NINTENDO SIXTY FOUUUUUUUURRR!!! (A Childhood Fanboy Thread)

The Last Gent

When I was in elementary school, back near the beginning of the Pokemon Anime, I submitted fan fiction as part of a creative writing assignment, too. Fan Fiction about a plot hole in the anime that bothered me.

I can still sort of remember it.

The episodes in question here were this three-parter about the S.S. Anne, that involved Ash and co., as well as Team Rocket going on it, the ship sinking, and the main cast washing ashore on an island of giant robotic Pokemon. A noteworthy part of it was that episode involved the Pokemon speaking "english" via subtitling them. Thing is, for whatever reason, the episode ended with the heroes and their Pokemon, as well as Team Rocket, on a mining cart plunging into the ocean, then just hard cutting to just the heroes "some time later" covered in scrapes having somehow made it out of that situation and into a resort town. I remember this gap in events BOTHERED my young mind, so I wrote a story explaining it.

Involving death and time travel for some reason.

See, the way I wrote it, they all drowned and died in the ocean, except for Squirtle, who evolved into Wartortle, who then swam back to a city they visited in a previous episode, that had been haunted by a Gastly who could control space and time. So he got the Gastly to send him back in time to try and stop it, but then they somehow ran into Giovanni and Mewtwo (this was a short time before the movie was released, and they'd appeared on the series) and had to find a way to defeat them. At that time, I thought Mewtwo was being mind-controlled by Giovanni based on the series, though the movie proved me wrong later, so I had the two of them break the armor he was wearing to release him in the end.

I forget how the story ended exactly, but they saved Ash and co., and of course this created a time loop that paradoxed them out of existence, and reset everything to the way it was in the actual episode.

Funny thing is, I got a good mark on that, despite having most of the cast die at the beginning, which you'd think would get me in trouble at an elementary school. I'm not sure, but I think I managed to carefully write around that fact and only hint at it.

And thus goes my tale of elementary school Fix Fic/Continuity Porn writing. I have no idea where this story is now, sadly.

Edit: Oh man, I later wrote a really mind-screwy time-travelling Transformers: Beast Machines story after the end of the series for an assignment, too. I'll talk about it if you want, but it's kind of off-topic.

gigawatt666

I just thought of one...
The first game I bought with my own money was 'The Guardian Legend' (for the NES) from Toys'R'Us. It cost me a hefty $25.00 CAD, which was expensive at the time. Any-hoo , I never beat the game, but it was 'Heavy'. The story was some kind of 'Ark or something' in space that got lost or was trying to destroy something and it's denizens were out of control and as the only active 'guardian' it was your job to right it. It involved traversing dungeons searching for keys in your 'robot boy' form to access bosses (pre-historic fish looking things) by transforming into a high-tech jet fighter (up&down scrolling shooter) to conquer said boss. You would then absorb the boss' ability and those would aid you in the dungeon levels to defeat different colored blocks or MoBs. I dunno if anyone else played that game, but if you did, and if you beat it, lemme know. It's been a monkey on my back for 21 years.

mspencer

OK Internet, this is me, sharing.

First exposure to video games was in kindergarten. Pre-censorship Oregon Trail on the Apple II. I tried to get as much time as possible on the classroom Apple II whenever possible.
Christmas just before my 9th birthday I got a TRS-80 Color Computer II and some games -- and I set about trying to learn to code in COLOR BASIC. I had no formal training other than what was in that book, the couple of 1970's Creative Computing punch-and-run program collections my parents bought me from yard sales, and from punch-and-runs from subscriptions to COMPUTE! and Family Computing magazines.
. . . you can see where this is going . . .
Sad and pathetic as this was, one of my greatest sources of joy was trying to do, and sometimes succeeding at, the following:

• Watch the attract screen of (or *gasp* watch someone playing on) an arcade game, since we were poor and could never afford to give me quarters -- and see some interesting kind of gameplay I'd never seen before
• Go home to my CoCo and try to write something vaguely game-like that was vaguely related to what I had seen
• Spend weeks enhancing and fixing bugs (and oh boy were there a lot of bugs because all I knew how to write was horrible spaghetti code) until it was finally fun for ME to play
• Invite friends over and beam with happiness as they found a few minutes of fun in playing what I made.
• (Not quite every time) Watch happiness turn to shame as the game crashes or as they find a corner case that I never anticipated

Looking back I think there was only about a year or less where I was clever enough to make something fun, but hadn't graduated to PCs yet. I do remember those experiences stayed with me to the point that . . . well, I'm 33 now, have been in and out of college, have two semesters left on my Masters in CS, and I still *really* want to make games when I "grow up." Part of me says cynically that I'm just childishly trying to return to those days when I made stupid-simple games on an ancient computer and people enjoyed playing them. I'm sure as a professional it won't feel the same optimizing a shader so it's a little less accurate but ten times faster, as writing a game with blocky 64x32 screen resolution and 8 colors and seeing people have fun with it.

Ahem. Actually I think this topic is about games of old, and when I was a child I didn't have much of a chance to play what other people were playing. Well when I was 10 or 11 my parents bought a game for themselves to play on my little computer: Dungeons of Daggorath, the game pictured in my avatar. It was a primitive first-person game with paper thin line-art monsters and a spooky, dark dungeon. Many of the monsters were powerful but slow and you had to flee from them until you were strong enough to take them on. Hearing those powerful monsters stalking around the dungeon was a frightening experience for me as a child.

I can play jump-out-and-scare-you survival horror games just fine. I still can't play Dungeons of Daggorath without feeling embarrassingly scared and anxious. Eventually it gets to be too much for me and I turn the game off. I've still never finished the third floor of that

five-floor

dungeon.

*sigh*

Ballman

mspencer wrote: »

OK Internet, this is me, sharing.

First exposure to video games was in kindergarten. Pre-censorship Oregon Trail on the Apple II. I tried to get as much time as possible on the classroom Apple II whenever possible.
Christmas just before my 9th birthday I got a TRS-80 Color Computer II and some games -- and I set about trying to learn to code in COLOR BASIC. I had no formal training other than what was in that book, the couple of 1970's Creative Computing punch-and-run program collections my parents bought me from yard sales, and from punch-and-runs from subscriptions to COMPUTE! and Family Computing magazines.
. . . you can see where this is going . . .
Sad and pathetic as this was, one of my greatest sources of joy was trying to do, and sometimes succeeding at, the following:

• Watch the attract screen of (or *gasp* watch someone playing on) an arcade game, since we were poor and could never afford to give me quarters -- and see some interesting kind of gameplay I'd never seen before
• Go home to my CoCo and try to write something vaguely game-like that was vaguely related to what I had seen
• Spend weeks enhancing and fixing bugs (and oh boy were there a lot of bugs because all I knew how to write was horrible spaghetti code) until it was finally fun for ME to play
• Invite friends over and beam with happiness as they found a few minutes of fun in playing what I made.
• (Not quite every time) Watch happiness turn to shame as the game crashes or as they find a corner case that I never anticipated

Looking back I think there was only about a year or less where I was clever enough to make something fun, but hadn't graduated to PCs yet. I do remember those experiences stayed with me to the point that . . . well, I'm 33 now, have been in and out of college, have two semesters left on my Masters in CS, and I still *really* want to make games when I "grow up." Part of me says cynically that I'm just childishly trying to return to those days when I made stupid-simple games on an ancient computer and people enjoyed playing them. I'm sure as a professional it won't feel the same optimizing a shader so it's a little less accurate but ten times faster, as writing a game with blocky 64x32 screen resolution and 8 colors and seeing people have fun with it.

Ahem. Actually I think this topic is about games of old, and when I was a child I didn't have much of a chance to play what other people were playing. Well when I was 10 or 11 my parents bought a game for themselves to play on my little computer: Dungeons of Daggorath, the game pictured in my avatar. It was a primitive first-person game with paper thin line-art monsters and a spooky, dark dungeon. Many of the monsters were powerful but slow and you had to flee from them until you were strong enough to take them on. Hearing those powerful monsters stalking around the dungeon was a frightening experience for me as a child.

I can play jump-out-and-scare-you survival horror games just fine. I still can't play Dungeons of Daggorath without feeling embarrassingly scared and anxious. Eventually it gets to be too much for me and I turn the game off. I've still never finished the third floor of that

five-floor

dungeon.

*sigh*

I don't have anything to add, but I want you to know that I've seen your avatar on here for a while now, and always wanted to say something about the fact that I had a copy of Dungeons of Daggorath for my old Tandy computer when I was a kid. I was really young (probably 8), and I wasn't good at easy RPGs, let alone something like that. After trying it a few times, I was afraid to even turn it on.

mspencer

Well . . . if you liked that . . . http://mspencer.net/daggorath/dodpcpg.html Scroll down past the five map images and there are some interesting photos I took.

:-)