AlexanderCzar

* Using the game genie on the nes JUST to get the games to work cause the spring that holds down carts broke.

* Buying codebooks, tips n tricks, etc

* writing down passwords

* Digging around for the manual so I could answer a stupid trivia question just to play Indy 500 (dos)

* Mastering the tap tap tap of digital arrows in driving games rather than pushing a control stick for cornering

* putting batteries in handhelds

*buying a light attachment for your nintendo handhelds (often with magnification bonus!)

Leetables

madflava

Beating Pokemon Blue using nothing but Venusaur's Razor Leaf over and over.

Pressing down to try and get past THE ALL-CONSUMING BARREL OF DOOM AND DESPAIR in Sonic 3. I never could get past it myself; I had to get my brother's friend to do it.

You know, I feel that this video is appropriate for this topic:

+ Watch video

Allosteric

The reason its obsolete is that there are no more simple arcade stores where I'm from. Even the ones that are left have preffered replacing my beloved games (Like Daytona USA) with a frickin' quarter-fed rocking pony! *snif*

isoo

side

Namely, slapping blowing on it and slapping our ass with the then large, plastic cart like a retarded monkey.

And dammit, it actually worked, every frickin time.

SnakeCL

load "*",8,1
run.

Having to hand type your cheat codes, as edits to programs.

Which fits in nicely with the C64 VC post from earlier.

meeeeemories....

Polite Society

petethepiratesquid

nez77

xnamkcor

Gam3r

Erwin

Knowing the difference between Exended and Enhanced memory for DOS and how to get the most of each.

Mastering manipulation of game assets on a flimsy disc paddle.

Being able to play games without the plastic keypad inserts (I still have some of those!).

Navigating through diagonals in Snafu.

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

Artki

Calculating which fleet composition would give you the highest percentage Anti-aircraft shootdown percentage in Guadalcanal Campaign.

Knowing the maps in Wizardry I so well that I could take a newly generated halfing thief into the dungeon and walk all the way down to the 9th level and not fight any monsters.

Artki

mdelcomyn

vamp07

tylerstyle

Evil Tortie's Mom

steve

jjpember

steve

kneehighspy

w0nd3r

When I would get angry during a ps2 game i was able to throw my controller into the air and have the usb cord pull it right back down into my hands.

TriFF51

angrypuppy

J-Fro

geekgrrl

munkah

sadly, i don't remember how to add in the mach 5 memory upgrade call line.

*tear*

jerrt

Benjo

zibby

GOD

Feet controlling on Turok 2 Deathmatches. That was awesome.

Krondonian

Anemone

Tramz

darthpepito

seirerman

i was going thru my old stuff a few months ago, trying to find all the old doom and quake levels i used to make, when i dropped THE main backup disc. um.. anyone know how to fix 100 meg zip discs? :)

geekgrrl

kingofallcosmos

Bokusatsu_Tenshi

Chanaluss

mrsmiter

alienhead

Taco Bell™

OR

A B A C A B B

Need to say more? By the way, i have read some comments talking about PS2...this is about retro, right?

theblob

SkutSkut

chemical_eng_mx

damn, I'm old

msondo

DaiMacculate

We had to play with the pagefile and virtual memory through dos even before we learned /dir in order to load Street Fighter on a 486.

Or, anyone remember pressing SHIFT in order to bypass windows to load DOOMII on a 486?

Fyren

MURDERFACE

edgeblade

I tell ya you had to love PC gaming back in the day
(for the record, I still have a number of the DOS games, including Raptor: Call of the Shadows on floppy).

relic1980

chaindrop

1) Boot-disks/tweaking autoexec.bat/config.sys files. An absolute necessity back in the 486 DX processor, 4 megs of RAM days. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally broke my computer trying to get games to work on it by tweaking.

2) Blowing into NES cartridges/NES. By all accounts, it shouldn't work, and the moisture should actually be bad for the game/system. But somehow, mysteriously, it always worked.

Strangelove

Jordan Lund

Easy? Try not no laugh.

LaughingCrow

I'm OK with that, but the AI has to be improved more. There were so many gambits that I wanted to be included in FFXII that would have allowed me to never care about my party members again.

In Persona 3, I loved that the party remembered what weaknesses and strengths the monsters had, so I didn't have to instruct them to only use certain attacks.

Still, I would like my party members to be smart enough to basically understand my personal strategy.

YotaruVegeta

noliferuin (PSN+XBL)

Damn those DOS games, anyone remebers STUNTS? I played a lot of that game. Also the turbo button making your pc go from 33 Mhz to 66 Mhz, Batch files memory managment, Video Card settings, it was try¿uly an adventure hell, messing around with DOS taught me more about computers (and Math, actually) than school ever did.

Messing around with the SNES carts so they would run, "just pull a little on the left side, good now we have two color bars running on the screen instead of only one!"

Also putting another NES cart on top of the first so the pressure would make it run.

Soleyu

I could defintiely make some cartridges work by blowing them. And I was very good at fighting games. The only people that beat me was my dad(numerous times) and my friend(Who used handicaps). However, my reflexes have gone down since then. Interestingly, I'm still pretty good at Killer Instinct.(C-C-C-C-combo breaker!!!)I was the best gamer at my daycare center.Nobody beat me at NBA Jam and Bases Loaded. I beat the bosses on Mega Man X and Super Mario World. Everyone would always ask for my help when playing the games. Those were the days...

KM91

keiichimorisato

jardmonkey

Fast forward 15-20 years to now and some of those may have even graduated to running their local arcade.

Oh wait, they've nearly all closed down now (-;

DreamcastRIP

Irenicus-the one and only

AstrayPenguin

There was an Apple II, ZX80, Gameboy brick and a SNES IIRC at the science museum.
Honestly it is really scary when you see your childhood in a museum case. Not aided in the least by the sarcastic comments of my girlfriend and my daughter.
OH! and nothing is cooler than a T-rex skeleton, the only photo's I took were four of the skull at the natural history museum so I could play the "what specimen is this copy from?" game.
@system 11
OOOOo get you mister flash with his 64K RAM pack when I was young we would have killed fo 64K we used to do 18hours a day at the computer shop coding until our fingers bled just for the whiff of a chance of 16K!

Oh and talking of the computer games shop, distracting the grumpy old bloke we all hated so a mate could alter what Frack! said on the game running in the shop.

Weirdwolf

Mokona

Run-punching in Marathon to do more damage and grenade jumping, because Marathon had no jump button.

Making half-pony-half-monkey monsters in SimLife.

etho

DreamcastRIP

I remember having fireball fights in Street Fighter where both sides would rapid-fire them as reliably as possible until they eventually collided at one side of the screen or the other and hit the other guy... but I bet everyone got bored enough to do that at some point.

At one time I could clear the hoverbikes in Battletoads. Probably not now.

I remember burning selfboot Dreamcast discs (wasn't rich enough to import in high school...) but I had to do it the long way where you burn one session, then record the LBA address of the session end, then manually burn a second one. That was quite the arcane art especially if manually converting a game to self-boot.

Saving and loading programs from audio tape.

Learning to speak adventure game command parser. ("Use key on door" THE DOOR SEEMS UNIMPRESSED "Use key on lock" YOU UNLOCK THE DOOR "walk door")

Finding the right slowdown factor to play older PC games on a newer PC.

Blocking and returning Winnuke-malformed packets when playing Diablo 1 online. Like it or not, it was neccesary. :/

Using a screwdriver or punch to "mod" import SNES carts for US systems.

fuchikoma

Mokona

Swiffer

That may have been one of the most awesome stories ever - you should send it in to Digital Press for the next collector's guide!

NYLatenite

I remember how cool I thought I was in first grade cause I was the only one that knew how to open the Dos games without the teacher's help.

Atsumi

- playing PC game 'the third courier' with my mother...wondering why we kept getting killed as soon as we walked outside the apartment...after months of this, she realized it's not a good idea to tromp around cold-war western germany with your weapon out.
- my mom trying to decipher the morse code cassette tape that came with 'the president is missing.' i don't think we ever cracked that.

btw, surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet: [www.theonion.com]

geekgrrl

Kevin Purdy

FelicioLostHorizonPT

That's the transformer I was talking about - ya screwed in the game line on one end, then attached it to the tv via those two wires and the screw-terminals on the back of the tv!

NYLatenite

my contribution: copy protection. i have this little cardboard wheel thing from monkey island 2 - you have to spin it to match up the ingredients the game randomly asks for every time you boot it. piracy is killing the gaming industry! i seem to remember passing round a photocopied page of passwords for the original x-wing so that we could all play my mate peter's copy without having to buy our own. copy protection copy schmrotection.

also- knowing which combination of SCUMM commands worked in any given situation. can't think of a specific example but i'm sure in games like... zak mckraken (and the alien mindbenders, no less) there were things like:

USE OVEN
doesn't work!
TURN ON OVEN
the oven turns on
USE OVEN
yay!

Juan

FelicioLostHorizonPT

NYLatenite

Karlott

SpcmnSpf

Strangely, I've always sucked at billiards...

PapaBear434

Also figuring out obscure things in LucasArts games (when they used to be good) like the fact you had to make Guybrush spit when the wind was blowing at your back.

EdgesRazor

I had to spend like 45 minutes convincing my friend's father that booting off a boot disk with different autoexec.bat and config.sys files wouldn't permanently modify his machine. Just to play the original NHL Hockey, which incidentally, was awesome!

teeth7

Darkmoon

GOD

Also still collecting extra lives before bosses - currently in Mushihimesama Futari Black Label, a 2D shooter from Cave released in the past 2 months.

I'd suggest their suggestions are coloured by only following the mainstream. Kudos for the Spectrum pokes thing though, I had a ZX-81 you had to type pokes into to enable the extra RAM, a MASSIVE 64k.

system11

ElektroDragon

ElektroDragon

icespot69

Also, games that load instantly, i.e. cartridges, is something that is surely missed from todays consoles. How damn slow is that blu-ray drive in my PS3...

DreamcastRIP

Weirdwolf

GOD

Robotube

icespot69

I owned Uridium on the Speccy and didn't find the first level that tough but you're right, that was one tough game! Played it on an emulator recently and its still cool even after all these years...

DreamcastRIP

Lying about game cheats and secrets.
Lying about fictitious games that don't really exist.
Fuck you internet, you ruined my lying capabilities.

Sunjammer

JayrodT

Weirdwolf

- Using RF adapters to hook up a console to an ancient TV's two-screw antenna input.

- Turning a knob on the television set to mechanically adjust the channel.

psychobaka

ferrets4free

Tei

I can also crit. path through Mass Effect in 2 hours and 40 minutes, but the "classicness" of that skill is debatable ;)

biokim

GOD

Daear

Yeah, I was a cheater back then. I still remember the game genie code for infinate gold in Final Fantasy.

GXSZPKSV + GXSXZKSV

I mostly remember this one, because both lines are similar and the sound play from enter KSV always reminded me of 'Three Blind Mice'.

Now a days I actually try to beat the games without cheating.

mooglegiant

Also, screw in rf adapters? Try attaching one of those to a 75->300 Ohm transformer, and then screwing down the 2 little forks to the back of the tv.

Do they still use quarters in arcades for anything? All the arcades i go to now are barcades that just use swipe cards. Now you have to stand in line to play instead of argue over whose quarter is whose.

ThatGuyOverThere

MissingNo

- having to press the 'video' button on our old B&W TV to be able to play anything.
- scouring my dad's copies of Big Blue Disk to get to the one game they had a month.
i'd say my obsolete skill is getting buttloads of lives with the slot machine game in SMB2...except i can still do it :D

i love this thread!

geekgrrl

captronj

GOD

Oh what fun that was..

xpnet

meekzzz

Or how about docking in Elite?

DreamcastRIP

Magma

fauxgodzilla

*To this day still not knowing what frigging buttons to press on the Half Pipe in California Games.

*Deleting my 100% Donkey Kong Country save in order to re-live its fun again. Not being able to beat past 75% since, on GBA, Snes or Emulator. Still hate minecart/stop'n'go levels.

AllOfUsAreLost

SuperPope

I am very good at contra (arcade version) I can beat it on one quarter and actually can beat it on 2 lives. Funny story about that I was having my best run ever on one guy and got to the final boss, and one of those face huggers got me, *sigh* needless to say I was pissed that I got that far on one guy and had to use a second to kill him.

Being good at contra is an underused skill

Also I could run through Full Throttle like no ones business

GrooveChampion

I have a horrible memory, that's the most I can remember :x

fauxgodzilla

"Where's the flute in Zelda?"
"Have you got any passwords for Metroid you can read out to me?"

Often they didn't even tell me their name, and I'd get several calls a night. I really enjoyed it, and my parents thought it was hilarious. This was obviously before the Internet and before Nintendo Power was still the subscription-only "Nintendo Fun Club News".

Then came strategy guides and the Internet. My fame dwindled and the calls stopped, finally dropping me into obscurity...*sniff*

SuperPope

The other related skill was to find out which video rental and electronics stores and which staff members at the stores didn't throw you out for playing their video games for 6 hours after school every day. Me and my gaming gypsy friends used to know the hours of certain kid-friendly people on those stores.

Good times, good times.

Pixelantes Anonymous

Playing Dreamcast's Soul Calibur with the Fishing Rod Controller!

DreamcastRIP

supercrap

chemical_eng_mx

"Error at line 2687"

you would go back, sort out the error you made type run again!

"error at line 2821"

Eventually you would get a crappy spaceinvaders clone!

i took great enjoyment in changing the game code, so instaed of it saying "Game Over" when you died it would tell you to "FU** OFF"

AH! memories!

GOD

DreamcastRIP

Giant Enemy Crab

If you had a joystick with auto-fire, there was a spot close to the bottom of the screen slightly left (if I remember correctly), where you could leave your little commando dude firing upwards and you would never die.

Leaving the game like that overnight or during school and then come back to play it afterwards without losing any of your lives was the shizznit. I got much respekk from my homeboys at school for that :) Oh, and the high-score was something else, too.

Pixelantes Anonymous

Geckosan

Making little cardboard pointy things to keep the button pressed down on the ps1 so I could swap in the japanese games. What was the game I used to go through this hell the most for? Bloody Roar......

Importing a chinese LCD TopGun with horrenodous sensor bars that go bad after limited use just so I could play all the old lightgun games on an LCD tv. Anyone know if they have drivers for the time crisis 3 guncon?

cokpendejo

Darkmoon

Best thread in ages btw

DreamcastRIP

I can "rapid-fire" manually faster than the "rapid fire" feature on the NES Advantage and almost as fast as the "rapid-fire" on the TG-16 gamepads.

I can grab a handful of quarters and tell you the exact amount within 1 or 2 quarters.

silkylove

chemical_eng_mx

I also used to modify the Basic source code of a few C64 games to get past difficult parts, or give you an edge over the "AI".

I am SOOO glad I don't have to tweak the autoexec.bat and config.sys files for memory management on my PC any more. That was just horrible.

Pixelantes Anonymous

roogi

firesign

NYLatenite

firesign

Geckosan

LoopyChew

Also, in the picture up top, is that kid playing Red Raper? Is that why Nintendo doesn't like third party developers?

Señor Vorpal Kickass'o

def PD

shufflemoomin

zanzibarlegend

Furious_Liver

Up, Down, Left, Right, A+Start (Easy one)
Cockadooledoo (Harder one, 10 points if you can guess ;)

Memorising all the secret locations on all levels in doom's first two acts (never did it with Inferno though!)

Filling in the map for Zelda1 on the NES using a pencil, because part of the included one was blanked out.

Having the correct timing and finger dexterity to pull off the hyper knee attack at will in double dragon 2.

Interesting nearly 20 years later I still have the double dragon 2 theme tune permanently fused into my eardrum which plays 24 hours a day (along with green hill zone from the megadrive version of sonic 1... sometimes they intermix with each other o_O).

Geckosan

...Does anyone even know of Heretic? I feel like I'm the only one.

I also beat doom when I was in kindergarten, but I cheated like a mother*&cker so I guess it doesn't really count. Still, I felt pretty damn proud as it was still hard for my 6-year-old brain even with cheat codes. That damn rabbit at the end gave me nightmares for a week.

I got pretty far into doom 2 and would have finished it sometime in the middle of 1st grade, but my mom found out what my dad was letting me play so I never got to. Man that game was cool, I still remember this one room where a bunch of imps ambushed me and I screamed. It was great.

eskilla

kwant

Ah memories.. =)

Fonzy

Furious_Liver

it's gotta be

or as a subset of that, tracking down that last unwanted TSR, to get enough conventional memory free to get my game on

directhex

Beating Street Fighter 2 on the Amiga with a one button joystick!

YUP! ONE BUTTON JOYSTICK!!!

I never got the hang of the console and arcade versions, but I absolutely ruled SF2 on the Amiga. Pulling off all those special moves using a squeaking quickshot joystick..

or how about....

pulling out the stick from my Competition Pro and replacing it with a long and thin pencil, in order to get better leverage for Skate or Die and Summer Games...

Never mind the blisters I got from that on my palms...

little_dragon

Cheat codes

Playing street fighter for real when bored

Balancing the action replay precariously so my Japanese copy of Paradious would work on the Snes.

RobTheBuilder

Absent Blue

noliferuin (PSN+XBL)

I also used to be able to beat people using just my right hand in Soul Calibur.

Oh, oh, oh, I can also beat Double Dragon on one credit(elbows all the way baby!).

TokeYo

Zippidydoodaa

That and hiding grenades in flowerpots. That's not a skill I use much anymore.

bateleur

TheAmericnDream

Darkmoon

CyberG4

Nintenboy01

An obsolete skill I do not miss are key binds for effective team-based communication. Having to make cfgs for each map was a pain. Even worse, if clan matches spanned different maps having one cfg have effective communication binds for all maps was a pain. Remembering which key did what on the fly on first use? Bah. Voice chant wins.

Tetelestia

z3ntn3l

i never played contra 4, so i don't know how hard it was.

After a few playthroughs on contra 1 with the 30 lives, i had every pattern down and could finish the game without dying very easily. the other day i saw this post on kotaku (i think) about the most difficult games and contra was #2. that baffled me...i just must have been very good at just that game, because i pretty much suck at everything else when compared to online leaderboards for current games.

dh4645

L_K_M