Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy
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.

Chumbawumba4ever97 fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Dec 20, 2020

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy




Thank you :)

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

trying to jack off posted:

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

lmao that's great, I didn't even think of that

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

mycophobia posted:

among other things my parents got me a very obviously bootlegged mario wall calendar with badly resized images ftw

Those were actually official

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

Chuck Buried Treasure posted:

the illustrated biography of Yoshitaka Amano.

is there a big section on FF6, if so I must go shopping

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Chumbawumba4ever97
Dec 31, 2000

by Fluffdaddy

Chuck Buried Treasure posted:

It’s about his whole life and career, not just the FF stuff, so there’s one big chapter for his whole Final Fantasy career, including a few pages on VI specifically. You might be interested in “The Sky: The Art of Final Fantasy,” which is a multi-volume set that’s just all of his FF work, VI is in volume 2

Thank you! Gonna buy volume 2 and his book as well.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply