What game do you most regret selling or trading in?

0
72

Woe is shortsighted me

I have a troubled history with collecting games. Growing up, I lived in one console household until both my brother and I were in high school. So when we got our NES, that is all we had. When it came time to move up to the SNES, we sold our 8-bit wonder and all of its games to pay for the new system. When the PlayStation came into fashion, we traded in the SNES to Funcoland to pay for it. It wasn’t until the PlayStation 2 and Dreamcast were available that my brother and I were able to have our own consoles as well as our own TV sets.

With my Dreamcast, I finally had a choice. As a teenager with a job, I didn’t need to trade in anything to pay for something new, but there was a problem: the practice had already imprinted on my brain. Three generations of starting from scratch will do that. So I kept with my habit of trading in the old for the new. When the Dreamcast was discontinued, I traded it in and put the money towards a GameCube. The GameCube led to the Wii and the Wii to the Wii U.

I’ve wasted a lot of fucking money on games I should never have purchased, and I’ve wasted far too much on games I gave up on before I had the chance to truly experience them. In the Destructoid Slack chat, this topic was brought up as I lamented my decision to trade in my copy of Cubivore —stupid, stupid CJ! — and I thought it would make a great topic for a Destructoid Discusses question. I was going to talk about my regret in getting rid of that game, or Opoonawhich I somehow bought brand new for $9, but as I write this lede I realize I’m still not over trading in my Dreamcast.

Fuck me I was carelessly shortsighted with that one! I had the system, two of those awesome VMU memory cards, two controllers and the following kick-ass games: Sonic Adventure, Sonic Adventure 2, Marvel vs. Capcom, NFL 2K1, Crazy Taxi,Ready 2 Rumble Boxing andSpace Channel 5. All of them wonderful games, all of them I would play today, all of them gone. My anger at Sega for discontinuing the product so soon after I got it for Christmas clouded my judgment and made me miss out on so many other titles I could have enjoyed. I didn’t even get a chance to try Jet Set Radio or Shenmue.

I have a lot of trade-in regrets, but nothing causes me to lose sleep like my idiotic decision to get rid of my Dreamcast collection.

Chris Carter

HawkingFinal Fantasy VIIkind of represents the lament of trading in any of my PS1 games as a whole. Two words — Greatest Hits.

My first FFVII clear came from a friend’s copy, by way of disc trading in school. I’d clear Disc 1, someone else would swap me Disc 2, and that’s how seven of us beat VII. It was glorious as we’d share stories of uncovering secret items or regale tales of bosses we each needed to prepare for, and a year later I decided to buy my own version — only to trade it in a year later.

It was short-sighted, as I needed the cash for Final Fantasy VIII, and figured “hey, I can just buy it again one day.” Except my new purchase was a green disc version, a decision that haunts me to this day as I stare into the abyss of my case whenever I check in on my collection— commenters won’t let me forget it either as they constantly ask about it!

Pixie The Fairy

I don’t know if I could ever narrow this down to just one game, as I’ve traded countless games and systems at this point, a habit I’ve only really broken this last year. Well, and having a steady, reliable income helps you keep things you like.

But if I ever really regretted selling off anything it was my PlayStation 2 and the mountain of RPGs I had for it and putting it toward a Wii in anticipation of Metroid Other M.

Let me clarify that statement a bit. I don’t particularly regret trading away the PS2 itself. It was one of the older models I constantly had to repair to keep the DVD lens in alignment because I sure as hell wasn’t paying the price of a console for someone at Sony to fix it. The video output was also somehow capable of overheating after long periods of play and the video output signal would be scrambled if I reset the system, meaning if I wanted to play anything else within the next half hour, I had to stick the PS2 in the freezer for a few minutes.

So that specific PS2 was a piece of crap. I still regard the platform itself the best thing since the SNES. I don’t regret getting the Wii, either. I really just regret trading all those PS2 RPGs forMetroid Other M.

I also regret The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess being my first Wii game, but how could that not be disappointing when my last finished PS2 game was Okami? It just did everything better, even if it overstayed it welcome by, oh, 20 hours or so.

But the Mario Galaxy games, Metroid Prime Trilogy, No More Heroes and more washed away the disappointment. The Wii had its fair share of gems and Xenoblade was excellent.

But all those RPGs for Other M? Ugh. Even as middling as some of the Xenosaga or Devil Summoner games were, I’d take all their flaws over Other M. I don’t think I even have to explain how awful that game is, as it is the living embodiment of regret.

Chris Moyse

Having worked in game retail for years, I’ve always been fortunate enough to be able to buy, resell and borrow games frequently, for cheap, so I’ve never really regretted any I’ve sold. I do, however, really regret the loss of my Baywatch pinball machine. No, seriously.

One thing about pinball is you should never judge a machine by its theme, and despite the campy aesthetics of the title, this SEGA developed cabinet from ’95 is really solid and a lot of fun. It has a ton of modes, great sound and music, a supersized Dot Matrix screen with nicely animated clips and an inventive, colourful playfield.

It’s a great, underrated machine and I sadly had to sell mine (which I’d put a lot of work into restoring) when the wolf was at the door. He’s always at the door. Sigh, I can still hear David Hasselhoff’s score call-outs ringing in my ears…

Rich Meister

It’s hard to pin down one game in particular. I grew up on the habit of trading in games. I had to play anything I could get my hands on and as a kid with no income I would either wait for Christmas or my birthday or sell the old for the new.

As an adult, I’ve held on to all my games, but the one I miss the most is probably my black label Final Fantasy IX. You see Final Fantasy IX was the first Final Fantasy game I beat and it will always hold a special place for me.

It’s still a game I fire up every few years for nostalgia sake and seeing that green greatest hits label always makes me sigh. In a perfect world, I’d go back and warn a younger me that certain games are worth saving, if not all.

Cory Arnold

After finishing the story in Grand Theft Auto Vback near release, I only fiddled around in the online mode for a short while before selling the game on eBay for extra cash. I may have been a bit annoyed because connection issues made me do that first race with Lamar like three times.

But over the years the insane amount of updates and addition to the online mode including Tron-inspired light cycles and a vehicle Battle Royalemode have continually made me regret getting rid of the game. I’ve felt like I missed out on a lot the past few years, and unlike single player games it’s not as simple as just picking it up and playing it; I’ve probably missed the boat on a lot of it.

Peter Glagowski

There are a few game series that mean a whole lot to me and one of those happens to be Super Mario. The NES classics were essentially my childhood and I even loved watching the ridiculous Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World cartoons. I also wasn’t an exceedingly rich person, so I tended to trade in games to get newer ones.

One of the games that became a casualty of my trade-in craze was Super Mario Sunshine for the Gamecube. While I don’t care for the game with regards to the Mario series, I always felt incomplete without the disc in my home. Until I eventually reacquired a used copy, I always had the sting of disappointment for getting rid of Mario’s more tropical outing. Even if it was one of the weaker games in the series, it is still a valuable and entertaining part of the pudgy plumber’s legacy.

I pride myself on having complete collections to spontaneously do series playthroughs of. I don’t need to necessarily have the original versions (lord knows I don’t with Zelda), but being able to grab a random entry from a given franchise and then playing through them in differing orders was impossible for me with Mario until I purchased Sunshine again.

Salvador G-Rodiles

When I look back to the games I traded in, one of my regrets is related to a Nintendo 64 game I enjoyed as a kid. As a person who likes Yoshi, I fell in love with Japan System Supply’s Chameleon Twist since you played as a character who fights and platforms with its tongue.

Thinking back to the day I parted ways with it, I was going through a phase where I thought I grew out of the game. When I overcame this delusion. I learned about the importance of not taking things for granted. Seeing thatChameleon Twist never came out on the Wii and Wii U Virtual Console, I interpret this as a punishment for not appreciating my video game collection more.

Thankfully, I’m satisfied with remembering the hero’s interesting moves, such as using a tongue stand that can connect with a high jump. Even though I sold other games after this incident, I’ll never let any of my treasures go through the same fate as Chameleon Twist.

Josh Tolentino

I’ve got two stories of regret to share, the first for selling, and the second for NOT selling. The first isn’t even really a sale. Back in grade school, I lent my SNES and copies of Final Fantasy III(VI) and Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage(complete with a sweet red cartridge) to a girl I had a crush on. What she failed to tell me was that she was moving to Australia the next month. I never saw my SNES again, and now I can’t remember the girl’s name.

The next story is about my NOT selling an original copy of Final Fantasy Tacticson the PS1. I received it as a present from a visiting relative, who had heard how I spent a lot of money pirating Final Fantasy VII(back in the day burned CD copies of PS1 games would cost a week’s allowance per disc). I didn’t enjoy the game very muchbecause I was a dumb idiot kid that didn’t know how to enjoy grid-based games (ironically, playing Fallout a few months later would teach me what I was missing), and I considered selling it. Had I known more about things like eBay at the time, I would’ve made quite a bit of money, as physical copies of Final Fantasy Tacticswere vanishingly rare and valuable all the way until the release of War of the Lions, its enhanced remake on the PSP.

*****

I didn’t even think about the possibility of being upset you traded in a game only to rebuy it later with an ugly “Player’s Choice” label. Hell, I remember trading in Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrowonly to rebuy it later with that stupid Konami’s Best box art. That copy, along with the rest of my DS Castlevania collection, was accidentally donated to Goodwill when it was put in the wrong box while moving. Yet another regret.

Once again, we decided to open this question up to the community because I really wanted to see what types of regrets we all had.

Rad Party God:The one I regret the most is Tengen’s Tetris for the NES. I traded it in to get some money to buy a PSX, I didn’t care back then, but a few years later, I heard the game was one of the rarest NES games and it’s highly sought after in the collector’s market.

Snorlaxowns:I sold S.C.A.T. on NES for like less than a dollar in 2014 or 2015. ? Yeah…

Michael Giff:“OH MY GOD WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO!” “You GOT to make A DECISION HERE!”, ahh being screamed at my fake Samuel L Jackson made,Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis worth the price of admission alone.

Genesis was a park building sim. Where your built your own Jurassic Park and open it to the public, going through a variation of challenges to keep your Dinosaurs happy and your visitors off the menu.

I must have spent hundreds of hours in this game and I was really quite fond of it… maybe too fond. At one point I played the game so much I felt comfortable that there was nothing else new to see or experiment with. The game had a pretty rigid cap on resources. Only X amount of sidewalk, Y amount of electric fence, and as a kid that was really frustrating. So when I traded it in for ten bucks I thought nothing of it.

But as the years went by I started to miss the game and am always sticker shocked to see the game going for well over a hundred dollars on ebay… Nostalgia can be very expensive at times.

Tohsaka:Kirby’s Super Star on the SNES. Forced hand to do so. Spent about 70 bucks for it. Had to get rid of it per basically what my mother said. Got all of 4 bucks back for it from GS. Worth so much more than that.

Voodoome:Oh man … this list could be a mile long. So many mistakes made when I was a dumb kid trying to upgrade to the latest and greatest system. The SNES to N64 transition was especially painful. So many Square RPGs sold away for next to nothing.

My crowning achievement in idiocy, however, is when I gave away all my PS1 and PS2 games to impress my then girlfriend. She hated videogames and I wanted to convince her that I had grown beyond the need of such trivial things. It’s hard to remember what was there exactly, but I had Haunting Ground which was a game I liked a lot and a bunch of SE and Atlus stuff.

We ended up getting married a couple years later, and I resumed the hobby. I walked into our apartment one afternoon after work and she was sitting on the floor tearing my Gamecube games to ribbons with a can opener. She also took a hammer to our TV. There were bodies everywhere. It was like a war scene with ripped apart classics like Skies of Arcadia and Fire Emblem torn to shreds and scattered around the floor. I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan, and this incident gave me more PTSD then those deployments combined.

We ended up getting divorced a couple years after that. My current wife enjoys games as much as I do, so I suppose it all worked out. She even had Haunting Ground in her personal library! I have replaced mostly everything that I have lost over the years, but man did those losses sting at the time.

TysonOfTime:When I was much younger and less intelligent, I traded in my copy of Dragon Quest Heroes Rocket Slime.

I use that experience as a reminder to never trade a game in again.

Electric Reaper:Alienators Evolution Continues on the GBA. You had 1 life and no continues, but a pretty decent health bar and a lot of health pickups.

iam16bit:Well I keep most of the games I buy but there is one I did regret selling. It was called Azure Dreams.

For those not familiar with the game, it’s like if Pokemon, Chocobo’s Dungeon and Harvest Moon had a baby. You have to traverse a randomly generated dungeon located in a massive tower in the middle of the desert looking for monster eggs to hatch, raise and sell. All the while attracting new visitors to your town and courting one of the many women in town to marry.

Well at the time I was playing it, I was also strapped for cash. So once I finished it, I did what I thought was a good decision and sold it. Then a few years later I got in the mood to play it again and started kicking myself for selling it. Eventually, I found a copy online and every once in a while I like to give it a go, it really is one of the most underrated games on the PS1.

RenaudB90:Rogue Squadron 2.

If I could invent time travel and go back in time to slap my 18 year old self, I would. It’s true that I was between jobs and needed the store credit, Fallout 3 being around the corner.

Maybe if I still had Rogue Squadron 2 and its fantastic arcade style dog-fighting action to keep me warm at night, I wouldn’t have turned to drinking.

Not that trying to get to get a Gold Medal on Razor Rendezvous again is any healthier than a near decade of alcoholism.

Also RenaudB90:Aww, great, that reminds me I also exchanged Path of Radiance, Tales of Symphonia and Harvest Moon A Wonderful Life that day, too.

And the EB Games clerk gave me a French Copy of Fallout 3 after all that, the bastard. And I only noticed when I got back home and started playing.

jasondm300:I dont trade games in anymore, but the one I do regret is Avalon Code for the DS. It had a really weird mechanic where you could add attributes to everything. Weapons you would want to add power ups and elements and enemies you could weaken. It was really weird but pretty cool. I could order it, but it is pretty expensive.

RiffRaff:I’ve learned my lesson and stopped trading games in. I think this trade went towards some Working Designs game, so not a total bust, but it’s a game my collection is sorely missing.

Lex:I regret trading in Metroid Prime 3 Corruption some time after I got Metroid Prime Trilogy for the Wii.

For some stupid reason the discs were switched and I now still have MP3 in a MPT box while someone is now a happy owner of MPT in a MP3 box… and it took me at least two years to notice that when I wanted to replay MP1-3 at one point.

Not sure if it’s the worst one but it’s the one I remember first because it’s so stupid.

Jiraya:All my Master System games and console for a single SNES and them all my SNES carts and SNES for a single ps1.

SHAME ON YOU POVERTY! LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!

Samhain:I just sold 23 PS3 games for $75. I feel good about it now but I’m sure Ill regret it later

*****

The most shocking thing admitted by the Destructoid community here is that it took a couple of years after that massacre for Voodoome to get divorced.