the longest time owning a game without beating it

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13 to 15 years.

i had kirby's dreamland on the gameboy for that long and i never knew how to beat dedede on the last level. i would get to the final boss and fly in the corner or die. or both.

i was 4 or 6 at the time.

when i turned 10 we moved to pa [i hate this ugly, depressing, forest state] and 2 or so years later i got a new school and a friend who happened to own kirby superstar for the snes or nes, i neither remember nor care which. and i asked her how to beat dedede cause believe it or not i still didn't know how to beat him.

she said just suck up the stars and shoot them back at him. after that i finally beat my game.

pathetic ain't it.

13 years.

I got Mario64 in fifth grade
(first kid in my class to have an N64!)
and I still can't get the 120th star.
It's the 100 coin star for Tick Tock Clock.

If beating a game includes defeating the bonus stuff, such as the Ruby and Emerald weapon of FF7, then i guess that applies to me. <.< (I had all the rest though D: )

i've owned one of those little handheld gameboy tetris games since the 90s, and i've never been able to make the rocket take off at the end. i knew a genius who fluently spoke several languages but was slumming as a janitor in the hospital i worked in- one day she noticed me struggling with the tetris and took the game from me to demonstrate her brainpower, and while discussing [really talking down at me so i'd understand her] learning theory, she managed to make the rocket take off in less than 3 minutes or so. without even thinking about it. it was like her hands had genius brainpower of their own. it must be nice to have lots of smarts.

nope to me beating a game just means getting done with the main storyline. getting all the extras i referr to as 100%ing the game or fully completing the game.

i hated tick tock clock, so much timing in that stage, i completely understand that one.

A long time. Here's an example: I own Ghostbusters for the NES. The game is impossible to beat without cheating.

I've had Saint's Row and Splinter Cell Double Agent for about 4/5 years without completing. I got bored of both though and havn't played either for a very long time.

Not sure how long, but I suppose Morrowind. Got it after beating Oblivion, which I got near the beginning of getting my 360 (about 4 years ago?).

Because of the game complexity, I could not get into it very easily. So it's sat on the shelf until recently.

I'm not sure how long I've had Sonic for the 360 but I only played it once as it's a truely terrible game. I don't know why I still have it!

Unask the question. Not all games exist to be "beaten", especially but certainly not exclusively games which are primarily multi-player, and not all players play to "beat" games.

26 years. I couldn't finish the Bard's Tale because my game was bugged on the platform I played it on, the final battle couldn't be completed. I suppose at some point I should play through it again on an emulator and finish it. But there's just too many new games to play first!

Do it was the first time she played Tetris?

On the subject, I guess it must super Mario All-Stars. Got it since christmas 1994, still haven't beaten any of the NES Mario game. Shadow of the Colossus have been long too, as I was blocked on one of the colossus for years.

whatever, i posted that while sleep deprived, and still am at the moment. i was mainly just posting this little fact just to see if was the only one and to tell my story.

you are thinking to deep here i'm not even sure if i had a logic thought at the time of posting this, though the story is true.

and honestly i can't process much other then facts about xemnas, harkness, or fallout 3, right now. so i have no clue what you are going on about.

i'm seeing flashing colors in front of my eyes right now, and i may not know what i'm going about 3 seconds after posting this.

It comes down to "games are there to be enjoyed, and you can enjoy either a) playing them or b) trying to "beat" them, and if you're seeing flashing lights and dazed and confused, you're probably doing a little too much of one and not enough of the other."

Anyhoo, I couldn't sensibly answer the question you posted, because there must be hundreds - that's literal, not hyperbole - of games I never finished as a kid, so roughly twenty-eight years. Still, y'never know. There was a game called Loco-motion, which consisted of driving a little steam train across different screens of track making sure it had enough fuel and water to keep going and moving gold and supplies around. I got it working on an emulator a while back and systematically mapped it (which didn't take that long - what was difficult for a six year old isn't quite so taxing now ) and finished it as far as it can be finished. But that was 'cause I like mapping things and really wanted to know what was in the mysterious top-right end of the game, not 'cause I had any burning desire to finish it... so I don't really get the completionist thing that so many people seem to have about games.

There is one game I'd love to finish, though, and that's an old vertical scrolling shooter called Firetrack, which is the second-best game ever released for the BBC Micro (after Elite, which is saying a lot.) It's insanely difficult. There's eight worlds to it (plus a bunch of in-between stages) and it starts to get impossible about level five; the best I've ever managed was the seventh, and that was when I was drunk (I *know* that shouldn't be the case, we all know drinking messes up your reflexes...) at university thirteen-ish years ago (I was playing it emulated even then.) I try it again every now and then, but I can't get that far anymore.

I guess I see the question more the way a fisherman might see the question of "So, what's your story of the one who got away?". Some game that mattered to us more than the dozens of so-so games that we would try out and discard without ever getting past the first level, the game that looking back on it, we wish we'd managed to play all the way to it's end at the time. I mean there were games I never played to the end before Bard's Tale, but none of those games mattered to me. They were mostly simple games, many of which were designed to be played infinitely. They were just a throwaway experience and left no mark they'd ever been there.