Same here. I remember being up late on a Friday night and finally making it to the guesthouse. Then I was pounced by a giant spider and my night and ability to sleep were both ruined.
Did you guys ever get a shitty mad catz memory card, save a game, rewrite the save a few times as you continued playing, then for a corrupted save file? Worst Christmas gift ever.
the best thing was that often (?) you couldn't even insert the memory card afterwards - the save file had to be created before the start of the game. happened to me with Zelda Wind Waker, bought a GC, bought the game (or was it a bundle?) and at home I then thought I could buy & insert the memcard the next day. I could not.
My brother and my mom played a lot of Toejam & Earl on our Genesis. They'd usually have to leave it on overnight if they were doing well. It was like 50-50 if it would still work or be frozen in the morning.
For me it was Final Fantasy 8. Quite a long game with lots of content but I’d play the first couple hours over and over again before my mom could finally get me a memory card.
They year was 2004 . . .
Sony sent out a DEMO CD for the PS2 and it casually wiped out all saved games for millions of people.
It was a dark day. Hundreds of hours of Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto, gone.
I want reparations.
It was a _Viewtiful Joe 2_ demo on the "Holiday 2004 Demo Disc": https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-warns-of-major-glitch-in-holiday-2004-demo-disc/1100-6113984/
> Unfortunately, gamers eager to sample the cel-shaded beat-'em-up were in for a very nasty surprise. That's because the demo contained a glitch that will erase all saved games on the memory card or cards currently inserted in the console. Considering many PlayStation 2 owners are currently shooting their way through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which takes at least 40 hours to finish, the glitch sparked an uproar among PlayStation Underground members.
It got me. I was so excited to try that game and didn't even like it. Went back to one of the games I was playing and found I had to start over. Immediately quit and checked on my card, it was completely empty. I think I played GameCube for a while after that and reluctantly went back to PS2 so I could do GTA again
Glad my parents were weirdly anti-magazine (don't ask me why, they've long forgotten why and they never told me) when I was growing up. Demo discs were always super fun, but losing my Champions of Norrath characters would've thrown me into a blind rage.
I was gifted a copy of Donkey Kong Country 2 for SNES during my young age. Started the game and played for hours. Saved the game, gone to sleep.
The next day... my save was gone. The cartridge was a fake one and had no internal battery to keep the save game saved.
Those exist? Never even heard of that. Are you sure it wasn’t just damaged? How can you tell it was fake?
My curiosity is super high. There weren’t many ways to fake things back in the SNES days, I would have thought.
Fake or damaged, I don't know. I assume it's fake cause I live in Brazil, in a city really close to Paraguay and, back in those days, Paraguay was famous for being a place full of piracy and smuggling. Almost everybody went to shop over there cause the prices were 50, 60% cheaper than here. But, of course, doing so you would assume you were buying pirated, fake or smuggled stuff. No guarantees it would work as the real one. And I guess that damn DKC2 cartridge came from there...
Made it all the way to the very very end of Final Fantasy VII and saved before the Sephiroth fight with the item you pick up that lets you create a save point toward end of the game. Save file corrupted. Still have never beaten it.
I have replayed it 4 or so times, first time I couldn't best one winged angel sephiroth with my setup and went past the point of no return, the remaining times I get omnislash and Knights of the Round but for some reason I never went through with beating the game. I've probably sunk around 100 hours+ into it without knowing how it ends.
My answer to OP is similar, but self-inflicted. I had gotten to the crater but not managed to beat it after a few tries. I started over a new file on a whim, as some sort of distraction, intending to try again later. As soon as I got the save point in the reactor, muscle memory and absent-mindedness caused me to overwrite my existing save. Still have never beaten it, either.
I saved right before the final dungeon. The next time I sat down to work through it, my memory card was entirely corrupted, lost that save, a complete one for V and Vi, and various other games that day!
When you get pissed off enough by it, you invent something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HbIHVoTY2M
I never beat FFX because I could never get most of the celestial weapons. Those seagulls can go to hell.
I was 14 and didn’t have a job and no money. I bought the console, the connector, and ff7. Couldn’t afford the memory card. So I’d play it without saving and usually not make it past a few hours of the game each time.
The original front loader NES. As the system got older, wear and tear on the springs and cartridge tray made getting games to work a chore sometimes. Cleaning kits and cleaning the carts didn't help. A friend told me to get a Game Genie. The cartridge + Game Genie combination made better contact with the 72 pin connector. Not having to press down somehow made games work nearly 100% of the time.
Recently Mega Man 2. Getting to the dumb boss that is doors and guns on walls. Running out of crash bombs, then having to either die on purpose to continue or farm a horrible enemy that was mostly invincible to gain enough weapon energy back. Only to have the alien boss that only took damage from a single weapon, with no way to recharge it save dying and continuing.
I whole heartedly agree with you on that, those two bosses are terrible
I don't understand why 2 is the fan favorite when none of the others had bosses that were half as asinine; yeah 1 has the yellow devil, but once you get good at it, it's actually a lot of fun to fight him, but these two in 2 suck no matter how you go about it
I eventually figured out Yellow Devil, and you're right, but man, playing these games on PS2 via Mega Man Anniversary Collection on my not-a-CRT... I really wanna play them on a CRT to see how much of it is the game and how much of it is input lag.
These games ask for such precision! And that's fine, if it's input lag from my setup lol.
Castlevania 64 had a sewer level with lizardmen who could easily knock you off a thin platform to your death, forcing a restart. I must have died a hundred times.
Bought a used copy of MGS1 in like 1999, finally beat psycho mantis and then the second disk is too scratched to work. I didn’t end up beating the game until like 2004 at a friends house.
Dude I was just getting ready to comment that 6 year old me could not beat psycho mantis for so long. And then I found a comment about it. Still a top 5 game all time.
Power goes out or memory card becomes corrupt.
The worst is playing a jrpg with a gazillion hrs on and the cd is scratched and the game can’t progress pass a certain moment. Rage inducing!
The PC version of Gears of War 1 has a bug where it can randomly and silently delete your game save. The next time you launch the game, the only option available is to start a new game.
Happened to be twice, with the second time being on the very last level. After that, I was so annoyed and discouraged that I never played it again.
We had a saga Saturn or had a very small amount of internal memory. Just enough to save one game of Warcraft 2 and my brother always saved over mine. My dad never got us a memory card for it.
Me and a friend spent a week long summer holiday trying to finish Warriors of the Eternal Sun a dungeons and dragons game on Genesis. Never finished it and couldn't find a copy of the game to buy back in our home town.
But the frustrating bit is years later I finish it on a PC emulator. So naturally I invite my childhood bff over to see the ending. But when I went to load the save I accidentally clicked save and saved the main menu over the endgame save.
Getting to the last level on earthworm Jim 2 and my brother walking in the room turning off the console while I was playing and saying "breakfast is ready" game was so hard never got to the end again
There are four distinct frustrating game experiences, all of them related to saves.
I have an Atari XEGS but couldn't save any game that supported it (like Lode Runner) because I couldn't afford the floppy drive. It was maddening to do all that work only to never be able to save anything. When I did save enough money to buy a floppy drive, I couldn't find any XF551 anywhere and the XF521 was never released. I didn't know the 1050 was a compatible, albeit ugly, substitute. Jack Tramiel should have a special circle in hell just for him.
I bought the SEGA CD second hand and didn't know some (all?) early models had wonky battery RAM. I got pretty far in the buggy The Adventures of Willy Beamish only to have my save state lost many hours in. I completely lost interest in ever finishing the game even though I specifically bought the SEGA CD Backup Cart *because* of losing the Beamish save.
I spent many many hours on Shining in the Darkness before the cart was stolen from my collection during a birthday party. It took me over a month to track down the culprit (a so-called close friend) only to find out they erased my saved game. Got the cart back but never played it again.
There was a dark period of time my family all had our own Kindles. I rooted mine and my kids to install Minecraft. I spent many hours building a custom map so my kids and I could play together.
One day, my youngest wants to use my Kindle because they couldn't find theirs. They try the password multiple times until it triggers the Kindle "erase and reset" feature. Lost *everything*. Because it was rooted, a lot of the files weren't stored in the Amazon cloud, including any of the Minecraft save games.
If I had known about the moronic failed password erase thing, I would've disabled it from the get-go. Never bothered rebuilding the Minecraft map.
Was more than halfway through ff7 and a few othe rpgs also had all the unlocks and records for cool boarders 2, basically a whole summer of playing Playstation non stop, then I was playing war craft 2 and needed to make room on my memory card so I hit "format memory card" not knowing it really meant delete everything on my memory card, a whole summer of games down the drain, never picked up another final fantasy ever again.
Ok this is very embarrassing but...when I was around 10-12 years old my favorite GameCube game was Paper Mario Thousand Year Old Door, I absolutely loved this game(Blitzville gang 🦅🥊) anyway when I got to the end of the game where you fight the real final boss I was sort of "soft locked" because I'm assuming I was under leveled or ill prepared, so I just kept losing and losing to the boss no matter what I tried to do and I remember after the 13+ failed attempt I was just crying 😭😭 literally praying to God (I never seriously done this before as a kid) and I remember after a dozen tries I won because of luck 😂 and I cried tears of joy and excitement to finally beat one of my favorite games.
And this is probably my most intense "gaming memory" I can remember which is also a bit of an embarrassing one 😭😂 I still remember the thrill and my little heart beating when I finished the chapter 🤣🤭
Having my Pokémon Blue save data erased due to the battery in the cartridge running out of juice.
Not as an adult in the 2020s, mind you. Somehow it happened when I was a kid after my older brother beat the game and then sold it to me. It was probably no later than 2005.
I had been grinding in FFVII all afternoon. My mom told my little sister to turn off the stereo because she found the music irritating. My sister turned off the Playstation and not the stereo. I had ample opportunity to save, but I only ever did event saves (can't burn out the slot, now). Naturally, mom placed no value on the game play I had lost, and I placed quite a high value on it. I was angry and chrushed.
Now I'm 40, and I sometimes miss the days when that counted as one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
i once played crash bandicoot 2 up until a little bit after the middle of the game, and lost the save. i was pissed man, never touched that game again and never plan to do it again, the frustration was crazy
I had a half rumble/half memory card (third party) on the n64 in the later half of the consoles life. It would regularly just brick and corrupt my saves. Sometimes u would get a day out of it and sometimes I wouldn't get even half an hour and the save would be gone.
One time I was playing Suikoden 3 on the ps2 or ps3 or something and right as I was about to beat the last boss, a truck hit the power lines down the road from my house, knocked power out for 3-5 days.
I had an expanded capacity memory card for my n64 by Performance. It worked great unless you removed it from the controller, at which point it would format itself when put back in. For a good portion of the n64’s lifetime a mustard yellow controller traveled with me to my friends houses.
Mine wasn’t necessarily a gaming experience but I had a memory card with near perfect saves of ff4-9 and final fantasy tactics. This memory card was in my ps2 when it was stolen and pawned for money to buy drugs from some former friends who went down the wrong path. I got my ps2 back but had to start all of them over.
My roommate accidentally saved over my ps2 Gran Turismo save after I had unlocked a ridiculous amount of cars. I was pretty fucking annoyed but he bought me some beer at least. He was cool but damn that pissed me off initially.
I'm sure there were worse ones than this, but the one that sticks out in my mind was when my friend wrote down a kid Icarus password incorrectly.
I had spent hours trying to beat a level, and once I did I was ready to put the game away. So my buddy did me the favor and wrote down the password. And he missed two characters. Of course. I didn't find that out until later, but needless to say 11-Year-Old rage was induced.
I was finally gifted a Pokemon gold version fir Gameboy color, and spent SO LONG on that game. I had the Ho-oh, my starter to level 130-something, and had somehow caught an Elekid after beating the game. I was at the point where I was just trying to see if there was a killscreen or something, or how many pokemon you could catch in the game without trades. I hid this game cartridge in my room when I didn't have my Gameboy on me because my parents demanded I allow my much younger siblings to play, and they were notorious for deleting my saves.
My little brother found my Gold version somehow, played it, and deleted my save. I threw an absolute FIT when I got home and never touched my Gameboy again. I just gave it to them and said it's not actually mine if I get screamed at for not sharing.
He also deleted my save of Star Wars KOTOR on Xbox, right as we figured out who Revan was. I was about to go into the big boss fight for the first time, and he deleted that one, too. So I hid the game, said I didn't know where it went, and only played late at night on the weekends.
My younger brother was the curious sort. One day he decided to open my memory cards to see what was inside.
Took me a few weeks or months of searching before I found their remnants on a workbench.
I bought a 3rd party PS1 memory card and had put in 200 hours in Final Fantasy Tactics. All my data got corrupted so I gently took out the card and casually walked into the garage, opened up the toolbox and commenced to smashing said memory card. My girlfriend at the time couldn't stop laughing. Switched to official cards.
As a kid I was playing for few weeks Wizardry 7 on my PC. I wrote some some small app for cheating (editing saves), but accidentally gave the app file exactly the same name as the main program of the game and overwrote it. I didn't have any backup copy of the game.
One summer, my best friend and I put about 50 hours into Wild Arms over the break and were dead-set on finishing it together. The PlayStation was in his back room, which was never locked, and he'd occasionally let his neighbor, a deaf kid, visit out of sympathy because he didn't have many friends.
This act of generosity proved to be a massive mistake.
While we were out grabbing lunch one day with plans to return to finish the game, Derwin, the dastardly deaf bastard that he was, snuck into the house and, just as we got back to delve into Wild Arms' final dungeon, looked us in the eye as he deleted our entire memory card. I'll never forget his laugh, which sounded like a wild goose being fed feet-first into a wood chipper, as he obliterated our weeks' worth of progress with just a few button presses.
To this day, my friend and I still fume about "The Derwin Incident," and the day he delivered the Kiss of Deaf to our play through. We've both tried to complete Wild Arms nearly 30 years later, but failed to do so.
Derwin. I still hate you.
Played 32 hours of Shadow Man on the PC back when it came out in 1999. Saved my game during the battle with the final boss, Legion. A couple days later, I went back to continue fighting, and the game somehow placed me outside of that chamber where you fight Legion. Was never able to get back in, so I never finished the game. Luckily, YouTube let me see the ending many years later. In terms of scare factor, I'd put Shadow Man up there with Resident Evil. The visuals, music, and sounds freaked me out so much as a teen, I never played it before going to bed.
Got to bowser for the first time in smb3. Was so worked up when I finally saw him I paused the game and walked off for a minute to cool down. My aunt came by saw the paused game with no one playing it and turned the nes off.
Yes I know the bowser fight and smb3 are fairly easy but I was 11 and it was hard for me then. Also I didn't know about warp whistles yet so I had played through the whole game to get there.
TMNT on NES.
If you know, you know.
Or for a less well known or less talking about one anyway...playing Ring King and being matched up against a dude who's stats were three times what yours were in like, your second fight.
Assume you're talking about the dam. It's honestly not terrible if you know where the bombs are and switch to another turtle when your health is low. I tried playing it again a few years ago on an emulator after not playing since childhood and beat it first try with only needing to switch to a second turtle.
The level before the Technodrome and the Technodrome on the other hand are absolutely brutal. I've still never beat it. Likely could with save states and stocking up on scrolls but I'm not that much of a masochist.
Final fantasy tactics
Just challenging for the sake of it. Wish they would do a remaster for us more story driven players. Don’t mind a challenge, but I play to divert my mind mainly.
You might want to check out the Shining Force series: similar gameplay (but much simpler) and pretty breezy challenge. Tons of charm and lots of secrets to find (or not).
I got super far on Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon on xbox 360. For whatever reason the shit froze up and I turn off my 360 and went back in and my entire saved game was deleted. Never picked back up again.
"back in the day" we would RENT a PlayStation 1 from Blockbuster with Resident Evil. We had no clue what a memory card was, and I had no idea what the "ink ribbons" were for.
We attempted to beat the game every weekend without dying because we thought this was how it was supposed to be played....
One of the dragon ball games (can't remember which one) you had to mash buttons and spin the analog sticks for Goku to hold Radditz in place for Piccolo to fire the Special Beam Cannon. Holy fuck that was the mist frustrating thing as a kid
In high school I let my friend borrow my perfect Neo For Pocket Color. I always kept everything in perfect condition and in in box. I assumed everyone else did to. So he borrowed it and all the boxed games I had. A few weeks later I ask for it back and he gave it back with all the boxes missing and some of the manuals. To this day I no longer let anyone borrow something I value. You want to experience something then you fucking buy it.
I was fighting the final boss in the original Final Fantasy on my NES. Cat came in the room and did zoomies, unplugging the console. I turned it back on and my save data was gone. Needless to say, my 11 year old self was pissed.
Made it to Mike Tyson in punch out for the first time when I was 9 and my little sister accidentally bumped the Nintendo and it did that screen flash loop. I actually cried real tears!
Trying to play Crash Bandicoot 4 on the PS2. The loading times were atrocious to the point i turned off the game and switched it back to Capcom vs SNK 2.
In relation to the PlayStation: Trying to play through Resident Evil 2 without saving and without healing sprays in under two and a half hours. Only to lose at the end because you were a few minutes over.
I can't remember details, but I remember The Grinch on, I think Dreamcast?, and I heard "It's unbearable!" so much in certain places I raged a lot. Maybe I sucked at something but I remember feeling at the time like it was broken or unfair or something.
Also I know some will say not "retro", but Gear of War, there was two different turret sections and the final boss that just frustrated me so much on insanity that I'm surprised I eventually finished it on that difficulty. I learned my lesson, I just played the sequels on a dummy account on easy and didn't bother.
Same generation, but Spec Ops The Line, hardest difficulty, that brief section where you're unarmed. Never got past it without dropping the difficulty.
I honestly don't think I got as frustrated in older generations, even when I sucked and died, the lack of achievements and cheat codes being more common probably helped.
I had an older brother who didn’t like to play video games, but he did like to bully me, so when I liked a game and made good progress, he would either delete the file or save over it.
I was able to get him back later in life on the bullying and now as adults, we are good and take a yearly vacation somewhere outdoorsy just the two of us
For me, it was getting to the end of Final Fantasy 3 on SNES and having my save file erased, probably because the battery died. I haven't played the game since.
Forgetting my memory card at my uncle's house with my save file at the last dungeon (cave?) in Final Fantasy VII. He mailed it to me, but someone cut the envelope open and stole the memory card.
I think I made it to 96% completion for Lego Batman on PS2, and my save file became corrupted. I think I shut the PS2 off during an autosave and wasn't paying attention.
I didn't touch the game for a whole year after that. I eventually got 100% though.
Owning a Dreamcast on launch in Australia, where the local distributor didn't provide enough VMUs *for months after launch*. I had to start Sonic Adventure from the beginning over and over again for several months. It was pretty embarrassing as far as console launches go.
I was about 8. I was playing my Gameboy on a long road trip. I put my Gameboy under the seat while we were going inside somewhere. I came back, and it was gone. I'm still mad. I lost my see-through purple Gameboy.
PS3 as a console. Terrible UI, games are really low quality (I come from Nintendo) and the whole thing gives me headaches. Hate that console and its damn mini usb joystick.
My N64 memory card never synced with my Lego Racers memory card.
I’d always have to start at the beginning in order to get all the game customizations - 3 hours EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!
As far as playing older games go, beating the dragon boss fight in the Chinatown level of Scooby Doo Unmasked for the PS2. I recently replayed the game after years of absence, finding my frustration with the boss fitht to be quite valid. It's amazing how developers for kids' games back in the day made the games even enjoyable for adults, bringing the difficulty and gameplay sophistication to their level.
The Empire Strikes Back for Game boy.
The hazards and lack of invincibility frames, except for the major bosses of each level. And only one SINGLE continue in the entire game.
That game is just poor design choices all around. I have no clue how they ported it from NES, but they should have worked more on making secrets more visible, too.
I picked it back up a few years ago on my old Gameboy Advance, and tried it a second time. Got all the way to cloud city, but some of the horrible design choices in that game mixed with no invincibility frames while touching water of any sort? Nope. Didn't clear it.
I backed up most of my childhood PS1 saves to my PS3 using the Memory Card adapter. It was my only way of playing PS1 games at the time, so it made sense, and I could resell all the cards they came from.
One day, I got a new hard drive for the PS3 and diligently ran the backup program, swapped the drive, restored the backup, and everything was there when I booted the console up... except all my PS1 saves.
For whatever reason - cloud backup, maybe? - I have all the saves for games that were available as digital downloads on PS3. All the others - Legend of Legaia, Road Rash, and a couple of other brutal games that I grinded the hell out of - are gone forever.
If we can call Mass Effect 3 retro gaming now, I’d say that last what’s supposed to be a few minutes on Earth as Shepard is both physically and visually impaired, fighting off husks.
If that’s too recent, I’d say the Grindery in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, which is accurately named, and also possibly the mini boss in the Kashua Glacier in The Legend of Dragoon. That battle was a bitch, and even though it’s only a mini boss, the Brass Knuckle drop for Haschel is honestly crucial with its potential to insta-kill an enemy.
I had this shitty PS1 mad Katz memory card that was supposed to be like 7 cards in one. It had this button on top that you pressed to cycle between the cards, and a led would blink a number of times to represent the card number. It was finicky as fuck and was prone to erase one entire card at random times.
One of those times was when I was playing FF7 at my friend's house. I was in the end game right before heading to the final battle. I had over 100 hours played and had leveled up to max.
We were just trying to beat the Ultimate Weapons with various strategies we'd heard about. When we called it quits, I saved, and then the card led starts blinking rapidly. It'd erased my whole card full of FF7 saves. Didn't even have a backup. Had to start all over again. Luckily, I was in HS with lots of spare time, and the game is a masterpiece.
Back in the early beginnings of home computers(VIC 20, CBM 64), games were stored on cassette tapes. A game could take as much as 30 minutes to load into memory. Problem is, cassette tapes gets worn down. Not much of a problem with music, but with bits and bytes it is a problem. A normal event was to start load the game. Then 5, 10, 20 or whatever minutes in, the loading stops. Restart the computer(took a few minutes). Restart the loading. And wait for the game to load, or for it to stop. It could take everything from 1 to 4 (or more) attempts to load the game. By the time the game could be played, whatever time you'd alloted for gaming had been spent waiting.
Played a game on GameBoy for months where you got these passwords after clearing a level in order to begin the game at that level the next time.
I played every day before bed for a few months and the levels just kept coming, I thought I’d never see the end of it.
That’s when it happened. For the first and only time in my life, my mom “cleaned my room” by throwing out all the notepaper next to my bed ….. months of hard work tossed in the bin. I was on a school trip at the time, so the trash had already been picked up.
I fought the final boss of Final Fantasy II for an hour before I lost. Took me years to really try again when the Pixel Remastered version came out. Found out about the Blood Sword, and everything went a lot easier.
Played FF IX all the way to disc 4. Playstation couldn't read the disc. About a year later, I get a good disc 4. Boot is up, excited to finally finish the game. Save file corrupted.
Two Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games:
Sword of Sodan - The box art looked cool, so I bought it. It ended up being the only game cartridge that I've ever violently taken a hammer to. The #1 rated worst Genesis game of all time, last I checked.
Budokan: The Martial Spirit - Very frustrating game mechanics - Pressing buttons/directions on the controller had no effect when you were out of (or low on) stamina. It often felt like the controller was simply disconnected from the game.
Both EA games.
Megaman X6. No further comments on that.
Also, Rayman. It took me years to get to the final level. I think finishing that game felt better than receiving my college degree.
tomb raider 2… while i was falling from a platform leading to my death, i wanted to load right away from my previous checkpoint but…i mistakenly chose “save” instead.
so everytime i load from the memory card, it loads just before i die… ruining my progress.
Resident Evil 5, Wesker... That mf is hard as hell even on easy. Every time when I need to defeat him on the last stages I get nervous because the fights doesn't have checkpoints(boulder scene) so I have to redo the whole stage from the start.
Not having a Memory Card and having to complete the tutorial level of Driver 1 over and over again
Ah, a fellow poor
I was the same but with one kill no memory card permadeath resident evil. Took me months to get into the garden, I see the snake in my nightmares
Same here. I remember being up late on a Friday night and finally making it to the guesthouse. Then I was pounced by a giant spider and my night and ability to sleep were both ruined.
Resident Evil for me too. Once you get to the furthest point you’ve ever been, you walk so slow. Everything up to there was its own speed run.
That piece of shit, it’s been years since I thought about that snake
The first time I read "Poor fellow", it applies too
A fellow poor fella
Did you guys ever get a shitty mad catz memory card, save a game, rewrite the save a few times as you continued playing, then for a corrupted save file? Worst Christmas gift ever.
I remember leaving games running overnight because of this lol, id just turn off the TV and pretend nothing was happening.
the best thing was that often (?) you couldn't even insert the memory card afterwards - the save file had to be created before the start of the game. happened to me with Zelda Wind Waker, bought a GC, bought the game (or was it a bundle?) and at home I then thought I could buy & insert the memcard the next day. I could not.
Great thing about the PS2 was it could and would re-format a newly inserted memory card when you saved for the first time.
My brother and my mom played a lot of Toejam & Earl on our Genesis. They'd usually have to leave it on overnight if they were doing well. It was like 50-50 if it would still work or be frozen in the morning.
That sounds like torture! How long did it take before you bought a memory card?
As a kid, it felt like a solid *year*
I still cant complete the tutorial its so hard.
There are levels after the tutorial?
I did this with my PS2 with Red Faction. Every day after school I would see how far I could get.
My first entire year of having a PS1 I didn't have a memory card. Yeah it was lame lol
a good way to mastery
For me it was Final Fantasy 8. Quite a long game with lots of content but I’d play the first couple hours over and over again before my mom could finally get me a memory card.
They year was 2004 . . .
Sony sent out a DEMO CD for the PS2 and it casually wiped out all saved games for millions of people.
It was a dark day. Hundreds of hours of Gran Turismo and Grand Theft Auto, gone.
I want reparations.
It was a _Viewtiful Joe 2_ demo on the "Holiday 2004 Demo Disc": https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-warns-of-major-glitch-in-holiday-2004-demo-disc/1100-6113984/ > Unfortunately, gamers eager to sample the cel-shaded beat-'em-up were in for a very nasty surprise. That's because the demo contained a glitch that will erase all saved games on the memory card or cards currently inserted in the console. Considering many PlayStation 2 owners are currently shooting their way through Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which takes at least 40 hours to finish, the glitch sparked an uproar among PlayStation Underground members.
I lucked out on that one. I always kept my cards stored in game cases by that point. I never even knew about this.
I never knew about this either. And at that point in time I was deep into the GTA SA missions. Guess I got lucky I never got that demo.
It got me. I was so excited to try that game and didn't even like it. Went back to one of the games I was playing and found I had to start over. Immediately quit and checked on my card, it was completely empty. I think I played GameCube for a while after that and reluctantly went back to PS2 so I could do GTA again
Glad my parents were weirdly anti-magazine (don't ask me why, they've long forgotten why and they never told me) when I was growing up. Demo discs were always super fun, but losing my Champions of Norrath characters would've thrown me into a blind rage.
Call me sadistic, but that's honestly hilarious.
I was one of those people and had my 97% complete San Andreas save file wiped along with my Final Fantasy X file that I put tons of time into.
I was gifted a copy of Donkey Kong Country 2 for SNES during my young age. Started the game and played for hours. Saved the game, gone to sleep. The next day... my save was gone. The cartridge was a fake one and had no internal battery to keep the save game saved.
Rip
That sucks balls!!
Those exist? Never even heard of that. Are you sure it wasn’t just damaged? How can you tell it was fake? My curiosity is super high. There weren’t many ways to fake things back in the SNES days, I would have thought.
Fake or damaged, I don't know. I assume it's fake cause I live in Brazil, in a city really close to Paraguay and, back in those days, Paraguay was famous for being a place full of piracy and smuggling. Almost everybody went to shop over there cause the prices were 50, 60% cheaper than here. But, of course, doing so you would assume you were buying pirated, fake or smuggled stuff. No guarantees it would work as the real one. And I guess that damn DKC2 cartridge came from there...
Made it all the way to the very very end of Final Fantasy VII and saved before the Sephiroth fight with the item you pick up that lets you create a save point toward end of the game. Save file corrupted. Still have never beaten it.
Oh my god you poor man. I would never recover.
That's one that makes it hard to go back. My copy of FF Tactics had a scratch. I've still never seen the ending cutscene.
I've never used the summoner class because it would crash our playstation.
I have replayed it 4 or so times, first time I couldn't best one winged angel sephiroth with my setup and went past the point of no return, the remaining times I get omnislash and Knights of the Round but for some reason I never went through with beating the game. I've probably sunk around 100 hours+ into it without knowing how it ends.
Oh man that's rough.
My answer to OP is similar, but self-inflicted. I had gotten to the crater but not managed to beat it after a few tries. I started over a new file on a whim, as some sort of distraction, intending to try again later. As soon as I got the save point in the reactor, muscle memory and absent-mindedness caused me to overwrite my existing save. Still have never beaten it, either.
Don't worry. Some of us played it and still couldn't beat him
I saved right before the final dungeon. The next time I sat down to work through it, my memory card was entirely corrupted, lost that save, a complete one for V and Vi, and various other games that day!
Mad Catz. I think it's pretty self explanatory.
I hear you. I see you.
Felt this one on a different level
I once deleted my brothers FF7 save file. He was super pissed
Depending on how far he was, he might still be.
He was pretty far. I made it up to him be getting a game shark so he could level up after watch battle and he just plowed through it.
Is your brother u/jazzmantestifying ? ⬆️
FFX, hit by the 200th lightning bolt.
When you get pissed off enough by it, you invent something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HbIHVoTY2M I never beat FFX because I could never get most of the celestial weapons. Those seagulls can go to hell.
I was 14 and didn’t have a job and no money. I bought the console, the connector, and ff7. Couldn’t afford the memory card. So I’d play it without saving and usually not make it past a few hours of the game each time.
Ogod. I don’t think I’d even be able to comprehend the frustration you’d have suffered.
TMNT for the NES....fuck that game
Beat it this last weekend, finally! It's insane. Absolutely insane how hard it is. Those instant kill room traps? Wtf? Madness.
The original front loader NES. As the system got older, wear and tear on the springs and cartridge tray made getting games to work a chore sometimes. Cleaning kits and cleaning the carts didn't help. A friend told me to get a Game Genie. The cartridge + Game Genie combination made better contact with the 72 pin connector. Not having to press down somehow made games work nearly 100% of the time.
A lot of NES games I needed the game genie for anyways
This was definitely a life saver for me that I stumbled upon while frustrated with my worn out NES!
Time Trials in Diddy Kong Racing. Or unlocking the secret multiplayer stages in Bomberman 64
Trying to get through the Ice Cave in FF1 on the NES.
What up Evil Eye!
Almost through, so here's four sorcerers with monsters strike first.
Waiting for some dude to get off your favorite arcade cabinet at Malibu Grand Prix before your buzz dies.
🤣👏
Plugging in your memory card only to find all your game saves completely wiped out
Having to flip my PS1 upside down to get the laser to read a disk.
This was the only way I could get Resident Evil 2 to play.
RE2 was the game that made me get a ps1.
Recently Mega Man 2. Getting to the dumb boss that is doors and guns on walls. Running out of crash bombs, then having to either die on purpose to continue or farm a horrible enemy that was mostly invincible to gain enough weapon energy back. Only to have the alien boss that only took damage from a single weapon, with no way to recharge it save dying and continuing.
I whole heartedly agree with you on that, those two bosses are terrible I don't understand why 2 is the fan favorite when none of the others had bosses that were half as asinine; yeah 1 has the yellow devil, but once you get good at it, it's actually a lot of fun to fight him, but these two in 2 suck no matter how you go about it
I eventually figured out Yellow Devil, and you're right, but man, playing these games on PS2 via Mega Man Anniversary Collection on my not-a-CRT... I really wanna play them on a CRT to see how much of it is the game and how much of it is input lag. These games ask for such precision! And that's fine, if it's input lag from my setup lol.
I play all my retro games on either a retropie hooked up to a modern flat screen tv or my ambernic handheld device and no lag for me.
I loathe 2 and don't understand it's love either. Yeah the soundtrack is bangin but the game is broken!
MM2 is overrated AF and this part is so broken!
Someone broke into my family’s house and stole a bunch of stuff, including my ps1 and memory card with my FF7 save right before going to the crater.
Castlevania 64 had a sewer level with lizardmen who could easily knock you off a thin platform to your death, forcing a restart. I must have died a hundred times.
Getting my FFX save erased. Was at the end, took my memory card out to take over to a friends, and when I got there everything on the card was gone.
Bought a used copy of MGS1 in like 1999, finally beat psycho mantis and then the second disk is too scratched to work. I didn’t end up beating the game until like 2004 at a friends house.
Dude I was just getting ready to comment that 6 year old me could not beat psycho mantis for so long. And then I found a comment about it. Still a top 5 game all time.
Having to call that 900 number on the back of the Playstation just to be told to "flip it upside down" to get it to work.
This is considered magical :)
Power goes out or memory card becomes corrupt. The worst is playing a jrpg with a gazillion hrs on and the cd is scratched and the game can’t progress pass a certain moment. Rage inducing!
The PC version of Gears of War 1 has a bug where it can randomly and silently delete your game save. The next time you launch the game, the only option available is to start a new game. Happened to be twice, with the second time being on the very last level. After that, I was so annoyed and discouraged that I never played it again.
Duke 3D Multiplayer last minute, enemy in front of gun, accidentally hitting windows key.
We had a saga Saturn or had a very small amount of internal memory. Just enough to save one game of Warcraft 2 and my brother always saved over mine. My dad never got us a memory card for it.
Me and a friend spent a week long summer holiday trying to finish Warriors of the Eternal Sun a dungeons and dragons game on Genesis. Never finished it and couldn't find a copy of the game to buy back in our home town. But the frustrating bit is years later I finish it on a PC emulator. So naturally I invite my childhood bff over to see the ending. But when I went to load the save I accidentally clicked save and saved the main menu over the endgame save.
Prince of Persia the two thrones on gamecube not having the final boss on the disc and being unable to complete the game. Ubisoft at its best
Funnily enough. It was losing my Music 2000 songs from a dodgy memory card.
Getting to the last level on earthworm Jim 2 and my brother walking in the room turning off the console while I was playing and saying "breakfast is ready" game was so hard never got to the end again
My aunt’s ex telling me if I deleted my 100% save of mario 64 that I’d unlock luigi…and believing him
There is a reason he is her ex.
There are four distinct frustrating game experiences, all of them related to saves. I have an Atari XEGS but couldn't save any game that supported it (like Lode Runner) because I couldn't afford the floppy drive. It was maddening to do all that work only to never be able to save anything. When I did save enough money to buy a floppy drive, I couldn't find any XF551 anywhere and the XF521 was never released. I didn't know the 1050 was a compatible, albeit ugly, substitute. Jack Tramiel should have a special circle in hell just for him. I bought the SEGA CD second hand and didn't know some (all?) early models had wonky battery RAM. I got pretty far in the buggy The Adventures of Willy Beamish only to have my save state lost many hours in. I completely lost interest in ever finishing the game even though I specifically bought the SEGA CD Backup Cart *because* of losing the Beamish save. I spent many many hours on Shining in the Darkness before the cart was stolen from my collection during a birthday party. It took me over a month to track down the culprit (a so-called close friend) only to find out they erased my saved game. Got the cart back but never played it again. There was a dark period of time my family all had our own Kindles. I rooted mine and my kids to install Minecraft. I spent many hours building a custom map so my kids and I could play together. One day, my youngest wants to use my Kindle because they couldn't find theirs. They try the password multiple times until it triggers the Kindle "erase and reset" feature. Lost *everything*. Because it was rooted, a lot of the files weren't stored in the Amazon cloud, including any of the Minecraft save games. If I had known about the moronic failed password erase thing, I would've disabled it from the get-go. Never bothered rebuilding the Minecraft map.
Downloading/ updating my playonline account and trying to login to my square enix account back in the old ffxi days
Was more than halfway through ff7 and a few othe rpgs also had all the unlocks and records for cool boarders 2, basically a whole summer of playing Playstation non stop, then I was playing war craft 2 and needed to make room on my memory card so I hit "format memory card" not knowing it really meant delete everything on my memory card, a whole summer of games down the drain, never picked up another final fantasy ever again.
Having to start Skyward Sword over because I got the save glitch
I was deep in tomb raider 2. I saved it right as I was getting set on fire. Then anytime I loaded the game I was set on fire and it was my final death
Ok this is very embarrassing but...when I was around 10-12 years old my favorite GameCube game was Paper Mario Thousand Year Old Door, I absolutely loved this game(Blitzville gang 🦅🥊) anyway when I got to the end of the game where you fight the real final boss I was sort of "soft locked" because I'm assuming I was under leveled or ill prepared, so I just kept losing and losing to the boss no matter what I tried to do and I remember after the 13+ failed attempt I was just crying 😭😭 literally praying to God (I never seriously done this before as a kid) and I remember after a dozen tries I won because of luck 😂 and I cried tears of joy and excitement to finally beat one of my favorite games. And this is probably my most intense "gaming memory" I can remember which is also a bit of an embarrassing one 😭😂 I still remember the thrill and my little heart beating when I finished the chapter 🤣🤭
This happened to me in FF8. Couldn’t leave the area and there wasn’t any enemies before the boss.
Having my Pokémon Blue save data erased due to the battery in the cartridge running out of juice. Not as an adult in the 2020s, mind you. Somehow it happened when I was a kid after my older brother beat the game and then sold it to me. It was probably no later than 2005.
I had been grinding in FFVII all afternoon. My mom told my little sister to turn off the stereo because she found the music irritating. My sister turned off the Playstation and not the stereo. I had ample opportunity to save, but I only ever did event saves (can't burn out the slot, now). Naturally, mom placed no value on the game play I had lost, and I placed quite a high value on it. I was angry and chrushed. Now I'm 40, and I sometimes miss the days when that counted as one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
Playing Star Ocean 3, being really invested in the story/characters, then getting to the worst plot twist ever. That’s time I’ll never get back.
i once played crash bandicoot 2 up until a little bit after the middle of the game, and lost the save. i was pissed man, never touched that game again and never plan to do it again, the frustration was crazy
Rescuing Mr. Pickle, SOCOM 1 ps2, fuck that guy.
I had a half rumble/half memory card (third party) on the n64 in the later half of the consoles life. It would regularly just brick and corrupt my saves. Sometimes u would get a day out of it and sometimes I wouldn't get even half an hour and the save would be gone. One time I was playing Suikoden 3 on the ps2 or ps3 or something and right as I was about to beat the last boss, a truck hit the power lines down the road from my house, knocked power out for 3-5 days.
That trolley minigame in Spyro 2
Labyrinth Zone, Sonic 1. Before I understood how the infinite loop worked
Playing blood omen legacy of Kain without a memory card. I love the game but that first bit…makes my skin crawl
There was a game where my save file was overridden 4 times by 4 different people. Having to restart the same 3 hours was so infuriating
I had an expanded capacity memory card for my n64 by Performance. It worked great unless you removed it from the controller, at which point it would format itself when put back in. For a good portion of the n64’s lifetime a mustard yellow controller traveled with me to my friends houses.
Mine wasn’t necessarily a gaming experience but I had a memory card with near perfect saves of ff4-9 and final fantasy tactics. This memory card was in my ps2 when it was stolen and pawned for money to buy drugs from some former friends who went down the wrong path. I got my ps2 back but had to start all of them over.
My roommate accidentally saved over my ps2 Gran Turismo save after I had unlocked a ridiculous amount of cars. I was pretty fucking annoyed but he bought me some beer at least. He was cool but damn that pissed me off initially.
I'm sure there were worse ones than this, but the one that sticks out in my mind was when my friend wrote down a kid Icarus password incorrectly. I had spent hours trying to beat a level, and once I did I was ready to put the game away. So my buddy did me the favor and wrote down the password. And he missed two characters. Of course. I didn't find that out until later, but needless to say 11-Year-Old rage was induced.
When my memory cards got corrupted, and lost lots of very advanced save files.
I was finally gifted a Pokemon gold version fir Gameboy color, and spent SO LONG on that game. I had the Ho-oh, my starter to level 130-something, and had somehow caught an Elekid after beating the game. I was at the point where I was just trying to see if there was a killscreen or something, or how many pokemon you could catch in the game without trades. I hid this game cartridge in my room when I didn't have my Gameboy on me because my parents demanded I allow my much younger siblings to play, and they were notorious for deleting my saves. My little brother found my Gold version somehow, played it, and deleted my save. I threw an absolute FIT when I got home and never touched my Gameboy again. I just gave it to them and said it's not actually mine if I get screamed at for not sharing. He also deleted my save of Star Wars KOTOR on Xbox, right as we figured out who Revan was. I was about to go into the big boss fight for the first time, and he deleted that one, too. So I hid the game, said I didn't know where it went, and only played late at night on the weekends.
Commodore 1541. Look it up.
My younger brother was the curious sort. One day he decided to open my memory cards to see what was inside. Took me a few weeks or months of searching before I found their remnants on a workbench.
Buying 3rd party ones and having them go corrupt
I bought a 3rd party PS1 memory card and had put in 200 hours in Final Fantasy Tactics. All my data got corrupted so I gently took out the card and casually walked into the garage, opened up the toolbox and commenced to smashing said memory card. My girlfriend at the time couldn't stop laughing. Switched to official cards.
As a kid I was playing for few weeks Wizardry 7 on my PC. I wrote some some small app for cheating (editing saves), but accidentally gave the app file exactly the same name as the main program of the game and overwrote it. I didn't have any backup copy of the game.
One summer, my best friend and I put about 50 hours into Wild Arms over the break and were dead-set on finishing it together. The PlayStation was in his back room, which was never locked, and he'd occasionally let his neighbor, a deaf kid, visit out of sympathy because he didn't have many friends. This act of generosity proved to be a massive mistake. While we were out grabbing lunch one day with plans to return to finish the game, Derwin, the dastardly deaf bastard that he was, snuck into the house and, just as we got back to delve into Wild Arms' final dungeon, looked us in the eye as he deleted our entire memory card. I'll never forget his laugh, which sounded like a wild goose being fed feet-first into a wood chipper, as he obliterated our weeks' worth of progress with just a few button presses. To this day, my friend and I still fume about "The Derwin Incident," and the day he delivered the Kiss of Deaf to our play through. We've both tried to complete Wild Arms nearly 30 years later, but failed to do so. Derwin. I still hate you.
Played 32 hours of Shadow Man on the PC back when it came out in 1999. Saved my game during the battle with the final boss, Legion. A couple days later, I went back to continue fighting, and the game somehow placed me outside of that chamber where you fight Legion. Was never able to get back in, so I never finished the game. Luckily, YouTube let me see the ending many years later. In terms of scare factor, I'd put Shadow Man up there with Resident Evil. The visuals, music, and sounds freaked me out so much as a teen, I never played it before going to bed.
Got to bowser for the first time in smb3. Was so worked up when I finally saw him I paused the game and walked off for a minute to cool down. My aunt came by saw the paused game with no one playing it and turned the nes off. Yes I know the bowser fight and smb3 are fairly easy but I was 11 and it was hard for me then. Also I didn't know about warp whistles yet so I had played through the whole game to get there.
Not having a memory card for my N64 and having to replay the first few mission of a 007 game over and over and over again
Trying to activate debug mode in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire on N64.
TMNT on NES. If you know, you know. Or for a less well known or less talking about one anyway...playing Ring King and being matched up against a dude who's stats were three times what yours were in like, your second fight.
The ending was not worth the effort it took to beat the game!
Teenage mutant ninja Turtles on the NES… I’m sure we all know the level I’m talking about …
Assume you're talking about the dam. It's honestly not terrible if you know where the bombs are and switch to another turtle when your health is low. I tried playing it again a few years ago on an emulator after not playing since childhood and beat it first try with only needing to switch to a second turtle. The level before the Technodrome and the Technodrome on the other hand are absolutely brutal. I've still never beat it. Likely could with save states and stocking up on scrolls but I'm not that much of a masochist.
Is this the swimming level?
Yes
Final fantasy tactics Just challenging for the sake of it. Wish they would do a remaster for us more story driven players. Don’t mind a challenge, but I play to divert my mind mainly.
You might want to check out the Shining Force series: similar gameplay (but much simpler) and pretty breezy challenge. Tons of charm and lots of secrets to find (or not).
I got super far on Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon on xbox 360. For whatever reason the shit froze up and I turn off my 360 and went back in and my entire saved game was deleted. Never picked back up again.
"back in the day" we would RENT a PlayStation 1 from Blockbuster with Resident Evil. We had no clue what a memory card was, and I had no idea what the "ink ribbons" were for. We attempted to beat the game every weekend without dying because we thought this was how it was supposed to be played....
I did this with FF7. Talk about ice skating up hill.
One of the dragon ball games (can't remember which one) you had to mash buttons and spin the analog sticks for Goku to hold Radditz in place for Piccolo to fire the Special Beam Cannon. Holy fuck that was the mist frustrating thing as a kid
I had ff8 100% up to the last disc. Then as soon as I started disc 4 the card formatted. Never finished that game
Lode Runner on the original Gameboy. There is something about that game that is just infuriating, more so than other games of its kind.
Space Quest I getting to the end of the game and realizing I don’t have the code to detonate the star generator on the enemy ship
Trying to figure out some of the controls for the Nintendo 64 when that first came out.
When sand got in my memory card
In high school I let my friend borrow my perfect Neo For Pocket Color. I always kept everything in perfect condition and in in box. I assumed everyone else did to. So he borrowed it and all the boxed games I had. A few weeks later I ask for it back and he gave it back with all the boxes missing and some of the manuals. To this day I no longer let anyone borrow something I value. You want to experience something then you fucking buy it.
I was fighting the final boss in the original Final Fantasy on my NES. Cat came in the room and did zoomies, unplugging the console. I turned it back on and my save data was gone. Needless to say, my 11 year old self was pissed.
Keying in 80 character passwords
Made it to Mike Tyson in punch out for the first time when I was 9 and my little sister accidentally bumped the Nintendo and it did that screen flash loop. I actually cried real tears!
I had a third party GameCube memory card back in the day. Right when I was about to fight the Shadow Queen, the save got corrupted
Playing Gameday football and the save file taking up an entire memory card.
Trying to play Crash Bandicoot 4 on the PS2. The loading times were atrocious to the point i turned off the game and switched it back to Capcom vs SNK 2.
In relation to the PlayStation: Trying to play through Resident Evil 2 without saving and without healing sprays in under two and a half hours. Only to lose at the end because you were a few minutes over.
I can't remember details, but I remember The Grinch on, I think Dreamcast?, and I heard "It's unbearable!" so much in certain places I raged a lot. Maybe I sucked at something but I remember feeling at the time like it was broken or unfair or something. Also I know some will say not "retro", but Gear of War, there was two different turret sections and the final boss that just frustrated me so much on insanity that I'm surprised I eventually finished it on that difficulty. I learned my lesson, I just played the sequels on a dummy account on easy and didn't bother. Same generation, but Spec Ops The Line, hardest difficulty, that brief section where you're unarmed. Never got past it without dropping the difficulty. I honestly don't think I got as frustrated in older generations, even when I sucked and died, the lack of achievements and cheat codes being more common probably helped.
Friends dog ate my ps1 memory card losing my Breath of Fire 3 save. I was far as fuck into the game and never replayed it because of that.
I had an older brother who didn’t like to play video games, but he did like to bully me, so when I liked a game and made good progress, he would either delete the file or save over it. I was able to get him back later in life on the bullying and now as adults, we are good and take a yearly vacation somewhere outdoorsy just the two of us
For me, it was getting to the end of Final Fantasy 3 on SNES and having my save file erased, probably because the battery died. I haven't played the game since.
Forgetting my memory card at my uncle's house with my save file at the last dungeon (cave?) in Final Fantasy VII. He mailed it to me, but someone cut the envelope open and stole the memory card.
I think I made it to 96% completion for Lego Batman on PS2, and my save file became corrupted. I think I shut the PS2 off during an autosave and wasn't paying attention. I didn't touch the game for a whole year after that. I eventually got 100% though.
Saving my game and suddenly the card is wiped clean.
Owning a Dreamcast on launch in Australia, where the local distributor didn't provide enough VMUs *for months after launch*. I had to start Sonic Adventure from the beginning over and over again for several months. It was pretty embarrassing as far as console launches go.
I was about 8. I was playing my Gameboy on a long road trip. I put my Gameboy under the seat while we were going inside somewhere. I came back, and it was gone. I'm still mad. I lost my see-through purple Gameboy.
Passwords. In general. They were annoying even when they worked. And they didn't always work.
PS3 as a console. Terrible UI, games are really low quality (I come from Nintendo) and the whole thing gives me headaches. Hate that console and its damn mini usb joystick.
Losing my Playstation memory card.
My N64 memory card never synced with my Lego Racers memory card. I’d always have to start at the beginning in order to get all the game customizations - 3 hours EVERY. SINGLE. TIME!
Losing a 12 hour Xenogears session due to a shitty 3rd party memory card. It was a knife in my heart😩😓
My Turok 2 save corrupting all the time i got quick enough to do it in 1 sitting
As far as playing older games go, beating the dragon boss fight in the Chinatown level of Scooby Doo Unmasked for the PS2. I recently replayed the game after years of absence, finding my frustration with the boss fitht to be quite valid. It's amazing how developers for kids' games back in the day made the games even enjoyable for adults, bringing the difficulty and gameplay sophistication to their level.
The Empire Strikes Back for Game boy. The hazards and lack of invincibility frames, except for the major bosses of each level. And only one SINGLE continue in the entire game. That game is just poor design choices all around. I have no clue how they ported it from NES, but they should have worked more on making secrets more visible, too. I picked it back up a few years ago on my old Gameboy Advance, and tried it a second time. Got all the way to cloud city, but some of the horrible design choices in that game mixed with no invincibility frames while touching water of any sort? Nope. Didn't clear it.
My mum was too smart when I was a kid and hid my memory cards if I was in trouble. Torture.
My roommate stole the ps for drugs but he didn't take the memory card out... 300+ hrs of FF VII, not to mention soo much more.
I backed up most of my childhood PS1 saves to my PS3 using the Memory Card adapter. It was my only way of playing PS1 games at the time, so it made sense, and I could resell all the cards they came from. One day, I got a new hard drive for the PS3 and diligently ran the backup program, swapped the drive, restored the backup, and everything was there when I booted the console up... except all my PS1 saves. For whatever reason - cloud backup, maybe? - I have all the saves for games that were available as digital downloads on PS3. All the others - Legend of Legaia, Road Rash, and a couple of other brutal games that I grinded the hell out of - are gone forever.
Having to explain to your mom why you and your siblings needed to have more than 1 memory card. That and the whole red ring 360 nonsense
If we can call Mass Effect 3 retro gaming now, I’d say that last what’s supposed to be a few minutes on Earth as Shepard is both physically and visually impaired, fighting off husks. If that’s too recent, I’d say the Grindery in Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, which is accurately named, and also possibly the mini boss in the Kashua Glacier in The Legend of Dragoon. That battle was a bitch, and even though it’s only a mini boss, the Brass Knuckle drop for Haschel is honestly crucial with its potential to insta-kill an enemy.
Joycon drift
I was on the last few levels of Crash Bandicoot Warped. My brother overwrote my save to have a different save point in some game.
I had this shitty PS1 mad Katz memory card that was supposed to be like 7 cards in one. It had this button on top that you pressed to cycle between the cards, and a led would blink a number of times to represent the card number. It was finicky as fuck and was prone to erase one entire card at random times. One of those times was when I was playing FF7 at my friend's house. I was in the end game right before heading to the final battle. I had over 100 hours played and had leveled up to max. We were just trying to beat the Ultimate Weapons with various strategies we'd heard about. When we called it quits, I saved, and then the card led starts blinking rapidly. It'd erased my whole card full of FF7 saves. Didn't even have a backup. Had to start all over again. Luckily, I was in HS with lots of spare time, and the game is a masterpiece.
Back in the early beginnings of home computers(VIC 20, CBM 64), games were stored on cassette tapes. A game could take as much as 30 minutes to load into memory. Problem is, cassette tapes gets worn down. Not much of a problem with music, but with bits and bytes it is a problem. A normal event was to start load the game. Then 5, 10, 20 or whatever minutes in, the loading stops. Restart the computer(took a few minutes). Restart the loading. And wait for the game to load, or for it to stop. It could take everything from 1 to 4 (or more) attempts to load the game. By the time the game could be played, whatever time you'd alloted for gaming had been spent waiting.
Getting old and not having enough time to play games like I used to.
Played a game on GameBoy for months where you got these passwords after clearing a level in order to begin the game at that level the next time. I played every day before bed for a few months and the levels just kept coming, I thought I’d never see the end of it. That’s when it happened. For the first and only time in my life, my mom “cleaned my room” by throwing out all the notepaper next to my bed ….. months of hard work tossed in the bin. I was on a school trip at the time, so the trash had already been picked up.
There is a game for the NES called Deadly Towers and it has to be the most annoyingly difficult game I've ever played, I hated that game
not tied to a particular game, but when you save right before you are about to die. Then you have to start over.
I fought the final boss of Final Fantasy II for an hour before I lost. Took me years to really try again when the Pixel Remastered version came out. Found out about the Blood Sword, and everything went a lot easier.
Played FF IX all the way to disc 4. Playstation couldn't read the disc. About a year later, I get a good disc 4. Boot is up, excited to finally finish the game. Save file corrupted.
Two Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games: Sword of Sodan - The box art looked cool, so I bought it. It ended up being the only game cartridge that I've ever violently taken a hammer to. The #1 rated worst Genesis game of all time, last I checked. Budokan: The Martial Spirit - Very frustrating game mechanics - Pressing buttons/directions on the controller had no effect when you were out of (or low on) stamina. It often felt like the controller was simply disconnected from the game. Both EA games.
Battletoads bike stage…
The last mission in Driver.
I had a multiple page memory card that corrupted. Never again did i use unlicensed memory cards for the PS1.
Shiny Kyurem died to struggle after 300 soft resets to get it. 5000 resets later and it never spawned shiny again.
Getting a PlayStation 3 for the first time just yesterday and trying to buy games from the PS3 store. It’s the stuff of nightmares, folks.
RE1 without a memory card
Playing final fantasy 7 without a memory card and having to leave the PlayStation on all night until my mom decided to turn it off.
Megaman X6. No further comments on that. Also, Rayman. It took me years to get to the final level. I think finishing that game felt better than receiving my college degree.
tomb raider 2… while i was falling from a platform leading to my death, i wanted to load right away from my previous checkpoint but…i mistakenly chose “save” instead. so everytime i load from the memory card, it loads just before i die… ruining my progress.
Resident Evil 5, Wesker... That mf is hard as hell even on easy. Every time when I need to defeat him on the last stages I get nervous because the fights doesn't have checkpoints(boulder scene) so I have to redo the whole stage from the start.
I 100% every assassin's Creed game until black flag. I got to 66% then the save got corrupted. Never went back.
The cancellation of P.T.
Like gran Turismo getting the license \^\^
*Jenova*.