trying to jack off posted:

this is a nice story, but it also involves secretly modifying your dads computer and its cracking me up

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

The last video game thing I got from my parents for Christmas was Mortal Kombat 3 for the PS1. I was 13 and I got my first "job" when I was 14 so anything gaming related that I ever wanted I just bought for myself, so they never really knew what to get me or just assumed I had everything I wanted so they never bothered after that. Anyway I remember unwrapping it at like 5 in the morning and playing it by myself in the pitch black and just being completely stunned at how arcade-perfect it was (minus the loading while Shang Tsung morphed). The sprites were huge, the colors weren't dithered down, and the audio sounded flawless. It just absolutely blew me away. Playing it on Christmas morning before anyone else was awake just owned so much.

Anyway that was the last time my parents ever got me anything gaming related as I said except for this one other time.

My dad had lost his yearbook from when he was in Vietnam (apparently they gave yearbooks out to people in the military/navy/etc). He lost it long before I was even born but it always tortured him because it had a lot of pics of him and his friends and a lot of his friends he couldn't remember their last names.

I knew the name of the ship he was on and the year he was on it so I always had an ebay alert setup in case it ever showed up. He manually checked ebay twice a week for it. He did this for probably five years to no avail.

One day it finally showed up outta nowhere. The seller wanted $300 for the starting bid which was an insanely high amount of money for me in my early twenties but I didn't care. Since it was October, I figured I'd get it for him as a Christmas gift, but I didn't want him to start outbidding me unknowingly. So a goon helped me edit the hosts file on his laptop (this is from before smartphones) and I made it so whenever he visited eBay it said "under construction" and to come back in a week. I ended up winning it for $400.

Anyway sometime a month later he was going through some sort of mental breakdown which had never happened before (and never happened since). He was convinced he was going to be fired from his job and also my sister was going through some horrible rebellion phase and he was getting less than an hour of sleep a night for weeks in a row. He actually had huge holes in his socks because of how much he was pacing around the house at all hours of the night.

One day I saw him trembling just trying to drink a cup of water (his hand was shaking so much that it would just splash all over as he tried to drink it) and it really got to me, so I gave him the yearbook even though it was a few weeks before Christmas. I wouldn't exactly say he started crying (I never saw him cry ever) but he was doing that choked back thing where he couldn't speak because of how excited and I guess moved he was.

He said he wanted to give me an early Christmas gift too and it was Sword of Mana for the GBA. Again keep in mind I was like 20 at that point and he hadn't gotten me a video game gift since MK3 for the PS1. I asked him how he knew it would be a game I'd like (he was completely oblivious with video games and what we were into) and he said he remembered I had a "something of Mana poster in your room when you were a kid" (he was referring to the Secret of Mana tree artwork poster that came with the SNES game) and he asked the guy at the store if there were any recent Mana games and sure enough there was; Sword of Mana. I already had bought the game, beaten it, and sold it back to FuncoLand but there was no way in hell I was going to tell him that, of course. I made sure to let him seeing me play it whenever I could. I'd always tell him how far I've gotten and what a great time I was having with the game.

My dad's episode ended a few days after I gave him the yearbook (I'm not saying it's related) and he's never had another breakdown ever since. When Facebook came around a few years later he was able to find a bunch of his old friends since he now had their last names. He's still friends with most of them to this day. He was even best man at one of their weddings a year or two ago.

Anyway even when I sold my entire game collection like a gigantic moron a few years later, I couldn't sell Sword of Mana. I still have it complete in the box and I'll never get rid of it.

Edit: (Sorry this was long as poo poo. I just started typing it then realized how long it was). I don't expect anyone to read all of it but this was the Christmas gaming memory that immediately came to mind when reading all the other posts here.

trying to jack off posted:

this is a nice story, but it also involves secretly modifying your dads computer and its cracking me up

Unexpected Raw Anime posted:

were not having kids but my 17 year old nephew called me a pussy because i havent beaten ocarina of time on randomizer

NienNunb posted:

One Christmas my dad got all puffed up and angry when I opened GTA Vice City, saying he didn't know how that got under the tree and that he was gonna return it to the store

trying to jack off posted:

this is a nice story, but it also involves secretly modifying your dads computer and its cracking me up

Daikatana Ritsu posted:

ty again for the game hizuna. stardew made me late for a pickup order so i had to run, lol

Arrhythmia posted:

*sherlock mind palace engaged, time going slowly, grey and brown flash back*

Mom was in the room.

a Loving Dog posted:

Merrry Impsmas

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

Wormskull posted:

Just blew a synapse watching my niece fall into the tutorial black hole in Mario Galaxy and watching my dad take 25 minutes to enter his Nintendo password.

EmmyOk posted:

My niece ignored all the toys she got to chew on a handmade copper water jug I got my ma

EmmyOk posted:

My niece ignored all the toys she got to chew on a handmade copper water jug I got my ma

Hizke posted:

On topic, I used to live in upstate New York and one winter, still a few weeks out from Christmas, our basement flooded like crazy cuz it got a little warmer and a ton of the snow closest to our house melted. I was like 7 years old, it was 1 or 2 AM and I was helping my mom take buckets of ice cold water from our dark rear end basement while our sump pump struggled. My dad was working some lovely graveyard shift job so it was just us trying to get all this water out with like two buckets but I told my mom I'd do it alone. I don't remember how long I spent pulling water outta there. It was insane. I remember passing out on the couch watching Sci Fi channel playing anime.

The next day my mom said Santa left me an early present, cuz he'd seen me working hard and it was Mario RPG. It's been one of my favorite games since then.

Larry Parrish posted:

it will be cool when my nieces and nephews are old enough to game

In Training posted:

it was cool going to family holiday parties every year and seeing which version of smash Bros we were playing since it hasn't stopped for 20 years now and the smash just keeps getting better. Can't wait to unleash the One Winged Angel on my family next year if we get the chance.

EmmyOk posted:

My niece ignored all the toys she got to chew on a handmade copper water jug I got my ma

Fungah! posted:

lmfao

when my nephew was 4 i got guitar hero 3 for christmas and he was obsessed with it so we spent the whole day with him sitting on my lap pretending to play it with me and singin the songs

P-Mack posted:

Got Dragon Quest XI for my daughters... Impmas RPGs ftw