I used to be a gamer, but then I took a metaphorical arrow to the eye. [/sorry attempt to be clever with old meme from a franchise I’ve never played).
But yeah, I gamed a lot back when I had a working eye, but after my good retina detached in 2012, I’ve done a lot less gaming. It’s just so hard to find games a blind person can play without saintly patience, and even when other blind people say a game is playable or accessible, both terms that can be highly subjective, it’s hard to convince one self it’s worth dropping money on a game you can’t be positive won’t be a total pain in the anatomy to play, much more so convince oneself that dropping a few hundred on new hardware will grant access to enough blind playable games.
Anyways, some games I miss playing include:
Legend of Zelda
Ys
Disgaea
Pokemon
Tetris
Mario
Sonic
Also, I could be a bit of a completionist as well… in Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, I had gotten to over 90% on the item record… and to put that in perspective, The first Disgaea game has 8 classes of weapon(Fists, Swords, Spears, Bows, Axes, Guns, Staves, and Monster weapons) along with Armor and a few miscellaneous categories… and there are 40 ranks of weapon for each weapon class, 40 ranks of armor, 10 ranks each of HP healling, SP(the game’s magic energy) healing and Combo HP/SP healing item along with a few other classes of item, and nearly every item in the game comes in three rarities, Common(7/8 chance of an item being common), Rare(3/32 chance of an item being rare) and Legendary(1/32 chance of an item being Legendary) and the in-game check list has separate check boxes for each rarity of every item… and while a lot of these can be purchased from the store in the game’s hub and the store displays a new icon on items not yet checked off, the store maxes out at like Rank 35 for weaspons and armor and like 7 or 8 for healing and miscellaneous items and some of the highest rank items can only be obtained by delving into the Item World of a high rank item, with the Item World being a randomly generated dungeon you can only exit after clearing 10 floors unless you have a special consumable in your inventory and the rarity of the item determining how deep you can go(Commons have 30 floors, Rares 60, and Legendary items 100) and where the strength of enemies grows stronger the higher the item’s rank and the deeper you go. In particular, the Rank 40 weapons can only be obtained by diving into a Legendary Rank 39 or 40 weapon of the same class, reaching floor 100 and stealing it from the Item God who acts as the final boss of the Item world and which is based off the strongest class of generic unit in the game… and stealling an enemy unit’s equipment requires expendible hand items with the chance being based on the stats of the hand item and the enemy’s strength, and unless the unit doing the stealing is of the thief class, the success rate caps at 50% and even for thieves, there’s always at least a 1% chance of failure… and the only gauranteed way of having a shot at a Legendary Rank 39 weapon with a few exceptions is to steal it from the Item God on Floor 100 of a legendary Rank 38 weapon of hte same class(every Legendary rarity item has an Item God on floor 100 and they always hold a legendary version of the next item in the same series) Oh, and I logged over 400 hours in Disgaea Afternoon of Darknesss… and its a game where you have to reload your last save whenever you get a game over(excluding a few game overs that trigger a bad end and a new game plus)plus there are other items that can only be obtained through stealing from specific bosses, some of which you only get one shot at per game cycle and have to go through a significant part of the game’s main story to get another shot at(the boss of the seventh or eighth of the story’s 13 or so chapters is just a generic zombie, but it’s equipped with three unique items found nowhere else in the game and whicch all have the common,rare, and legendary variants(so you have to play through roughly 2/3rds of the story at least three times to get all of them, and the chances of all three being rare or legendary on a single playthrough is 1-512 and the chances of all three being legendary is 1 in over 32 thousand… Granted, there are at least 3 or 4 endings that require playing the game all the way to the end of the story, but still.
Also, I got a 370+ pokedex in Gen 3 Pokemon without any gamecube games and no cheating beyond using warp codes to get to Naval Rock, birth Island, and Far Away Island… I was missing two Johto Starter lines, Celebi and Jirachi, and maybe one of the Johto Beasts(can’t recall if I ever went through a second playthrough of LeafGreen to get the Third, but I beat both FireRed and ELafGreen to get two and between the 5 GBA games, I got everything catachable.
On the Challenge run, I also got most of my Gen 3 collection caught in Premier Balls… then played Gens 4 and 5 using nothing but Premier balls. It’s a challenge because premier balls have the same catch rate as a normal pokeball, but to get a premier ball, you have to buy normal pokeballs 10 at a time, so if you resell the pokeballs, a premier bll is effectively five times the price of a normal pokeball. As such, staying well stocked with Premier balls, places a limit on your purchasing power prior to reaching the point where you can effortlessly farm money and you tend to go through them quicker once reaching the point where the game expects you to be using great, ultra, and specialty balls… and catching legendaries in premier balls can be tedious… especially when it comes to legendaries where you have to catch or defeat it to continue the story… and when catching a mon in a premier ball wasn’t possible, I went for the lowest level ball possible(which often meant breeding one offs I caught before I started my premier ball challenge to get a version in a pokeball).
