Question of the Week: May 10th

[RoboCop]

QotW: What’s a product/trend/store from your childhood that you wish would come back?

My answer's gotta be Blockbuster Video. As a 90's kid, I'd get out of school Friday afternoon and my mom would take me straight to Blockbuster so I could try to rent a good NES or SNES game before they were all gone. If it was an rpg, like Earthbound or Lufia 2, I'd have to hope I got the same cartridge as the previous week and hope no one had deleted my saved game. Streaming services are certainly more convenient (even if all of their interfaces are straight asscheeks....), but they will never achieve that feeling of stepping into a Blockbuster to pick up games and movies for the weekend.

Your turn!

 

[Juxtapose]

Blockbuster is a good one, and I have many fond memories of going through Blockbuster as well.

Do restaurants count? If not, I'd say Consumers Distributing. They were a Canadian retailer in which you'd walk into the store and you'd have to write on a card the product number from the catalogue of the item you wanted. You'd then take it to the counter and the employee would go get the item for you. No products were out on the floor or displayed, everything what through their catalogue.

I bought a lot of toys and games from them, and it was almost like online shopping today, but in person and with no shipping fees.

My friends and I would pour over their catalogues (you could have them mailed to you) and highlight games and toys we'd want. I specially remember Mortal Monday with them.

 

[Marlow]

Just in general I have fond memories of walking through the video store, looking at the movie box covers, or looking at the games and looking at the game covers, reading the back of the game box to get the details. Great fun.

 

[Arqwart]

Same idea with places like Gamestop. As much as they collected dust and took up space, physical game cases and disks hold a sense of nostalgia and accomplishment for me. It was easy to look at one's game collection and think "Hell yeah. These are mine." It's much harder to look at my game library on Steam and think anything but "...k." They just feel like text as opposed to my own possessions.

God. Am I getting old? I feel like I'm about to start spouting off about "The good ol' days."

 

[Marlow]

When I was growing up, there was this awesome Food Court restaurant called Ollie's Ovens. It was probably a minor chain in the Wisconsin area, maybe Michigan or other parts of the upper Midwest as well. As far as I know it was just a food court/mall restaurant chain, so it probably died as malls died. Their big thing was all different kinds of Stromboli. I remember the menu usually had a bunch of puns using the word Ollie for the different sandwich's. There was the Muhammad Ollie, the Ollie Babba, some other ones. I loved those sandwich's, it was basically Quiznos before Quiznos was Quiznos.

 

[Juxtapose]

I feel like I'm about to start spouting off about "The good ol' days."

They were good ol' days. The world, and media, are very, very different today than they were twenty years ago. In some ways things are better, but in other ways, not so much.

 

[DixieFlatline78]

While the current platform for video game content is obviously way superior, I watched G4 obsessively when I was a wee lad. In my eyes, no reviewers were as authoritative as Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb.

In general the old days of video game content through the 2000s are a golden age we'll never get back. Screw Attack was a big part of my teenage years as well

 

[Arqwart]

Another thing that's tied to physical copies of games: going to midnight releases. I still remember doing the Halo 3 and Halo Reach midnight releases. Nothing better than a ton of strangers in line at a Gamestop shooting the shit about a series they all love while waiting to nab a copy of the newest installment.

 

[Swindle]

Another thing that's tied to physical copies of games: going to midnight releases. I still remember doing the Halo 3 and Halo Reach midnight releases. Nothing better than a ton of strangers in line at a Gamestop shooting the shit about a series they all love while waiting to nab a copy of the newest installment.

I got MK11 at a midnight release at GameStop.
They aren’t dead.