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Forgive us, Reggie, for we have sinned
Here’s some news: We are not infallible human beings here at Nintendo Life. Hard to believe, but true.
We don’t all sit on a throne of priceless Spice Orange GameCubes and rare SNES games, although a fair few of us have been known to collect a few odd trinkets here and there. But life wasn’t always mint-in-box… In fact, we’ve all had our share of mistakes and woes that we look back on with shame and sorrow. Sometimes, we miss out on great deals, lend a prized gaming possession to a less-than-trustworthy pal, or sell a game that would later become priceless (monetarily, or emotionally). These are the stories that keep us up at night.
And, since our pals and co-workers on the Nintendo Life YouTube channel have admitted their most heinous gaming mistakes of the past (check out the video at the bottom of the page), we might as well be honest in the same spirit.
So! Without further explanations and attempts to explain away our shame, here are our biggest gaming regrets.
No Ragrets. That’s my motto. But it’s not true. I have many ragrets.
The main ones I have are based around a particular time in my life. I was at university, and didn’t have a great deal of money at the time, as I was spending most of it on lectures and noodles. But I wished… to game.
My solution was HMV’s fairly generous (at the time) trade-in policies, which gave me in-store credit in return for my games. I would buy a game, like Ghost Trick, Professor Layton, and Okamiden, play through the whole thing as quickly as possible, then trade it in for the maximum amount of store credit (which was usually about half the cost of a game). With that credit, I’d buy another game… rinse and repeat.
While this resulted in me getting a chance to play a ton of excellent games, it also resulted in me not actually owning any of them in the end. Now that I have more disposable income, I’ve been buying them all back — and DS games are not cheap. I still haven’t found a reasonably-priced copy of Ghost Trick. Still… I’d rather have lots of memories and zero games, than still be in possession of one or two games that I could afford at the time.
Also, I wish I could go back in time and replay VA11 Hall-A. I think I was pretty unfairly mean about it in my reviews (which you can read here, and also here), with way too much focus on the bartending, and not the story (which is the more interesting bit). In my defense, I was working very long hours, and I was very stressed, tired, and sad at the time — but I couldn’t afford to turn down work! It made me re-evaluate what a «review» can and should be, and what a reviewer owes the audience and themselves.
Most of my gaming regrets are based around bargains I didn’t snap up, or games I sold during a clear-out. At the time it must have made sense to cull a couple of games and snatch back two DVDs’ worth of space on the Billy Bookcase, which is why I no longer own Metroid Prime Trilogy or Killer7. Bad times.
Not buying the Resident Evil chainsaw controller for GameCube when I saw it for 20 quid is another error I think about often. Lending Sonic & Knuckles and Castle of Illusion to a schoolfriend and having them come back to me inoperable unless you jiggled the cart out of the slot a millimetre or two is another one. I learned a lesson about trust there, though.
But probably my biggest game-related “what the hell was I thinking?!” is the time when during a rough patch I decided to sell my Xbox 360 Elite. I was savvy enough to keep the games – again, I’m not sure why – but either Microsoft hadn’t introduced cloud saves by then, or I wasn’t aware they existed (pretty sure it was the former) and all my precious save data got wiped as I prepped my Elite for its trip to GameStation.
It’s not the saves I miss – the achievements I unlocked were saved forever to my Xbox profile – but I built some stunning (if I say so myself) creations in Banjo-Kazooie Nuts & Bolts, and now they’re just gone. I don’t even have the little screenshots I grabbed of my London bus, my Ecto-1 or my awesome USS Enterprise to offer hints for a potential rebuild. What a bloody numpty, eh?
A younger version of this humble scribe who still lived with his parents once walked into local Cash Converters to be blessed with a complete-in-the-box Nintendo Entertainment System with two joypads. The whole thing was in spot-on condition and of course, if someone sold a NES they probably got rid of their games as well. My heart nearly skipped a beat when I spotted Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3, Mega Man 2, Ducktales and Faxanadu also in their pristine CIB glory.
I did not think twice about grabbing the whole lot for an absolute bargain and spent the next week playing those games in absolute bliss. Despite lots of friends having NES and Famiclones I never had one myself because by the time Nintendo arrived in Portugal, the Commodore Amiga already ruled my household. My parents were not so keen on the space this “incredible find” was taking up in the living room that was already abnormally filled with an extensive collection of GameCube games. I had no choice but to sell the entire lot for twice the price of purchase (and I can assure you it was still a bargain!).
It only took a few more years before I bought and moved into a house of my own, one of the biggest changes in my youth since up to that point I never even had a bedroom to call mine. At the time of this brief NES ownership I had no idea I was going to move out so soon nor had a real sense on how valuable those games would become. Along with the NES Classic Mini I keep two CIB NES games on my living room shelf (Ice Hockey and Blades of Steel) as a reminder to never (ever!) sell anything video game related from my youth.
So my biggest gaming regret is not so much specific to gaming, but rather a general life regret that happened to have a huge effect on my beloved hobby. So gather round, kids, and listen to a tale of true woe.
Back when I was around 14 or 15, I’d amassed a decent selection of Game Boy Advance games to go with a NES edition of the GBA SP. It was my pride and joy. Of course, being an impressionable teenager, I’d gotten a phone contract and used it to chat with a girl I’d become rather smitten with, well into the early hours of the morning.
Now, contracts back in the mid 2000s didn’t offer much for your money; maybe about 50 text messages per month. I went way beyond this, racking up a bill of around £150-200 in just one month. It’s safe to say my parents weren’t best pleased, so in order to ensure the full amount would be comfortably paid off, they hauled my GBA SP along with its many games to the nearest store and sold them right there and then.
Ladies and gentlemen… I bawled. I was devastated and I knew it was my fault. Needless to say, I fell out of touch with the girl I was texting. Heck, I’m not even sure I remember her name now…
I remember my GBA, though. Every day. I hope it found a good home.
Good (or maybe bad) news: We certainly aren’t alone in the gaming regrets that keep us up at night. We polled Twitter, and got over 150 responses (at the time of writing). Here are a selection of the ones that hit hardest:
So, welcome to the Nintendo Life confessional, where we will forgive you of all your gaming sins (unless it was someone else who lost/threw away/destroyed/sold your games. They will never be forgiven). Tell us: What are your gaming regrets?
About Kate Gray
Formerly of Official Nintendo Magazine, GameSpot, and Xbox UK, you can now find Kate’s writing all over the internet. She moved to Canada a few years ago, but gets tea imported from England, because she has good priorities.
Comments (80)
Look at all these lovely humans that provide us entertainment day after day!
I don’t really give thought to regrets, but my biggest «lesson learned» was when I hit «new game» on Dragon’s Dogma when I had a nearly complete save file already. This started me completely over with no option to reload my old save (You can only have one per user).
Lesson Learned: Hit «Hard More» and you can basically New Game + with your existing progress, including the ability to remake your character and companion. The only downside is starting from the beginning of the game, but all items, money, and stats you keep.
what is a "ragret"?
Removed – unconstructive feedback
@HamatoYoshi mate, I’ve never played Super Metroid. I have also never written about it. If you’re getting me mixed up with Kerry, one of the only other women who writes for the site, then that really says more about you than me, doesn’t it?
It’s always the ones that got away for me. Super Mario Galaxy 2, Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, Kirby’s Return to Dreamland, Pokemon Platinum, Kirby Planet Robobot, the list goes on and on. Games that I would’ve loved to have played nowadays but at the time passed them up in favour of worse stuff like NSMB2 or Triforce Heroes.
@KateGray
via GIPHY
Not giving Banjo 11/10
But really: throwing away all my boxes for my vintage Nintendo games!
@HamatoYoshi Good call, an article focused on appreciating NL staff is actually the perfect time to shame and insult the wrong author for something NL wrote that you disagreed with.
Maybe in the spirit of regrets you should apologize for being so rude. Everyone makes mistakes.
i regret not buying enough spare 2ds xl’s. they are pretty expensive now, and hard to find. i still have a huge backlog of games … hope my 3ds will live much longer
I sold off a massive collection of Gamecube and N64 games just a couple years before their prices really skyrocketed.
I still got a chunk of money for it all, but I could have easily gotten about triple if I hadn’t been in such a rush to get rid of everything.
I’ve purchased every Nintendo console and portables day one since the GameCube/GBA era. I have many nephews in my family so I’ve given all my systems and games to them once a new Nintendo system would arrive. funny thing is that I’m 50/50 with regretting or no regret. in one hand, I wish I could own these still for the nostalgia factor. on the other, I made my nephews very happy kids back then so nothing to regret there.
I’ve wasted so many hours on bad video games this generation alone. 85 hours in Xenoblade 2, 55 in Breath of the Wild, 35 in Pokemon Sword…it’ll get better, I tell myself. It never did.
@Anti-Matter My biggest regret was selling my Cobalt Flux DDR pads…..
But the other day I got a pair of L-Tek metal pads, so I’m back on the dance floor! They’re fantastic
Now I just have to find some good IIDX Controllers!
I once gave Harvest Moon SNES to the bin man, just part of growing up and improving on the last generation. I regret it but was 12 years old when it passed. It´s fine.
Selling my GameCube with 2 wave birds and a ton of games that I had from day 1 so they were all in like new condition I miss it so bad ? also my local Game were having a clear out and they were selling samba de amigo pal version with the maracas for £25 I had it in my hand but thought this is not my kinda game so I put it back
I owned the Legendary copy of the hacked cart of "Pokémon Black." You know, the one where the Pokémon died permanently and you could catch trainers.
Once I found out it was "illegal" I panicked and tossed it away in fear of the government gun’ git me.
I regret not keeping that treasure as just a conversation piece.
I can empathize with Gavin on this one. I sold my XBox 360 with Nuts & Bolts years ago, and forever lost my beautiful flying toilet.
Lots of regrets here seem to be about selling Nintendo stuff…
I sold my N64 but even in retrospect don’t regret it.
What I DO regret is getting rid of a decent size CRT tv. To be fair, they take up huge amounts of space and are heavy as anything, but to be able to play light gun games and lag-free Donkey Konga would be amazing.
My biggest gaming regret is buying Paper Mario Sticker Star. God, that game is an abomination. Easily the worst game i’ve ever played in my entire life and it’s not even close.
Never finishing Donkey Kong: Tropical Freeze. Damn those collectibles…
My biggest gaming regret is an ongoing problem of mine where I haven’t made up my mind where I most want to play my games and whether that be in digital or physical format.
This leads to me double dipping way way too often and then usually selling off physical copies of games when I realise it makes absolutely zero sense to own both that and a digital copy.
I must have spent a fortune on games I already own.
I have, like many others sold a tonne of games and consoles over the years but I regret none of it because ultimately it was most often to gain access to the next thing I wanted when I would have otherwise been waiting for a Birthday or Christmas.
regret #1: selling a complete in box copy of F-Zero GX. I’ve not been able to afford re-buying it, and I miss it every day.
regret #2: giving an ex-girlfriend my vanilla 3DS after upgrading to a New 3DS. she barely used it, and I wish I had it as a backup 3DS.
I try not to think about it.
My biggest regret was leaving my NES/SNES collection at my parents house when I moved away. I returned later to claim it only to find that my brother threw it all out when "cleaning".
My biggest regret is leaving my old game systems at my parent’s house.. The NES.. The Sega Mega Drive.. The N64.. and all with more than 20 games each.. I had each of them tidily packed away in boxes..
“Mum, where are my gaming systems?”
“I don’t know..” (guilty look) “did you look for them?”
“Yes, I did”..
“Well, I did throw some of your stuff away”..
[I personally would never throw them out and my parents have a huge house.. They keep a lot of old junk there.. There was more than enough room there for them..]
A few years later my aunt did the same thing with my little cousin’s NES (that my cousin had also owned since the 1980s) .. In the original box, with about 50 games (many of them in boxes).. also with included extras (such as two orange zappers).. Just basically gave them away online (sold for an extremely low price).. Soon after selling, she told me, “I would have just given them to you had I known”..
Well, at least someone got a bargain..
Ive made some trade in mistakes as a kid (limited funds and all)
I traded in terranigma and got like £20 credit…..but saying that I paid like £20 for it to begin with. When telegames (?!) mail order company that advertised in CVG had a sale. So it felt like a good offer at the time.
But Biggest mistake was a Majoras mask adventure set. For whatever reason my woolworths was selling it for like £20.
Problem was I didnt have an expansion pak.
I happened to win a copy of donkey kong on swapitshop but couldnt play that either.
Not being the biggest zelda fan (and still think they are a tad overated) I traded it in for an expansion pak so I could play Donkey Kong……..in hindsite I probably shouldnt have
@BloodNinja
Psst…
You can play DrumMania with IIDX controller.
Regret 1 : Purchasing BOTW and found the game was not appealing at all after several minutes playing. Then I sold the game after being neglected for more than 4 years.
Regret 2 : Sold my Gardening Mama 2 3DS at the end of year 2014 and now I found the game was nearly impossible to be found even the used one when I have a feeling to reconsider the game.
Regret 3 : Bought MLB 2K10 PS3 with very cheap price and found the game was nearly impossible to play with very stupid rules by using both analog sticks to throw the ball or hit the ball.
I regret trading in my original still-pristine-not-discoloured SNES.
As the Wii’s Virtual Console expanded and most of my carts were available there, I figured my SNES was redundant. But there are so many good games that have never been re-released, and I miss having MY one, the one my dad bought me for my 11th birthday, the one with the Mario Kart-fuelled teethmarks in the controller…
Selling most of my GameCube collection because I was a poor kid back in the day. I used to buy rare and obscure games too, so now if I want to get them back I’m paying upwards of a $100 for each one.
I regret not taking on computer sciences in undergrad. I would adore the convenience of working from home.
A redeeming note would be to continue learning Japanese as a language, pass the proficiency exam, and get a job as a translator for the Japanese gaming industry.
..after I finish this damn health care doctorate.. :Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.:
Whats a ragret? Am I missing the joke?
(this is a bit of a long comment, I apologize beforehand)
If I ever get to see my younger self I’d tell him «You’re an idiot! Don’t lend your games!» That’s how I lost many Game Boy Advance games (Super Mario Advance 1 and 2, Sonic Advance, most Pokémon versions save for Sapphire (which I still own), a Link Cable and a GC/GBA Link Cable), Pokémon Colosseum and Luigi’s Mansion for the Gamecube.
When it comes to not buying games, I missed a chance to get the Special Edition of Metroid: Samus Returns at MSRP 2 years ago. Thankfully I didn’t skip the Metroid amiibo duo.
On the same note, I regret not buying a sealed set of Poochy & Yoshi’s Woolly World + Yarn Poochy amiibo while it was discounted the same day I bought my first and only 3DS and picked up my pre-order of the Cloud amiibo, especially when I still had money to do it after the purchase.
Last year I missed a chance to get various 3DS and Wii U games I don’t own for less than 1500 pesos (about $75), all of them boxed and in good conditions. If I remember correctly they were Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, Paper Mario: Color Splash, Devil’s Third and (the one that stung me the most) Kirby: Planet Robobot, that last game is one I hardly ever see available.
Selling my Gamecube copies of F-Zero GX, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Metroid Prime with Prime 2 Bonus Disc is also very high on the list of regrets. Especially now that people are asking too much money for discs in bad conditions and missing the manual or even the box altogether.
I would also add «giving my Metroid Dread amiibo duo to my nephew for Christmas» to the list if it weren’t for the fact that I was able to get a second pair.
Well I gave my nephew my copy of panzer dragon saga. When he was old enough to sell it, it wasn’t complete with 4 discs. Not sure if he lost a disc as he was a child at the time or I gave him a incomplete version.
@HammerGalladeBro You took the words right out of my mouth. Several of our childhood N64 cartridges, complete in box Wind Waker collector’s edition with the OoT Master Quest disc, Baten Kaitos, endless controllers… just some of the things that vanished after my brothers handed them out to their friends.
I had no friends, so never had this problem.
@KateGray I am pretty sure I am probably the 10,000th person to tell you this, but Super Metroid is totally worth taking the time to play. It holds up beautifully even by today’s standards.
@Gitface you’re not the first, but that’s okay!! I suppose it wouldn’t surprise you that games writers don’t have a lot of time to catch up on the games they’ve missed, though ?
I don’t have alot of regrets but I’m biggest one would probably buying my best friend botw for Christmas without knowing if she had it . . . Plot twist she had it, also not buying a actual switch (I have a lite)
@Marianne Something similar happened to me with my nephew, except it was with Luigi’s Mansion 3. In the end I traded it for Mario & Sonic Tokyo 2020.
@Anti-Matter WHAT
Hahaha I used to play that at the arcade. I was terrible with the kick drum, so I always played auto bass. But man, thanks for that! I’ll try and track those down.
I’ve sold games and consoles that, in hindsight, I wish I hadn’t only because I would like to play them again. But then I think about 20 years ago, trading in my N64 and games. If I didn’t do it, I wouldn’t have been able to buy my GameCube. So when I look at it in that context, I don’t necessarily have any regrets.
But there is one situation that I do have regrets about and still haunts me to this day. Back when Pokèmon Yellow had come out, my grandmother was babysitting a kid from the neighborhood while his mom went to work. I was about 15, 16 at the time. Phillip couldn’t have been no older than 7, 8. Anyways, I had the game and a Game Boy Color (which was gifted to me) and had gotten to the point where I managed to pretty much finish the Pokedex outside of Mew. I really don’t know what I was thinking and he lived just around the corner. But he had begged me to let him borrow my GBC and Yellow.
Again, I still to this day don’t know why I said yes. Maybe because he didn’t have much in the way of video games or things like that. But I let him borrow it and told him he had to bring it back the next day. To make a long story short, I never got it or Pokèmon Yellow back. He claimed he lost it. He was an 8 year old kid. His mom was really sweet and I didn’t really want to make a big stink about it. But it sucked big time. Fortunately, I was working at the time and ended up being able to buy another Game Boy Color and the game again. But yeah, my biggest gaming regret
@Mauzuri
Bad game yes, but weirdly I have a lot of fun playing sticker Star.for me 64 is the opposite with it being a good game but I don’t really like it.
Luckily I never traded in games as a kid. I just played them over and over again. My biggest regret is probably losing my Mario and Luigi dream team 3ds. It was a Christmas gift and was really nostalgic for me.
Losing Goldeneye and Mario Kart out of my n64 collection and losing Smash Bros out of my GameCube collection.
As for never purchasing?
On the n64?
Diddy Kong Racing
Star Fox 64
On the GameCube? Loads…
Star Fox Adventures
Pikmin 2
Viewtiful Joe 2
Luigi’s Mansion
Resident Evil games
On the Wii?
Metroid Prime Trilogy
Super Mario Galaxy 1&2 (although since got 1 on the 3D collection on switch)
I really have no ‘real’ regrets when comes to gaming; maybe one — losing most of my gaming collection back in 1994 while I was visiting a relative in a foreign country, but that’s water under the bridge by a long time. My only regret is not having time almost at all to play videogames lately. The last (big) game I finished was BoTW and that was five years ago.
I regret moving all of my downloaded games to the Wii U. The backwards compatibility is so clunky on Wii U, and now all my games are on a console I don’t even like
Worked at a used game shop in 2010 and I was too broke to buy GBC Metal Gear Solid for 15 bucks. Finally picked it up last year for way more than that. I regret nothing.
Edit: Oh yeah and my older brother giving me our GameCube after getting a Wii, but keeping our full run of Resident Evil titles. 6 months later he moves to a new place and LOSES THEM ALL.
So yeah, I regret being the youngest brother and having zero say in any kind of application of logic or decision making when dealing with a FIFA drone.
@blindsquarel
Ah, is that right? Well at least you don’t outright hate the original, as much as I hate Sticker Star haha
Game regret: lost game boxes, manuals.
Never got a N64 till high school…
A few:
1. Picking up Ultraman as one of my first titles when I got the Super Nintendo. I played that game about three times before I put it away, never to play it again. Should have gotten Pilotwings or UN Squadron instead.
2. Getting the Virtual Boy. That thing was an uncomfortable headache inducing nightmare.
3. Skipping out on the Gamecube. By the time it came out, I was in college and decided I had "outgrown" Nintendo products, so I got a PlayStation 2. While I had a lot of fun with the PS2, I remember going to a friend’s house when I was home over summer vacation and playing the Gamecube. It was such a fun console and I was sad that I skipped over it.
4. Buying the Wii. Probably my least favorite Nintendo console. Played it mainly for Wii Sports when it first came out, but that lost interest with my friends after about a month. Liked Mario Galaxy, but dreaded playing it with force motion controls (thankfully got to play it with regular control on Switch and had a great time). Virtual Console was cool initially, but the "wow, older games on a newer console!" effect wore off over time. I had no plans on getting a Wii U, but I won it at a work event and liked it much, much more than the Wii (even though it sold far fewer systems).
1) Giving away a load of SNES games to son of our family’s cleaner; although at least he had the chance to play a lot of classics as we had bought him the SNES for Christmas years earlier as they couldn’t afford it. So I take some solace in that I enabled him to play lots of games and maybe had a good influence on his life. I’ve since rebought many.
2) Trading in all my Pokemon games a few years back; today I probably could make 5-10 times as much as I did then.
3) Trading in all my Armoured Core PS2 games to a friend. He still has them though. Some day…. Or may just hit eBay.
4) Buying Last of Us on launch. Mentioned here before, bought it at launch for an in-store price to get a special phone case bonus to give to a girl I liked. Didn’t get the girl (stayed friends though) and pushed myself through one of my most miserable and disliked games ever and probably got only around £15 most worth of “credit” via a private trade.
In life in general I always worry about future impacts of all my decision, which is why I still hold onto so many games I may never actually live to play. Heck I’m doing a replay of all the Halo games on Game Pass (plus the new one) now instead of completing a new game!
@Patendo @6ch6ris6 It’s from "We’re The Millers" and has since become a meme.
I still can’t believe my stupidity as it relates to this particular topic. I had a genuine copy of a Donkey Kong Country Competition cart, which is absolutely one of the rarest SNES relics there is. Now, I paid good money myself for this cart, like $400 in 2005ish. Fast forward to 2015; I desperately needed some cash, so I sold it for $1500. Sure, I made a good profit, but I had a ton of other games at the time that I could have offloaded, stuff that would have been replaceable. Instead, I elected to sell the one thing that is damn near impossible to replace…Oof
In 2013, I traded Kirby Air Ride for four average or sub-average GB/GBC games. Only one—Game & Watch Gallery 3–was good enough to make up for the rest, and now Air Ride is absurdly expensive to rebuy.
Erm… Let’s just say I was a clumsy 6 year old. I was walking down the stairs with my DS, then it kinda slipped out of my hands… Yeah, you can guess that it wasn’t in playable condition anymore.
@Damo never heard of that haha thanks for letting me know
I remember being at a Best Buy when the SNES was fazing out and the N64 was gaining traction. They had a stack of pristine, big box Earthbounds for $15 a piece. I had the money, but I looked at the back of the box and 17 year old me thought “these graphics stink” and put it down. I got a forgettable $60 N64 game instead ?
My biggest regret is selling my pristine SNES collection.
40+ games, all complete, all mint including the console itself.
I sold the lot to my old boss so I could buy the new PlayStation console.
Absolutely loved my new PS console but boy my Snes collection would be worth a fortune now.
Definetly trading in all my old games and systems. Like others have mentioned though, when youre young you’re kinda limited in how you acquire new games to play. Still have all the memories and a few old gems like my original gba sp. Vowed though a long time ago to never trade another game!
I definitely regret trading in games for a pocket change when I was younger or even worse throwing them away. I wish I could go back in time and knock some sense into young me haha
I’m 53 and my biggest regret is missing the NES. Somehow it wasn’t a thing in germany where I lived at the time. So I went from the Atari 2600 to the gameboy and to the SNES. When I played the original Zelda I already had played a link to the past..It’s not the same then
When did Ghost Trick become so expensive? I bought a mint copy for about £30 just over a year ago.
I don’t have many regrets in general in life but wish I’d bought Samus Returns before Dread was announced and prices went through the roof. I also wish I’d bought Metroid Trilogy. I wasn’t a fan of Super Metroid so was waiting for Samus Returns for under £20. That’ll never happen now. I’ve since played Dread and think it’s great.
I prefer focussing on the positives like buying Terranigma for £7 from a friend. I wonder if he remembers and regrets selling that?
Actual gaming-wise, my time feels more precious these days compared to when I was a kid, and I do regret sticking with To the Moon all the way to the end. Such a boring waste of time, and the only Nintendo Life review I’ve dramatically disagreed with.
If I were to list out all of the games I traded in as a kid desperate for just a bit more money to spend on games, I bet I could make half of y’all weep. At least.
The rarer ones I can’t even afford to re-purchase now, as a "proper adult."
Somebody offered me a boxed, mint condition Panasonic Q (the DVD playing GameCube) for £150 back around 2010.
Even then it would have sold on eBay for way more than that, and nowadays they cost about £1000!
I don’t really have any significant, specific, gaming regrets, I guess cos I’ve never parted with a game I wasn’t sure I didn’t want.
On a general note though, I guess I feel a sense of having missed out a bit by getting on the console train so late. I had an Amiga as a (lucky) kid and only ever really played copied disks, so didn’t feel the need to spend hundreds on expensive consoles and games, so through my teens I hardly played any SNES, PS1, N64 games etc. It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I bought a GameCube, and not until I got a Wii that I really started playing any Mario games beyond Mario Smash Football. In hindsight it would have been nice to have played Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World in their heyday, for example.
@AlexHarford I bought To The Moon years back on Steam for just £1-2 but only played half an hour and have been waiting ever since for it drop to a similar price on Switch to finally play through it. But perhaps I’ll give it a miss now, having read your experience.
I’ve got a few, but nothing TOO major, thankfully…
One is, as a kid, I bought the big box PC version of "Cadillacs & Dinosaurs: The Second Cataclysm" for 10 bucks. I couldn’t run it properly on my PC though, it had no sound, so my parents made me return it…
Another regret – I once found a bunch of neat SNES games at a local store – Donkey Kong Country, an NTSC copy of "UN Squadron" and a region cartridge converter, all dirt cheap…I ended up selling them a few weeks later, again, relatively cheap, because I never thought I’d actually own a SNES. That UN Squadron still hurts a bit…
And there are also a few bootleg GBA carts I lent to a friend, who, at one point, just dropped off the face of the Earth and I never got them back…among them were TMNT (2007) and Contra Advance: The Alien Wars EX…at least they were bootlegs, I guess…
Back in high school, late 80’s, I sold a Michael Jordan rookie card to a friend for $20 so I could buy a Nintendo NES – Max TurboController. Needless to say, the card went way, way up in value…..ugh.
Many years ago I sold off the vast majority of my game collection so I could save up and buy a plane ticket to New Zealand, to chase after a girl I was infatuated with at the time. Matters of the heart can cause one to behave irrationally at times, and well, I really regret selling those games! Ah well, at least I had the sense to hold onto my Resident Evil gamecube collection and my dreamcast fighting games:p
@KateGray Was Ghost Trick that DS game that reportedly at one point GameStop wasn’t going to accept trade-ins because it was designed to require a bunch of physical objects inside the packaging to play? (not that such a thing has stopped them from reselling other games that are made unplayable by owning just the game media)
Or was it a different game I’m thinking of?
@CharlieGirl Ugg… I did the same with my F-Zero GX….
At the time though, I would have never thought, “whelp, that will be the last F-Zero game they ever make!” ?
In general: selling almost all the Nintendo hardware and games I owned over the years. The only system to escape that fate was my Wii and only because I sent it to my sister for her to use for Netflix. I did get it back from her a couple years back.
Of those I owned at one point and sold (SNES, N64, GBC, GCN, DS) I probably regret the N64 the most.
I think the runner up would be the SNES because probably a year or so before I got back in to gaming my parents sold it and it would have just been cool to have the actual piece of hardware that was the first gaming system I ever owned. It would have been cool to have the Super Mario World save files too if they were even still there after all those years (probably not — since I think those were battery backed).
Two regrets: selling my beautiful purple Game Boy colour, and the games. What was I thinking. The other is reading NL review of Baldo. It made me ooo so mad haha.
I used all my birthday money to buy Mario Party 10 brand new when I was 10 or so. I could have bought any of the fun games for Wii U or 3ds, and in fairness, 10 was pretty fun to someone who had never played a Mario Party game before, and my sister, who never played video games, had fun playing it, but it was one of the few times I could pick whatever game I wanted, and I picked 10 over dozens of great games I had never played before.
Could have been worse, though. I also had my eye on Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric because it was cheap…
I thought of a different type of one: Not properly enjoying and playing through many of the games I’ve owned over the years (at the time they came out and I first owned them). An examples would probably be Ocarina of Time and Metroid Prime. I would tend to get stuck in games and just give up.
Although this probably contributes to a lot of the enjoyment I’ve gotten from gaming since I got back into it a few years ago because I have gone back and enjoyed playing through some of those games (Ocarina of Time being one of them. I haven’t played Metroid Prime yet since getting back into gaming.)
@Gitface i thought the same thing! sad times
I have a DS Lite that was getting a purple tint on the screen so I opened it up to see how hard it would be to replace, and I never got it together and working again. Another story, long before this happened, when I first got my 3DS, I thought that DS games were too outdated so I sold them all! At least most of the games were pretty bad, but I missed Mario Kart. I didn’t learn my lesson though, and I sold all my Xbox 360 games a few years later. Oh well, the only game I really liked was Rayman Legends which I have bought again on the Switch now.
Hard related with Kate on trading in a lot of my DS games when I’d completed them and now not being able to replay them if I want. I really enjoyed Ghost Trick but after I finished it figured it didn’t have much replayability. Like Kate I would love to track down a reasonably priced copy now …
I don’t have any regrets like most of you since I own games to play them and when it’s done it’s going back to GameStop to buy other games, I don’t replay games often for me it’s have a good time then seek for another good time with another game, there is so much games to play and not so much time to play and I wan’t to try the most experience that games have to offer, not replay the same game over and over again. That’s why gamepass is heaven for me and hell for nostalgic people!
I have so many gaming regrets I could write a mid-size book.
Giving away my Model 1Genesis
Giving away my beloved NES
Selling my GameCube
I have other regrets but I’ve rectified many of my mistakes. I now also have many classic consoles I was never able to own in my younger days. So I guess it all worked out. I still miss my original 2 consoles though.
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