Well, i'm kind of a fps fanboy, but ironically, most games that left their mark in my mind aren't of that genere. I'm gonna give three examples, there are more, but i can't write a bible here. The games are Megaman 3, Contra, and street fighter 2 the world warrior.
It's hard to be objective explaining why because i was too young when i played them and well, i just loved them, never stopped to think why until i grew up a little and started analizing. For example, despite what fans and even Keiji Inafume would say, for me, at the time, Megaman 3 was a perfect game, and improoved the series in various ways, gameplaywise, it added the signature slide to megaman's list of moves, storywise, it included protoman to the cast of characters, Contra, well, is an action game like none other, it is difficult, fun, had exellent graphics for the time, exellent music, the level design was challenging and, it had the spread gun ('nuff said). Finally, the world warrior, it set the standard for all fighting games in years to come, and the gameplay mechanics of that game are still being emulated, no wonder why capcom is going back to the roots with street fighter IV, plus, who doesn't remember entering an arcade house and hearing Hadoooken!!!?
I must say Joe, your girlfriend has good tastes (at least in gaming!). While FF7 immediately sprung to mind for me, it really was the Genesis-era Sonic games that sucked away my childhood. There were plenty of others that took tons of my time, but I think that blue rodent took an amount of screen time that's only rivaled by the number of times Tails died.
Ooh, also just remembered Turrican 2 - that was amazing and took a few good sittings, the levels where you had to fly your ship made the game stand out (and more often than not ended with an 'aaarrgghh!! bugger me, bugger me!! ooh, that was close.. arrrrrggghh! ooh, flippin eck.. woah, that was cool..' as the speed increased.
In grade 9 at high school I was introduced to Continuum, which we played during lunch hour for most of that year. even just in December, I led a renaissance of that, with my own server running at lunch for about 4 weeks. I had about as many people playing during those 4 weeks as we had back in the day. It took months to learn how to make balanced settings for the game, and even longer to make fun and interesting maps, but when I had the chance to run my own server, it was bliss for me. I am actually quite bad at the game, but my skills with making content more than make up for it. That is my story. Continuum is the best game ever, with 1,000's of players, dozens of 24/7 servers online, and a handful of successful community sites.
Originally Posted by Zurechial The first game I ever actually played was "Gorilla.bas" (A QBasic example game) which my father taught me how to load up and play on our 286 when I was about 3 years old.
Eventually I got my hands on a bunch of the Apogee & ID releases of the early 90's and in that regard you could say that the guys at ID and Apogee played a big role in my formative years. :) Wolf3D, Duke Nukem, Xargon, Commander Keen, BioMenace, Cosmo, Doom, Quak, etc..
After that, the list of my favourite games throughout the years reads like a contents page to my life, showing my changing tastes and expectations in gaming, which for years was the only hobby I spent any significant amount of time on.
Ditto on that, my dad showed me Gorilla and QBasic on my 286 and I also had a lot of the Apogee releases. Lemmings was a big game in my past too.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AlohaStitch OH yes of course, Shoryuken = Are you ken? / Tatsumaki Sempuu Kyaku = Contact at you ken
Welcome to the forums ;)
Thinking back I actually had a Game Boy long before I started PC gaming, played a lot of super mario, tetris and zelda - link's awakening.
The game (series) that hooked me into gaming was Mega Man. To be exact, Mega Man 2. During the day my grandmother would baby-sit me while my parents worked. I would spend all day either playing the game, or making arm cannons out of cardboard and duct tape. I didn't just play the game, I wanted to "be Mega Man" Others had heroes like superman or the Green Lantern, mine was Mega Man. But it is not my obsession. I literally owe my life to another.
Back in 1996 my friend came over and brought a game with him. It was called Chrono Trigger. Now I'm sure you are familiar with it. Though it is quite popular nowadays, I knew nothing about it at the time. I asked to borrow it and I loved it. I was so engulfed in the story about this band of characters that came together basically by fate to travel though all corners of time to defeat an inevitable threat. I felt their pain and their motivation, as if the very world I live in was threatened. I didn't play the game because it was fun, I played the game because I "cared". (Keep reading, I promise this is going somewhere)
When I got into High School, my interest dwindled from gaming with my pointless strive to be "cool". I got with the wrong crowd (though they were my friends and I still live them to death) and started doing drugs and partying. I had lots of fun, but it was affecting my life and my health. I graduated and in 2003 I bought my first "real" gaming computer, still "living on the edge". I played different games but a year or two down the road I found out you could emulate the Super Nintendo. The fist thing I played was Chrono Trigger. It was back, that feeling that I had unknowingly missed for years. Here's the turning point : Drugs were effecting my relationship with my soon to be wife (June 5th, 2008!) and I knew it. After I got that feeling back I started buying more games. That means my money was going to games instead of drugs, and that is good. They both make you lazy and unproductive, but hey, it's better than living your life in a gutter wondering if you took or drank or took too much. I got back in the gaming world and realized that being cool is well, stupid. I am cooler than I ever have been lol.
While we had a +4 first, many of the "Games" included with it didn't really tickle my ticklish bits. "Fire Ant" was good (As already mentioned), but nothing else seems memorable.
The first game I played through to completion was "Sonic the Hedgehog" on the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US), and that started my love of the blue hedgehog. The game that really cemented my love of gaming, however, would be a toss-up between "Toe-Jam and Earl" and "Ecco the Dolphin", both on the Mega-Drive. Ecco was arguably the easier game, as it gave out save codes between each level, whereas TJ&E had to be played through in one sitting. And man was that game BIG!
Multi-Player gaming got me when a friend of mine got a PC of his own (That I built for him), and we strung over 100 feet of null-modem cable (Not really, it was a whole hodgepodge of Serial, Centronics, RS-232 and Parallel cables joined end-to-end with gender benders and one null modem cable to make it work) between his machine and his parents machine after school to play long C&C:Red Alert skirmishes. Quake was always fun, too, but my friend didn't like it so much (Mainly 'cause I kicked his ass!).
Then the internet came around, and I was using an Amiga 1200 to surf (With hard-drive and '040 expansion card, of course). Still, going over to a (different) friend's house and hooking our A1200's up to play rounds of XTR was big fun, and alone, Monkey Island and Flashback took my time.
Sneaking "Descent" into college to play on the network there was awesome. A nice 16-way game of Descent was more then enough to get the grey matter going, and a better lesson in relative physics and 3-dimensional thinking than any other game I've seen so far.
Then, when it was obvious Commodore were never going to be able to keep the Amiga alive, I got myself a PC. Doom, Quake, and Half-Life became my life until one by one they fell to completion. Then came a round of hardware upgrades, and Q2, Q3A, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, Halo, all of them were played and completed.
Now I'm in Canada, with a wife. And while there's a fair few computers here, none of them are up to playing modern games (Portal won't work without patching - only a GeForce 4 MX, so no pixel shaders!). The XBox sits here, Halo2 having been completed. It taunts me with Black still (Not completed it yet, damn that game is tough), and Burnout is fun, but mostly it's there to act as a frontend to my DVR (MythTV + XBMC on the XBox). The Wii is great fun. And Super Mario Galaxy is sitting at 90 stars - So close to completion!
So, right now, I'm saving my pennies to get legal and get working. Then I can get (In order) bills paid, a House, a New PC, and an XBox 360. Then I can revel in Crysis, Halo 3, UT3, GoW, GoW2, and whatever else comes to hand.
So, quite the chequered history, but fun and interesting, perhaps?
the first game I ever played was Gorilla.bas on an old beltron machine, which is still gathering dust at home in a closet if I remember rightly.
I was mostly a casual console gamer for alot of my life, and then really got into 'hardcore' gaming (clans, heavy online multiplayer, etc) by the release of the xbox and the first halo.
before that I did play games, on pc and console, but not at the level I did after that.
since then I've accumulated a great love for FPS games and a few RPGs and RTSs as well as a Passion for modding flightsim games (did some work on the Freespace 2 SCP, have written scratch mods for FS2002/2004/X and xplane, currently writing an entire game overhaul for Wings Over Europe to bring it up to modern scratch.)
The Games that hooked me were the first few I got for the Amiga when it came out and they are the likes of Frontier: Elite II, Megalomania & Cannon Fodder.
To this day even though I love my fast FPS games like UT, ect. I still think the games I like th most are the big epic space based games, the fast & frantic RTS's and ... Dawinia as it's the only other game to come close to capturing the spirit of Cannon Fodder (hurry up Multiwinia!)
I don't need the wine (but I'll take it if you're offering), the answer to your question appeared in my mind about two sentences before you posed it:
Civilization. Played on my mother's enormous black and white copy editor's monitor, struggling to make out what the unit tiles indicated.
Sure, I had played games before on the IBM my dad had for as long as I can remember... Ninja, Marble Madness and Sopwith come to mind, as well as that weird adventure game in the castle that I know I'll never remember the name of or find a 5 1/2" floppy drive on which to play it again (remember bootable games?), but Civilization was different. Civilization was hard. I don't mean hard like tested your reflexes like Ninja, or hard like solving a puzzle in MM, Civilization made you get organized; Civilization made you think ahead. Most games are "balanced" by the design team, so that no player comes into the game world different from any other, and at any point the player can load a quicksave and be back on top of it again. In Civilization balance was a task (a quest?) lain upon the player's shoulders, and if you failed in that task, (often evidenced by the sudden appearance of a horde of Roman Legionaries) your oldest autosave was rarely sufficient to fix your mistakes.
I remember the first game I played. Jupiter lander on the C64. It was not that good to put it mildly. I played several games for a while, but the mother of all games is easy to identify: Ultima 4. It did not have great graphics (how could it in the mid 80s?), but the story line and the game play experience was unique and totally immersive. It had something that current RPGs do not have. You actually had to think... and keep notes of what to do or ask to the right person. You had to keep notes... tons of notes not to get stuck. Fine, this is a drag in a way, but it really made you feel in the game, a true RPG. I still enjoy RPGs, but they are missing that factor. You can just hack and slash and solve quests without even knowing what the characters are saying. I enjoyed Oblivion a lot, but when you talked to somebody, all of a sudden you passed an object that you had forgotten and quest solved...
I really like the graphics in today's RPGs, but they could add a little of that Ultima 4 experience. Long live Lord British! Long live Britannia!
--Orlix, the Avatar
I had a Binatone game thingy (you know, the ones with the controls where you twist a knob to control your bat/player). And I had early exposure to what early text-based adventure games on the Commodore Pet. When I say text-based, I mean some were purely textual narration, but some were crudely rendered using standard ASCII characters (Nightmare Park?).
Then I got a C64 where I bought the odd game, but often programmed them out of books (no cash as 12 yr old!).
I remembered being totally wowed by games like Way Of The Exploding Fist. but the key game that sealed my fate as a gamer was Gunship by Microprose.
It was non-linear and career-based. There were degrees of success rather than simply win or lose. And these characteristics have stuck with me throughout my gaming life - recent games I've played, loved and ultimately kept: Pro Evo, BF2 &, Oblivion. Bioshock and Crysis were great but being linear means I play them once and re-sell.
Apart from defining the style of my gaming, Gunship was the first game to obsess me. Previously I'd loved and played many games, but I always had time for one more mission on Gunship. 'Coming out for a game of footy?'... 'Nah, I'm in the middle of a game of Gunship'.
For years afterwards, I compared all games to Gunship; it was the benchmark against which all other games were measured.
I'd love for someone to re-develop it... same game but modern eye-candy...
the first game that got me hooked was elite on the acorn electron. my mates and I used to spend our entire french lessons discussing our progress after each weekend to discover which spectactular trades we'd pulled off or the latest rating we'd achieved.
progress was only halted when my electron stopped being able to save games (to tape!) and i had to get as far as i could in a single day. the real physics of elite II really put me off the next updated versions though
the next real addiction i had was to civilization on the amiga, and laterly civ 2 on the PC. again whole days would disappear trying to complete a game in a single session. the advent of the internet led me to apolyton (as someone else mentioned) and other forums to pit my skills in OCC challenges on deity level
now i mainly play RTS games, all those FPS's are best left to consoles
Remember those handheld game were everything was preset, you just moved from preset image to preset image. I think those were my earliest gaming experience... then there was a plethora of consoles and great games (metroid, sonic the hedgehog, super Mario 3, ff2, ff7, nba jam, super Mario world, star fox, Mario 64, smashies, doom, age of empires, wing commander 1,2,3 just to name a few), but I remember the first time were things changed and gaming became, less socially acceptable.
I remember the night I had just discovered battle.net on Diablo and I stayed on that game for 36 hours sans bathroom and snacks. My mom woke up the next day and was hysterical that I was still awake and she didn't understand that I was still playing the game. a few months later when I was in the throws of Diablo clans and duping, my grades were falling and there was this night were my mom and I got into an argument about the game and she was crying that I was wasting my life and I gave her the cd as a sign that I was done playing.. I think I pilfered it back in a couple days so I could make a no-cd image. Ahh the good old days... then I discovered asheronâs call and I can has mmo!
MechWarrior (1st was very open, only the 1st was great IMHO)
Pirates! (very open ended, many difficulty levels)
Sim-City (best simple time waster ever)
Civilization (I even made batch files that hex-edited in cheats, 2 was great, 3 sucked, 4 bored me)
Wing Commander (1&2) (linear but Extremely Immersive for its day, great storyline, wingmate selection was brilliant)
Warlords (won on the original demo, liked 2 & 3)
Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe (wow, just wow, loved the Go-229)
Monkey Island (what can I say?)
Sadly most of those had sequels that disappointed. :(
One thing I'm noticing is that games like Pirates!, MechWarrior, Wing Commander, etc. had many facets to them (trading, combat, big picture results of player actions, storyline, ...). They were the antithesis of the simple platformers of the day.
I guess I'm an old-schooler, who was privileged to say the least...
The first game I ever played, was Pong. My neighbor was probably the least likely person I would have ever expected to own one, and honestly, he rarely ever even touched it. None the less, he had purchased one of the early early home units, and he and I would occasionally sit down and play together. When he wasn't playing with us, it was generally the other neighborhood kids or their family we'd play against. It was an odd experience, much like table tennis but without all the exercise, which given his medical conditions suit him just fine. A far cry from anything that came after, but it always leaves me with a bit of nostalgia whenever I remember it. It brought us together, and gave the people on our block one more chance to get together, share, and enjoy an experience we'll never forget.
From there, I was personally hooked. There was the old Atari 2600 games like Tanks!, then the Intellivision with Bomber Squadron, etc. Not to mention the arcades and coin-op games that came tumbling one after another after...Galatix! and Pac-Man, Sub-Roc, Robotron, and 1942 just to name a few. After that a good friend's father bought a Commodore 64, and soon after myself also, using all my paper route money, playing such oldies along the Epix Megagames line, amongst others (Paper Route, Marble Madness, etc.) With my own in hand, I was able to help my friend's father figure out how to do word processing and budgets and simple type spreadsheet programs to help him manage our Boy Scout troop and other daily tasks. Surprisingly, it was my first consulting experience, and lead me further along the road to ruin.
After that it was the Amiga 1000 where I would play such greats as Contra! and many if not all of the early EA games (Snow Fox, BlazeBall, to name a few). My uncle went and bought a real IBM PC just to play around with (which those days, cost as much as a car!) and we would spend hours together playing such awesome greats as Flight Simulator. As much as the EAA had instilled in me to learn about aviation, it was a mere pittance compared to the real experience of FS. I'll never look at a ball gauge the same way again...
But the few that stick out as real *experiences* were the following:
Scorched Earth (IBM PC 386) - This was the first intensely fun multi-player experience we ever had. We as college buddies would all get together and play SE with it's snarky epithets and raucous weapons. We even managed to turn it into a drinking game, forcing each other to snap a shot each time we died. That, if we didn't fall over just from sheer laughter. It brought us all together as friends, and to this day, we reminisce about how so and so killed such and such, using their Death's Head in a horror of calamity!
System Shock (PC) - This game was so visceral it wasn't even funny. At night I would play it with the lights turned low, and the speakers turned on high. All that would be seen was lit by the ethereal glow of the monitor and miscellaneous lights blinking from the computer below the desk. My wife would sit behind me just to see what was happening, and was the only game I can really remember in which we felt our hearts pound and jump in fright as we heard the growling noises and deafening roar of the creatures roaming the halls. That's when we both really realized how much *more* there was to a video game than a movie or book. You don't watch it, you don't read it.... you *experience* it.
World of Warcraft (PC) & Lineage II (PC) - These games were huge time sinks. Not because the game itself was such a wild experience, but because it kept us as friends together regardless of the vast distances between us. No matter how far we were from each other, we could still get together online, chat, and share experiences trying to slay the next raid mob, or show off the latest gear we managed to score. It was a forum not only for entertainment, but a means to share something with everyone, that life and it's trials kept us from doing by sheer distance. Coupling that with the added bonus of tech such a Ventrilo and TeamSpeak, and it seemed like we were all back together again... just like in SE.
Of course, time continues marching on, and as well, the new and exciting experiences that await. Every day, I look forward to seeing the 'next big thing' that will either bring us closer as family, or reunite us as friends no matter where we live. At the moment, it's the wonderful Wii and it's awesome control interfaces, and the Star Wars games which my kids adore so much. Hopefully, I'll be able to share a bit with them the experiences I so loved, and start them along the road I so aptly followed...
The first game I played must have been my sisters Game & Watch back in the early 1990s. The first gaming platform that I got was the original Game Boy, complete with Super Mario and Tetris. I played the Game Boy on and off over the years, along with a few PC games that my father had on an old computer that we had (circa 1992 I think), up until about 1999.
It had some classic games (well I grew up with them!) like PGA Tour Golf (the 1st one) and Xenon 2.
Then, two things happened - we finally got a new computer (an old Pentium 166Mhz from work) and I got a Nintendo 64. What a great system that was.
One of the few games that would run on the old computer was Railroad Tycoon 2, and there was a demo in a games magazine that I picked up. I played it and I was hooked. It can still draw me in for hours and hours to this day (still haven't finished the expansion pack).
I think the first game I remember using was a version of Monopoly that came on a floppy disk for my family's first computer. I say "using" because, being as right-brained as I am, I remember never being able to get the game to work. I must have been 3 or 4 at the time. Still though, that is one of my earliest memories, period.
Fast forward a few years when I was at my friend's house and discovered Doom II. My friend's family, albeit turf farmers, had quite a bit of money and were always able to get him the newest tech presents. At his house I discovered Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit, until, for one holiday, he received the N64. And a little while after, came the Holy Grail.
Goldeneye.
I never really turned into a hardcore gamer, and we never even finished the single-player missions, but that game was so mind-opening for me. Three dimensions, location damage, a little bit of auto-aim, the most incredible array of guns and it was just... beautiful. As the years went on we'd still diversify in our game choices, always being a little partial to Bond games - even today we'll still throw Agent Under Fire or Nightfire in the Gamecube whenever we just want some mindless shooting - but I'll never forget the implicit impression that the multiplayer in Goldeneye left on me. (And it wasn't until much, much later that I'd get around to seeing the movie.)
In the meantime, I messed around with online flash games for several years until I got my first personal computer, a Pentium 133mHz IBM Thinkpad. I played a lot of single-player games from then on, especially Starcraft, and some older DOS games but I forget which. When I got a better computer in high school (500mHz, 640MB RAM) I expanded a little to Age of Empires II and Counter-Strike. At school (my first 2 years of high school were at a boarding school) I played on another friend's uber-laptop and played a lot of C&C:Generals and just got introducted to HL2 but never finished it.
Two years ago, almost, I built my current rig and thank God I was able to get the 7600GT. I've been able to run almost every game since, depending on settings, and was finally able to experience Half Life 2 and Oblivion. Now, at college, I've been gaming a little more but until I can get a new card (9600?) and better CPU cooler things are on hold.
I think that it's possible I may have an inherent proclivity towards computers and gaming, but I don't fit the type - I'm, as aforementioned, right-brained and not nearly as good at math or science as most enthusiasts I've met. While I truly do love games as an art form and think perhaps one day they could be the successor to cinema itself (which is something that really came to me in HL2), now life is starting to really sink in for me and I'm starting to use my computer experience and knowledge in more practical pursuits.
Don't take that the wrong way, Joe - you're good at what you do and you've been able to make a career out of your passions. I just mean that personally I see my career future developing in other areas, namely law. Areas which, traditionally, one could draw little experience from an activity as gaming and computer science.
But I'm going to do my damnedest to get this entertaining and even enlightening pasttime involved in there somehow.
PS - kt3946, my roommate and I have been playing Scorched Earth on DOSBox this past week for a bit of nostalgia.
I started playing space invaders on an Osborne, and then moved up to Sopwith and Castle (an ASCII RPG thing) on the 8086. (yeah, I'm old. Get over it)
The gmae that got me hooked was DOOM, or more specifically DOOM2. I got the boxed set with 1 and 2 and the user created levels for DOOM2 and I don't think I ever played all of them, but I sure tried.
After that, there was a bit of a hiatus until Halflife, and then HL2 took over my life for a while. I just finished HL2 and HL2E1 again yesterday, and I'm not waiting until I can afford to get decent internet again so I can get E2 and portal.
I never got into online play as I hate losing and so it's pretty much single player story driven FPS games for me. Looking forward to Bioshock and STALKER this year.
Originally Posted by kt3946 The first game I ever played, was Pong. My neighbor ...
...There was the old Atari 2600 games like Tanks!, then the Intellivision with Bomber Squadron, etc. ...
... Epix Megagames line, amongst others (Paper Route, Marble Madness, etc.) ...
Scorched Earth (IBM PC 386) - This was the first intensely fun multi-player experience we ever had. We as college buddies would all get together and play SE with it's snarky epithets and raucous weapons. ...
World of Warcraft (PC) & Lineage II (PC) - These games were huge time sinks. Not because the game itself was such a wild experience, but because it kept us as friends together regardless of the vast distances between us. No matter how far we were from each other, we could still get together online, chat, and share experiences trying to slay the next raid mob, or show off the latest gear we managed to score. ...
Thanks for a great article and an awesome site!
LOL, That brought back a lot of memories: My neighbors also had a Pong. I remember using the bi-plane bit in "Combat" to do aerial stunts on a 2600 (mostly buzzing the tower while inverted and recovering from a stall - after getting bored of the combat part). I replayed Jill of the Jungle (from Epix Megagames) way too many times (& the music was awesome for it's day). And how could I have forgotten Scorched Earth? (incidentally the 3D version is not too bad). A group of friends and I have been using Guild Wars similarly to the way you use WoW & Lineage II.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cthippo I started playing space invaders on an Osborne, and then moved up to Sopwith and Castle (an ASCII RPG thing) on the 8086. (yeah, I'm old. Get over it)
...
I never got into online play as I hate losing and so it's pretty much single player story driven FPS games for me. Looking forward to Bioshock and STALKER this year.
I remember replacing the motherboard on my mom's computer from a 8086 board to a board with a V20. "zoom-zoom" :)
I wasn't into online games either until I tried Guild Wars (I only play PvE). As an additional bonus I really like the fact that it's instanced (It really feels like single player or cooperative LAN game when you leave town).
Mario 64 on the N64, simply awesome, then what got me hooked was Super smash bros on GC! And the last straw was HL2 and Legend of Zelda (series) which eventually showed me what I was lacking in computer strength which led me to the need to make my own computer which taught me everything I know today about computers, and the last step was bit-tech
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ReplyIt's hard to be objective explaining why because i was too young when i played them and well, i just loved them, never stopped to think why until i grew up a little and started analizing. For example, despite what fans and even Keiji Inafume would say, for me, at the time, Megaman 3 was a perfect game, and improoved the series in various ways, gameplaywise, it added the signature slide to megaman's list of moves, storywise, it included protoman to the cast of characters, Contra, well, is an action game like none other, it is difficult, fun, had exellent graphics for the time, exellent music, the level design was challenging and, it had the spread gun ('nuff said). Finally, the world warrior, it set the standard for all fighting games in years to come, and the gameplay mechanics of that game are still being emulated, no wonder why capcom is going back to the roots with street fighter IV, plus, who doesn't remember entering an arcade house and hearing Hadoooken!!!?
Ooh, also just remembered Turrican 2 - that was amazing and took a few good sittings, the levels where you had to fly your ship made the game stand out (and more often than not ended with an 'aaarrgghh!! bugger me, bugger me!! ooh, that was close.. arrrrrggghh! ooh, flippin eck.. woah, that was cool..' as the speed increased.
Ditto on that, my dad showed me Gorilla and QBasic on my 286 and I also had a lot of the Apogee releases. Lemmings was a big game in my past too.
Welcome to the forums ;)
Thinking back I actually had a Game Boy long before I started PC gaming, played a lot of super mario, tetris and zelda - link's awakening.
Back in 1996 my friend came over and brought a game with him. It was called Chrono Trigger. Now I'm sure you are familiar with it. Though it is quite popular nowadays, I knew nothing about it at the time. I asked to borrow it and I loved it. I was so engulfed in the story about this band of characters that came together basically by fate to travel though all corners of time to defeat an inevitable threat. I felt their pain and their motivation, as if the very world I live in was threatened. I didn't play the game because it was fun, I played the game because I "cared". (Keep reading, I promise this is going somewhere)
When I got into High School, my interest dwindled from gaming with my pointless strive to be "cool". I got with the wrong crowd (though they were my friends and I still live them to death) and started doing drugs and partying. I had lots of fun, but it was affecting my life and my health. I graduated and in 2003 I bought my first "real" gaming computer, still "living on the edge". I played different games but a year or two down the road I found out you could emulate the Super Nintendo. The fist thing I played was Chrono Trigger. It was back, that feeling that I had unknowingly missed for years. Here's the turning point : Drugs were effecting my relationship with my soon to be wife (June 5th, 2008!) and I knew it. After I got that feeling back I started buying more games. That means my money was going to games instead of drugs, and that is good. They both make you lazy and unproductive, but hey, it's better than living your life in a gutter wondering if you took or drank or took too much. I got back in the gaming world and realized that being cool is well, stupid. I am cooler than I ever have been lol.
While we had a +4 first, many of the "Games" included with it didn't really tickle my ticklish bits. "Fire Ant" was good (As already mentioned), but nothing else seems memorable.
The first game I played through to completion was "Sonic the Hedgehog" on the Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in the US), and that started my love of the blue hedgehog. The game that really cemented my love of gaming, however, would be a toss-up between "Toe-Jam and Earl" and "Ecco the Dolphin", both on the Mega-Drive. Ecco was arguably the easier game, as it gave out save codes between each level, whereas TJ&E had to be played through in one sitting. And man was that game BIG!
Multi-Player gaming got me when a friend of mine got a PC of his own (That I built for him), and we strung over 100 feet of null-modem cable (Not really, it was a whole hodgepodge of Serial, Centronics, RS-232 and Parallel cables joined end-to-end with gender benders and one null modem cable to make it work) between his machine and his parents machine after school to play long C&C:Red Alert skirmishes. Quake was always fun, too, but my friend didn't like it so much (Mainly 'cause I kicked his ass!).
Then the internet came around, and I was using an Amiga 1200 to surf (With hard-drive and '040 expansion card, of course). Still, going over to a (different) friend's house and hooking our A1200's up to play rounds of XTR was big fun, and alone, Monkey Island and Flashback took my time.
Sneaking "Descent" into college to play on the network there was awesome. A nice 16-way game of Descent was more then enough to get the grey matter going, and a better lesson in relative physics and 3-dimensional thinking than any other game I've seen so far.
Then, when it was obvious Commodore were never going to be able to keep the Amiga alive, I got myself a PC. Doom, Quake, and Half-Life became my life until one by one they fell to completion. Then came a round of hardware upgrades, and Q2, Q3A, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, Halo, all of them were played and completed.
Now I'm in Canada, with a wife. And while there's a fair few computers here, none of them are up to playing modern games (Portal won't work without patching - only a GeForce 4 MX, so no pixel shaders!). The XBox sits here, Halo2 having been completed. It taunts me with Black still (Not completed it yet, damn that game is tough), and Burnout is fun, but mostly it's there to act as a frontend to my DVR (MythTV + XBMC on the XBox). The Wii is great fun. And Super Mario Galaxy is sitting at 90 stars - So close to completion!
So, right now, I'm saving my pennies to get legal and get working. Then I can get (In order) bills paid, a House, a New PC, and an XBox 360. Then I can revel in Crysis, Halo 3, UT3, GoW, GoW2, and whatever else comes to hand.
So, quite the chequered history, but fun and interesting, perhaps?
I was mostly a casual console gamer for alot of my life, and then really got into 'hardcore' gaming (clans, heavy online multiplayer, etc) by the release of the xbox and the first halo.
before that I did play games, on pc and console, but not at the level I did after that.
since then I've accumulated a great love for FPS games and a few RPGs and RTSs as well as a Passion for modding flightsim games (did some work on the Freespace 2 SCP, have written scratch mods for FS2002/2004/X and xplane, currently writing an entire game overhaul for Wings Over Europe to bring it up to modern scratch.)
To this day even though I love my fast FPS games like UT, ect. I still think the games I like th most are the big epic space based games, the fast & frantic RTS's and ... Dawinia as it's the only other game to come close to capturing the spirit of Cannon Fodder (hurry up Multiwinia!)
Civilization. Played on my mother's enormous black and white copy editor's monitor, struggling to make out what the unit tiles indicated.
Sure, I had played games before on the IBM my dad had for as long as I can remember... Ninja, Marble Madness and Sopwith come to mind, as well as that weird adventure game in the castle that I know I'll never remember the name of or find a 5 1/2" floppy drive on which to play it again (remember bootable games?), but Civilization was different. Civilization was hard. I don't mean hard like tested your reflexes like Ninja, or hard like solving a puzzle in MM, Civilization made you get organized; Civilization made you think ahead. Most games are "balanced" by the design team, so that no player comes into the game world different from any other, and at any point the player can load a quicksave and be back on top of it again. In Civilization balance was a task (a quest?) lain upon the player's shoulders, and if you failed in that task, (often evidenced by the sudden appearance of a horde of Roman Legionaries) your oldest autosave was rarely sufficient to fix your mistakes.
Wonderful column, by the way.
I really like the graphics in today's RPGs, but they could add a little of that Ultima 4 experience. Long live Lord British! Long live Britannia!
--Orlix, the Avatar
I had a Binatone game thingy (you know, the ones with the controls where you twist a knob to control your bat/player). And I had early exposure to what early text-based adventure games on the Commodore Pet. When I say text-based, I mean some were purely textual narration, but some were crudely rendered using standard ASCII characters (Nightmare Park?).
Then I got a C64 where I bought the odd game, but often programmed them out of books (no cash as 12 yr old!).
I remembered being totally wowed by games like Way Of The Exploding Fist. but the key game that sealed my fate as a gamer was Gunship by Microprose.
It was non-linear and career-based. There were degrees of success rather than simply win or lose. And these characteristics have stuck with me throughout my gaming life - recent games I've played, loved and ultimately kept: Pro Evo, BF2 &, Oblivion. Bioshock and Crysis were great but being linear means I play them once and re-sell.
Apart from defining the style of my gaming, Gunship was the first game to obsess me. Previously I'd loved and played many games, but I always had time for one more mission on Gunship. 'Coming out for a game of footy?'... 'Nah, I'm in the middle of a game of Gunship'.
For years afterwards, I compared all games to Gunship; it was the benchmark against which all other games were measured.
I'd love for someone to re-develop it... same game but modern eye-candy...
progress was only halted when my electron stopped being able to save games (to tape!) and i had to get as far as i could in a single day. the real physics of elite II really put me off the next updated versions though
the next real addiction i had was to civilization on the amiga, and laterly civ 2 on the PC. again whole days would disappear trying to complete a game in a single session. the advent of the internet led me to apolyton (as someone else mentioned) and other forums to pit my skills in OCC challenges on deity level
now i mainly play RTS games, all those FPS's are best left to consoles
I remember the night I had just discovered battle.net on Diablo and I stayed on that game for 36 hours sans bathroom and snacks. My mom woke up the next day and was hysterical that I was still awake and she didn't understand that I was still playing the game. a few months later when I was in the throws of Diablo clans and duping, my grades were falling and there was this night were my mom and I got into an argument about the game and she was crying that I was wasting my life and I gave her the cd as a sign that I was done playing.. I think I pilfered it back in a couple days so I could make a no-cd image. Ahh the good old days... then I discovered asheronâs call and I can has mmo!
Pirates! (very open ended, many difficulty levels)
Sim-City (best simple time waster ever)
Civilization (I even made batch files that hex-edited in cheats, 2 was great, 3 sucked, 4 bored me)
Wing Commander (1&2) (linear but Extremely Immersive for its day, great storyline, wingmate selection was brilliant)
Warlords (won on the original demo, liked 2 & 3)
Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe (wow, just wow, loved the Go-229)
Monkey Island (what can I say?)
Sadly most of those had sequels that disappointed. :(
One thing I'm noticing is that games like Pirates!, MechWarrior, Wing Commander, etc. had many facets to them (trading, combat, big picture results of player actions, storyline, ...). They were the antithesis of the simple platformers of the day.
Quite how your girlfriends grandfather comes into this I have no idea...
The first game I ever played, was Pong. My neighbor was probably the least likely person I would have ever expected to own one, and honestly, he rarely ever even touched it. None the less, he had purchased one of the early early home units, and he and I would occasionally sit down and play together. When he wasn't playing with us, it was generally the other neighborhood kids or their family we'd play against. It was an odd experience, much like table tennis but without all the exercise, which given his medical conditions suit him just fine. A far cry from anything that came after, but it always leaves me with a bit of nostalgia whenever I remember it. It brought us together, and gave the people on our block one more chance to get together, share, and enjoy an experience we'll never forget.
From there, I was personally hooked. There was the old Atari 2600 games like Tanks!, then the Intellivision with Bomber Squadron, etc. Not to mention the arcades and coin-op games that came tumbling one after another after...Galatix! and Pac-Man, Sub-Roc, Robotron, and 1942 just to name a few. After that a good friend's father bought a Commodore 64, and soon after myself also, using all my paper route money, playing such oldies along the Epix Megagames line, amongst others (Paper Route, Marble Madness, etc.) With my own in hand, I was able to help my friend's father figure out how to do word processing and budgets and simple type spreadsheet programs to help him manage our Boy Scout troop and other daily tasks. Surprisingly, it was my first consulting experience, and lead me further along the road to ruin.
After that it was the Amiga 1000 where I would play such greats as Contra! and many if not all of the early EA games (Snow Fox, BlazeBall, to name a few). My uncle went and bought a real IBM PC just to play around with (which those days, cost as much as a car!) and we would spend hours together playing such awesome greats as Flight Simulator. As much as the EAA had instilled in me to learn about aviation, it was a mere pittance compared to the real experience of FS. I'll never look at a ball gauge the same way again...
But the few that stick out as real *experiences* were the following:
Scorched Earth (IBM PC 386) - This was the first intensely fun multi-player experience we ever had. We as college buddies would all get together and play SE with it's snarky epithets and raucous weapons. We even managed to turn it into a drinking game, forcing each other to snap a shot each time we died. That, if we didn't fall over just from sheer laughter. It brought us all together as friends, and to this day, we reminisce about how so and so killed such and such, using their Death's Head in a horror of calamity!
System Shock (PC) - This game was so visceral it wasn't even funny. At night I would play it with the lights turned low, and the speakers turned on high. All that would be seen was lit by the ethereal glow of the monitor and miscellaneous lights blinking from the computer below the desk. My wife would sit behind me just to see what was happening, and was the only game I can really remember in which we felt our hearts pound and jump in fright as we heard the growling noises and deafening roar of the creatures roaming the halls. That's when we both really realized how much *more* there was to a video game than a movie or book. You don't watch it, you don't read it.... you *experience* it.
World of Warcraft (PC) & Lineage II (PC) - These games were huge time sinks. Not because the game itself was such a wild experience, but because it kept us as friends together regardless of the vast distances between us. No matter how far we were from each other, we could still get together online, chat, and share experiences trying to slay the next raid mob, or show off the latest gear we managed to score. It was a forum not only for entertainment, but a means to share something with everyone, that life and it's trials kept us from doing by sheer distance. Coupling that with the added bonus of tech such a Ventrilo and TeamSpeak, and it seemed like we were all back together again... just like in SE.
Of course, time continues marching on, and as well, the new and exciting experiences that await. Every day, I look forward to seeing the 'next big thing' that will either bring us closer as family, or reunite us as friends no matter where we live. At the moment, it's the wonderful Wii and it's awesome control interfaces, and the Star Wars games which my kids adore so much. Hopefully, I'll be able to share a bit with them the experiences I so loved, and start them along the road I so aptly followed...
Thanks for a great article and an awesome site!
It had some classic games (well I grew up with them!) like PGA Tour Golf (the 1st one) and Xenon 2.
Then, two things happened - we finally got a new computer (an old Pentium 166Mhz from work) and I got a Nintendo 64. What a great system that was.
One of the few games that would run on the old computer was Railroad Tycoon 2, and there was a demo in a games magazine that I picked up. I played it and I was hooked. It can still draw me in for hours and hours to this day (still haven't finished the expansion pack).
Fast forward a few years when I was at my friend's house and discovered Doom II. My friend's family, albeit turf farmers, had quite a bit of money and were always able to get him the newest tech presents. At his house I discovered Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit, until, for one holiday, he received the N64. And a little while after, came the Holy Grail.
Goldeneye.
I never really turned into a hardcore gamer, and we never even finished the single-player missions, but that game was so mind-opening for me. Three dimensions, location damage, a little bit of auto-aim, the most incredible array of guns and it was just... beautiful. As the years went on we'd still diversify in our game choices, always being a little partial to Bond games - even today we'll still throw Agent Under Fire or Nightfire in the Gamecube whenever we just want some mindless shooting - but I'll never forget the implicit impression that the multiplayer in Goldeneye left on me. (And it wasn't until much, much later that I'd get around to seeing the movie.)
In the meantime, I messed around with online flash games for several years until I got my first personal computer, a Pentium 133mHz IBM Thinkpad. I played a lot of single-player games from then on, especially Starcraft, and some older DOS games but I forget which. When I got a better computer in high school (500mHz, 640MB RAM) I expanded a little to Age of Empires II and Counter-Strike. At school (my first 2 years of high school were at a boarding school) I played on another friend's uber-laptop and played a lot of C&C:Generals and just got introducted to HL2 but never finished it.
Two years ago, almost, I built my current rig and thank God I was able to get the 7600GT. I've been able to run almost every game since, depending on settings, and was finally able to experience Half Life 2 and Oblivion. Now, at college, I've been gaming a little more but until I can get a new card (9600?) and better CPU cooler things are on hold.
I think that it's possible I may have an inherent proclivity towards computers and gaming, but I don't fit the type - I'm, as aforementioned, right-brained and not nearly as good at math or science as most enthusiasts I've met. While I truly do love games as an art form and think perhaps one day they could be the successor to cinema itself (which is something that really came to me in HL2), now life is starting to really sink in for me and I'm starting to use my computer experience and knowledge in more practical pursuits.
Don't take that the wrong way, Joe - you're good at what you do and you've been able to make a career out of your passions. I just mean that personally I see my career future developing in other areas, namely law. Areas which, traditionally, one could draw little experience from an activity as gaming and computer science.
But I'm going to do my damnedest to get this entertaining and even enlightening pasttime involved in there somehow.
PS - kt3946, my roommate and I have been playing Scorched Earth on DOSBox this past week for a bit of nostalgia.
The gmae that got me hooked was DOOM, or more specifically DOOM2. I got the boxed set with 1 and 2 and the user created levels for DOOM2 and I don't think I ever played all of them, but I sure tried.
After that, there was a bit of a hiatus until Halflife, and then HL2 took over my life for a while. I just finished HL2 and HL2E1 again yesterday, and I'm not waiting until I can afford to get decent internet again so I can get E2 and portal.
I never got into online play as I hate losing and so it's pretty much single player story driven FPS games for me. Looking forward to Bioshock and STALKER this year.
I wasn't into online games either until I tried Guild Wars (I only play PvE). As an additional bonus I really like the fact that it's instanced (It really feels like single player or cooperative LAN game when you leave town).
Stakler's great and all but if you can I'd start with Oblivion if you haven't played it, simply epic!
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