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What's a game that you feel like you missed out on?
Examples:
- A live service game that got shut down
- A multiplayer game that no longer has a live community
- A game whose cultural relevance has faded
- An older game that doesn't stand the test of time
- A game you had spoiled for you
- A game that got updated and went in a different direction
- etc.
Let us know what it is, and why you feel that you missed out on it.
Ooh, this is going to be a really odd one for this thread.
Cartoon Network used to have a game on their site called GToons, which was a competitive deck builder thing. You got points by playing games or logging into the site daily. You used the points to buy packs of cards or buy cards on the market. It wasn't terribly deep, but it was a fun thing for like 10-12 year old me, whatever I was.
It's been remade here: https://gtoons.app/
It eventually was removed from the site, but that's not why I missed out.
Cartoon Network had an interesting username system - instead of letting people type words in and risk ruining the family friendly thing they had going, usernames were based on three dropdowns of words. You picked your three words and your password and you got in.
One day, one of the words for my username was just gone. I didn't have the wherewithal to investigate why at the time, so my account with all of the cards were just gone.
Adult me realizes that I probably could have cheesed some system to get points quickly to regain my rare cards and rebuild my decks, but preteen me didn't grasp that and was sad that my collections were gone and I never got back in to play.
Oh I'm sad for you! How confusing for a young DeaconBlue :(
Their forums are also where I learned about HTML formatting and had the epiphany that I could tell the magic boxes what to do, leading to a career in programming.
Take the wins with the losses I suppose.
Ultima Online.
Ultima 7 was my coming of age game. It's a part of my coding. But for whatever reason I never once tried playing Ultima Online. I was too busy playing MUDs. Although I also don't have any sense for how similar it felt to the single player franchise, so for all I know I didn't miss anything.
Minecraft, big time. I bounced around gaming circles but none of my friends have ever been Minecraft players, so I never really got to make a living breathing world with someone. Nowadays I don't really have the time.
Dwarf Fortress. It's just something I read about and it seems like a game I'd love, but I guess I get intimidated because again, time.
Dwarf Fortress is easier to get into than ever right now and you can even just walk around in first person without having to run a fort
I'm kind of surprised that UO is still running. And apparently even F2P. I don't have any faith in it being any good though; certainly not at all what it would have been in it's hayday.
There are fan-run servers that specialize in classic Ultima Online. The player counts are always low and the emphasis on old-school mechanics usually means everybody is gung-ho for PvP (which was my least favorite part of the game) but if you want a taste of that weird, brutal flavor of hell that was OG UO, it's out there.
I got lucky catching Minecraft literally the first couple months Notch started making his work public. I was a junior in highschool around 2009, and stumbled on the game through reddit. I'm pretty sure I am one of the first few hundred people to buy it when it stopped being free (if you sort the Minecraft subreddit posts by oldest, one of the first is me complaining that we had to pay to play the game.) It was a fun little community then, there really weren't any games like it, and it was super cool to see how creative people were, especially before it had any of the complex systems it has now.
Had I missed it, I probably would have already aged out of being into the game, whenever it got popular around 2011. Still blows my mind how it became one of the biggest games ever
I got into it when I was in Middle School (around the same time). At the time everyone used the minecraftforums, I think people still use it but it's shifted attention.
It also got me into PC gaming, it did start a revolution in video gaming similar to stuff like Doom
When Microsoft bought it, I thought it was a stupid move. "Surely it has already reached the peak of popularity," I told myself. Obviously I was very wrong...
Ultima Online was quite a bit like the single-player games, but due to the other players, was often a brutal, Mad Max-ian type of experience.
OG UO was a peculiar beast. It was all hardcore full-loot PvP outside of city limits, which meant new characters often never left town until they got their magery up high enough to fizzle recall only about half the time. That's much easier said than done, since skill leveling was brutally slow and time-consuming, especially on the popular shards. Magery was an especial pain in the ass, because you needed thousands of expensive and often difficult to acquire reagents in order to grind, and there was no easy way of calculating how many you'd need to gain skills.
Housing was abysmally scarce, as every single inch of buildable terrain was spoken for. That meant that you would have to spend two or three times the amount to buy an already placed hovel from a player than you would pay for the deed to a keep from an NPC vendor. Since there was no in-game method for secure transactions, you'd have to contract third-party guilds that specialized in housing escrow services or you'd be virtually guaranteed to have weeks or months worth of work in gold scammed right out from under you.
I was once walking around just north of Britain, trying not to get my shit pushed in by random passing ettins, when up strolls this handsomely equipped mage. He'd worked for weeks by his lonesome for the deed to a castle (a couple million gold), then spent close to a month touring the whole length and breadth of Britannia or Sosaria or whatever looking for a spot to place it. He'd minded all the decay states of larger estates, hoping that someone somewhere would forget to log in once a week to refresh their housing. No luck.
He was at his wits' end, and decided right then and there that he'd had enough. He simply handed the deed to his castle over to me, said. "I quit," and logged off, presumably forever. I immediately sold off the deed to an NPC and promptly lost almost half of the proceeds to a housing scam that the GMs either couldn't or wouldn't rectify. I spent the other half buying two of the smallest houses in the game that were placed right next to each other right outside one of the dungeons (can't remember which one, but it was on an island way up in the northeast). Good mining around there, and at least some of the dungeon was survivable for someone who'd only put a mere couple hundred hours into his combat character.
You missed something by not playing UO at its height alright, but I'm not sure it's worth lamenting.
There are still fan-run servers out there that use the original mechanics, if you're still itching for punishment. Pretty much every gripe I've had in this screed are non-issues on smaller shards like them, so you might get something closer to the intended, non-hellish experience. I have fond memories of playing on one such shard about a decade back–certainly more fond than the memories I have of the OG.
Wow, that was interesting to read. It sounds like I wouldn't have enjoyed it but would've thought I did and slogged through it. Maybe it's best that I missed it.
There were frustrations, but there wasn't anything like it at the time (still isn't, really). It wasn't the first MMO, but it was the first to get really massive. The whole idea of banding together into guilds and doing dungeon raids was fresh and exciting, and it actually did that well.
It did a lot of things really well, actually. It's just a bit difficult recounting them all because the things it did great have become staples of the genre, so listing them all out just reads like a description of MMORPGs generally.
One aspect that deserves special praise I think is the player economy. It was pretty well balanced between NPC and player vendors, considering it was the first attempt at such a thing. You could buy generic NPC weapons, but they did a fair bit less damage than ones crafted by a grandmaster player character, so having a GM blacksmith was a real boon financially. There wasn't epic loot really (you could find enchanted weapons, but those were scarce and balanced between player-made weapons pretty well), so there was a real incentive to have at least one GM crafter among your toons.
Reagents were kind of a pain in the ass in that it took lots of money and time to find them, unless you were strong enough to dungeon delve. You could find large piles of certain reagents in monster loot drops, which is where a lot of the PC vendors got their stock. So while you could bounce around between all the town mage shops looking for them, you were usually better off buying stacks off the many many player-owned shops.
Whole districts sprang up outside the towns that were known as shopping malls, often run by one or more guilds who would set hawkers out by the banks in town offering free recall runes to their malls. Of course, there was always the possibility it was a trap and a gang of PK gankers were waiting for you on the other side, but you have recall bound to a hotkey and you won't fizzle three times in a row, right?
I would love to find a fan server dedicated to a specific era with some balancing fixes again, but everyone seems to have a different aspect of the game they enjoy, and one that caters to my specific nostalgia isn't likely to just fall into my lap soon.
If you end up having even a couple of hours per week free, feel free to join us on the tildes minecraft server! Though things have been relatively quiet in the last couple of weeks due to easter and other real life reasons, we have a pretty active community & everyone is free to play any way they want :)
Was also going to give a plug to the Tildes Minecraft server, everyone there has been super welcoming and the designs everyone have come up with have been quite inspiring. Even if you don't have a lot of time to build, it's cool to hop in and explore.
I would love to. I lurk the threads often. I just moved to a new home and need to set up my gaming PC for couch gaming. I think you'll see me around in the next month or two!
I can't think of Ultima Online without remembering the one and only LAN party I went to. It was dozens of people in a warehouse all playing Quake 3 while one dude played UO.
This may not fit the spirit of the topic but for me, it's Chess. Just good ol' fashioned chess.
Though I play it somewhat regularly (1-2 games a day, sometimes less, sometimes more, sometimes none for a year straight :P), I feel like if I had played it when I was 5-10 years old, I'd be a lot better at it... but I'm just awful. I only started playing in my early 30's, where I assume most of my brain plasticity has fallen too much to be any good at retaining simple patterns.
I'm sure if I tried really hard (like Tyler1 did), I could reach in the 1200 range or so, but as of now I am sitting at a beautiful 570 on chess.com, and have been around there for a looong time. I live in a perpetual onosecond, constantly blundering things that I know are coming but I somehow just short-circuit and forget how to think, make the worst possible move, and get steamrolled. I get tricked by the same simple moves all the time but I never seem to learn.
I just guess if I'd had an interest in it in childhood, I'd be way better at it today, even just playing casually.
Ragnarok Online, most of my friends played it back in the day, but I wasn't very into games back then, looking back it still looks cool, but nobody that I know plays it anymore.
!! I played a ton! Are there still any private servers? There's an unplayable mobile version but it's, unplayable
Edit: when our private server was about to close down soon, I in-game married one of the GMs so he could teleport me to all the maps/dungeons/limited time places to take screen caps and walk around. In the end I just spent a lot of time in the Cherry Blossom town sitting with my pet Poring.
Looks like there still are, no idea if those numbers are accurate tho
Very interesting indeed....I don't have the time but even then I'm quite tempted to try.
https://play.origin-ro.net/?module=core&action=info looks like they're on my side of the world and just launched . Blurb on Reddit list for April
When I was playing there weren't transcend classes yet and could read any of the dialog boxes, so this might be old + new for me.
Alright, I've got a weird one: Mario.
Yes, the famous red plumber. I know they still make Mario games, but I never got into it as a kid. Despite exclusively having Nintendo consoles as a kid and teen, my first Mario game was Super Mario Odyssey.
Why?
Well you see, my first console was GameBoy Advance, for Christmas 2001. And my parents, instead of getting me Pokémon which had no GBA releases yet, got me Frogger. Aaaaand... I never got past level one. Based on reviews I've found, it's considered fairly difficult for kids, and I was like, 6 with zero gaming experience. I never stood a chance.
Cut to sometime the next year, and we're at GameStop when I see—gasp!—a Lilo and Stitch game! I loved Lilo and Stitch!! So of course I get it, and plug it in aaaand... I'm stuck at level one. Again. Kept getting killed by this claw-thing. Years later as an adult I tried again, finally got past the claw thing... And found out there was more to the level and, yeah. I still have not beaten the first level. This game also was noted by reviews to probably be hard for younger players.
Basically, I just had bad luck and happened to get two very hard games as a little girl. Those two games combined left me convinced I sucked at "level games". So, I almost never played any games with levels. I made an exception for Sonic Adventure 2 and DX because of Chao, and even then it took me years to play later levels because I just assumed I'd suck. (I also struggled at Sonic GBA, which I got for the mini Chao Garden, which just reinforced that belief.)
And of course, "level games" include Mario. So I never played them until college. I've never felt the strong pop culture connection so many countless others do, the big rush of nostalgia and fondness for his character. Playing Mario Odyssey and Superstars are just so-so for me. Makes me feel a little sad to lack that special connection most of my friends have.
I have to write a separate comment for this one because, dang, I can’t believe it! Did I just stumble across another Chao fan?
So, another funny story: When my mother bought my Gamecube, she was like $10 or $20 short of being able to buy the game that I really wanted (which I later got anyway), Super Smash Bros. Melee. She got me Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.
I was skeptical. I had never played a Sonic game before.
But this time, I was the one who was in for a surprise.
I entered the Chao Garden for the first time and immediately fell in love.
I played the ever-loving heck out of the Chao Garden. So many hundreds of hours invested into raising, breeding, playing, and racing with those adorable little creatures.
This was what prompted me to ask my parents to buy me the only GBA game that I ever owned (and the console along with it): Sonic Advance. lol Admittedly, I wasn’t good at the mini games in the Chao Garden either, and I was really bad at the main game, so I never succeeded in getting all the emeralds (which I think were required for some special eggs to show up in the garden). But still, I got a few special eggs that way and was somewhat satisfied.
Funny enough, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle became one of the few games on the Gamecube that I “completed”. I mean, I never had a full-S rank chao, or all the chao variations, but I got every emblem and unlockable. I don’t know how I had the patience to grind through that game, to be honest with you, especially the racing missions with Tails and Rouge. Some of the levels were so difficult and frustrating, yet I somehow got all 180 of them and unlocked the Green Hill Zone.
Another Chao fan here, I think my sister and I spent more time with the Chao’s than the rest of the damn game, lol
My husband "suffered" through the actual levels of the game just to be able to play with his Chao pals for hours. 😂
Haha! Same!
Yes, always love meeting Chao fans!! My cousins had SA2:B, which is how I learned Chao existed. If they didn't own the game, I never would have gotten it. I remember this friend came over a lot one summer and we spent hours just playing with the Chao.
I recently replayed it on my Steam Deck after seeing GameGrumps play it. Even after 10+ years, just watching someone play the earliest levels had my muscle memory basically waking up and getting annoyed they didn't go for the most efficient routes. Sadly, maybe because it's a new file with very few Chao, but spending time in the Chao Gardens waiting for them to age up and unlock the Hero and Dark gardens didn't feel as immersive as when I was a kid.
Still, I wish they'd bring back the gardens. The rest of the game could be the jankiest Sonic game ever, but I'd buy it ASAP just to get it. I really don't get why they haven't brought it back yet.
You have my respect for completing all the Tails and Rouge racing missions. I could do the third mission easily enough (no hitting cars), but the walls one was impossible for me. Route 101 was actually one of the levels I'd play the most since it had no enemies, so it was a good way to farm rings for the Chao Garden.
Dang. I didn’t know they ever did the game. I found the playlist. I’m definitely going to watch it.
I also wonder why. I understand them not making a standalone Chao game, because the community is too niche and “small” to justify the investment, but as a side game for any of the many Sonic games that were released after Adventure 2? Why not? I guess they just don’t care to pay developers for the time to program that.
Oh. That’s smart. I never thought of that. I “cheated” a little bit. I started playing the game around the time that I began using the Internet, so circa 2003 or 2004. I learned somewhere online about this bug where, if you sold an item in the Black Market, and then turned your GCN off, the item would be preserved in the Garden, but the rings would still be added to your total. I would mostly grind City Scape for rings at first (I had developed muscle memory for a route that earned me 400 on each run), then buy one of those really expensive accessories (I think one of them could be sold for 2,000 or 5,000 rings), and then just trigger the bug over and over again until I had tens of thousands of rings.
I also learned rather early about the glitch with giving them animals from a certain distance that allowed me to quickly raise them to full stats.
Playing the Garden as intended would still have been fun, but a lot slower otherwise. These bugs and glitches significantly sped it up. There was no way to speed up their evolution though, as far as I know.
As much as I love Chao Gardens, I'm not sure it could stand as its own game anyway without adding a massive amount of new features. The ones that exist are pretty barebones in terms of things to do. But yeah, they seem fairly simple to add as a side-option in the games, and they seriously add to playtime since the main game provides resources that can be used there. At the bare minimum, I'm surprised they haven't tried making a mobile game spin-off.
I never heard of that glitch! I also grinded City Escape for rings... By playing the Lost Chao mission and running through it two or three times before rescuing it. I'd get 999 rings in about 10 minutes. Given I recall having ~60k rings at some point, I do not exaggerate when I say I played City Escape hundreds of times. I think the memory card should still have my save data (somehow SA2 was the one game that didn't lose the memory when my memory card got corrupted), so I'll have to see if I can get my GameCube or Wii hooked up after the move and check.
Also, I think I remember hearing about the animal glitch, but I never exploited it for stats since I mainly used animals for aesthetics. I'd usually grind Tails and Eggman's levels at the military base for chaos drives to raise stats instead, and usually just enough so they could walk and/or learn to swim. I didn't particularly care about stats and the races or wrestling as a kid, which in retrospect makes the amount of time I spent in there even more wild.
Related note: did you use that one freewebs site about Chao Gardens too? I just vaguely remember it now, but it had guides to unlocking all the Chaos Chao and had pictures of rare Chao like hacked Amy and Tails Chao.
Same. I have a vague memory that at one point, I had played the first mission more than 400 times. I love that they added that little counter to the missions.
Do you mean Chao Island? They’re still around and I still occasionally visit. They have a ton of resources, more than even back then, including a Wiki! The community is small, but still active, and with all the resources (and mods for the Steam version), there has never been a better time to play this game.
Your experience actually reminded me of a funny story.
So, this is around the time when Nintendo released Pokémon Stadium on the Nintendo 64, with the famous Transfer Pak, which allowed you to connect your Gameboy games to transfer your Pokémon or even play the games on the big screen.
My father, who understands nothing about video games, somehow put it in his head that if you bought a Gameboy game, then you could use the Transfer Pak to play it on the TV, and that it would somehow be visually enhanced even. He never consulted me on this and only told me later, after he had bought the 1999 Antz game for the Gameboy, which was based on the movie (that I think he watched in theaters and really enjoyed). I still remember when he came up to me one day (I was maybe 11 or 12), told me that he bought a game for me (voluntarily, which never happened before, since I always asked first), and handed me Antz. I wasn’t sad or anything, but I was like, “Uhhh... O... K...” He was pretty disappointed at my reaction, and even more so when I told him that no, the Transfer Pak doesn’t magically allow you to play Gameboy games on the TV. It’s only for Pokémon.
But two or three years before that, I had a similar experience with my equally “gaming ignorant” mother. So, my sister and I enjoyed watching the show Rugrats back then. She found out that there was a Nintendo 64 game called Rugrats: Scavenger Hunt, based on the IP. I remember the day we went out to buy it, and I remember warning her that the game was not good (a warning that I, admittedly, I had no evidence for, and was 100% based on intuition). She countered with: “You always get the games that you want. Your sister can have what she likes for a change.” I mean. lol Of course! If I’m getting the games that I like, then it’s only fair for my younger sister to get one that she likes. But I just knew that she wouldn’t like this one. And guess what? lol All three of us tried it out and it was utter garbage. Like. Wow. I mean. I’m sure that the developers made sacrifices to design and program the game. It was hard labor and all. But it’s still just such a sloppy mess. It’s basically Mario Party, but it has only three boards, no mini games, is extremely buggy, and doesn’t even make proper use of the IP, since all boards are imaginary places. Nothing from the actual show, other than some of the characters made it into the game. It was a total cash grab that completely flopped. But it gets better: My mother never acknowledged that I was right, but she took the game and went back to the store to return it. I was there. The store didn’t want to take the game back for whatever reason. My mother actually argued with them that the game was bad, and the clerk just said: “Well, that isn’t our fault now, is it?” LOLOLOL
I’m actually a pretty dumb and unintelligent person, but somehow I instinctively knew, even from that age (8 or 9), and without anyone teaching me, that video games based on movies or shows tend to not be good (or at least, not good for me). I have never ever bought a video game based on a show or a movie. And of course, I know that there are many good ones out there today, but I’m just not interested in experiencing a movie as a game. It’s a me thing. I only feel comfortable buying games where I know that the developers were concerned with the gameplay first, and the “setting” second, because then I’m more likely to enjoy playing the game. Gameplay is king for me.
It’s funny that you brought up the difficulty of the two games that you got on the GBA. (Side note: I’m a huge Lilo & Stitch fan). I did try out the Antz game on the Gameboy. It was a side-scrolling platformer, so a “level game”, like you called them. I don’t know how many levels it had, but I don’t think I ever got past 10 (if there even were 10). At least, it had some cheat codes that you could write down so you didn’t have to always start from the beginning. The game was so frustrating though. I never fully beat it. It was just way too difficult, especially for a kid. And it’s so weird, because these games were based on IPs for kids.
There was an adapter to play gameboy games on the tv - some even with enhancements - if you had a SNES!
Super Game Boy.
There's an irony that not only did the real product exist, there could have been some enhancements.... if only OP's dad was into A Bug's Life instead!
I had one of those! Never really made good use out of it though, I was pretty much always playing Final Fantasy 3 (aka FF6) once it came out on the SNES and never looked back.
It feels weird that this isn’t a commonly known thing anymore.
I did get into mario, but never got into the whole gameboy thing for similar reasons. Can't remember the exact games I got with it, but I do vividly remember not understanding the games and getting stuck a lot.
Thinking back it is odd I didn't get other games. But that's probably my kids brain not making the connection that it is the games and the games themselves being fairly expensive.
If it makes you feel any better, I played all the original Mario games on NES and really liked World when my parents would let us rent a SNES, but these days? Could not give a crap about Mario and Nintendo franchises in general, never owned a Switch, don't plan on getting a Switch 2 either.
Feels like a weird answer in a way, but Dungeons & Dragons. I do play it, and have an ongoing (very slow) campaign with a small group, but I feel like I missed out on it as a HS / college student given the spirit of the other answers in this thread. A bunch of my buddies played it all through high school and loved it, and invited me to join them. Problem was, they never fully explained what it was to me. They also played a lot of MtG and 40K, so I assumed it was something really similar: something with really rigid rules and/or would require a ton of study and investment of time and money (they all painted their own 40K figurines, etc.). I had no idea that a lot of D&D is basically the exact opposite of that experience, so I never took them up on the offer to play it at a time in my life where I could have very easy fallen into the systems and scheduled sessions with folks whenever I wanted. I’m in my mid-30s now and didn’t even attempt to learn about the game until I was 25, and realized very quickly that I had been missing out.
Of course, I know I can still play it, but my availability to do so is radically reduced compared to HS and college, and it almost exclusively has to be remote. So the real pain here is that missed the opportunity to experience the quintessential weekly sessions with all my best buds gathered around a table in a basement. And maybe the real pain beyond that is that I miss a lot of my friends, but we’ll leave that examination for future threads. :’)
Do they know this is how you feel? Is there a possibility of planning a week-long getaway and doing a marathon one shot together? As an older adult I cherish my weeklong getaways with my buds. I swear it's a youth potion, when we can all act like teenagers again but with grown up cooking skills and wisdom and planning skills.
Oh, for sure. At this point the issues are largely self-inflicted, like the seven-month-old I have at home! But hopefully as baby gets older, we can find time to deliberately reconnect.
Good reminder to always say yes to new experiences, even if it's something you think you might not like!
Yeah, I enjoyed D&D, even though I only played as an adult. But the longevity of the experience demands serious time commitment. For anyone who works, and especially anyone with a family, dedicating 5+ hours to a session is rough, especially in-person.
Online, you lose a lot of the charm of it. The engagement of actually sitting next to people and becoming invested in the world. But even if you accept that compromise with online, you're still going to have to commit that chunk of time, just without the commute duration.
I explored the concept of "play by mail" (but actually online) a while ago, but it seems like it would be hard to find a group where everyone is fine with the slow pace. And it still would require a time commitment, just spread out a lot more. And this is the polar opposite end of the in-person interaction element as well.
Another interesting thing I tried was an AI D&D bot. It was actually very cool and fun to interact with, but I didn't want to pay for it as I worry the novelty would wear off quickly. And again, no interaction with other people.
Baulder's Gate 3 is cool, but playing the game more than a few times through would feel way more repetitive than actual D&D.
I guess there's no real point to this rant, other than saying that I feel like I've exhausted most D&D options.
Same here. But none of my IRL friends want to play it and I’m too awkward to play this kind of game with strangers.
Star Wars Galaxies
Missed it by a couple of years, sadly. If there was ever an MMO I was going to enjoy, it was Galaxies. Living life and going on adventures in Star Wars? All the stories I've heard from folks who played it in its heyday make me regret not having an internet computer at the time.
This is mine too. I loved reading about the game - it felt like such an interesting and alive world. But by the time I could convince my parents to spring for a subscription, the CU and NGE had happened. I did play it, and the atmosphere/worlds were pretty cool, but it felt like the soul of the game was dead.
MMOs in general, but in particular World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XI. World of Warcraft was only interesting to me in that it was very popular, but Final Fantasy XI was something I felt that I really wanted to play but couldn't. A game that cost a subscription was an unreasonable amount of money for me at the time, especially because I never bought new games at that time period; most of the games I bought full copies of forever were the same as they were asking for for a single month. I've had many people who were into WoW in particular, but the zeitgeist has passed and I couldn't really get into playing either of them precisely because I couldn't ever play with people I gave a damn about. FFXI in particular turns into a brick wall if you're not in a party, and at the time I played it it was already full of people at max levels or going through again with their friends; it was a very lonely place to be. I find it especially irritating because I know it's got a lot of work with Masato Kato that I would have loved to experience! I sincerely wish that they would make a single-player version of the game! And then of course there are all of these really interesting looking worlds that are completely lost to the sands of time as they got shut down.....
But other than those, honestly, no. I've long decoupled myself from the hype train, so seeing people get excited about something tends to have the opposite effect on me. I guess I do kind of regret not playing Gotham City Imposters and Guardians of Middle Earth because they were made by my darlings at Monolith Productions (RIP, and a big FU to WB). But online-only games have always been a turn-off, really.
Wow Gotham City Impostors is a blast from the past! That was a fun game, I loved how unique it was compared to most multiplayer pvp games, shame games can just fully die.
Sometimes I wish VRChat was around when I was younger; I think I would've come out of my social shell a little sooner and been more aware of myself.
Out of curiosity, do you then mean the fact that you are actually talking to people instead of typing?
I do remember some fairly popular text based chat platforms going back to the early 2000s where you basically controlled a 2d avatar of yourself. But, I also realize that is different from the more immersive environment VRChat offers.
I'm not OP, but I used to chat a fair amount in text lobbies (infact I even used to use voice chat in a lot of games that supported it, which I wouldn't do so much now) but it's really nothing compared to VRChat.
I only played a very small amount of VR chat (because I found the social pressure way too much lol) and it was honestly a unique experience in a lot of ways.
It's kinda a funny story actually, because I played it for the first time with a freind who'd just got his VR headset and wanted to try it too. We both went in, choose avatars and joined a random room. It was super awkward and I didn't really love it to be honest, but I completely understand the appeal. My friend though kept playing, he racked up some insane hours, like thousands in the span of a year. He slept in his headset he told me. And he eventually met his wife in a VR chat server. Completely wild.
Definitely Final Fantasy 14 for me. I did play it for like a hundred hours, but it was after endwalker came out and I had to catch up. I made it through ARR and Heavensward and then halfway through Stormblood, but I had already played 100 hours and was still 1.5 expansions behind even being on the same expansion as friends (and then would have to play through endwalker, too, to raid with my friends) and I just burned out. I think if I had picked up the game 8 years ago and could play the expansions as they come that I’d probably still be playing it. It’s just very daunting to get into with that much content.
Besides that, as a long time MMO player, I wish I was maybe 5 years older so that I could have been old enough to play some very early MMO’s like Ultimate Online, but I was only 5 at the time. Many 90’s PC games in general intrigue me, but I was just barely too young to be into them (I was a PlayStation and GameCube girlie instead).
Yeah, Final Fantasy XIV is not a great game to pick up if your only goal is to reach endgame quickly. It is, at the end of the day, still a Final Fantasy game, and that means that the greatest focus is always on the story.
For what it's worth though, as someone who has been in endgame for several years now, it's really nothing to write home about. The raids are very fun, but beyond that there's really nothing to do in most patch cycles. I'd love to be able to go back and experience the story again for the first time.
I did enjoy the story while playing through it, it was just way too much when I ultimately wanted to just play with my friends who were all doing Endwalker raids and I just couldn’t catch up. I didn’t want to entirely skip the story either since I liked it (Heavensward is so, so good), but it was just too much in the end.
You've described my main complaint about FFXIV. I played before any expansions had come out, liked it a lot, but ended up putting it down for awhile. By the time I came back, I was behind and that was that.
I joined a Guild and tried to get myself to the point that I could do stuff with them, but it was just such a tedious grind through dull, overwrought story, I finally made it to the second expansion before I put the game down forever. It's a crap way to design an MMO and I have many other complaints about it besides that, but I'll leave it there since it was the crux of your post.
Also, 90s PC games are still worth playing...
My problem with FFXIV is that back several expansions ago I had decided to try the game out (actually, I had played the original release of the game before they wiped it out and tried again, then tried the new current release when it came out but didn't stick around) and bought the fancy editions of the game and whatever expansions had been released thus far. But I didn't stick with the game, so now I have an account that hasn't even finished the Realm Reborn questline but has several hundred dollars invested.
I could go start a new account and play the old content for free, but that would mean abandoning the content I've already paid for. Or I could bite the bullet and subscribe and try to plough through the story as quickly as I can with my current account. Or I can just give up and decide that the FF MMOs are just the games in the series that I'll never really have touched.
You can have multiple characters per account and most of the items you get with the deluxe editions are account wide so every character gets a copy. So you could start a new character under your current account if you wanted to begin from scratch, or switch over to your prior character when you catch up if you have any character specific items you really want to keep.
I know, and I've started again pretty much every time I've tried picking up the game. The problem is that there's the free trial that goes up to level 70, including A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Stormblood (none of which I've finished, I've only gotten to about level 30, I think, and am still not very far into ARR). I could theoretically play all of those for free if I started a new account, or I can pay the subscription fee to play them on my current one.
It comes down to either abandoning the expansions & VIP content I've already paid for in exchange for not having to subscribe to the first 3 parts of the game, or having to pay a monthly subscription for something I could be experiencing for free because the free trial ends as soon as you spend any money (which I did when the game was originally released because the free trial didn't exist back then, so too bad for me).
Ultimately though, it's kind of a moot point because I don't really have time to throw into such a large and long game at this point. I just wish I had gotten into it back when I had a better chance to do so.
I missed out on UO also and I was perfectly positioned to enjoy it. I was in the beta of it and had already been very active online playing warcraft 2 on a platform called kali, so was ready to go with a group of people. I ended up just not really understanding how to play it or get started and gave up in frustration. If I had just stuck it out I think I would have had an amazing set of memories playing on one of the first virtual online worlds.
There is something to be said about the design of the games back then, but I don't think they can exist and be fun given the state of gaming now. The way that information and strategies are analyzed and perfect, the abundance of perfect information about games, the speed of sharing, and honestly the exitance of numerous methods of interacting with people over the internet, all contribute to the experience being, IMHO, not worth the time.
But back then, that was your only option, myth and rumor invited imagination, relatively simple strategies became very powerful due to just not having the same amount of general gaming talent out there and less overall people. That meant there was a very real possibility you yourself could discover or come up with something unique.
There is also just not knowing better how to spend time with length of grind or overall understanding of game design. The goal then was to simulate a fantasy world, not to create a perfect tiered loot/rewards system. I also recognize in myself that without goals I would be bored with a sandbox style game now, so not to knock on modern designs, just that not knowing of them was easier to take what was.
But honestly, I think now is still the best time to engage with people online in a way that is fun and meaningful to yourself, it's really the plethora of choice that makes it hard to settle on any one way to spend your free time.
I do remember a lot of boredom during the 90s waiting for the right game to come out just as I do now sometimes, and for most 90s games you can really find a much better variation on it now that plays so much better and smooths out bad designs, and if you can't find that, some mod group has faithfully been patching up the original 100%. I still see groups playing warcraft 2, I just saw the patched myth I and II just released and there is also still online gameplay of that as well.
So it may feel like something was lost but honestly I think it's not so bad, it's still out there or just overall done better! And yeah I guess we experience tech gains like EGA -> VGA -> 3D for the first time again, but I think there are still equivalences in the modern age for this like 3d for the first time.
I hope that may take out some of the feeling of loss for playing consoles instead, because honestly those ALSO pushed boundaries, and someone just playing PC games would have missed some of the amazing GC and PS 1 + 2 games, like FF7 blew us all out of the water despite having modern PC games at the time.
Guardians of Atlas was a 3v3 RTS/MOBA hybrid that Sean "Day[9]" Plott was previously working on. It only released in an open alpha, at the same time I had broken my elbow and couldn't play it. Three weeks later, Artillery shut down the servers and ceased operation. The game likely went under after Day[9] left the team.
Wildstar had serious potential as a MMORPG but it was marred by awful optimization (Carbine never really fixed it until the F2P patch, after which the game was already doomed), atrocious PvP balance, a convoluted raid attunement path which made the lengthy chore list from Burning Crusade look straightforward.
No really, this is what you had to do in order to gain access to Genetic Archives, the first 20-man raid in the game.
I wish NCSoft hadn't pulled their funding from this game and effectively relegated Carbine to a skeleton crew. Wildstar desperately needed new content to keep players coming.
World of Warcraft. Long story short, I was cyberbullied off of a realm (Turalyon EU, Horde side) sixteen years ago, with everything occurring over the course of Burning Crusade and Wrath. It all started over an angry rant I posted in Trade chat about rogues being OP in PvP, which (among other things) drove the entire server to collectively blacklist me for being a "whiny bitch." There were a lot of players who took the abuse way too far, i.e. openly calling me homophobic slurs in public chat channels, spreading false rumours I ninja looted, telling me to to do the server a favour and kill myself, inviting me to dungeon groups, using me for summon and then kicking me and hiding behind /ignore too.
Unfortunately due to a "friend" damn near bricking my PC and having to play on Linux for a while, any screenshot evidence I had of the harassment is lost to time. Not that Blizzard Customer Support would have done anything about it (the most I did was get someone a 24 hour suspension.) There was also no place where I could publicly call out the behaviour (a lot of guilds had IP banned me from their sites preventing me from even applying, and both the WoW forums and /r/wow subreddits had "no naming and shaming" rules on their spaces which effectively protects toxic shitheads from being publicly called out for their shitty behavior.) And I'm not gonna namedrop the players nor guilds involved on here either, as it feels petty to hold a sixteen year grudge.
Also, Turalyon is a dead server now. Everybody abandoned ship when Cataclysm launched. Many moved to Stormscale EU (for PvP) or Tarren Mill EU (for PvM.) I rerolled on Emerald Dream and within weeks of freshly levelling an 80 character was raiding ICC Heroic. So the problem was definitely Turalyon's community.
My experience is a very large reason why I don't have the drive to commit towards endgame progression raiding anymore, and why the most I have ever delved into endgame for the past decade has been pugging Mythic+. I can't bring myself to trust people.
Oh, you mean spoiled in terms of the plot....
Undertale. My first experience of that game was watching Jacksepticeye play through it, which I wouldn't recommend because it's one of those games really driven by the story and lacks replayability for that very reason. Once you've done a Neutral, Pacifist and Genocide run, there's no real reason to come back to this game.
StarCraft II. Wings of Liberty was peak RTS, at least before the Queen patch which greatly increased their range and led to tonnes of unskilled "patchzergs" outright winning tournaments with 12 minute BL/Infestor rushes, which were virtually unbeatable. Heart of the Swarm is when the game started going downhill, because a lot of bullshit cheese units made the game far too punishing and frustrating. I mean imagine having your whole mineral line wiped out by a single Oracle proxied out of a Stargate because you didn't build two turrets in your base by the 4:45 mark. And don't get me started on the absolute bullshit added in the expansions, like Medivac boosters, Siegeivacs, Warp Prisms being able to pick up from long range, the original iteration of the Swarm Host, 10 range Lurkers, Liberators, Adepts, Dark Templar with blink, Disruptors, Tempests, etc.
StarCraft 2 suffered from premature and excessive tweaking.
What a terrible experience! 😧 I've only seen such things when one of those asshole groups that have their own forum all join a game at the same time and throw their weight around. They'll join the same server, but not necessarily the same guild. If you catch their eye they post about you on their forum and the next thing you know it's a game to harass you in just about every way imaginable, some even dox people to harass them IRL. It's rather messed up and worse was that this was ignored back then, posting about online bullying didn't create anywhere near the outrage it would today. Only thing you could really do is a name & server change and make sure you trust everyone on your friends list. Unless they had a GM in their group it'd be impossible to follow you.
Btw, to get around an IP ban (at least in the US) just power cycle your modem (turn it off, unplug everything for a bit, plug it all back in and turn it back on). Unless you specifically pay extra for a static IP you will receive a new IP address as most people have "dynamic" addresses meaning when your modem connects it's handing a random unused IP within the range for your area. Just don't try to login to your old username or use the same email as it might update the IP ban.
Wasn't an undead rogue the thing to have for pvp at the time? They were so annoying popping out of nowhere and locking you up just long enough to kill you, even if you break free they'd vanish and do it again. 🤬 One of the many reasons I avoided the PVP servers, sticking to RP PVP where it wasn't as full of toxic, murder happy people.
Elden Ring for me.
I never played any of the FromSoftware games before it came out either. Got Elden Ring when it came out and found it incredibly hard and I didn’t really know what to do so I started watching YouTube videos of people playing.
For me, it’s one of those games where exploring and experimenting is the exciting part and the story is secondary. The videos I watched ruined that because they 100% the game.
I chose to watch them so I can only blame myself! But I certainly learned a lesson.
Go for Dark Souls! Still the same energy.
The what is secondary??
Story. You know. The thing you need to watch 14 hours of VaatiVidya for on YouTube.
I joke but that's totally what I do. I even did it today! Just watched his latest hour long musing on Messmer.
i know, i know. i just really like lookin’ at stuff and finding treasure.
Go get a PS2 emulator and a copy of Kings Field 4. It is the direct predecessor of Soulsborne games and practically nobody has ever talked about it in English speaking spheres. In some ways I think it’s better because it is so much more simple. I was not able to get into those other games until I started playing it, and having an emulator means that you can cheese it with save states if you’re really bad (which is recommended because the save points are brutally far away from each other.
Two come to mind for me, not because I missed the peak player time, but because I wasn't an early adopter:
Eve - I would have loved to have gotten into Eve early. I have always dreamed of MMORPGs in which quests/contracts/objectives were player-driven rather than NPC-driven. I like to feel like humans are the plot creators rather than just plot executors. But it got so min-maxed so fast. When I tried to get into it, it felt like I was showing up at a decades‑old poker table where everyone already knows every trick in the book and owns half the casino. Wealth begat wealth for the heavy hitters, borders were stagnant, and the game had moved from sandbox to spreadsheets. I deeply regret not getting into Eve the moment I could.
Similarly, Civcraft. It was a long‑running, player‑run Minecraft server built around the idea of emergent civilizations, politics, and economy. It was tightly coupled to the subreddit /r/Civcraft, which acted as the game’s forum, legislature, newspaper, and diplomatic back‑channel all at once.
Players formed cities, built factories, conducted trade, had governments. It had just about the best set of server mods I could imagine, aiming for the same goal as that which I mentioned above: player-driven everything. There were no bans, no moderators, all mods. The design philosophy could be summarized as:
PrisonPearl and Citadel were amazing together:
PrisonPearl: If you had a Pearl in your inventory when you killed someone, they were transported to "prison," which was a repurposed the End they couldn't get out of. You could only leave the End if your Pearl was thrown on the ground. Your Pearl could be kept in someone's inventory or put in a chest, and you'd just be stuck in the end.
Citadel: Allowed block reinforcement. Reinforcing with diamond, for example, meant you needed to break the block 1,800 times for it to stay gone. Iron bar was 250 times, and stone was 25 times. You could set groups (like your town), so members of the group could toggle the protection on and off, allowing remodeling, fixing, etc.
These two mods together were absurdly fun. Griefers could still grief, and non-griefers could combat them. Cities would build huge vaults at bedrock, pyramids of diamond-reinforced obsidian with a chest in the middle, holding the Pearls of griefers (or high-ranking governmental officials from neighboring towns). There were bounty hunters, vault breakers, cactus producers, mayors, lawyers.
FactoryMod drove the whole economy. Put raw materials into the factory, get items out, based on the type of factory you built. It had so much depth.
Unfortunately, I got there late. I had a few good months with it, but it was just as it was getting too popular, drawing from HardCore servers, and pulling the sort of players that used transparent texture packs to dominate and steal everything. It was frustrating to watch cheaters win in the end, but, more than that, it was heartbreaking that my time with the game was cut so short. Close allies just slowly drifted to other games as our very well hidden bases were again and again ransacked by players who could see chests through layers and layers of dirt.
Sorry to wax long; I just miss CivCraft so much.
You might want to know CivCraft has successors. There's a whole "genre" of Civ servers! I discovered it later too, and first joined CivEx 3, which eventually shut down not too long after I joined, then CivClassic, on which I got a more decent amount of playtime. I was in a nation called Casia, loosely based on Ireland.
It appears that currently, the most popular server of that line is CivMC which follows CivClassic. Haven't tried it, kinda want to, but in any case, I'm glad it's still going. Maybe you'd wanna give it another try?
(By the way, same thought for me; I really wish I was around when sandbox MMOs were more of a thing. I grew up with Minecraft and anything sandbox that followed it, but that also means I missed some of the coolest sandbox experiences during their prime.)
Wow, thanks!
Now I feel like I need to rebuy Minecraft. I lost my account in the migration to Microsoft. Sure, they emailed me 40 times about it and told me to migrate, but why didn't they email me 41 times?
Etc:
Slime Rancher. The Witness. Portal 1, 2 -- I've mentioned before that I have motion sickness that even medication can't aid. Much sadness.
A live service game that got shut down -
Tales of Luminaria / Tales of the Rays / Tales of Link / Tales of Kinza / Tales of Card Evolve / Tales of Asteria from Bandai Namco, and the unrelated Tales of Food 食物語 and Princess Connect are all anime style mobile games that got shut down. At this point in time I'm probably never going to get into mobile games with any amount of effort because of the nature of how the mobile business is run.
A game whose cultural relevance has faded / and or / I'm not too old for :
Dance Dance Revolution DDR. In its hayday it was at every arcade, and people would watch, and even cheer for failed attempts or n00b efforts. I just didn't have pocket money to be able to get enough into it, and with very poor athleticism I would have needed a LOT of money to be even halfway decent. I know other dance arcade machines exist but DDR in the 90s was its own realm entirely.
That sounds lovely! My experience was, unfortunately, almost entirely the opposite. DDR was deeply uncool among the general population of my age group, and the people who did play it at the mall were sort of elitist about it and didn't look kindly on people who couldn't full combo Max 300 or whatever. I eventually got up to their level skill-wise (but refused to use the bar which still made me look worse at the game).
I have fond memories of going to the mall on Saturday as soon as it opened so that I could play DDR without anyone knowing or seeing. The added benefit was that I got the machine all to myself and so I never had to wait and could just play track after track. It ate a LOT of my quarters!
:p ours cost $2 (Canadian doubloons) to play each, it was way more than what I could afford. Esp if I suck and game over quickly lol
I'm sure there were mean groups everywhere and that sucks that people in a niche hobby are sometimes the worst gatekeepers. But to be fair it was deeply uncool outside of our little Hong Konger and Asian Canadian enclave too.
Bonus DDR neighborhood competition photo and article from a way back archive, dated 2000 04 09. Oh good heavens that was a quarter century ago??!!
Reading that made my bald spot get bigger. And why is my back hurting?
Also it was a TOONIE per play?! That's outrageous. I think mine was only 50 freedom cents for three songs (though the failure rate on the third was turned pretty high to get you off the machine sooner).
Third song is when you go for broke and select Paranoia 180 so you can fail out with dignity and to cheers.
So jealous for your freedom quarters machine. We did mamage to buy a home mat and played a ton on Ye Olde PlayStation (1) but it's not the same.
Oh! Maybe it was because a lot of the Hong Konger kids didn't have parents to supervise, got bought fast cars (Honda Prelude!) and we're given unlimited spending money and arcades charged the popular games accordingly....
DDR machines are still around. They’re still making DDR games! The newest ones, however, are Kinect monstrosities that I’m not sure I would recommend.
Elden Ring - I'm playing through it now for the first time and it's still a really good game and I am thoroughly enjoying myself, but I can't help but feel that I'm walking through the venue after the party is over. The zeitgeist has long since passed and I can't really look up anything without risking spoilers about what's ahead (beyond what I've already been spoiled on because it was a huge hit). I played offline for a while because PC has XBox glyphs as default, and I use a PS controller, but once I got comfortable with the controls I turned off the mod and now I can see all the faint echoes of players that I surmise have been long gone. I mean, there are people still playing but it's just a small sample compared to what it was back when it first came out. Still a great game though. Would still recommend.
I've played Bloodborne/DS3/Seikero/ER on release, but played DS1 years after it came out. I never really thought about it, but there really is a huge difference playing FromSoft games in the first 6 months. There is something especially fun about playing their games without the option looking up guides everytime you can't figure something out (if thats your thing, I get some people don't like that in games they play.)
Those bloodstains phantoms are current. They can only exist when someone hasn't picked up their runes after dying. Any one of those is an active player that just got told to lay their foolish ambitions to rest. Elden Ring hasn't left the building yet. Even Dark Souls 1 sees regular playtime, bloodstains and even vagrants.
But, it's definitely threaded ground. The discovery before guides exist is something else.
As far as dead games though, I think this would be closer to the bottom of the list personally - you can still find people playing Dark Souls 1 or 2 PvP hahaha - close to 30,000 people is a pretty healthy player base for a single player game.
Outer Wilds - I was going through a bit of a phase where I watched playthroughs more than actually playing anything. I didn't know anything about Outer Wilds and was too far through watching a play through by the time I realised I shouldn't have.
Not that it's not still good now, but it's really a game that you should play through completely blind, since it's all about discovery and exploration.
Animal Crossing on the Switch. By the time I got myself a switch (i.e. fairly recently) the online part of the game was more or less dead.
Then again, pretty much the same thing applies to more switch games...
Animal Crossing New Horizons was such a great comfort game during the pandemic. I spent countless hours on there making the town my own. Then in true Animal Crossing fashion, one day I just didn't open it and then 5 years passed.
Need For Speed Online - Got in way too late, as in a few months before the game got shut down. But, it was fun playing a MMO version of one of my favorite game series growing up. And I did played with my brothers and sister, when it was still up, so that was fun.
WoW - I never felt drawn to play it and I had heard not so good things about some of the server communities. And the subscription model, was another factor as to why I did not (and probably not) play it. Another reason, I had a PS2 growing up, so yeah.
Eve - See @HelmetTesterTJ's reasons for Eve. The description of it being a spreadsheet that you "play" really sounded boring as hell. And along with the subscription model for it was another turn off for me personally.
A lot of the MOBAs, especially League of Legends, I never felt drawn to any of these types of games and LoL has this reputation of just being toxic as hell, which is just a major reason as to why I never played it.
I missed alot of classic PC games which were hugely popular in the 90s, like Doom, Quake, and duke3D. Obviously you can experience them as played with OG hardware and enjoy them on emulated systems and source ports, but never that original experience of connecting to computer networks and downloading stuff / joining multiplayer matches.
So for me I think I missed out on alot of classic PC multiplayer gaming, though that in itself was still in it's infancy.
Another one that popped into my head: 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS. See, for some reason I got the sequel Virtue's Last Reward from the 3DS eshop, but never the original. So I watched a youtube video of someone playing the remastered version so I'd know the stoey before playing VLR myself.
The story has all sorts of twists and turns that don't hit as hard after you finish it for the first time. Since then though, I've also learned that the DS version apparently made heavy use of the dual screens for some mechanics, and to reveal a certain twist. I've seen people comment how much harder it hit on the DS because of that, and... Yeah, I'm bummed I won't get to experience that. I love games that make very specific use of the DS's unique features, and even if I play it now (which I just might), it just won't hit the same.
Adding to the bitterness is that 999 is my favorite of the Zero Escape trilogy. VLR is set entirely in a cold, metal base, and the atmosphere feels sufficiently heavy and dark because the stakes of the reveal are much higher. The third game (which I also didn't play but watched on YouTube) is in an even more gritty and cold metal bunker, and has a LOT more gore. Both also make heavy use of time travel to the point the endings can be a little mind-bending, and also leave a lot in the air.
999 meanwhile is in a replica of the Titanic, with a colorful cast where the stakes are just their own lives and unraveling the mystery of what connects the cast. It feels a lot lighter than the sequels in every way.
This might seem like an odd choice, but I have to mention Gigantic, now relaunched as Gigantic: Rampage Edition.
I remember playing it back in 2017, right after Overwatch's boom. At the time, it was an incredibly fun and refreshing free-to-play alternative to the hero shooter/MOBA mix. The gameplay felt innovative, the characters were vibrant and original, and the art style stood out beautifully.
Unfortunately, the original version was shut down about a year later. Now, it's returned, but as a paid game. This shift from free-to-play to paid has significantly reduced the player base, creating a frustrating cycle: fewer players mean longer matchmaking times, making the game less appealing and ultimately causing even fewer people to buy in.
It's disappointing because Gigantic really had something unique going for it initially.
Puzzle Bandits was an iOS (or maybe iPad?) game that had a completely unique mechanic for match-3 style games. Rather than moving a single piece at a time and watching them explode, you could tap-and-drag a piece around the board and therefore shuffle the order of the entire board state — as long as you made your moves within a few seconds — and then only once you released that piece would the game check and explode matches.
I’m still to this day trying to find a game that uses this style of matching pieces, and haven’t found it yet, so if anyone knows of any, please let me know!
It’s also the mechanic that keeps pulling me back into my sporadic attempts at amateur game dev/coding.
Here’s a video I found on the internet of some gameplay, and I forgot the soundtrack was also a banger!
https://youtu.be/lgALZ-wcjOU
Really interesting conversation starter!
I grew up in a relatively low income household, so whenever I got a console (I had a PS1 and an Xbox 360), I would have to wait years in-between games, unless my friends were nice enough to gift me a game on my birthday.
I missed out on the prime days of Halo 2 multiplayer, I never have played WoW or Guild Wars, didn't get to play many of the Call of Duties to the aformentioned reason above,
I also never owned a Nintendo home console (other than the current Switch, which I have almost no games for) so most of the games on there are games I never got the chance to play.
There are probably others I can name if I thought about it more.