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How did you play? [Nostalgia Thread]
Posts
The game was called Guys. We would dump all our respective toys into a big pile and take turns picking the ones we wanted, building vast armies of myriad figures and assigning them new names and identities. Sometimes, we'd break out the plasticine and modify our guys, giving, say, the otherwise useless Leia pterodactyl wings and a scorpion tail. We would build fortresses out of Legos and Jenga blocks.
And then such war.
Strict rules must be in place, always in flux as we found new and exciting ways to cheat. We each got to take three actions before it was the other's turn, otherwise I'd rush my younger and slower-thinking sibling and confound him with big sister tactics. Despite having giant, city-destroying monsters like Godzilla and Dragonzord on our sides, no one Guy could take out a base in one hit. Lack of batteries did not defuse atomic breath nor chest missiles, and Eric Draven was perfectly capable of dying despite what the movie said. If the dog chewed off someone's limb, their player got first crack at the plasticine to formulate an appropriate replacement. Diplomacy was possible, just unlikely in the case of zombear. Really, we were a die's roll away from preteen, cartoon-based D&D.
A good two thirds of the time, though, it would inevitably devolve into screaming, name-calling and fisticuffs. Ah, youth.
Even then I never had transformers or G.I. Joe (my brother was the big G.I. Joe collector).
Instead I maxed out on all the sweet ghostbusters toys and a couple of the beetlejuice figures with the spinny heads. The Ghost House was probably the coolest figure toy I ever had.
At around 6 or 7 I ended up getting into legos huge time. I remember my brother buying and putting together the old lego town police station and I was pretty much fucking sold.
I started out with Fantasy (majisto's magical workshop, the dragon wagon) and worked my way into the space stuff.
The one Christmas toy I remember always wanting and asking for was this:
Screw the castles and the huge town buildings, I wanted a goddamn space monorail.
Never got it though. Shit was like $130 if I remember right. Best my dad could afford (bless him) was the Ice Station Odyssey some years later when I became obsessed with Ice Planet.
So for the most part my childhood was spent creating these ornate worlds and elaborating their downfall.
My apologies if you already know, but I felt I had to make sure. You know they made a new M.A.S.K. figure, right? Just one, and it was a part of the G.I. Joe line, of all things. The perfect single piece for a bit of nostalgia:
Building toys had me at Legos, K'Nex, and Construx. We never made anything out of Construx besides weapons. I'd make swords or claws (that could actually wrap around my arm) and my older brother once made a construx replica of the Caster from Outlaw Star (with a working compartment for energy shells) and it was awesome.
Basically all the Legos I had were either from under-sea sets or outer space sets. Later branched out and got some fantasy types, and then Bionicle. Once in a while I'll buy a set, such as the Atlantis theme.
And man, I thought having ten bucks a week to spend on toys was bad, I wonder if I knew I'd grow up to be spending upwards of $50 for a single figure.
Thanks but I now enjoy sex more than toys.
Seriously though: I'm broke, and those lil' guys are still awesome.
Is this what you're thinking of?
Weapons and Warriors: Castle Siege
I had this game, and it was fucking awesome!
Yes, that's it! It was the coolest game that I never knew how to play.
Whenever I'd get a new kit, I'd build it up to match the instructions, then after about a week or so take the whole thing completely apart and make something new and cool with the new pieces combined with my previous sets.
When I finally got Technics, that opened up even more possibilities as now I had pneumatics, motors, and gears!
Had the Mindstorms come out when I was a kid, there would have been no hope for me to ever have human contact again as I'd be busy building robots.
I didn't do much in the way of making up my own narratives or really following the ones that were premade for my toys. As a kid, I thought a lot about how my Lego creations would work within the universe I was making them for, but almost nothing about characters or what they would do with my mechanical creations.
I didn't get into Legos until years later, and found that I'm not much of a 'building crazy stuff' dude. I prefer to use them as epic, expensive display pieces.
Oh, Kate: Completely unrelated, but I don't suppose you hop on any IM service these days? Wouldn't mind chatting with you. I recall you being pretty awesome.
We had a huge basket of building blocks. They weren't the sort of square blocks babies play with, more like wooden bricks and planks and arches in all different shapes, and pretty large, perfect for building cities and spaceports for lego spaceships. One thing I often did was to build a block tower taller than I was (which wasn't all that tall, in retrospect), by building up a frame of pillars and gradually smaller tiers, then filling in the floor on each level by laying in planks across the frame. It was pretty stable as long as nobody bumped it, and if I was careful I could put my toys on the different tower levels and have climactic battles between two lego figures up the top, ending in the whole tower collapsing.
We also had a toy that I think was pretty genius, but I have no idea what it was called or who made it. It was basically a collection of little red pipes and black connectors. You could snap the pipes together with the connectors and lock them in place, but only at right angles, so you could make connected squares and cubes. There were square plates that you could snap into the sides of the cubes if you wanted to close them up. That would be hideously boring as a toy, but the trick was that we had a jungle gym sized version of the same thing in the back yard. So we could plan our base or our castle with the miniature set, and then go outside and with a little help from our parents make the same thing big enough to play on.
I have lots of Lego and still build stuff. I am 35 years old.
My time was spent with all of those things, but one important set of toys has been left out. Centurions:
These guys were bad to the bone. They were the only humans that could go toe to toe with Transformers in my brain. I mean they were human transformers!
Also Garbage Pail Kids.
But my all-time favorite thing to do as a kid was play with dinosaurs. A friend and I had a group of small trees that we could climb up easily and we would throw those dinosaurs into the trees and climb up to get them. We got points based on how high we had to climb and how far out on a limb we had to go. You lost points if you fell out of the tree.
And Soundwave was the best toy ever made. EVAR MADE!!
WTF are all these bills and responsibilities I have now? Where are my dinosaurs ...
What I didn't know was they couldn't help me construct my Micro machines plane, which carried cars inside it, because they were setting up the C64 my eldest sister had got. Well when I saw that I pretty much forgot about all my action figures and other toys
I really wanted some Visionaries (the guys with the hologram shields). Gave one out as a birthday present but never had any of my own.
I did have a Sword of Omens (Thundercats) with lights and sounds and it was sweet.
I love how about 90% of the outside games I played as a kid could have probably injured me pretty seriously.
See: Trampolines.
Attack Pack
I thought these were the coolest damn things around. I think I have the tiger one and the Slime-inator at one time, but I think my mom threw that one out due to the slime getting on the carpet:lol:.
I remember having a couple of Transformers, one was a purple jet guy that I broke when it wouldn't bend the right way, and the other was one that changed colors in warm water. I'm not sure where that one went, but that purple one is around somewhere.
I had a Stretch Armstrong, which of course broke. I also had the green monster variant that came with a pump, and he could stick in a stretch position for quite some time. That one actually last a few years.
I also a Beast War figure somewhere. I think it was some sort of pterodactyl. It was one of the smaller ones, that's for sure.
I also had this huge collection of plush animals that I won on a trip the Las Vegas. I felt like I was the shit for grabbing so many at that place, even though they were probably designed to give large payouts.
I remember getting sucked into a yo-yo phase at one time, getting some overpriced thing that automatically retracted back up after letting it hang for a certain period of time.
I had a Yo-Yo ball at few times as well. It kind of reminded me this fascination I had of playing with the ball and rubber sting of paddle-balls. I probably hit my sister a few times with each said object a few times =P.
I also had a bunch of glow-in-the-dark statues my dad got at some place. I think they were like old movie monsters or something. They were highly detailed for such a chunk of plastic.
Oh, and of course, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle paraphernalia. I don't think I ever had a full set of them, I would either get Raph or Michelangelo characters. I think one of them turned into a bus or something....
Other than that stuff, I was into Nintendo systems and such.
Something kids born after....let's say....1995 sorely lack.
I never finish anyth
What I will get into, however, is how stupid and dangerous the games you play as a kid can be.
Growing up, one of my best friends was named Peter. He lived in the house behind mine and we were separated by a fairly tall fence that was easy enough to get over by climbing some trees.
Peter had a trampoline
One summer we were both kicked out of our houses and told to "go play" and having nothing else to do we went into his backyard and jumped around for a while
We had done this so many times before and we were getting bored with it
Then I had an idea
"Let's see who can jump the highest! But you can only jump once so make it count!" I declare
"Okay but this is my trampoline so I get to go first!" Peter said
Fair enough
I hopped off and waited to see how high Peter could jump (and I was sure that I could jump higher)
Peter hopped off and ran up his deck, which was maybe 4 feet off the ground and fairly close to his trampoline
He then hopped up onto the hand rail around his deck and proudly yelled "Watch this!"
He then hopped of his deck and landed on the trampoline and catapulted into the air
I was amazed
However his bounce was on an angle and he came down just BESIDE the trampoline
I still remember the high pitched wail he let out the split second before he ate the ground
He belly flopped directly onto a gravel pit his dad had put down a few days earlier
I stood there stunned
I couldn't see him as the trampoline was blocking my view of the pit
I was frozen, waiting to hear any kind of movement come from the gravel
Finally I hear shambling and peter slowly pops up, with rocks embedded in his face
"Are you ok?" I ask
"Yup!" He responds "Didn't hurt! Your turn! I got as high as the fence!"
Now any rational thinking person would have put an end to this game long ago
But nope
We were 7
"Okay" I say as my concern about Peter's face immediately dissolves into 'how can I jump higher than him?'
I look around for something higher to jump off of
Then I see it
His shed
It's easily 10 feet high, but it is a little ways away
But I was confident I could make it if I got a running start to my jump
So I climbed a nearby tree and managed to get on top of his shed
"Now watch this!" I scream as Peter stares at me from the gravel pit, seemingly unconcerned about the rocks in his face
I run across the roof and jump as hard as my legs will allow
I make it onto the trampoline
It is important to point out that this was all before the time I even knew what the word 'physics' meant
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I hit the trampoline, I was going way too fast, and the landing hurt my legs - bad
I bounced off at an angle
I completely shot over the fence separating our two houses
I began to scream - a mixture of both pain and fear
To Peter it must have simply looked like I had disappeared over the horizon
I hit a tree that was just on the other side of the fence and fell through the branches, screaming a high pitched wail as my foot got caught between two branches
I kept falling but the branches didn't give and my ankle snapped
I screamed in agony as I heard Peter scream from behind the fence and run away, face full of rocks
So there I was, hanging upside down from a tree, screaming like the dickens
My mom comes dashing outside screaming "WHAT THE HELL?! BRYAN!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? HOW DID YOU EVEN GET UP THAT HIGH OH GOD LLOYD GO GET THE LADDER!!!"
Me and Peter weren't allowed to play with each other for a while after that.
I'm pretty sure that there was an increase in adolescence mortality because of those things.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkjVZBNEopc
Kids these days area all safe and stuff.
When I was growing up, a few of us decided to build a bike ramp out of a bunch of old wood we found and some nails from my friend's barn.
The first person on it, someone's older sister, collapsed the ramp and got a nail clean through her foot, bottom to top.
We were then encouraged to build only with lego.
Except one time, I managed to get enough momentum that I went across the field, down a smaller hill, and smack into the elementary school at the bottom. Ow.
The good ol' days of begging your parents to buy overpriced cardboard cut out disc's.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzelVpgSfVM
Yeah, it was really that lame.
Oh god, winter as a child. Noma GT Snow Racer FTW!
I never finish anyth
When I was a tad older, my grandparents got me a lego kit for christmas, one of the ludicrously expensive ones with hundreds and hundreds of pieces. It was a space set that had what was basically an AT-AT walker that ran on batteries, this being many years before star wars had their own lego kits. That set was huge amounts of entertainment for me. I wish I could remember which one it was. I probably made about 300 different spaceships over the course of 2 years playing with those.
The only other toy that I remember as being the shiznite was actually one that I never had. I want to say that it was a construction set called marble madness - unrelated to the vidya game of the same name. It was a set of plastic tubes, pipes, chutes and what have you that you could set up how you liked and then, oddly enough, run marbles through. I swear to god, if people wanted to build a plan for peace in the middle east, they would find one of those playsets and force the Israeli and Palestinian leaders into a locked room to play with it for an afternoon.
I remember marking down a lot of things...
They remind me of these.
One Christmas my grandparents gave me and my two brothers one of the human figures each, one dino each, and one vehicle each. My brothers got two of the jeeps, while I got the badass motorcycle with the raptor skeleton strapped to the front. I got the T-Rex later, and made me a very happy kid. Combine the JP figures with the fifty generic museum-type plastic dino models I already had and I never left my basement (where we kept all our toys).
You bought Pogs? I simply built up my collection through winning keepsies games and trading the homemade ones back for an obscene amount of basics.
I didn't even have to buy my first one - I was given it by a friend, and I borrowed slammers for a while.
There were also bags of crisps that had Tazos (like Pogs but plastic) in them, so that was a source.
I'm doing Movember for Men's Health! Donate if you can - thanks.
oh yeah Pogs! they were pretty cheap though to be fair, I got a tube of them for like £2.99, from there I filled another tube just playing it. The second tube was a present from someone, it had like 20 pogs in it but I was more interested in the fact you got Chupa chups with it.
I also had some metal holographic slammers, I most likely won them from one of the kids who got really into it in a scary way. The beauty of pogs was they were so shit I barely cared if I won or lost.
Talking about collectibles I guess most people (in the UK at least) went ape shit over the premiership stickers. I never liked football and hated the time of year were everyone bought into that fad. You had people spending a couple of quid a day on those things, seemed crazy money back in primary school.
my brother had that roller coaster set
i had to help him put it together