i guess it never occurred to me as a kid to leave the NES on overnight, and nobody had told me about the warp whistles, so the furthest i ever got in mario 3 before the inevitable reset was up to world 4. and i had only managed to survive that far after hatching the plan to grind dozens of extra lives one at a time by purposely dying in 1-4. by the time i finally beat world 3’s airship i was shaking with adrenaline and found myself too psyched out to continue.
still wonder sometimes how i would’ve reacted to the humongous enemies in that state
gosh that bothered me as a kid, the sense that the game wouldn’t move on acknowledging what we’d done together, that I had to take positive action to wipe it and return it to a state where I knew but it didn’t
it’s even more in games that save but also freeze; Ocarina of Time forces it explicitly, the player required to wipe the game’s mind just as Link enters to talk to a friend who doesn’t know or care about him
Yeah games that save everything except the LAST THING YOU DO which is also the MOST IMPORTANT THING fucked me up as a kid
I think the multi-game arc for the Hero of Time is extremely fitting for this sort of “the world is perpetually locked in a state of almost-ruin-almost-salvation” anxiety.
It’s me, the person who left Earthbound on for 15 years so everyone could remain in that happy state of post-game Earth-wandering instead of trapped as robots in an alternate timeline of pain and suffering.
tons of nes era games did this because battery back ups were kind of a luxury back then. a lot of them didn’t bother with a password feature either. journey to silius comes to mind. game rules hard.
when i was a boychild i spent numerous hours cawing over Chrono Cross stuff online. id built a memory of it in my head from strategy guides, fanfiction, early rips of the OST. it wasnt until i was 9 or maybe 10 that i actually got it.
my friend loaned me a copy and i hurried home.
the only memory cards i had were two madcatz big block cards. the kind with the buttons that had like 1gb of space instead of 52mb. it was completely corrupt.
i decided trying to just play that night instead of looking for a working memory card was much more important.
chrono cross lived up to my imagination in basically every way. i never found a memory card when i originally owned it. i was able to play for three days raucuously, getting far past lynxs mansion. i think ot was the first time i saw thw ocean in a videogame that captured it at all.
i dont believe ive ever been able to enjoy chrono cross as much as i did playing it until it finally got unplugged or whatever
I still have one of those mega memory cards for PSone, with like 12 memory cards in one. Still works great. Its even clear blue! Its got every PSone save I ever made, on it.
Lode Runner for the Apple IIe. It had 50 levels? 100 levels? More? My brother and I got really far one day then had pause it while we ate dinner. Lightning knocked out the power while we were eating. Fuckin’ RIP.
I misread the thread title as “games that don’t care” and thought about games that were indifferent to the player’s presence but I think there is a Galaxy Oddity thread on that.
At a certain age as a kid my Dad would uninstall any games he found, saying they were “clogging” up the PC and making it too slow (nevermind that it was 6+yrs old), so I would reinstall Half-Life, figure out the console command for the map I was on and continue from there. But it never felt like my Gordon earned the entire adventure.
Also I had bought a used copy of Viewtiful Joe that was pretty scratched and it would always freeze during the musical credits sequence, and I still feel that I never properly beat the game. Much like having to power off Zelda and Snatcher at the end screen.
The original Grand Theft Auto. It had you play like 5 hours at a time through an entire city’s mission tree with limited lives and a score multiplier system (+1x per completed mission, lose half if you get arrested). Super tense and high-stakes, still the best GTA by my lights, although it didn’t communicate the idea very clearly and I gather most people didn’t get it
Usually with games that don’t save I don’t use savestating bc I understand that it changes the experience a lot compared to how it was played by the Typical Player back then, and savestating means you also miss out on when games are specifically designed around the experience of playing starting from the beginning over and over again (Sonic the Hedgehog makes a lot more sense that way: the alternate paths, the way the levels feel good to beat them faster and faster, the way earlier levels feel better and better to play the more acquainted you are with how he moves)
But Mario 3 is a big game that I feel that it’s a lot better with a save feature or savestates. It’s just too darn long of a game without using warps! I get that there’s alternate level choices and tons of secrets to find on subsequent playthroughs but:
I just wanna play all the levels anyway (and playing only obligatory levels doesn’t save -that- much time)
the warps are hidden way too well for you to naturally come across them
In SMB1 I feel that the warps are hidden in such a way that most players will naturally find them after some playthroughs, it feels like an alternate interesting way to do a “save system”. I get though that ater some time everyone knows about the World 1-2 warp so you can’t do it the same way for a sequel. But in SMB3, if you come across a warp, you’re either VERY lucky, VERY curious, or you’re VERY literate and read up on game mags telling you where to find them.