Be Excellent To Each Other

There were a several games that left an incredible impression on me as an individual. I think I can narrow them down into this, however.

Phantasy Star II
This was the beginning of the end for me. I probably had no business playing this game when I was 9 years old, as it had many mature themes. However, I did play it, and I still remember it now with an amount of fondness. Before this game, playing videogames was merely a hobby of mine. They were something to play when I was bored, or when you had friends over. Afterwards, videogames became an integral part of my character. I started to consider myself as a "gamer," and so began my quest to find for more difficult and unique challenges.

Dog shit on the end of a stick chase.

If it's spam, it's bizarre.

How do you play that? Blindfolded taste test sort of thing?

If it's Bizarre, the spam is held by Dita Von Teese.

The latest trick appears to be a normal looking post -- probably scraped by a bot from a different forum -- with spam links in the signature (which I have removed). I suspect the idea is to gain pagerank, rather than directly make anyone here click the links.

So we shouldn't hate the playa, hate the game?

UFO: Enemy Unknown, Frontier: Elite II and Cannon Fodder.

The first two were the first games that really captured my attention for a significant amount of time - and indeed, still do. It is a source of continual bafflement and frustration that no-one has bothered to remake UFO with high-resolution graphics, but without changing the gameplay. I don't want 3D graphics either. I like the detail you can see in the graphics in UFO, and 3D remakes always seem to make the models low-poly with little detail.

Cannon Fodder made me realise what a shit war is. It sounds cliche, but it's true - when I first started playing it, it was a laugh, but as the soldiers died and the hill filled up with graves, I started to realise just what the moral of the game was.

Are we running with this? A spam post that might actually turn into a thread? Maybe a mod could TOTALLY CHANGE TIME and reattribute the first post to themselves.

Anyway, the game that had the most impact on my life was 'It Came From The Desert!' on the Amiga. That was the first 16bit game I ever played with my own 2 hands. Up to that point, I was vaguely interested in the games on my 8bit computer (speccy at the time) but I could hardly say I was massively into them. After seeing the Amiga in action I got heavily into games, even with the Speccy and in 1992 I finally got an Amiga of my own.

Never did finish ICFTD though.

How's that?

I'm lost, what did I miss?

Woah! 4D in comeback shocker!

I DEMAND MOD TRASPARENCY.

Everyone elses replies before your post by the look of it.

When I opened the thread there was only 4thDimension's post in it, and there weren't any links in it that I remember?

The topic was started by a spammer "selinagames123" or something, using a post stolen from somewhere else. They're not sticking around to debate it.

This was much discussed.

Then Gazchap made a serious contribution to the topic. Then Davpaz went "oh well, can mods change the first post so at least it isn't a spammer" and then Craster totally changed time to do that.

The links were in the sig. As discussed

Anyway, perfectly valid topic now, carry on!

Thanks mods, you bunch of cunts. At least say what you did in the first post!

Sorry, GazChap.

This forum gets weirder and weirder by the day....

Bring back Gerald The Shit Eating Mouse.

Okay then you basts, let's kick this shit off properly.

Or, er, something.

Anyway, for me I guess the game would be Out Run. I can remember being mesmerised by the deluxe arcade cabinet when I was a kid and constantly hassling my parents to give me the money to have a play. Of course, when I did actually get to play it, I felt pretty short changed when I was totally unable to get past the first stage, but then I had no idea what the gear lever was supposed to do and the brake pedal seemed like an unnecessary distraction.

If it wasn't for Out Run, I'd have never hassled my parents for a Sega Master System for Christmas back in 1988 and it was arguably that which began the downward spiral to my terrible games addiction.

SoTalkAboutGettingOverIt.

For example: http://www.dxalpha.com/forum/viewtopic. ... cd66bc3335

I miss CUS.

We'll never know if Gerald made it out of the sewers!

Feex.

Just check behind your bins.

Harrier Attack, because it was the first computer game I saw and it seemed amazing.

And the deluxe sit down Space Harrier machine that popped up at Southsea arcade. It was there for a while before they turned it on, and when they did it had long queues to get on it. The graphics and sound were so far ahead of everything else it was amazing. Nothing since has made a leap that big.

WWF Superstars on the arcade. I loved wrestling, and I loved video games...

Bringing the two together was amazing.

I still remember hearing about MAME for the first time and realising that I might actually be able to play it again.

Yeah, the hydraulic cab version of Space Harrier was amazing for me too as a child.

Civilisation.
I vaguely remember playing this on a 286 in glittering EGA around the same time I started becoming interested in politics. Clearly, I learnt from an early age that power is Fun!

That and Star Wars

The very first video game I saw was Space Panic, and it mesmerized me how you could actually control what was on the TV screen with your input. So I was basically hooked instantly to video games.

But then Star Wars came on TV and I saw it for the first time. I must have been around 10-11 years old and it was just the most incredible thing I had ever seen. At the same the video game arrived in the local arcade, and you got to BE IN STAR WARS. It is one of my favorite games to this day.

20p a go.. oh how much money I wasted in the arcades back then .. All of my £1 pocket money

CUS didnt draw the Gerald cartoons

I know, but he's a shit eating mouse.

Going along with it...

Half-Life Firearms Mod/Counter-Strike. Ruined my GCSE and A-Level results. Changed my life significantly.

AND I NEVER WENT TO CHURCH AGAIN. I don't think I was even asked by my mother again. I suspect she only wanted me to go to keep me pure and all that. But that, my dears, was that. Pod 1, Catholicism 0. Well, except for the fact I went to a cathloic primary and secondary school + college and was occasionally forced to go to churches by them. Whilst Monkey Island was not the first game I played by any stretch, nor even the first I remember, I do remember this 'significant' moment. I have no idea how old I was though. Why not have a guess?


*It might not have been The One, possibly amiga action? I'd know if I saw it, though. It had some yellow on it.

Ah Sundays. That was the day myself and my friend Neil used to pop round to this bloke's house each week to blow all our pocket money on shitloads of pirate Amiga games, half of which wouldn't work on my machine as I had an A1200. And for some reason a lot of pirate stuff never seemed to want to play nice with Kickstart 3.0.

Get out and never come back.

Skooldaze because it was the first game where I could do what I wanted and I did for hours on end. Sandbox on the Speccy.

Hide the Salami

Significant games in my life:

Missile Command - handheld LED game thing. First game I discovered how to cheat.
Tomy Tronic 3D Sky/Tank Attack - A tank vs the flying things from tron. Amazing. Played to death.
Rock Man Vic20 - Boulderdash type game based around single screen puzzly type things. Pretty damn amazing.
Robocop (Spectrum) - So astonishingly slick and amazing. One of the first games I could complete.
Jet Set Willy - Seed astonishing when I was about 5.
Street Fighter 2 arcade - Complete revelation of how amazing and arcade game could be
Shining Force 3 - Probably first time a game had emotional impact so maybe that should be the only one I should have listed.
Panzer Dragoon Zwei/Saga - Just such an incredibly well crafted world.
Phoenix Wright series - They're just a delight.

I have a phd in astrophysics because of, in no small part, frontier elite II.

And no game has come close since.

Kato & Ken (Chan VS Chan) because you could fart on things. Which I thought was utterly hilarious.

For being the first game I played, and the first computer software I ever used. After that, computers weren't just something my dad posted back to the manufacturers every other week.



For showing me that games could be involving and captivating.



For keeping me interested in games when I was tired of boring Amiga platform games. This was so superior to the competition, it was scarcely believable. Also made me appreciate Japanese games design.

Hard choice. Hmm.

I think it's either Sim City or Elite: Frontier or UN Squadron or Colonization.

UN Squadron was a fairly average shoot-em up, but it was the first game I ever played on the first console/computer I ever owned - the Amiga 500. Mum and dad at Christmas telling me to go upstairs to get my present, and finding the coffee table with a blanket draped over it and under that blanket something that I thought must be a computer but yet couldn't be... my own computer? MINE? Best Christmas ever.

Me and my sister played the intro pack to death, Lemmings, UN Squadron, some sort of R-Type game (Zirax?) and Bart Simpson vs. the Space Mutants. Somehow we managed to fail the first Lemmings level. I'm not sure if that's even technically possible.