My brother traded a Nintendo VR (or whatever ot was called for a Sega Genesis. He occasionally mentally beats himself up for that.

Virtual Boy? That thing had mechanical parts in display and breaks quite easily. Also it causes more headache than a keg of moonshine next day. Nice item for collectors but if someone wants to play those games, Retroarch + Google Cardboard or something similar will be waaay better as it won't make you puke after 40 minutes and can display image in grayscale instead of red and black, which is thousand times better.

I tried to emulate that thing on PC with Occulus Rift. Some games were really good. if only Nintendo did that better - low latency black and white backlit LCDs instead of that garbage they used as display that thing would be a HUGE success. But they created a torture device and it obviously failed.

P.S. Genesis does what Nintendon't! Virtual Boy had 3-4 good games. So not a big loss really.

I once paid perfectly good allowance money for this. :P

Did you know that to level up a character at Ultima 3, you have to talk to the king?

Yeah, well, back in '84, neither did I. It was my first CRPG ever, and I didn't know "leveling up to get more powerful" was a thing.
I tried to beat this game
For.
3.
Fucking.
Years.

5 years later, a friend of mine who knew the trick helped me and we finished that thing together 3 month later. But boy do I feel stupid when I think about all those times I went against dragons with my level 1 parties (plural). To give you an idea of the casualty rate, the fighter of the group that finally finished the game was called "Azerty14" ^^

Your younger self was very creative. =D

Well, as I said, I had probably already clocked 100 dead characters, so my azerty keyboard kinda started naming the new ones for me ^^

That's why I appreciate it when roguelikes include a "random name" option -- otherwise, looking at the high score/hall of fame screen would be rather monotonous. :)

ha, you just made my day!

Many, many years ago I was playing the old Atari 2600 game "Spider Fighter". It wasn't the original 2600 I was using... it was some kind of a re-package (much smaller than original) but it did play the original carts. Anywho, the other thing you need to know is... I have a fear of spiders! Seriously, even in games. Fortunately, the graphics on Spider Fighter are so "abstract" that it's hard to tell it's really a spider, and I always prided myself that I even played a game with spiders in it! I.e. this game didn't scare me.

For reference... I had to stop playing Arx Fatalis (for awhile, eventually picked it back up) when close to the beginning I was trying to get out of that first dungeon and a spider-as-big-as-a-dog came crawling towards me. I ran as fast as I could, and down at the end of the hall, I just "peeked" around the corner to see if it was still coming at me... it was! So I kept running, until I was backed into a room with no exit. And that damn demon spider crawled around the corner and into the room! I had to "fear-quit" the game instantly!

So anywhat, back to Spider Fighter. I'm playing SF on this 2600 when I hear a loud "pop" sound to my left. I look over on the desk, where we had an old Epson printer, and a real spider had climbed down from the ceiling on its own webstrand, and landed directly on top of the paper feeding into the printer. (Remember those old pinfeed printers with continuous feed paper with holes on the side? No? Nothing? Anyone? Buehler?) For a spider to come down on a web and POP down on a paper like that scared the BEJEEBUS out of me! I jumped up and toppled over the chair I was in, and the hairs on my arm all jumped up as I saw the spider crawl down INSIDE THE PRINTER!

Needless to say, I never used that printer again.

Once in Diablo II my lvl 90 or so Necromancer focussing on skeletons got deleted by an harddrive crash. I had called him Leoric and he had the unique item Leoric's Arm which I never found again with any other char afterwards.

I was so frustrated I didn't touch the game for years.

I was gonna echo a similar sentiment. Most of my catastrophic gaming stories are of corrupted save files and a litany of swear words and broken desktops/consoles.

I thought it would be a clever idea to save my 300 hours worth of Forza 3 progress to a USB, only to discover that my entire save got corrupted by doing so. It turns out the Forza games were one of those few Xbox games that did not allow for external save options. Something I was obviously not aware of at the time.

Another case of a corrupt save happened with F1 2012, also on the Xbox. This time I "only" lost 120 hours worth of progress. It turns out I did not allow the game enough time to autosave. The same thing happened later with Dirt 2. Consequently I never use autosave in a Codemasters game, they are extremely sensitive.

I've never had any major incidences on PC to be honest, not to the same extent as the above.

Interesting idea.

Years ago.
Final Fantasy II on the PSX.
I had clocked in hours and hours into it, leveling up my party to be on level with the monsters at the end-game dungeons. As this was Final Fantasy II, it was a grindy game, meaning that I needed to grind a lot to have a chance in hell at scratching the final boss. By then I went through the complete game in a near-lucky way, going to the final dungeons with just 2000HP (I beat it earlier last year on the GBA with the average as over 9000 HP for each party member, but in way less time). There I trained through the infamous method of 'clubbing yourself' that Final Fantasy II was very much known for, until I had some health to be proud of. Until suddenly, I must have came on one of my siblings' nerves (don't remember how) because one of them wiped my save file. Luckily I had a backup on my PS2 memory card (by complete luck, not via my current backup-freak habits), but...all the grinding was undone. I lost interest in the game, and only finished it a few years later on a totally different platform, GBA via emulation as opposed to a native PSX run.


Then this year.
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;birth 1 on the PC (the version sold here)
The run went well. As this was HDN, the game was very grindy, so if I wanted a chance at hell to scratch most bosses, let alone the final, I'd have needed to grind day in and day out by fighting the 'superbosses' or the 'extra bosses' as I like to call them now in the dungeons, who if successfully defeated, grant you enough XP to take you to the next levels. The run went really well this time by using the Final Fantasy II GBA philosophy, which is not to finish this dungeon and move to the next, but rather, finish this dungeon, 'train' a little bit to gain easy levels, then move to the next (which is how I got over 9000HP in FFII). The party was over level 50 and I was satisfied with how powerful my party was. Then the hard drive that held all the data was nuked. It might be a little while before I restart this game, this time with the DLC which includes a character that may be useful early-game.