Not a great deal in the way of gameplay-y stuff, I don't think.I'm passable enough to beat most videogames (or was. Probably not so much these days, given how dull my reflexes are getting~ :'D), but there aren't many I'm really "good" at. In lieu of that, I think these are the three things to have come out of my time gaming that I'm absolutely the most proud of.
- Getting my cousin into Final Fantasy VIII. He was a really sweet kid growing up, but his mum didn't really have a lot of resources at her disposal, so he wound up living in quite a bad area from a young age. And by the time he had just started high school he was on the verge of falling in with something of a bad crowd, and my aunt was worried that he was going to go down a similar path to his older brother (who had a history of drug addiction and petty theft, and was doing jail time for stabbing someone). One evening he was at mine shortly after Final Fantasy VIII had just come out, and he became really interested in the game as he watched me play it. So when his birthday came around my little brother and I bought him a copy of it. And the impact that that game had upon him was absolutely huge. He began to become really interested in music and composition because he loved the music in the game, and he started playing the drums (he's a very gifted drummer to this day~!And I think choosing to share it with him at that age is one of my proudest memories of my time gaming, even if I didn't foresee what would happen as a result of it, and was simply thinking to share something I was enjoying with someone close to me.
- Playing, clearing and understanding Kingdom Hearts II and Final Fantasy VII in Japanese. I think I had probably muddled my way through a couple of games in Japanese before Kingdom Hearts II, but it was just about the first big new release that I remember playing in Japanese and actually understanding enough of to enjoy. And the idea that I had enough Japanese to play this big new game and actually enjoy it before it was even translated into English was pretty mindblowing to me at the time, even if I didn't think that much of the game itself, and even if I probably only understood about a third of it.
Final Fantasy VII was just the opposite: a game I played last year after years and years of Japanese study, and understood 100% of without a dictionary. I had spoken enough Japanese for years to tackle FFVII (the script's difficulty level is, comparatively speaking, not that high) in the language, and I knew it was something I wanted to do sooner or later, but somehow I had always held off doing so. I think because it was one of the most important pieces of media in my childhood and in many ways the first thing to make me aware of the existence of Japan and the Japanese language as more than names in a textbook. It had played such a huge part, both directly and indirectly, in a large chunk of my life, and to go back and play it in its native language would be, I felt, like saying goodbye to all of that and resolving to move on and look to the future. Last summer, though, having reached a level with Japanese where I felt pretty comfortable calling myself bilingual, and facing down graduation having lived abroad and grown and changed so much, it seemed like kind of the right time to revisit it.
Of course learning a language is a lifelong thing, and my study of Japanese won't end with finishing Final Fantasy VII any more than it began with finishing Kingdom Hearts II. Still, I think the two games are kind of the bookends, as it were, on my study of Japanese, as well as that chapter of my life in general. And I think between them they meant more to me to clear in Japanese than all of the other titles I've finished put together.
- Getting the bad ending on Streets of Rage with my brother our first time through by accident, and then making sure that we never, ever got it together again. My brother and I fought all the time growing up, as I suppose most siblings do. He's lovely now, but he had a real mean streak then, and he could be a bit of a bully at the best of times - a tendency that probably wasn't helped by the relatively small age gap and the clash between my very stereotypically feminine personality and his stereotypically masculine one. Looking back on it, a game like Streets of Rage, which encourages cooperation but also enables friendly fire, probably wasn't the best choice for us at that age.
I can't even begin to count how many fights that game caused between us. How many times he would troll me by killing off my character when I was trying to play properly and make progress, or hold me steady so that enemies could hit me. :'D I can think of at least three or four times when we outright fell out and stopped talking to each other for hours on end.
Looking back, I don't know which one of us picked Yes. And I don't know why we did. Whether it was just a slip of the hand or one of us was trying to mess with the other. At first, I think we were both laughing about it. It was a cool little Easter egg of the sort that we hadn't seen in many games until then, and we fought it out in pretty good spirits to begin with. But I think as our little battle went on and on, we both grew a little bit uneasy with what our characters, who had been teammates until that point, were doing to one another. Eventually, the person who said Yes won, and one of us sat back to watch the other defeat the last boss. I don't think either one of us quite expected what came next. I'm not sure whether it was the desolate, sad music that plays over the bad ending credits, the fact that it was the first game we had played (and probably some of the first media we had experienced) where the lines between "good guy" and "bad guy" were blurred, the way that the clash between the two in-game characters mirrored our real life issues with one another, or simply the fact that we were really, really young kids for whom games and TV still felt all too real. Whatever the reason, though, I remember us both being very silent over the ending credits and all throughout that day. I know for a fact that we both went crying to my parents only a few hours later about what "we" had done to one another. And though it might just be my imagination, I feel like my brother and I made the effort to get along a lot better from that day. Like we never quite opted for the "bad ending" again, whether in our many replays of Streets of Rage or in real life.
Originally Posted by Drageuth
I have beaten Super C only dying twice though! So there's that.
Then again, most of my deaths in those games are instant and caused by pits. 
With that said, the trickiest part, for me, when beating Castlevania without dying is that damn hunchback swarm just before you reach Dracula. I don't need the triple cross for him, but I like it so much so I don't want to switch it for the stop clock even though it would allow me to get to old Dracs pretty much unharmed. 
