Games from your childhood

Risewild

Antediluvian as Feck
Modder
Orderite
Thanks to @TorontRayne bringing over me a wave of nostalgia I decided to make this thread for people to post some of the games they played a lot during their childhood. This is a nostalgia thread so bring your best memories.

I don't have time to post many of the games I played at the moment but I will put a few of the ones I remember playing for each platform. Also I probably played the most famous games for that system, but I will try to mention some that are not as famous if I can. I might expand this lists later if I feel like it.

I will also not post about PC games since I wasn't a kid anymore when I started playing PC and I already posted in other threads which games I played on PC.

PS: I wish this forums had the option to shrink images... *Sigh*
I will start with my first ever game platform, a ZX Spectrum:
Captain Blood:
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I had no idea what I was doing in that game, but I played it for ages and ages.

MASK II:
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This was a pretty good sidescroller, we could pick three members from MASK and each had a different vehicle, it was cool because we could change vehicles at any time during the game. Pretty good because there wasn't many games for Spectrum you could play as a truck and then change into a plane at any time for example.

Thundercats:
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Was a nice sidescroller.

Operation Wolf:
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It was a first person shooter but not the way you might be used now. It was a static screen and enemies would appear on the screen and you would use your joystick or keyboard to move a small aim cursor and then shoot when it was over the enemy. You had limited ammo and also some bazooka or something you could shoot and create a powerful explosion (also limited shots of that). You could get more ammo, health and bazooka ammo by shooting boxes and stuff that would appear on the screen from time to time or when some enemies were killed (can't remember anymore).

Then I got a NES:
Faxanadu:
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It was a platformer, sidescroller, kinda very light RPG.

Sid Meyer's Pirates:
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One of the best games for the NES I ever played. The only game I played so much I got 100% score and I am not even close to be a completionist. Also it had a kinda time limit, if you get too old your crew will not like you and leave or mutiny and you will be forced to retire. I hate games with time limit but for some reason I played Pirates! almost non-stop back then.

Castlevania:
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Who doesn't know of the Castlevania games today? Well it is a nice sidescroller/platformer and the first game of the series. I played it a lot but I sucked at it (I still suck at Castevania games even now).

Metroid:
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Another iconic game series, another sidescroller/platformer but this one was hard and if you weren't prepared for it you would get lost or stuck or die a lot.

Then I got a Gameboy (The Original Battery Gobbler Brick):
Ren & Stimpy Space Cadet Adventures:
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A very silly game (like the TV show) and a platformer with some mini games.

Metroid 2 Return of Samus:
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Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow:
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Another iconic game series, I played the first games of it all in one brick of a handheld.

Then I got a Sega Mega Drive (Genesis):
Mortal Kombat:
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The first fighting game showing a lot of gore and where you could kill the enemy by performing "Fatalities" that ranged from ripping the head and spine of the enemy's body to a blown kiss that would burn the enemy and only the skeleton would remain. Also it was also the first fighting game who used real life "fighters", they were captured in camera and then implemented into the game instead of being draw.

Golden Axe:
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A great fantasy action game with a wonderful soundtrack (remember this was in a console with only 16 bit).
I could ever only beat it while playing with the Dwarf, which was a powerful fighter but sucked at the magic special attack. IIRC the Amazon warrior was weaker at fighting but had the most powerful magic special attack and the male warrior was the balanced one, with average fighting and magic attack.
In between each level, the player/s would camp and during the knight some small gnomes or something like that would come and steal your potions (potions was what would allow to cast the magic attack, the more you have the stronger the attack is) and you would have to attack them to recover your potions or they would run away after a while and you would lose the potions they nicked. If all went well you would end up with more potions because they carry some of their own.
The game also had mounts (drakes, which there was a few different ones which had different attacks and some kind of weird dinosaur with a beak creature).

The Revenge of Shinobi:
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Another nice action game. This one gets props from managing to blatantly ripoff Marvel and DC characters and use them as evil bosses. I can think of at least three, Spiderman, Batman and Hulk:
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Sonic & Knuckles 3:
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Sega made three Sonic games and then it came up with a crazy idea of making an expansion for a cartridge game, which was Sonic 3. They came up with a cartridge that would have a slot on the top to insert the Sonic 3 game and that would allow the player to play with an extra character that had it's own special abilities (Knuckles) and added some more stuff to the Sonic 3 game.
The beauty of it was that the expansion cartridge was called Sonic & Knuckles and it was also a stand alone game, you didn't need to own Sonic 3 to play it and it was different from that game. It was it's own game that you could attach the other game into and play the other game with added stuff. It was genius!
It was also cheaper than a normal game back then.

Then I got a PSX:
Final Fantasy VII:
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There are always discussion about which Final Fantasy was the best for the PSX. Many people say FFVII many say FFVIII and not so many say FFIX. But the game that had the biggest impact to me was FFVII.
I remember seeing a friend playing that game and I fell in love with it right away (it was as soon as it was released). I had never played or seen a game like that before and the music alone made me want to own this game. I saved for months until i managed to save enough to buy it and it was the PSX game I played more.
I then played the other FF games for PSX and I like them a lot too, but they didn't have that wow factor as VII did even though they had better graphics and the music was good too.

Civilization II:
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I had already seen the Civilization games on PC, but PCs were too expensive for me to be able to buy one. I was very happy when they released the Civ II for PSX. I played it over and over and even though the turns would take ages (I would usually have something nearby to distract myself with while waiting) I still loved this game.

Tekken 3:
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A good fighting game with varied characters and combat styles. I used to have Tekken tournaments in my house where me and a few friends would beat the crap out of eachother in this game. Quite fun.

Front Mission 3:
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I love this game. For me it is the best Front mission game ever made.
The game is a tactical jRPG where we control pilots and their giant robots called Wanzers. It has two different stories and you pick which you play for the rest of the game by choosing one seemingly innocent choice of going out at night with your friend or stay home (IIRC). That decision will decide which story you will play.
This game involves a lot of politics, information and counter information, conspiracies, etc. Many names and acronyms will need to be learned. The game also allows for the pilot of the wanzer to get out of it or to jump from one wanzer to another during battle if there is any wanzer without a pilot in it. You can destroy several parts of the wanzer (legs, right arm, left arm and body IIRC) if the body is destroyed then the wanzer is also destroyed. If both arms are destroyed then the wanzer loses it's weapons and can't do anything besides walking around, if the legs get destroyed it will only be able to move one square per turn. Destroying wanzer parts gives medals to the pilot who destroyed it and allows to get more exp or something. Destroyind all the parts except the body might make the wanzer pilot surrender and at the end of the battle you appropriate yourself with the surrendered wanzer. Sometimes you can also eject the pilot of a wanzer or be ejected from your wanzer and usually die a horrible death quickly if you do not manage to return to it quickly. If a wanzer pilot is ejected and killed that wanzer is your at the end of the battle.
The game allows customizing your wanzers with different models body parts and weapons, colors, etc.
There are also some pilots that can join your crew during the game but you might miss some depending on your choices ingame or actions in battle.

Then I got a PS2:
Zone of the Enders:
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A fast paced action game. I loved the music, visuals and gameplay.

Final Fantasy X:
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Although I prefer the older Final Fantasy games, i still managed to squeeze a few hundreds of hours in gameplay from this game.

Killer 7:
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This was a weird game, even being creepy sometimes. It was a first person shooter "on rails" and was bizarre.

Gran Turismo 4:
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A nice racing game where the cars wouldn't ever suffer a scratch even if they crashed. Beautiful cars though.

Onimusha Warlords:
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Another nice action game where we would control a samurai and fight the oni army that was raised to take control of Japan.

Seven Samurai 20XX:
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I don't think this game was very well known, but I had a blast playing it several times. It is another action adventure that is loosely based on the Seven Samurai movie but in a futuristic society.


Extras section

Arcade Machines
Saturday Night Slam Masters:
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Cadillacs and Dinosaurs:
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Out Zone:
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King of Fighters games:
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Metal Slug games:
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Dragon Ball Z games:
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Pinball Machines

Indiana Jones:
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Star Trek the Next Generation:
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I am not sure if it is relevant. Most of my first games were arcade games on Amstrad, Gamegear and Vectrex. Played them a lot, but they didn't leave as much mark into my memory as the first PC games i played. (Age of Empire, Lands Of Lore, Build Engine FPS, etc...)
 
Not sure how relevant. I'm not that of an avid gamer. The earliest memories refer to American McGee's Alice, but for too young mind it's a bad game. Also lagged to no end.

Basically a bunch of PSP+PS1 titles is all I remember. Resident Evil trilogy, Warcraft II, Quake 2, all in terrifying localization. Finest memory was ignoring the school with all attention at RE2 while technically actually being at school. Now the memories are damaged as I find these games a bit mediocre now.

The most idiotic memory was playing Fallout trilogy all in once. Once New Vegas arrived, the main series just stopped meaning anything to me, especially F3.
 
The earliest memories refer to American McGee's Alice, but for too young mind it's a bad game.
I only played that game back in 2011/2012, because I was interested in its sequel (Alice: Madness Returns). It's actually not a bad game, and I imagine it's good for what it is at the time of release. In fact, iirc, I actually finished it twice because I thought I missed some of the story. Sadly, the sequel is mediocre at best, but that's just because of EA being the fuckers they are. I still enjoyed and loved every moment of it, and the music pieces of these two games are some of the best I've ever heard in video games and they evoke the right atmosphere. Definitely a must for Alice in Wonderland fans (like me).

As for games from my childhood, I really only remember real-time strategy like Age of Empires II (yeah, I started from II and never really played the first one until much, much later), Dune 2000, Stronghold: Crusaders, etc etc, and lots of jRPGs. There's quite a lot of other games, but my memory kind of fuzzy.
 
First game I ever got in to was Zoo Tycoon. Started playing it when I was about 5.
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I haven't touched this game in about a decade, yet I still remember the tricks you needed to do to get Unicorns and Mermaids for your zoo.

Also the theme tune was lit af.
 
I only played that game back in 2011/2012, because I was interested in its sequel (Alice: Madness Returns). It's actually not a bad game, and I imagine it's good for what it is at the time of release. In fact, iirc, I actually finished it twice because I thought I missed some of the story. Sadly, the sequel is mediocre at best, but that's just because of EA being the fuckers they are. I still enjoyed and loved every moment of it, and the music pieces of these two games are some of the best I've ever heard in video games and they evoke the right atmosphere. Definitely a must for Alice in Wonderland fans (like me).
Yeah, that's all great... Not when your age is 6. As the time passed I actually liked it alot. And the sequel.
 
Spend most of my childhood playing
Doom and Heretic, later move to Quake, Age of Empires and Warcraft 2, then Age of Empires 2 and Statecraft before I turn into a teenager.
 
This was my first memory:
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Gorilla.bas, which was a sample program in QBASIC. We also had a few floppies full of small games for Windows 3.11, games like Destroyer (a Battleship adaption: https://www.classicgames.me/destroyer-for-windows.html) and other games.
Videogames really started for me with our first Windows 95 computer, a Pentium MMX wih 200 MHz. One of the first games I had was F22: ADF, which is a hardcore simulation. Then I also got a video game compilation that had games like Tomb Raider and POD and Earth 2140 in it. A friend had a second computer in his bedroom, there we'd play Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and Heretic and Diablo all the time.
Somewhere around that time ('99 or so) I bought Fallout at a flea market together with Z. Somehow I lost the box of Z later, but Fallout really stuck with me.
 
My gaming childhood was mostly Crash and Spyro. Sometimes we rented an N64 but tge PSOne was the first condole I ever owned.
 
Top Gun 2: The Second Mission

I played this game a lot too (and I usually don't like these kind of games). It was hard as hell and it annoyed me so many times, specially when I would make the mission perfectly and then crash while landing on the carrier... Those landings were really annoying.
But for some reason it was addictive.
 
Zoo tycoon, the Indiana Jones adventure game (the prequel to temple of doom), Turok Evolution, Godzilla fighting games, Smash Bros, Mario 64, Pokemon on the DS/gameboy, RE4, the sims, Mario kart, and etc.

Edit: Forgot X-wing and Spyro

Edit 2#: Also forgot DOOM 1-3
 
My earliest game memories were with point and click adventures like Pyjama Sam and Zoombinis. I also played a lot of platformers on my SNES like Donkey Kong Country and Toy Story.
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My earliest game memories were with point and click adventures like Pyjama Sam and Zoombinis. I also played a lot of platformers on my SNES like Donkey Kong Country and Toy Story.
Your post just reminded me that I used to play two games a lot in my Mega Drive, Fantastic Dizzy and Cosmic Spacehead (I had the two in one cartridge):
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Fantastic Dizzy:

Cosmic Spacehead:
 
Ooh lets see

Well definitely Jetpac for the ZX Spectrum


Road Fighter for the MSX


Kings Valley for the MSX (awesome little game)


Super Mario Bros for the NES of course


Castlevania for the NES, though I sucked at it
 
Sonic the Hedgehog for Sega Master System


Doom for PC


The Secret of Monkey Island (teaching me how great and funny point and click adventure games can be)


Indiana Jones and Fate of Atlantis (the real Indiana Jones 4)


There are just so many titles to mention, I have been a gamer from a very young age so I have played plenty of games on various of platforms.

My favorite platforms were always the Sega Megadrive/Genesis, SNES, and PC of course, secondary favorite platforms were the Amiga, Playstation 2, and Gameboy Advance.
 
Red Dead Revolver.

Got stuck on one of the boss fights so I didn't play it for looooong time. Found the copy I owned a year or two back.
 
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