The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did

 

If you play games long enough your bound to have done something stupid at some point.  Some kind of dire mis-play in an online game or some stupid decision in a single player one, it happens to the best of us.  One of my favorite Braindead Gamer Moments can be found on Game Center CX where Shinya Arino, the host, is playing Bonks Adventure.  He enters a bonus stage, jumps off the ledge to the first platform and immediately overshoots it and eats shit, ending the stage and getting nothing for his trouble, hilarious.

That's just a silly mistake though, my personal dumbest gaming moment I feel is far worse because it was influenced by an advert and entirely self inflicted.  The picture at the top of this post is an advert for Playstation 1 memory cards.  Just in case some zoomer stumbles on this post, the PS1 didn't have an internal memory so if you didn't have a card, you couldn't save your game.  You may notice that at the bottom of the image it says "Try beating Final Fantasy VII without it!".  This of course is because FF7 is a big ass game and the idea of beating it in one go without a card is unthinkable to most.  I however, was quite young and instead of being sold the idea of going out and buying a memory card I instead took it as a challenge.  "Fuck you, reverse side of the manual, I'll fukken show you", I thought. So for years I would play Final Fantasy 7 without ever saving.  I would sit and play and then at the end of a session I would turn off the PS1 and then start from the beginning every time I came back.  What made this even dumber was that I owned 2 fuckin memory cards for my PS1.  It wasn't like I didn't have a card and couldn't just give up the idea of finishing in one go, I was just to stupid to realize how long a 3 disc game was and too stubborn to ever give up and so it took me an embarassingly long time to beat Final Fantasy 7 for the first time.

What made this worse was that this mindset extended into other games.  Another title that took me an embarassingly long time to finish was Zelda: Ocarina of Time.  Even though that DID have internal memory I was so pressed by the challenge at the bottom of that FF7 advert that every time I came back to OoT I would delete my file and start over.  I think the furthest I ever got for a long, LONG time was the end of the Forest Temple.

If my memory serves then the tipping point for me breaking this habit was when Final Fantasy 9 came out.  I think that was around the time I wised up and though "yeah you right, I can't beat it without one" and started saving like a normal human being.  I spent an embarassingly long amount of time not beating many games because I refused to save because I wanted to show a marketing team whos boss.

Ironically, in my adult years I have taken up speedrunning and there are now many games I can finish in one sitting.  Hell, even big  RPGs like Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn I am now capable of finishing in a single sitting but that doesn't change the fact that child me refusing to use saves was probably the dumbest gaming releated thing I have ever done