I remember most of the things mentioned here so far, but only a handful of them actually make me feel nostalgic for the events that took place. I remember the pains I had to go through to get Ultima 7 running on a boot disk. I remember how QEMM7 made most of my headaches go away.
I remember how the only way I could get the game Murder! to run was from a bootdisk with MS-DOS 4.0. I could not get it to run with any other OS. I remember how crap the game Murder! was, and how I only ever managed to solve a single case in the game because it was a suicide.
I remember how much effort it was to actually start playing and completing a single game, either all by yourself, or with the help of some good friends. Today you just Google the answers to whatever is troubling you. We didn't have that 20 years ago. We had to WORK to complete our games!
I played through, and completed, Ultima Underworld without ever getting a single hint or scrap of help for the game. I wrote down, and later printed out, all the mantras and undocumented spells I could find as well as some other useful information on a piece of paper. I still have that piece of paper in my UW1 box. All the info on that piece of paper I discovered in-game.
I needed to patch UW2 before I could complete it, but otherwise the same applies.
The only time I ever needed any help in any of the Eye Of The Beholder games was right at the start, because I couldn't find a keyhole for one of the doors (it had the same colour as the wall).
I remember playing Star Control 2 for the first time, and the feel of insignificance as I saw just how big the gaming world was. Many of my friends had played the game, but none of them had completed it. I pieced together all of the bits of information they had on the game, and actually completed the game, beating them all to it.
I remember how I collected .mod tracks everywhere I could find them. I remember that the only track I had from Star Control 2 (and this was before I ever played the game) was the Umgah theme. I remember how excited I was when I came across a stray disk at a friend's house that contained a program that allowed me to extract the .mod tracks from the SC2 data files! After that I owned the SC2 soundtrack, and enjoyed it immensely. I still own all the .mod tracks I collected.
I remember when Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was released, me and a Harrison Ford-fanatical friend of mine sat and played it together. Two heads are better than one, as we beat the Teamwork path in only two days. We loved every minute of it.
I remember when UFO: Enemy Unknown was first released, how about 5 or six of us raced to try to complete it. Some of us had trouble learing to understand how the tactical part of the game worked, until I made the connection that it played almost just like Lazer Squad. That fixed almost all of the problems instantly. I can't remember which one of us was the first to beat UFO, but...
I also remember when X-COM: TFTD was released. Then the race was really on. I was the first to beat the game, but only by an hour or so. 3 of my friends were playing together on one computer, and the one who owned it was being a dick in the T'leth mission and blocked the other players from being the ones who made the final kill.
I remember Jagged Alliance. Once again, a race was formed, and again I won, but only by mere minutes. It was also the first game where I noticed a difference between two different versions of the game. The version I had was much easier than a version that a friend of mine had. He had the patched version, I did not.
I remember playing, and beating, the Castle of Dr. Brain on Expert, all by myself, sometime around 1997. I got very far through the Island of Dr. Brain, until I was stumped by a puzzle that required me to convert between the metric and imperial systems. I could not find the information needed anywhere, not even on the Internet back then. Fuck you, imperial swines!
I remember the first, and only time, that I submitted any content to a gaming magazine. I compiled all of the tips, tricks and cheats that I knew for all the games I knew. It was about 2 pages of content. The gaming magazine billed itself as a "all formats" magazine, but in the end they only ever printed a code for a GameBoy title. For me, consoleitis was been around for almost 20 years.
I remember the hubbub about the Konix Multisystem. 'nuff said.
I could go on like this for hours, but I've got a busy day tomorrow and need sleep.
