Parting with Your GameAugust 3rd, 2008 by Mercedes
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Have you ever fallen in love with a game so deeply that you’d fight for it? Did you grow so attached to characters that you’d reminisce about their final appearances? Would you’ve thrown yourself in front of a bullet to have kept it from damaging your cartridge?
I’ve been there. There are games I’ve obsessed over. Sometimes it’s not an obsession so much as a resonance, a thought about it that lingers in your head after you’ve turned it off. Some games just stay with you.
One of the saddest truths is that all good things must come to an end. But occasionally that end is too bitter. Premature, even. How do we cope with the loss of our favorite games?
It can happen in a number of ways. When I was younger, I sold my sister’s copy of Chrono Trigger to Toys “R” Us. (How was I supposed to know it was her favorite game? Ask her? Riiight.) She found out, naturally, and proceeded to tear me a new one. Of course there are other ways to play the game now, with the Playstation re-release and the port for the DS coming out soon, but it’s just not the same, she’d say.
Current games are much more easily replaced than they used to be; the video game market has since grown in order to cater to tons more consumers. So the games we lose and face heartbreak over tend to be classics, rarities that can only be found on eBay. Or maybe you finally found an active torrent for that old PC game you love, but months down the line you reformat and forget to back up the files. How will I ever play Dr. Brain again (without paying for it)?!
A game I had an odd affinity for was QuizQuiz (now known as QPLAY to Koreans), an MMO quiz game that gave you IQ points when you won a round. You had to type quickly and accurately to save yourself from getting eaten by alligators, and bounce your little drooling blob across the screen to mark a statement as either true or false. You could buy different clothes and accessories for your avatar depending on your IQ. In hindsight, I don’t know why I loved it so much. Maybe it’s because I’d played so often, I’d seen all the questions in one of the trivia games and already knew the answers, even if they pertained to some random Korean drama. Maybe it’s just because my character was so damn cute. Despite my devout worship of the game, the English version was taken offline shortly after release. And I was left out in the cold.
I guess it’s kind of like getting dumped, except not so personally insulting. Whether your favorite game got sold by your stupid younger sister or scrapped by the developers since it wasn’t raking in enough donations, you’ve got to come to terms with it and move on. Find a replacement. And soon you’ll forget about what drove you apart, remember the fun you had, and maybe you’ll even find a new game to go gaga over.
So here’s to all the lovely games we’ve seen come and go, to the games we’ve lost in the shuffle, to the games taken offline by bankrupted companies. Even though I’ll never get to play you again, I cherish the memories we made together and hold them dear to my heart. And by ‘memories’, I mean screenshots. And by ‘dear to my heart’, I mean in the depths of my hard drive.
August 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
There is an old RPG for the PC by Sirtech called Realms of Arkania III: Shadows Over Riva. It was my favourite game when I was a kid and it broke my heart when I couldn’t play it on XP.
I still have the original copy of the game so I didn’t really lose it, but I never managed to find a working DOS emulator for it. I still reminisce about the good times I had with the game and wish I could play it again… It had such an immersive story and the music was awesome.
August 3rd, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I lost my copy of Sim Copter - I downloaded a pirated version a few months back. PLayed it. Determined that it was better if my game was forever lost…
August 3rd, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I can’t play Arcanum on Vista! It makes me sad… =/
August 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
@William — Have you tried it in compatibility mode?
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:26 pm
When it cuts suddenly to black at the end of MGS4 I always feel tears well up inside my stomach. The ending may have been drawn out and pretentious, but damnit if it didn’t make me want the series to never end.
Oh and William, I’m sorry for your loss.
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I can’t get my copy of Might and Magic World of Xeen to work on newer computers. Even with DOSbox.
Sigh.
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I stepped on my copy of Bust A Groove 2.
I kept it anyway, just because I couldn’t stand to part with it.
August 3rd, 2008 at 9:05 pm
@Selphie
I have the same game and I can play it just fine in XP. Have you tried fiddling around with DOSBOX or VDMSound?
August 4th, 2008 at 1:33 am
It won’t even install… =P
Also, for emotional impact, I’d rate Xenogears pretty high, just cause I liked the game so much. I SO wished I could get into Xenosaga, but I just couldn’t. I’ll do it one of these days, I swear…
August 4th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Super Mario Bros made me sob.
samownall - Wow Blogger
August 5th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
For some reason this hasnt happened for many games for me, bioshock maybe.
It happens with books for me mainly. I read the Bartimaeus Trilogy, just the first two books, over and over for years and years because I loved them, then finally found a store that sold the third, I read it constantly for a day or two. Finished it, and just sat, kinda annoyed/upset that the people in the book, who were almost real to me had finally come to a conclusion, and I had nothing more to look forward to in the series.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
My brother sold his original Nintendo… granted it was his to sell but omg why would you do that. He even had the original gold Zelda cartridge. I was like 4 and i think i cried when i found out.
August 20th, 2008 at 3:35 am
I remember having games (FF8 off the top of my head) that kind of left me in a semi-daze for a day or two when, after months of playing, finding every item, battling every enemy and exploring every secret the game was finally finished. It felt very awkward to try to get used to the fact that characters and places I’ve almost lived with for several weeks or months have suddenly stopped existing. Knowing that they were never real in the first place only added to the internal confusion and surreal sense of (un)reality.
Selphie, William, Jennifer: What about VMWare? It’s commercial and a resource hog, but it might work for older games, it just might work…