One of the worst gaming experiences I had as a kid was dealing with things that didn't work. I'm old school enough to remember blowing on your cartridges to make games work again. But, what happens when you can't fix it?
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That happened to me one day when the family's Atari Jaguar blew a fuse when I tried to turn it on. My siblings and I could smell something was burning. We had plans to play some Raiden and then take turns taking stabs at Doom. Well, the console breaking meant we had to change plans. Good thing we didn't lack other alternatives.
Lucky for me, I wasn't blamed for the incident. It bummed me out that it finally gave up the ghost. Today, the system is very much collectible and pricey, but nothing astronomical. Last I checked, my parents still kept the game cartridges and their inserts intact. So yeah, at least we preserved some of the "antiques".
So, that's a hardware failure. Not much I could do about that unless I had the skills to repair/replace the damage. The more frustrating gaming experience I had growing up was being unable to complete a game. Not because the game was too difficult, but because the game had a serious glitch.
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Enter Turok: Rage Wars. I had a lot of fond memories playing this game with family and friends. I still remember my favorite load out: Mag 60, Shotgun, Flare Gun, Plasma Rifle, and Grenade Launcher. I played this game so much that I obtained all the medals/achievements I could... except the co-op and "frag tag" ones.
Frag tag, was a game mode where a player was "it", like the game tag. "It" can be a monkey or chicken that could not utilize weapons and items, but could pick up health. The other players try to kill "it" to score points until "it" finds a way to transform back and make another player "it".
There was this game breaking bug that would cause mission failure in co-op campaign mode. No matter what you did, your mission always end in failure. Unfortunately, it is impossible to skip the last frag tag stage in campaign mode. This bug seemed to also have prevented you to get any of the frag tag medals in multiplayer.
So, there I was at 43/50 medals, but could not complete it because the game wouldn't let me. Despite of that, I tried to enjoy the game as much as I could. It was the first time the completionist side of me felt completely ripped off.
This was before today's trend of constant patches and DLCs. This was also back in the early 2000's when internet wasn't as part of our lives as it is today. I didn't know how to look for information. I didn't even know if it was our particular cartridge or something else.
It was not until years later that I discovered a workaround to that issue. Turned out, you could send the black cartridge back to Acclaim Games, and they would replace it with a gray one. Here's an article about it. The gist of it is that the black cartridges were defective products.
https://www.cbr.com/turok-rage-wars-rarest-n64-game/
The younger me would have been livid reading that article. The current me laments the fact that I didn't find out about it sooner. I could have gotten a gray cartridge, which is a collectible item now.
In the end, those experiences felt crummy when they first happened. Toys were literally broken. As an adult, I came to realize how costly those inconveniences could be. They are not life changing amounts of money, but it made me wish we took care of things better.
On the other hand, my family and I had great fun with the Atari Jaguar and
Turok: Rage Wars. You can't buy those experiences and moments.