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Tuesday, 7 January 2025

Discussion Point: The Best Presents

 Written by The TAG Team


Now that the holidays are over, let's talk about the loot you've gotten over the years.  Remember when you were a kid, opening up presents on Christmas, Hanukkah, your birthday, or another occasion?  How about the joy of being given a big box, the mystery (and perhaps anxiety) over what might or might not be in it?

Did it ever turn out to be a game?  Or some new, upgraded hardware to play those games with?  What was the best gift like that you've ever gotten?  Or, if you're a better person than we are, the best game or hardware you've given someone else as a gift.

Regale us with "los regalos" from holidays past in the comments below!

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5 comments:

  1. Alex Romanov7 January 2025 at 00:14

    I got PC DOS big box games (and later W95, W98 and ME) between 1991 and 2000, around 80 games in total for my birthday, christmas, epiphany (reyes around here), and day of the child (does that even exist elsewhere?). Note that I still got gifts for child's day until being middle aged, I never oposed. I also got a lot of pirated games (thousands) but those don't count of course.

    I distinctly remember getting Loom at my birthday on 1991, probably my first legal game, and christmas of 1992 The Legend of Kyrandia. In 1994, I got Goblins 3 for the tooth mouse (tooth fairy elsewhere?, around here it's a mouse called Perez).

    Also, I remember getting around 10 to 15 games in each trip to the USA (I went several times in the 90s), I remember getting Mortal Kombat 3 for christmas in 1995, a AAA game that I think it was 60 dollars. That CD didn't leave my cd drive for months.

    Simon the sorcerer 2 was a highly sought gift for child's day 1996, particularly because it came on CD, and translated to spanish. Around the year 2000 I used to run one of the biggest abandonware latinamerican sites on the web, and I ripped and uploaded my Simon 2 game to it. I'm sure the copies floating around on the net nowadays are my ripped game (I removed all the voices for easy downloading back then)

    My last game on PC with box, was in 2000, Escape from Monkey Island (only MI game I have non pirate)

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  2. arcanetrivia7 January 2025 at 06:18

    I don't have a response to the actual question (probably I have received big-box games as presents, but I don't have any specific memories), but nice use of UHF gif. Or maybe not so nice, since "what's in the box" in that case is.... nothing! Stupid!

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  3. Anonymous7 January 2025 at 06:39

    the Atari ST bundle I opened when I was 7 still has a special place in my heart

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  4. Laukku7 January 2025 at 20:56

    One of the most useful has been a VHS digitisation device, to digitally preserve rare material from my family's tapes such as certain editions of films (primarily Disney stuff like Bambi's 1969 Finnish dub, and in some cases the pre-digital editions have better colours and such), TV recordings like the Finland-Swedish dub of The Animals of Farthing Wood, and custom-produced VHSes not in wider distribution from events my family members participated in.

    For this Christmas I bought myself a MiSTer FPGA (specifically the affordable MiSTer Pi clone, which is dumbly named as it has nothing to do with Raspberry Pi). The FPGA chip physically rearranges itself to become a clone of a given console on the hardware level (which has some advantages over traditional software emulation), and it has analog output so I can retrogame on the same CRT/VHS combo device I've been digitising VHSes on. :-)

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  5. DavidXNewton8 January 2025 at 01:45

    I think it was 1996 - my siblings and I had been playing the shareware version of One Must Fall for months ever since discovering it on a demo CD, and for Christmas we got... Rise of the Robots 2. I'll say no more about that

    But in the same pile of presents was Simon the Sorcerer 2 - my mum didn't like it because it was rude, but I still think the hand-drawn-to-digitized-VGA graphics are absolutely stunning. I powered through it over the next several months with no Internet to help out, and it remains the only adventure game I've ever completed in my life without consulting a walkthrough at any point!

    I've only just discovered your blog but I've been catching up reading about your experiences with adventures past - thank you for all your efforts and I'm looking forward to seeing what this year brings!

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