I had Duck Hunt but didn’t have the gun to play it with - nor the knowledge that I needed the gun. Every now and then I would try and fail to figure out how to play the game.
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
Back in the day we would often rent games for a weekend and sometimes we would get stuck at some point. There was one particular game that me and my friends really liked (Maui Mallard) on the genesis, but there was one specific point we didn’t know what to do. Every now and then we would rent the game again for a weekend in hopes of figuring it out. The game had basically three buttons IIRC: attack, jump and special. You could also press attack and special at the same time for a different attack. So one day I was playing it and reached the point that we all got stuck, and kept trying to figure out how to jump out of the area I was in (there was a clear exit, but too high up). My brother saw me struggling and mockingly said: “come on, do a super jump” and that made me think: can I do special + jump too? I tried it and then learned that this combination allowed climbing through short gaps (and this was the very first such gap in the game - anywhere else the combination did nothing). I was the neighborhood hero for a while thanks to that.
We had tons of pirated Commodore 64 games. Some single-player games became two-player with my little brother; “OK, I’ll drive the car while you try every key on the keyboard.”
I had Duck Hunt but didn’t have the gun to play it with - nor the knowledge that I needed the gun. Every now and then I would try and fail to figure out how to play the game.
So to me, Duck Hunt is a game about a dog that laughs at you.
No no, that part is still true.
This must have been a common thing, because you’re the 2nd person in the comments to mention this!
It’s funny now to think that if you couldn’t figure out a game pre-internet, you just didn’t get to play it. I know that happened to me plenty.
(edit: curse you, Batman on Sega Genesis!)
Back in the day we would often rent games for a weekend and sometimes we would get stuck at some point. There was one particular game that me and my friends really liked (Maui Mallard) on the genesis, but there was one specific point we didn’t know what to do. Every now and then we would rent the game again for a weekend in hopes of figuring it out. The game had basically three buttons IIRC: attack, jump and special. You could also press attack and special at the same time for a different attack. So one day I was playing it and reached the point that we all got stuck, and kept trying to figure out how to jump out of the area I was in (there was a clear exit, but too high up). My brother saw me struggling and mockingly said: “come on, do a super jump” and that made me think: can I do special + jump too? I tried it and then learned that this combination allowed climbing through short gaps (and this was the very first such gap in the game - anywhere else the combination did nothing). I was the neighborhood hero for a while thanks to that.
NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the original so many wasted weekends…BattleToads too.
We had tons of pirated Commodore 64 games. Some single-player games became two-player with my little brother; “OK, I’ll drive the car while you try every key on the keyboard.”