Goonies II was a biggie for me growing up. My cousins had it, and my friend and I rented it over one weekend. I myself didn't own a NES until like the Playstation was out, so my brief encounters with it made it even more intriguing. I think it was probably the beginnings of my love affair with Konami music especially from that era, and even though it's clunky as hell now, at the time I thought the 3D exploration segments were really cool. It's one of the earliest "Metroidvanias" in that it has the persistant world, a map, items needed to progress and so forth. And I just ate all that stuff up. The other factor was the weirdness of it being a sequel. I had the Datasoft Goonies game on my C64, but I don't think I thought it was a sequel to that at that time. Now of course I know about the original Goonies game Konami released on the Famicom, but when we were kids, we thought it was like a sequel to the movie just made as a video game. Which is a cool idea in itself, it's kind of how I consider Ghostbusters: The Video Game to be the true Ghostbusters III. Coupled with the fact that it now has Annie the Mermaid in it, it just seemed like this weird supernatural/fantasy element out of place from the movie.
Anyway, I did eventually buy it on Ebay as a "dumb buyer" because I foolishly expected since they listed as "new" that it would be. Instead they just assembled a separate box, game and manual and called it new. Didn't even try to shrinkwrap it, the box was dented, and my game has tiny toothmarks or something on the label. Honestly it's not that bad, and I would have opened it anyway, and I spent less than $10 on it (I think it was something like $8) so it's not the end of the world. But I'd like a cleaner copy one day.
