by PILMAN » Wed Jul 25, 2018 3:28 pm
Just want to say for the record, thank you all for the memories.
I remember in 2001 one of my classmates in my tech class told me about Shenmue for the first time and showed me the shenmuedojo page. He explained to me that it was a game like real life where you could go into arcades and work, you could talk to friends and call people and fight 99 people which sounded amazing. I saw it was exclusive to Dreamcast and during that period my family didn't have much in the way of money. I did later get an Xbox for preorder as a birthday gift and most places no longer stored the Dreamcast. The odd thing is I rarely ever saw Dreamcasts outside of a mall where it was being offered as a prize at this nascar simulator arcade and some of the commercials.
A friend of mine loaned me his Dreamcast and I borrowed him my Xbox but he did not have Shenmue, I was able to experience PSO, and some other games on the DC.
Having moved out of Chicago to rural Florida due to some issues with my parents, I went through a rough period where we barely had any money for anything really, my computer was having issues and my mom ended up getting an old tv from a garage sale which I bought a rf adapter from radioshack. I would go to the mall and hang around gamestop. I bought a gameinformer magazine which had explained ahenmue IIx was coming to the US on the Xbox and I remembered my pld classmate telling me the 2nd one never came to the US on Dreamcast so October 2002 I rented the game and played it for the first time and started visiting Shenmuedojo reading the forums.
My first experience playing the game I had watched the dvd that came with and then started playing the second game. I was intrigued stepping off the boat for the first time and seeing a huge variety of npca and all the various tasks you could do, working, arm wrestling, gambling, fighting, lucky hit, the qte action and the diverse shops and interiors of restaurants.
Visiting this forum and reviewing my forum posts, I can see how different I was at that time and replaying Shenmue, I learned so many things on this forum. I remember asking mundane or irrelevant questions that ironically other members also were curious in, small things like why are there guns in the convenience store in shenmue 1 or questions about rens knife, learning Kowloon was a real place as well as Guilin, the forum opened my eyes to a lot of things.
I remember the following years waiting on an announcement for Shenmue 3, we would be hyped up and then dissappointed, I remember at times how dead the forum was but I would always come back to read LanDC or Tails or other members posts explaining possibilities of what the future of the story would contain and the various modders who found hidden speech or back stories.
The day Shenmue III was announced, I was going through a layoff but I ztill wanted to be a part of history, I remember celebrating on the forums and watching Yu Suzuki live as the power failed but yet the hoal succeeded in raising the funds.
I will truly miss the forums here and I know it is easy to say it is time to look forward but there is a nostalgia of having been here so long and attachment. I am glad the forums will at least be archived .
Thank you again for the memories.
PILMAN has received 2 thanks from: spud1897, TheTimeRanger