• theangryseal@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    I know this probably won’t get seen much now, but man that game has a special place in my heart.

    Starting with the original Zelda game, my mother and I always beat them together.

    We were very poor, but she always did what she had to do to get us the latest Nintendo console. She worked as a dog groomer leading up to the release of the Nintendo 64. She would be gone for 12 hours at a time, working for below minimum wage (under the table) just to get us that console.

    She got Ocarina of Time for my brother and I for Christmas. She was just as excited to play it as we were, but there was no way my dad was going to let us open a Christmas present early. We only got one big present to share, and two small presents. Sometimes if my dad had saved a decent amount, we’d get the large present (usually a game), and then we’d get something that we really wanted that we didn’t have to share.

    I begged my mom, she begged my dad. He wouldn’t budge. In the weeks leading up to Christmas though, she broke. She came to me with her plan. We were going to open it every day when he went to work and play it until an hour before he got home.

    By the time Christmas rolled around, we were in the forest temple. He didn’t play games so he didn’t have a clue.

    It was so much fun sneaking that game out with my mom and my brother. It was so much fun. Seeing how big it was for the time, we literally couldn’t believe our eyes.

    Is OoT my favorite game of all time? Not anymore. It is my favorite memory of a game though, and by a long shot.

    Edit, for fun.

    It meant so much to me that the only boxes I still have from my childhood are my Zelda and N64 boxes.

  • Console_Modder@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Me having my first ‘open world’ experience with TES Oblivion and not enjoying it until my inner monologue suddenly switches from “I don’t know where to go. I don’t know what to do” to “I can go anywhere. I CAN DO ANYTHING!” and then I am slaughtered by the guard for trying to kill the nearest random peasant.

    -Sometime in 2007

  • Kaput@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    First time playing oblivion, still in the tutorial/intro. Grab the first bow and arrow laying a few meter from a well. Of course the only targety looking thing is the well’s bucket. Hit the bucket, it swing, cool. The bucket stop swinging and behold! It is now tilting on the side where the arrow is stuck in. Coming from Morrowind I had lots of gripes with oblivion, but that first arrow in the bucket feeling has been in my mind forever.

    • Klear@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I remember the bucket, but my moment actually came about a minute later. A skeever runs towards me and jumps at me. I put my shield in front of me. The shield shakes, the skeever dies and its body ragdolls down some steps. The bucket was an amazing technical achivement, but the shield thing made me immersed in the world.

  • Enkrod@feddit.org
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    6 days ago

    Me seeing the starting screen “These are the end-times… There was no hope of survival… This is how you died.” For Project Zomboid the first time. The one and only Zombie-Survival-Game that absolutely hit the nail on the head in relation to an atmosphere of despair and gritty survival.

  • otp@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Star Control 2 on the 3DO, playing that before I’d seen a PlayStation, was this for me.

    And later, FF7 was this for me.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    Me with Bioshock when you descend for the first time with Andrew Ryan introducing rapture.

    But tbf, imo that’s a modern game as in I don’t see much difference between that and the latest AAA single player game.

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    5 days ago

    I got the master sword in TotK around release and wasn’t spoiled on the context of it. It was really cool.

  • kautau@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Meanwhile 8year old me with a ps1 seeing this for the first time and thinking I can never be happy again

  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    And OoT still holds up. Gameplay still feels pretty modern even if you play it today unlike most games on the N64 and PSX. Even the single analog stick controls with z-targeting hasn’t really aged much. Also OoT and Majora’s are still my favorite Zelda games, the non-Switch mainline games after the N64 era just feel derivative with gimmicks slapped on top to make it feel new even tough it still the same quests for the same items you gather in the same type of settings with the same kind of dungeons. Wish they just followed Majora’s Mask and completly mixed the gameplay up for every sequel, instead of rehashing LttP and OoT in a different theme. While BotW and TotK are a breath of fresh air and they are great games, they lack that Zelda magic and feel more like sandboxes where you can fuck around rather than an epic adventure in and they lack proper dungeons.

      • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        Half baked, maybe

        Which is how I describe most Nintendo sandbox games in their entirety…

      • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        I liked them, but it felt like going to the same place over and over again once you were in there. (Which is why I’ve never finished Phantom Hourglass).

        I absolutely loved the world around them though, and the lore of the characters.

        I haven’t played Tears of the Kingdom.

        I’m currently playing Wind Waker again.

        • ZoopZeZoop@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          There are some differences between BotW and TotK, but they are fairly similar. I’m still playing TotK, but I’m enjoying it. The biggest difference between the two was a great addition, imo.

          I’m also replaying OoT. My son is excited to see the game that goes with the music he loves.

    • samus12345@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      The Ship of Harkinian PC port makes it even better. Free camera controls alone is a vast improvement!

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      What’s the best way to play Majora’s Mask nowadays, PC emulator or like 3ds? I don’t have original hardware

      TotK lacked proper dungeons

      How?

  • MudMan@fedia.io
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    6 days ago

    See, to me it was more like the first level of Panzer Dragoon in 95, because yeah, I was that guy.

    By 1998 it took a lot to blow my hair back, though. I’m not saying it was a better game, but FFVII had been out for a year, and Quake 2, Half-Life and MGS had come out already. Things had changed.

    But hey, the good news is by the time I did get around to OOT, later and through emulation, I still thought it held up alright, even if I’m not on the same “best game ever” boat as a lot of people.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Were you older? Might be that that if they were younger and didn’t have a computer to play they just wouldn’t have the same context.

      Differing opinions between generations can be largely boiled down to nostalgia and someone’s age during that period informs greatly how much they could even experience prior to [thing] to compare.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        6 days ago

        Yeah, I was in my teens and by the time the N64 came out I had a gaming PC with a proper GPU in it. Between that and the N64 launching quite late over here (and doing pretty terribly) I definitely had a different experience than all the “Nintendo SixtyFoaaaar!” kids out there.

        But there are levels to it. Coming at it dispassionately in those circumstances I still played through all of Mario 64 and OoT and thought they were great and good, respectively. GoldenEye, Turok and the Banjo games not so much.

        Of course that opinion also has to do with controller support on PC being utter garbage until the Xbox 360 came out. For a long time the best playing 3D games on PC that weren’t shooters or RPGs were emulated console games with a PS2 controller adaptor.

        • Ashtear@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          Oof, sounds like you missed the whole space sim genre then. Took extra hardware for the best experience, but even with a cheap joystick it could be amazing stuff. I enjoyed first-person shooters and the like, but TIE Fighter and Freespace were 3D to me back then. I loved my Sidewinder gamepad in that era, too.

          That may or may not be why fifth-gen console 3D does next to nothing for me. Until the Dreamcast came out, it all looked way behind PC, and almost no one was doing the amazing spritework that they excelled at anymore.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
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            6 days ago

            Well, yeah, OK, flight sims. We had flight sims, too.

            And yeah, visually PC games were way ahead of the curve, but that was part of the frustration, right? You had all these super polished, advanced graphics and you were stuck on mouse and keyboard or trying to make do with a joystick or a remedial gamepad. Even when PC pads started including some form of analog stick they were so flimsy. I was on a PS2 pad for a good long while, both for native and emulated games.

    • JasonDJ@lemmy.zip
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      6 days ago

      6 days after Christmas to find and beat the first dungeon without the internet? Sounds about right.