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Post by Ex on Jan 2, 2018 23:54:52 GMT -5
I'm sure a lot of us rented games when we were kids. I was thinking it'd be fun to share some memories that correlate to particular games you rented back then. I'll share a few...
Blaster Master (NES] Around age ~10, I remember renting this one on a Sunday. I loved it, and wanted to play it more. Problem was Monday was a school day. Well, Blaster Master was the first (and only) game I pretended to be sick to stay home and play. My mom probably knew I was faking, but all the same, I stayed home and played Blaster Master all day. I didn't beat it of course, but you can say I got my parents' money out of that rental.
Karnov (NES) Around age ~11, I had broken my wrist playing football at school. Later that night my parents had pity on me, and let me rent a game. I chose Karnov. Well, I had a helluva time trying to play it. Reason being was a cast on my left forearm. It made reaching the d-pad with my thumb very difficult. Fortunately my cousin was there that night, and he was able to play the game fine. So I got to see a lot of Karnov vicariously I wouldn't have otherwise.
Pilotwings (SNES) Around age ~12, I rented this one on a Friday. I remember being extremely frustrated with this game, as I kept crashing the biplane constantly. But I refused to give up, and stayed up till 2AM playing it. Eventually I got really good at Pilotwings, and fell in love with it. A few months later I owned a copy. Pilotwings taught me that not all games are awesome immediately, because sometimes it's worth acquiring the taste.
I have more, but I'll save some for later!
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Post by anayo on Jan 3, 2018 8:24:38 GMT -5
I didn't begin playing video games until 1995. One of my Dad's coworkers gave me an NES and I played Super Mario 3 on that, but I never rented NES games. I guess they were too old for rental places to carry. However, I remember seeing Sega Genesis games on Blockbuster's shelves as late as 1997. Game rentals were really cheap (like $2 for almost a week) so my mom frequently rented games for me. One neat detail I recall is that my Blockbuster had a gumball machine, and if you got a blue gumball with a blockbuster logo printed on it, you could score a free game rental. I won free game rentals a few times this way. It felt like a really big deal to 7 year old me when this happened.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2
I owned Sonic 3 and Knuckles, but not Sonic 1 or 2. When I plugged this into my Genesis, it wouldn't work, so my Mom took it back and the Blockbuster employees let me rent something else. Later, I saw it restocked on the shelf, so I assumed they must have fixed or replaced it. But when I took it home it was the same broken copy as before. It's kind of a pointless story but it pissed me off as a kid.
Ecco the Dolphin Tides of Time
I liked this game's pseudo 3D bonus stage and I remember thinking the game was neat in general, but I got stumped and couldn't progress very far. I had a book of Genesis cheat codes I used to skip ahead and peek at the last stage.
Earthworm Jim 2
I think I had to use cheat codes to beat this one, too. I remember liking the graphics, the music, and the variety, like the puppy catching or the space ship bonus stages. It was a nice departure from the platforming and shooting. Most of the humor went over 7-year-old-me's head, though.
Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers
This was basically Final Fight, except with Power Rangers. I invited a neighborhood kid to my house to play this in 2-player cooperative mode with me. It made it way more fun than going solo. At the time I appreciated how this was based on the Power Rangers theatrical movie with Ivan Ooze in it, since Power Rangers was still a big deal to me at that age.
By 1998 I had a Nintendo 64. I only remember two rentals from this time.
Battletanx
This is one of those games that showed off the N64's multiplayer capabilities. I don't even think I got very far in the single player campaign, I mostly played deathmatch with my Dad.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
The kids at school wouldn't stop talking about The Legend of Zelda, so I wanted to learn what all the fuss was about (I missed out on the NES and SNES Zeldas). It totally knocked 8 year old me's socks off. I don't think we'll ever see another graphics and gameplay leap as dramatic as that. I pleaded with my Mom to buy me the game for my birthday. She said, "You can have it early, but you won't have anything to open on your birthday." I was OK with that.
By the time I had Gamecube in 2003 we didn't rent games anymore because prices went up to $5 or $6 a rental. So after 3 or 4 rentals you were paying as much as a pre-owned game.
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Post by Ex on Jan 3, 2018 10:52:03 GMT -5
Great stories man, fun reading. When I plugged this into my Genesis, it wouldn't work I only had one rental that didn't work. It was in 1997, when I rented War Gods for N64 from Blockbuster. Turns out there was a bad run of War Gods and the one my Blockbuster had was one of them. - Final Fight III (SNES) This was one I rented in 1997, and co-op beat with a friend of mine. We had a lot of fun. I remember thinking "this is so much funner than Streets of Rage". The reason being is I'd just been reading online how much people loved SoR3. To this day I still think FF > SoR. Taz-Mania (Genesis) When I think about rentals I was utterly disappointed with, this comes out on top. I was 13 when I rented it, on a Friday. This is back when you'd rent a game on a Friday, and then be stuck with that game all weekend. So you'd try really hard not to rent a piece of crap. Sometimes though, you ended up with junk. I remember being so utterly disappointed with Taz-Mania within five minutes of playing it. I resigned myself to reading a book that weekend instead. Strider 2 (PS1) On the other hand, I recall absolutely loving Strider 2 when I rented it back in 2000. It was awesome, super fun, and perhaps too easy. I beat the game in one night. I also remember being confused when I put the Strider 2 disc in my PlayStation, and instead Strider 1 started playing. Capcom (or their disc production facility) had screwed up the labels! Strider 1's disc actually had Strider 2 on it. Thankfully the rental included both discs.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 3, 2018 12:16:07 GMT -5
I didn't get to rent games a ton, but I definitely got to at times. A couple of my go-tos: Dragon Warrior III - Yeah, my rental store had this. I even got about halfway through the game, and wrote a note to try to get folks to not delete my save game. Didn't help. I know my brother got annoyed that we wouldn't rent anything else interesting at times. I should have been nicer in that regard. I also got in trouble with this game, too. I had a friend whose friend owned the game, and he had borrowed it from him. So I did a no-no and borrowed it from him. I knew I was wrong, but I was desperate! Of course, I got found out, so I had to bring the game back and apologize for what I did. That's the first and last time I ever did that. And I've been on the receiving end of someone lending my stuff to someone else; losing my Link to the Past Player's Guide absolutely sucked, and of course the original borrower didn't offer to replace it. Anyway, back to the rental! I actually ended up buying that very copy when they started clearing out their NES stock. Even got the box and manuals! I still have that copy. We also bought The Guardian Legend at the same time. We were pretty discerning kids, let me tell you. I also remember renting River City Ransom from a different rental store, and we got to keep it for some time. Turns out the late fee was cheaper than the rental fee, so we (and a lot of other folks) did that. I also ended up buying that copy as well. Actually, that's how I bought a ton of my video games. I'd trawl the video stores I had access to, and would consistently ask them if they were willing to sell a game. Often times, they were, because the game had stopped renting. The old rental store used to be in a local Radio Shack, and I'd do the same thing at Blockbuster when they were still around. I got so many great games that way, especially several RPGs. Oh, darn, and there was another video store in the same town as the Radio Shack for a while where I got the original Final Fantasy. Nintendo was even nice enough to send me the manuals for the game when I wrote to them!
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Post by laurenhiya21 on Jan 3, 2018 13:12:17 GMT -5
I wish I had some good rental stories! Sadly in all of the places that I lived in either we were too far away from any rental stores, or we had a rental store nearby but they didn't have games. By the time we did live near something big like a Blockbuster, they had already been closed down for a while.
Although to be fair, even if we did live near a place we could rent games from, I highly doubt I would have been allowed to rent any haha.
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Post by Ex on Jan 3, 2018 13:20:45 GMT -5
>Sarge
Yeah borrowing an already borrowed something is just not right. I'm sure I did that before with games as a kid too though. I know I lost a game at least once like that also. And renting an RPG sounds like an effort in torture, I mean that because of losing your save file every time. Maybe if you named your save file "Erase&UDie!" or something, that might have made kids think twice.
>laurenhiya21
It makes me sad you couldn't rent games as a kid. I guess on the bright side, it meant you really played the games you had that much more.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 4, 2018 12:37:21 GMT -5
It would be hard for me to pin it down to specific games given the frequency which I rented them. A local store had a "three games, three days, three dollars" deal so nearly every week it was a different three games. This is probably part of what fueled my drive to collect as an adult.
I don't have any nostalgia towards the big stores like Blockbuster, we only ever went to the small local stores.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 4, 2018 12:47:10 GMT -5
Yeah, Blockbuster was more of a college deal for me. I didn't have any nearby when I was younger. I'm not even sure I rented anything from Blockbuster, my deal was going in checking if they'd sell certain games. I got lucky from time to time.
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Post by bonesnapdeez on Jan 4, 2018 17:04:12 GMT -5
There was a gas station near me called Jackson's Corner that had movie rentals, video game rentals, fried seafood, porn.
Rented Mega Man 2 and Donkey Kong 1 & 2 over and over and over.
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Post by Sarge on Jan 4, 2018 17:13:03 GMT -5
Those are good ones to rent! I remember for a while that our local Kroger had a rental place in it. I bought my copy of Arcana from there. On top of that, the Kroger itself had some games for a bit, so I got to purchase Suikoden and Tales of Destiny there. I think we might have rented Mega Man 2 once, but that one was so good that we were always on the lookout for it. Ended up snagging our own copy, thankfully, although I'd like a copy where the label weren't so beat up.
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