What game from your childhood is most nostalgic for you?

Probably all the earlier need for speeds (1 2 and 3, underground) just played em a lot! Also duck hunt of course

Pikmin 1! To say I'm obsessed is an understatement

Sonic adventure, honestly most sonic games.
Kingdom hearts would be but I never gave it the chance to be nostalgic because I never stopped playing em lol

Super Mario Sunshine and Pac Man 2

Super Mario World

Sonic Heroes (most nostalgic)
Sonic The Hedgehog 2
Minecraft
Glow Hockey (mobile) or a similar game to it but that's the one I saw available for download nowadays

X-Wing
TIE fighter
Secret of Mana
Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past

You know you’re old when most of the answers involve video games from one era or another.
The first video game we owned was a Coleco Telstar, which came out in 1976. It had a whopping 3 games:
hockey
handball
tennis
Basically all were just variations of Pong…
- Yep I naively expected to see board games and what not. Cos I keep forgetting I'm ooolllddd

Kick the Can.
- Followed by your mom ringing a bell or using some other noisemaker to call you home for dinner. We’d have about ten kids from around our neighborhood playing kick the can. And we could all tell who had to go home based on the type of bell etc. and the direction it came from.

I got a few.
N64 command and conquer I can still hear the commando blowing up logo and saying that was left handed.
Ocarina of Time
Skies of Arcadia
And kotor, but for some reason I remember the pazak mini game more than anything else.
- I loved that command and conquer game! It was actually my pivot point into PC gaming, because I picked up Red Alert 2 and there was no going back.

That's tough but it'd have to be between Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

Probably Star Wars Battlefront, THPS/THUG, or Ocarina of Time
But Oracle of Seasons was the first game I owned
- THUG and THUG2 were great.

xenos, interactive fiction from like 30 years ago

The Mind Maze game in Microsoft Encarta

Sid Meier's Pirates!
I played the original when it came out on PC in like 1987. A friend of my dad gave me a copy, but I didn't have the manuals or map or anything that came in the box, so in order to figure out how to get around the Caribbean I had to crack an encyclopedia to a map, and that got me both interested in maps and also in reading the history of all these places I'd been to in the game.
I still play the 2004 remake of that game a few times a year.
- I never played the original but Live The Life! slaps.

Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego. Played it as a child together with my mom. She had all the worldly knowledge, but at the time I was the only one who could speak/understand English, so teamwork was key. That game meant hours of educational fun for the both of us.

Black and white 2

- And sadly, this game runs too fast on modern hardware. Back then the programmers used CPU cycles as a timing advancement technique. So like a Pentium 4's cyclic operation kept the game playable. Try it under emulation on a modern CPU and the game is unplayably fast. Yes I tried slowing down the processor speed in Virtualbox, can't find the sweet spot % so this game is lost in time. Like the dinos.

I'd say it's a tie between The Curse of Monkey Island and Wing Commander (1 and 2).
- Oh, there’s a monkey in my pocket, And he’s stealing all my change, His stare is blank and glassy, I suspect that he’s deranged...

Gradius for the NES

- I can still hear that rabbit music

Chrono Trigger

The Incredible Machine

Age of Empires 2 is my most played game ever and extremely nostalgic. Conquerors was next to flawless especially with fan made AI that didn't cheat resources. I liked to play sometimes with friends co-op against one brutally hard AI. Most of my time was online pvp matches, or making and scripting custom maps to post on AOE Heaven. MSN Zones first, then GameRanger when that shut down. A little bit (still hundreds of hours) when Forgotten Empires picked it back up too until I got overwhelmed.
While I love all the new expansions except the few mid ones, I think it's too bloated now for PvP. I don't want to memorize so many nations. I had a similar problem with Dead by Daylight and to a smaller extent, TF2. I got filtered I'm just too old to dump so many hours into a game now to keep track of all that shit, and not for a lack of free time actually in my case.
But I love the new SP campaigns!
- Can a game be nostalgic if I still play it regularly?

Hitting a tree with a good stick.

-Operation Wolf Dad would watch me play. He would bring other people to come in and watch how good I was. -Mario Golf Dad would play with us, he even kept a spreadsheet, on grid paper, to track his stats. -Ultima 3 First game on a PC. Mom got it to play with me and my little sister after Dad died. She couldn't figure out how to get it to work. I ended up playing it alone years later, but only after learning enough MS-DOS to figure out how to even get it running. CD..
Hug your parents. Play with your kids.
- My earliest memory is peeking over the guard rail of my toddler bed so that I could watch my dad play Gradius. He passed away 2 years ago and I miss him every day.

Dune 2. It was the gateway drug that turned me playing computer games into a full blown addiction for a bunch of my family.
Relations camped out waiting for a slot to satisfy the urge for months until they could scrape together the cash to fund an appropriate PC to run it themselves at home.

Quest for Glory and Kyrandia!
- I loved that Quest for Glory soundtrack.
  Is Kyrandia the one where you play a jester in the 3rd game? I remember liking that one a lot.
  
  I did t know you play as Malcolm in the third game! I’ll have to play the second and third once I’m done with a replay of the first one!

Elderscrolls 3 Morrowind. Used to play it all day on my 13" black and white tv
- If you haven't heard of it yet, look up OpenMW. It's a complete rebuild of Morrowind for modern hardware. They're working on making it fully voiced too.
  
  I remember hearing something abou that years ago. How would I be able to download and play that?

Heroes of Might and Magic 3

Pokemon Blue on Gameboy

- The original one?

Handheld Zelda link's awakening for the Gameboy hits me the hardest as it was the first I owned myself bought with my first jobs mowing lawns and delivering papers.
Console, NES contra watching my older brothers get way further than I could at the time & teach me the Konami code
PC xwing, I had a f16 flight stick and my siblings would play splitting weapons/shield/engines distribution to a copilot and the pilot flying and aiming. That mission where you have to fly back and forth protecting the Corvette from imperial attacks from both sides jumping in and out of the area was peak retro space combat gaming.

Toejam & Earl! My dad got a deal on a used sega genesis when I was 6 and it came with one game, it ended up being my favorite. The presents and little pixel sundaes were so visually appealing to my simple child brain, sneaking up on santa claus successfully was absurdly satisfying, and discovering the secret level 0 hot tub pre-internet made me feel like a fucking wizard.

Ghostbusters on C64. Love that game to this day.

Zelda - Link to the Past. I had so much fun playing Link Between Worlds.
- I still need to play Link Between Worlds. Link To The Past is the best 2D Zelda imo

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the patrician's 4X.
It's just so ideologically diverse and deep, and so quotable too. Plus, you can use how much you agree with Miriam as a litmus test for maturity, lol.
- Alpha Centauri is a masterpiece that has never been matched, let alone topped. It’s a shame that rights issues have doomed the franchise.
  
  I agree. I'm really hoping someone just touches up UI and does some upscaling. I don't think it needs anything else to make it more viable and appealing to folks today. 🙏

Space Invaders and Phoenix. We had the cabinets in our movie theater

Mancala. omg I still remember learning how to play in Kindergarten and I'm almost 30 now. This game was probably my very first addiction.
- I discovered Mancala as a minigame in a shareware demo of Quest for Glory III, for a long time I thought they made it up for that game lol

Stronghold, the isometric one

Super Mario Bros 3. It was the first video game I'd ever played. That was my gateway drug.
I used to know that game like the back of my hand. Any time I pick it back up, it feels like visiting an old, childhood home.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3. I wish I could say Sonic 3 & Knuckles but we weren't swimming in money so I very rarely got a new game (and just to add, I never threw controllers or punched TVs either because mommy wouldn't just buy me a new one if I did that).
I did rent out Sonic & Knuckles occasionally though. But I can practically picture the early level layouts of Sonic 3 in my mind like they're familiar streets that I grew up in.

Might and Magic 7: For blood and honor

I suppose monopoly. It was the only game we really played. We also played trivial pursuit, but it was questions for my parents mostly.
I did get the question once of "What company was snoopy a mascot for" and answered "get met" which they were shocked and asked how I knew, and it was a brief appearance in a Bloom County comic, which they had the anthologies of so I read them all.

Secret of Mana. Played it with friends like crazy. One even had the extension thing to connect 3 controllers - guess where we hung out most of the time.
- Came here to list this. I always played the Sprite using a spear.

Ultima 7

The Star Wars arcade game.

Sunset Riders SNES.

Megaman 2

Legend of Mana and Megaman Legend. Can we get a legend 3, capcom?
- Mega Man Legends 3 is a valve game. That shit's never coming out.
- Legend of Mana is an amazing game. It's a game that showed me that nostalgia isn't just about the game but the people with whom you spent playing the game with. I tried playing it again when I got my V10. I thought, this is a wonderful game. It's got a great soundtrack, great spritework. I love these characters. I love making the map. Only catch is it's just me putzing around here. and I really miss playing this with someone else. I saw they remastered it, but there's really no point on account of what I said. It's truly a lovely game though.
- #BringRockHome

Master of magic

Any of the cluefinders games, or gizmos and gadgets. Plenty of other edutainment classics do it too. Outside of edutainment, only NHL2000 and Halo: CE come to mind.

Spore

Blake Stone aliens of Gold

Final Fantasy 8 and Crash Bandicoot.