Ask the Game Trust: The First Game You Bought
2/5/2009 4:57 PM | 19 Comments | Page 5 of 7
Did it live up to your expectations? Nope!
River Raid's actually quite difficult, especially with the Intellivision's less precise directional disc pad. It got repetitive fairly quickly (even by game standards back in those days), and I put it away for good after a day or two.
Do you still own the game? I lost all my Intellivision cartridges in one of the many cross-country moves my dad has made in the last 25 years. But, strangely enough, I still have the original boxes for all my Intellivision games, so I guess you can say I saved the best part of
River Raid.
Would you buy it again (at the original price)? No way -- I distinctly remember
River Raid costing me $30, which was a lot for a kid! And, if I recall, that was even expensive by Intellivision game standards. I was upset I saved up all that dough for a game I didn't ultimately like.
Jason McMaster: Gumshoe (NES)
When did you buy it? 1986. I was nine years old.
Why did you choose that particular game? When I first received my NES for Christmas in 1986, it consumed my every thought. I had it bad with my 2600, but that obsession paled in comparison to my vivid daydreams of R.O.B. and my light zapper. Of course, I loved
Mario and
Duck Hunt, but my eye kept being drawn to this title on the back of the system box. Who actually knew what
Gumshoe was about? The only thing that mattered to me was that I wanted it, and I would do whatever it took to get it.
How much did it cost? I don't actually remember. I remember having to go to a few different stores to find it. How odd:
Gumshoe wasn't the most popular game on the market.
Did it live up to your expectations? It did, for about an hour.
Gumshoe, for me at least, was very hard. I'm not sure if it was my lack of coordination or the fact that I just sucked, but our hero managed to plunge to his death about a million times.
Do you still own the game? Sadly, no. I was a rather enterprising young man and ended up selling games at school to afford new games.
Would you buy it again (at the original price)? Ah, no. I'd buy it for a quarter out of a cardboard box at a garage sale.
William Abner: Darklands (PC)
When did you buy it? It was 1993. I had just turned 21 and celebrated by buying
Darklands from the Micro Center on the Ohio State campus at noon. By midnight I was falling down drunk. It was a good day.
Why did you choose that particular game? I took a gaming break from around '89 through '91, so this was part of my re-entry into gaming, along with
Front Office Football and
Wolfenstein 3D. I chose
Darklands because I love fantasy RPGs, and the box looked cool. I knew nothing about it, other than it took a whopping
16 megabytes of hard drive space and came on something like 12 3.5" floppy disks. It was massive. I also recall that I bought an original Sound Blaster card with it.
