USgamer Community Question: What was the Last Game you Rushed Home to Play?

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We've all been there. Rushing home from work or school because you just can't wait to play a game in progress. Oh, and if you haven't, we unfortunately have to pause at this point to question your gaming enthusiasm!

Anyway, most of us know exactly what it's like to be sitting somewhere, watching the clock, and thinking about nothing but the moment when you can finally leave and head home so you can continue to play whatever game it is that you're currently obsessed with.

We most certainly do, as our answers below attest. But what we want to know is - what is the last game you rushed home to play. And why? What was it about the game that made you so impatient to play it?

Jeremy Parish, Editor-in-Chief

I'm going to assume "rushed home to play" is metaphorical for this discussion, because I can't actually remember the last time I literally rushed home to play a game. But I do remember the last game I had shipped via rush delivery and played to utter completion… as an import, just so I didn't have to wait until its U.S. release. Which was a couple of months later. Look, patience is overrated, OK?

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow was part of a long-standing tradition for me by that point. I imported Castlevania games as a matter of course, beginning with Symphony of the Night, which was the first game I ever imported. After that, I always picked up the portable entries in the series as soon as they hit Japan: I bought a Japanese Game Boy Advance before the system debuted in America largely so that I could my hands on Circle of the Moon. I begged my girlfriend at the time (who was staying in Japan as part of the JET program) to send me Harmony of Dissonance. I even imported Aria of Sorrow despite being out of work at the time and realistically unable to afford such an indulgence. Some itches just need to be scratched, no matter the cost.

Dawn of Sorrow was the culmination of it all. For once, I could actually justify the cost (it was for work, so I could write a hands-on preview)... and the combination of its deep, Aria-inspired mechanics and higher-spec, Symphony-like visuals made it the perfect realization of nearly a decade's worth of 2D Castlevania epics. As soon as I began playing, I found myself smitten (yes, despite the anime-looking artwork). The action, the visuals, the music, the gameplay systems… all pitch-perfect.

In fact, I became so hooked that I blasted through the game in the space of a day, more or less ignoring every other consideration in the world so I could reach then end. And once I got there, I unlocked the fantastic bonus game, which nodded back to Castlevania III by allowing you to tackle the adventure with a trio of heroes. I blazed through that in the space of a day, too.

The one downside of it all was that Dawn pushed my buttons so well that the series never quite measured up to the game after that. Portrait of Ruin and Order of Ecclesia were great, but I just couldn't get into them the way I did Dawn. And the less said about pretty much everything else in the series after Dawn the better. Sometimes, you just know a game is going to fit you perfectly, and you have to play it. And occasionally, that enthusiasm pays off.

Jaz Rignall, Editor-at-Large

I'm bending the rules a little bit here, so that anyone who wants to answer in a similar fashion can feel free to do so. What I'm going to do is not talk about the last game that made me rush home, but the game I had the strongest ever feeling of OMG, OMG, OMG, red light change to green NOW, and GTFO the way stupid minivan, 'cos there's a game I need to get home to play more than any other game I've ever needed to get home to play.

That game is Super Metroid.

What's funny is that I just remember a moment so clearly. I was living in Orange County in Southern California at the time. I'd left work at 5:30pm, and was making good headway. While waiting for the lights to change so I could turn right from Red Hill onto Barranca Parkway, I just remember the feeling of incredible anticipation and excitement - and indeed savoring it. I'd started the game the night before, and it had blown me away like few other games have before or since. I wasn't rushing it: I wanted to take my time and enjoy everything it had to offer.

That following day, I'd thought little else other than playing the game the following evening. Indeed, I'd been this close to taking a sickie, but I was working with a group of people on something that was really important to the company. So I just had to do everything the old fashioned way and wait until the earliest possible time that was reasonable to leave, and as soon as it did, I was out of there.

When I finally did get back home, I called a local food delivery service and sat down and enjoyed another stellar evening of gaming, and later that night finished it. What an experience. Pure gaming magic.

Mike Williams, Associate Editor

Honestly, this one isn't about the game in particular, it's more about the mindset that feeds into the game. I'm an MMO guy, probably USgamer's only big MMO person, which is why I've reviewed Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and Wildstar. The launch of any MMO is fraught with bugs and login issues, but regardless, I'm there at launch waiting to get in. (It's worse because I'm on the East Coast and servers tend to go up at midnight West Coast time.)

I've written about this before, in relation to Wildstar:

"At Carbine, happy developers did a countdown to the game's launch, hands full of champagne and other party drinks. The switch was flipped. And... nothing happened. Players mobbed the servers like desperate parents hunting for deals on Black Friday, but each and every one was greeted with a hamster (sorry, Chompacabra) in a wheel, as the WildStar client attempted to connect to servers."

"During all of this, I'm laying on my floor trying to get some more rest. I have my headphones on and I'm in my guild's Mumble voice chat server. When I hear the someone has gotten in, I crawl from my slumber, get back in my chair, chug a Red Bull, and try to log-in."

"No MMO launch is smooth. I've been through a number of them: World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, City of Heroes, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online. None of them has been perfect. There's always issues, and WildStar is no exception."

And when the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, Warlords of Draenor, rolls around, I'll be there on the frontlines. Jumping into a brand-new world with tons of other players is exciting. Destiny didn't do it for me, but Ubisoft's The Division is around the corner and there will always be another online experience waiting. So, I don't think I'll ever lose that moment completely. Plus, there's always Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Kat Bailey, Senior Editor

I've written before in this space about how I was in college in 2002, and about how I had nothing to do that summer except for work, watch baseball (this being when the Twins were actually good), and play games. I spent the majority of my time on two games that summer: Super Smash Bros. Melee and WarCraft III. I enjoyed them both, but of the two, WarCraft III was the game that had its hooks in me the deepest.

Sometime around July that year I started playing WarCraft III online, and to my immense surprise, I was actually pretty good. At the same time, I was blogging regularly about the game, and I had built up a following that enjoyed reading my strategies. That following soon developed into its own little community; and as most people who play online multiplayer know, getting heavily involved in a community is a very good way to get completely hooked on a competitive game.

For a good chunk of that summer, that was exactly what happened. At night, I would bike to St. Paul to sit at a desk for eight hours, patiently waiting for the sun to rise so I could go home and play more WarCraft. Then I would race home as fast as possible, plop down at the computer, and play for hours on end. In that time, I got basically no sleep, which probably took years off my life. I may have actually hallucinated some of the games that I played.

In the end, of course, that lifestyle was unsustainable. After a couple months, I weaned myself off WarCraft and headed back to school, where my life markedly improved. I won't say that it was a good summer, because it obviously wasn't, but it did make a lasting impact on me. I'm not sure that I'll ever play a game that grabs me that hard again.

Bob Mackey, Senior Writer

I wish I could say the last game I rushed home to play was an underappreciated gem or some obscure cult classic, but nope: It's Final Fantasy VII.

That said, as someone who consumed RPG after RPG throughout the 8 and 16-bit eras (despite their extravagant prices), I'd been on board the FFVII hype train since the game's announcement. I chose a PlayStation over an N64 for the Final Fantasy brand alone, and I reserved the game and bought a memory card months before I managed to pick up a console months later. Based on screenshots and tiny QuickTime videos I pored over endlessly, FFVII looked to be everything I loved about past Final Fantasy games, except made out of big, beautiful polygons (mostly big).

Even the day I picked it up is etched into my memory: September 2, 1997, five whole days before its marketing-friendly official release of 9/7/97. Even though I'd been significantly spoiled by jerks who intentionally flooded newsgroups with one of the biggest spoilers in the game, nothing could stop my ravenous appetite for 32-bit Final Fantasy. Outside of a few others, like Crystalis and Secret of Mana, it's one of the few games I remember playing before having to leave for school. Even sneaking in a good 10 minutes of random battles gave me enough of a fix to get through the day.

Strangely enough, I tend to associate a lot of RPGs with the smell and hum of a window-mounted air conditioner, since it seems a lot of them had release dates in the summer or early fall. We went back to school in late August, so the first month was always unbearably hot and stuffy--a reminder that the fun of summer continued while we sweltered indoors. Suffering through class after class, I wanted nothing more than to get home, put the A/C on full blast, and settle in for a long afternoon of playing Final Fantasy VII. It was essentially the oasis of my day--a well-earned break from the stygian horrors of high school.

This obsession extended to the point where I faked a minor illness (sorry, mom) just to stay home and marathon the game for an entire day. (Thankfully, nothing that happens in high school ever matters afterwards) There have been better RPGS, for sure, but Final Fantasy VII stood as the perfect escape from the hot, sticky discomfort of a stuffy old Catholic school in the dead heat of summer.