Related pride:
Mario
When I was about 9 or 10, I fell in love with SMB through the Mario Deluxe GBC cart. Once I discovered one of the more obvious infinite life glitches, I–for some reason–sat around on a Saturday morning, watching cartoons and repeating this infinite life generation loop, just to see my score counter go up.
To my surprise, when I got bored of this, I realized that I had unlocked an entirely new game.
It was Deluxe’s version of the SMB2J, which I had never heard of. They were called the Luigi Levels in this version. They were a bit more fair, because they didn’t have the random gusts of wind, and Deluxe overall allowed saving between levels, so you didn’t have to play the whole thing in one sitting.
The way that the Luigi Levels punished knowledge of the rules and rhythms of SMB completely blew my mind and changed the way I viewed video games. I had no idea that these levels existed elsewhere, so as far as I knew this was something special that likely very few other people knew about.
Megaman
I played through Megaman 2 for the first time in preparation for Megaman 9. I had never gotten into the MM games, but I wanted to have some relationship with them, in the hopes of enjoying 9. For some reason, I decided that I should play through it using only the peashooter. Part of it was that I didn’t want to bother sussing out the level order, but I also like a stiff challenge.
It was actually really, really fun playing the game this way. It forces you to really learn the robot master patterns. I had such a fun time playing that way that I beat 9 and 10 the same way, and that’s just how I play MM games now.
So yeah: not gonna lie: totally proud of that.