Regrets, I've Had a Few...

King of Posters
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Thematically neither the entire lyrics of “My Way” or Sinatra himself really fit with this topic but I still wanna show off this plate I found online the other day*, I’m hoping to someday buy it so I can spring it as a gift on an unsuspecting Italian.

Please share stories of times you traded games or game-related goods (such as Pokemons, or Sonic the Hedgehog branded fruit snacks) and felt regret afterwards. That is what this thread is for. You can go off topic a bit, why not, I ain’t a cop, but I want to hear about foolish decisions you made in pursuit of fresh gaming experiences, regardless of the age you made them at. Whether you swapped games at the playground, around the workplace water cooler, or at FYE during the two weeks they were buying used games…it’s all legal! It’s all on topic.

I didn’t go to school for long but I probably woulda dropped out sooner – around second grade, probably – if weren’t for illicit game trading. Like, I don’t think I ever traded a game “for keeps” but there was plenty of lending going on and I lived for that shit. Though most of my lending was one sided. I had lots of Nintendos, which I would lend out to almost anyone who asked, and oftentimes they would never be returned. Before long I realized any game I lent most likely wasn’t coming back but I kept doing it, because I was a mark, and had low self esteem. My family never noticed all these games were going missing because they were never really present, and didn’t care much about Nintendo. Not a big fan of the family of here, really think they shoulda taken more interest in Nintendo. I came out ahead a few times though. I got me a copy of River City Ransom once. That was pretty cool. Thanks Ray, hope you didn’t miss that game much.

So yeah okay I can’t think of any regrets but maybe you can. Share your heartbreaks, or heck, let’s flip it around, go ahead, brag about the times you ripped someone else off, that shit rocks sometimes, like when I duped my sister into giving me all her money for a copy of Ecco the Dolphin she never got to play. I can’t believe I didn’t grow up to be rich what the fuck, I was so good at scamming other kids.

*Many of the sellers offering Frank Sinatra commemorative plates on eBay do not know how to spell “collectors” and I admire that. You don’t see that so often now that predictive text is so commonplace. I bet they’re doing all their posts on a Hewlett Packard running WinME, all their pics taken with, I dunno, some old fuckin digital camera, I don’t remember any of those brand names, was there a version of the Canon SureShot with a USB port?!

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I regret seeling my copy of Evergrace. I regret selling my copy of Gitaroo Man. I regret selling my CIB Pocket Puyo Puyo Sun. I regret selling a lot of things. I regret selling a bunch of my GBA carts. I do not regret selling my copy of God Hand, because it needs to be passed along. I regret selling my CIB copy of Front Mission: Gun Hazard that a friend gave me. I needed the money really bad. I sold it to my favorite game store where I played the DDR Extreme cabinet. I was very fond of John, the owner. The store was called Gamerheadz in Edina, Minnesota, and I lived across the street from the mall it was in. Every time I went to play DDR there I’d see the copy of Front Mission: Gun Hazard sitting in the glass case under the counter. There was also a copy of Radiant Silvergun for Saturn. I think John might have secretly been an SBer.

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i received a copy of Streets of Rage 2, a game i had never planned on buying, because i was a Capcom loyalist, from my half sister when i was a kid. i think what she told me was that it belonged to a friend who didn’t want it anymore, or was gonna let me borrow it or something, but….

knowing how my half siblings were back then, i am pretty sure she stole it or it belonged to an ex and she took or something.

either way, i got a copy of SoR2 and it ruled.

never sold a game since the prices at stores were never worth it, to me, and never had a game taken from me after lending it, but one regret that sticks out in my head is the one time i saw a copy of that Rockman X Arrange Sountrack (the sort of jazz fusiony one from the 90s) in Chinatown on a trip with the day camp i used to go to. i had no idea what it was at the time (i think i assumed it was just the OST), but i never saw it again after that, and now it’s one of those really rare and hard to find arrange CDs.

not like i had a choice; i didn’t have enough pocket money on me to buy it, or else i would have. but damn.

i’d consider finding pristine used copies of Tron Bonne and Mega Man Legends 2 for like less than $20 at Gamestops during that era in the 00’s where they were getting rid of anything from older generations for cheap as a “steal,” but it’s not like a GS employee really would have cared about the cost of the games in their store.

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My neighbor Paul used to talk a lot about his Dad, probably because he was never around. I later found out he was in prison but I didn’t ask what for.

We both lived alone with our mothers. We liked to skateboard and play videogames and so we became friends.

One day I traded him my copy of Links Awakening for WWF Superstars. WWF Superstars is a very bad game, but at the time this seemed like a great idea.

I often wonder whether my indifference to Nintendo was borne out of this regretful trade or if my youthful judgement was simply so impeccable that I innately understood that Hogan > Link.

We lost touch after Paul got into drugs. I was terrified of inadvertently becoming involved, as if his youthful dabbling was contagious.

Years later, by happenstance I found out that Paul’s dad was released from prison. He came by to pick up his son in a taxi. They both then proceeded to assault the taxi driver and steal his car. It was in the local paper.

I wonder if Paul ever played Link’s awakening. How different would his life have been if he had just held on to that copy of WWF Superstars?

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Back over two decades ago, this fellow at my church was trying to collect ‘every NES cartridge’. It was too early in the age of the internet for me, or likely him, to know the full ramifications of that endeavor. At any rate, I handed him like somewhere between 10 and 16 cartridges we had, free of charge, on a silver platter. Because, hey! ROMs!

And for the most part, I was right. I have a chest of NES/SNES/N64/Misc hardware sitting at the very back of a closet nook under my basement stairs that has been there untouched since I moved in, well over four years ago. I have no desire for environment-perfect hardware fidelity, so anything I hold onto would be for sentimental reasons. To that end, and tying in with the FF binge/purge thread, I do wish I had held onto my NES copy of Final Fantasy I. It was Baby’s First RPG, and it ignited a relationship not only with RPGs but more generally with numbers that never really went away.

Also, at some point over the course of multiple transports and moves, our copy of N64 Gauntlet Legends went missing. It has been years since I’ve paid attention to the emulation scene, but that game never worked with emulators back when I checked. I’d have liked to have access to my original cartridge, even though fucking Henry saved over my file.

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i mostly regret buying videogames i could’ve just pirated later with a little patience

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I sold a sealed copy of Pokemon Yellow online for like, $60 back in like, 2007 or so. I regret trading away my copy of Clock Tower for Azure Dreams and Star Ocean 2. I regret not trading my Final Fantasy X for ICO with that guy on gametz back in 2001 or 2002.

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Yeah I gave a friend from high school my NES and every cartridge I owned for it (probably about 12-15 at the time?) for free, just because was thinking of getting into collecting and it had been years since I hooked up that machine. I hardly even talk to that guy anymore. I wonder whatever became of all that stuff.

The morning after a drunken night at a bar, I put my Game Boy Micro through the wash in the pocket of my jeans and killed it.

I’ve “re-bought” a few games over the years, after having sold them off previously. I also did this with the GBA SP. Although I have a much cooler color now.

I traded Super Mario Kart and Super Street Fighter II for Star Fox and Mortal Kombat III. I regret giving up SSFII the most, especially since I ostensibly swapped it for MKIII. I got a ton of mileage out of Star Fox though so that was okay by me.

Now for the positives!

All the trouble I went through to get a complete set of the Bit Generations GBA games back in the day looks like it’s going to make me some bank some day, Ebay prices on those games for even cart-only are pretty high.

A girl dumped me and she gave me her Dreamcast and a bunch of games and some joysticks. I mostly just wound up selling them all off but that’s okay, it was free money, this probably makes the NES thing I mentioned above a wash.

Another girl dumped me, and I stole her copy of Super Punch Out since she’d left it in my possession and has the memory of a gnat. I didn’t even have an SNES to play it with so I sold that too.

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I sold Ico because it bored me as a dumb teen after about an hour. I haven’t played it since but love other Team ICO stuff.

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I remember one time my older brothers borrowed Jet Force Gemini from one of their friends. We held on to it for a while but lost it after a couple months. Eventually (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was my dad’s fault) we agreed to buy a new copy of the game for the friend who wanted it back.

Several months later I accidentally found the lost copy of the game deep in the recesses of our recliner. We kept that copy for ourselves.

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ICO is a good game to play when you’re stoned and want to melt away into a hazy, dreamlike fairy tale world.

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Pretty much every trade-in up to the PS2 era I regret. I always had to trade in all my games and the console just to get to that next gen and it was such a waste. I can’t remember anything exactly but I’m sure I did something like trade in a bunch of obscure ps1 jrpgs for like a copy of Brute Force for Xbox. Giving all of my SNES carts (with like every jrpg) to my cousins who unceremoniously garage sold them off years later.

Obviously there’s a lot of things I don’t necessarily care to have physically anymore but it sure would’ve been nice to hold on to at least a few of those games that I really, really loved when I was a dumb kid instead of a dumb adult.

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Oh this is a good one; I traded a Sega Saturn and Shining Force 3 (“too ugly” x_x) to a guy named Chaz I used to play D&D with for a copy of Ikaruga for Gamecube. Really dumb.

As an aside, Chaz had a create a wrestler he’d use in wrestling games that had black angel wings tattooed on his back and he was called The Fallen One Winged Angel which I believe put him ahead of both Christopher Daniels and Kenny Omega.

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i don’t have many game selling regrets, but i do kinda wish i had sold off at least some o my games before just dumping them (and my other stuff) off in the place i lived in Ohio when i moved cross country to California. that living situation was pretty sketchy and all the stuff i left there got stolen eventually. to other people this would be horrible but given the circumstances i didn’t care that much (well, about everything but the cello that i left there…). i’ve learned to not be very precious about stuff anymore because i have so few things from my childhood left. could’ve used the money though.

i also regret my brother getting super into NES collecting when it was cheap in the late 90’s (which i was involved with somewhat) and then deciding to sell off basically his entire collection only a handful of years later, given i was the only one actually playing the games (and i think i helped buy at least a handful of them)…

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Sold Power Stone 1 and 2 for $20 in 2014 knowing full well they were going up in price but I wanted to buy junk food or something. Now they’re almost $300.

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i wish i’d gotten into import gaming (and anime fansubs/general tape trading) earlier than i did. maybe i should even have gone full 90s weeaboo kid and got a japanese penpal to trade stuff with

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i was always the beneficiary of this stuff since i had a bunch of cousins who were older and so ended up inheriting their snes games when exam season came around… their loss of super probotector alien rebels (pal version of contra iii) was my gain… also i was chary of swapping things ever since a harsh youth experience where i traded my infrared batman for some hot wheels. i’m going to claim that was retroactive karmic justice so that i can feel like i’ve already paid my debt to society for never returning my cousin’s copy of plok.

edit: i do regret that i got birthday gifted a copy of silent hill 2 as a teenager and then was too scared to play past the first hour, could have presumably had more interesting memories than uh “blowing up the japanese army’s collection of sake barrels to damage their morale” in medal of honour pacific assault

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Just remembered that I traded in M.U.S.H.A. so I could get Doom 2. They probably gave me like 50 cents for that game and nowadays it’s probably worth more than I made last year but we can all admit 90% of M.U.S.H.A.'s appeal is that first stage music and it’s not nearly as good as Doom, which is pretty much perfect. Right? Right? I made an okay call there, right. Even though I never finished Doom cuz my computer was a piece of shit. (Also cuz it scared me.)

Sending suggestive vibes out into the universe, hoping to attract Chaz to post on Select Button or, failing that, my wrestling thread on the trainsim.com forums.

This is the most relatable thing, I have spent the last 3 hours fighting the urge to spend every penny my bank account on a trip to the convenience store, I bet I’d be so happy if I had some snacks right now, I bet some Munchos and Dr Pepper would enrich my life more than paying the fucking internet bill, lemme tell you

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Since then I learned to cook and quit my soda habit… I now spend all my money on Chinese dumplings and boneless skinless chicken breasts.

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when i was a teen, someone had broken into the family home and stolen a bunch of movies and some of my playstation games. however, they left an empty game gear behind, which is a system i have never owned at any point in my life. does this count as a bad trade?

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