest Moon on GBC, but never finished it, because of boredom in the 2nd year. I also had Links Awakening, but never even got inside the first dungeon. Ridiculous, I know. My mum was better at that. I always watched a friend in elementary school play the game for me instead. I kinda liked it, but was simply not able to play it properly.
Same thing with Super Mario Bros. Advance. I found the first level not that hard, but never even managed to get at least to the middle of the second level. There is this part in the beginning, where you have to jump on some magic carpet enemy, fly over to the other side of a pit and even if I got that the masks in the vase afterward killed me and I had a hard time again.
This was when I learned I was pretty bad at jump'n'runs.
I liked Yoshi's Island quite a lot and thought I did much better in that game only to recognize (about one year ago) that I stopped playing like on the third or fourth level of the first world. Well, still better than SMBA, I guess. ^^

I remember that my parents used to order pizza and make milkshakes for my friends and I while we played Goldeneye 007 on the N64. Awesome times.

My brother and I would always play Super Smash Bros. Melee and pause a lot to pretend that our characters were talking, like those epic battle talks in DBZ. We tried to make our own plots for Smash Bros. That was awesome.

My brother, his friend, and I would stay up until morning playing that microphone trivia mode for Mario Party 6. That's my favorite Mario Party game.

I remember staying up all night playing Mario Kart DS. It was mind-blowing to me that Nintendo finally made an online game. I also would spend hours looking up how to make cool emblems. There were so many cool emblems people made in that game, like Dragon Ball Z ones - and they looked perfect. Mario Kart DS is still my favorite Mario Kart game. I'm not sure if that's an unpopular opinion or not. Too bad I can't play it online anymore.

I'll post more memories when I think of them.

Pffft, young 'uns. In my day I had to stick Paperboy in the cassette player of my Amstrad CPC, then I had to wait AND ENTERTAIN MYSELF, while waiting for it to load. A game could take up to an hour to load, but depending on the size of the game, there were more than one cassette, so there was more loading times on top of that. Keep in mind that for a two year old an hour seems like an eternity. But yeah, paperboy was awesome, however my earliest VG memory is of playing Minder, doing deals and trying to turn a profit.

My first console was the 2600 back in 81 or 82,I was only a nipper then but I still have some fond memories of it.Adventure was the very first game I recall seeing or playing on my uncles 2600.I would only have been 3 but I can still picture him playing it even now 35 years later.It's amazing how much of an impact games can have on your life that I can still remember that all these years later.it would have been a year or 2 after that I got my own 2600 for Xmas.Centipede,Pele Soccer,Q*bert and Pole Position were probably my most played games.I then upgraded to the Sinclair Spectrum 128k +2A with Lightgun where I became obsessed with football manager games,World Soccer League is the one I remember most vividly,loved that game.Other management games I used to play for hours with my mate were Tracksuit Manager,Player of the Year and Rock Star Ate My Hamster.

I could go on for hours here but I'll leave it at that for now.

I remember the very first time I was introduced to the NES. Before they were available for sale in the states a few video stores rented the NES out. There was a ma and pa video store right around the corner from where I lived and one day my dad rented an NES from there. It came in this black looking suit case. I remember him hooking it up to my brothers and my tv and when he hit the power switch being awed by the little man running across the screen and the words Super Mario Bros appearing. It was like a cartoon you can control. That night my family and I stayed up most of the night playing SMB and Duck Hunt. I also remember how sad I was when he had to return the system the following Monday.

Also I really loved Simon the Sorcerer as a kid. I watched my sister play the first one when I was younger and still own the second one and play it from time to time. Liked it more than Monkey Island.
And I played a lot of Crazy Machines (was it called like that?) when I was in that age (elementary school). I had a printed list with all the level passwords, because you could not save the stage you were at.

On the N64 we had Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2, Mario 64, Mario Tennis, Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64.
On the Gameboy we had Super Mario Land 1 and 2, Pokémon Red, Pokémon Gold, Pokémon Crystal.
I remember that Mario Tennis was one of my favorites, and of course Pokémon.

I began with an Acorn Electron: Creepy Cave and Repton were probably the two most played games. Beat them both I think - shame the habit for beating games never stuck with me... Another early game for me was Donkey Kong Jnr 'Game & Watch' (so I have that on my 3DS for nostalgic play).

My brother then saved and saved and bought an Amiga A500. Played many games on it (but only ever paid for one - Robocod) - some of the standout games were Super Cars II (loved the tracks with rail crossings), Sensible Soccer (and SWOS), Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Great Giana Sisters, Graham Taylor Soccer Challenge, Speedball 2, Populous. But the title that seems to have the most nostalgic charm is New Zealand Story.

We used to play Doctor a lot. It was fun at first, but got a bit tedious.

I played Crash Bandicoot 2 a lot as a kid. It was great!

I have a PS1 again, so I'll have to see if I can grab a copy. Relive the memories.

Monster Party, Zombies Ate My Neighbors, Castlevania. Yeah, I was a creepy kid.

The first shmup I ever played was Vanguard for Atari 2600. I can still remember the music when you get the powerup - it sounds an awful lot like the Superman theme.

Ah, the good old days, when I quit Pokemon Yellow because I couldn't find Professor Oak and assumed the game was broken, and made my mother get Pokemon Blue, only to encounter the same problem (and my little brother simply told me to go into the tall grass even though I wasn't supposed to).

Oh the days of the Genesis, where I played lots of (read: died a lot in) Sonic 2, Streets of Rage, Ranger X, Power Rangers: The Movie, NBA Jam, Vector Man, and piles upon piles of crappy licensed games....

I remember going to my friend's house and playing the crappy licensed games on their Super Nintendo. Good times...

And the Game Boy Color! What a system! I had Pokemon, and Pokemon, and Pokemon...and...Pokemon...
Maybe some Zelda somewhere, too.
Oh, and of course crappy licensed games!

And lets not forget the N64, where I sucked at Super Mario 64, Turok, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Goldeneye, F-Zero, X, Super Smash Bros., Donkey Kong 64, Banjo-Tooie, Chameleon Twist 1 and 2, Blast Corps, and Mega Man 64. In fact, the only game I really had a good time with on the system back then were Kirby 64, Star Fox 64, Paper Mario, because I could actually play them for more than 5 minutes without seeing the game over screen.

I guess I also had a Playstation...with nothing but Digimon games for it...except maybe Crash Team Racing and some crappy licensed games...

...Yeah, basically I don't have a lot of fond memories of my early time with games. Not until I turned 11 and got the Nintendo Gamecube, a GBA, and a subscription for Nintendo Power so I could actually find out what games didn't suck (which were mostly Nintendo's games). It helped that by then, people stopped making games to be so freakin' hard all the time, so now I could actually have fun without having to be punished by the game itself all the time.

Then I got a Playstation 2 and started visiting a rental store, and the rest is history.

Let's see...my parents would let me play their old Genesis. There was Paper Boy, Sonic (Which is obvious, because you kinda can't have a Genesis without Sonic), Ms Pac-Man, Pac-Man 2, and Frogger. There were also a lot of old Namco arcade games I played (had Namco Museum on the Gamecube). What else...I didn't really start to pay attention to some of the heavy hitters until I turned ten and got a Wii for Christmas. Before then it was mostly licensed crap. Though I loved THQ's games (Who else here remembers Battle for Bikini Bottom?). It wasn't all licensed, because I used to love the Sonic games, and my cousin gave me his copy of Super Mario Sunshine when I was six. Probably the first Nintendo game I played. I also remember playing Crash Bandicoot 2 at the YMCA. There was this part of it that had all these games in arcade booths, and Crash Bandicoot 2 was one of them. Also, what's weird is that I loved Pokemon, yet I didn't play the games. Seriously. I watched the show, rented the movies, got the trading cards, read the mangas, and got a couple of books. I even remember getting an actual Pokedex. Yet despite all this, I didn't start playing the games until years later. It's weird!

Bunch of old farts in this thread

I really liked Sunset Riders for the SNES as a kid. It was a cowboy sidescrolling shooter with co-op two player and stage ideas that blew me away as a kid. Riding a horse alongside a speeding train shooting down badguys? Freaking running on the backs of stampeding bulls in the opposite direction? Yes please!!

However, as much as I loved it, it got insanely hard later on so I don't think I've ever actualy finished the game.

My very early childhood gaming consisted of the DreamCast, N64, GameCube, Xbox, and the Game Big Advance. Ah, memories... GTA(DON'T ASK!), Sonic Adventure, Mario Party, Golden Sun, Project Gotham, Mario and Luigi, Super Mario Sunshine, Chameleon Twist, Wind Waker and loads more of games.
I remember the time my brother got his first fat DS. He left it on the charger with SM64DS on. He told me not to even touch it(being the klutz I was back then), but I couldn't bear it! Mario was just begging to be played, so I caved in. My brother didn't really do anything, so I got away somewhat being the first person in my family to play a DS!
Lots of memories... I'll say them as this thread develops.