[General Discussion] The Pride & Joy Of Your Video Game Collection

I have an original boxed copy of both Suikoden 1 and 2, PAL versions. I'm not especially proud of them but I will enjoy selling them for a couple of hundred pounds to some nerd on eBay one day.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I had no idea Alundra was a rare game, I've got a copy of that and Vagrant Story too. My N64 is the limited edition Pokemon Stadium version (Coloured yellow and blue with pictures of Pokemon on it) which I guess is a bit different and I quite often wear the t-shirt I got with Frontlines, mainly because the references to the actual game are pretty subtle.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Qwarky

Alundra is rare? I don't like the game (it's like a depressing version of Zelda with all the charm and sense of exploration removed ), so it's certainly not a pride and joy of my collection, but it's there on the shelf. Along with Vagrant Story and Grandia 1.

I prefered Alundra to any of the Zelda games, probably becuase it was a bit more bleak and not all smiley and colourful. It was also far, far harder.

Edit: You can get Alundra on eBay for £2 at the moment.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I know, I know, I just can't get past the happy funtime Nintendo day-glo colours, the excessive use of small children as main characters and all the nonsense with flutes.

I loved Link to the Past when I first played it but thought Ocarina of time was just cloying in it's saccharine presentation. Since then, I played most of Minnish Cap (Which was too samey and basically LttP with slightly different layouts), watched a mate play Wind Waker for quite a while (Which features the most boring sailing around all the time mechanic I've seen since Suikoden 4) and watched the same mate play a bit of Twilight Princess (Which looked to me like OoT with shoe-horned in "Dark" bits and some furry fan service). I've actually got a copy of Majora's Mask, I might give it a go one day. At the end of the day though, I'm simply more of a God of War and Ghost Recon person than I am a Zelda person. The incessant air of cheeriness that pervades all Nintendo games really puts me off and lessens any sort of pathos you might experience as a result of in game tragedy. I'll take the end of Shadow of the Collossus or the escape from Soniere Prison in Suikoden over Link riding his horse with a sad face any day of the week.

How ya doing, buddy?

Yeah but all that doom and gloom is only really apparent towards the end of the game, by which point you've been jogging around the excessively jolly game world for so long that it doesn't really seem that bad. The games I mentioned up there have a constant theme of struggle and failure throughout, right up to (And including in the case of SotC) the end. OoT for me was a kid running about trying to stop the charicature of a bad guy from taking over the world with his colourful magic spells.

Alundra isn't a brilliant game at all but at the time it came out, it was a nice enough change to be interesting and challenging enough for me to want to beat it just to say I did. With the Zelda games, once you've played one you've pretty much played them all in my opinion and it wasn't such a great experience the second time to warrant revisting agan.

If OoT hadn't come out at a time when there were so many awesome (And more grown up) games out on the Playstation I probably would have loved it but as it was, I had grown out of Nintendo by then and was enjoying games like Soul Blade and Tomb Raider and Wipeout so the appeal of what on the surface looked like a kids' game was pretty minimal.

I was speaking idiomatically.