Your gaming history

[jcoquillon]

Just having a discussion in the IRC room about our gaming histories and thought I'd invite you all to share yours as well. What games did you cut your teeth on, what genres have you loved and grown tired of, what gaming moments stick with you. Anything you feel is significant

After graduating from a NES and Gameboy to the PC my first game was Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. I remember saving up for weeks to pay for it and pestering my parents to pay for a 2 button analogue joystick to go with it. That started my fascination with flight sims which has never died but my tastes have broadened and flight Sims get very little of my time these days. Rowan used to make the best flight sims, dawn patrol being one of the best and Air Power which Crimso skies borrowed from heavily

Gaming highlights for me include the likes of Sam and Max hit the road, Day of the Tentacle, Close combat 2, Quake, X-Wing

Crimson skies was one of the the first games i felt compelled to play all the way through and couldn't wait to see where it went with the story.

Quake was the first game i played online but Half-Life and it's array of mods grabbed my heart and has held it until recently. Despite the fact I didn't enjoy the SP game of HL much.

I'll leave it at that for the moment as i could go on for hours and want to hear your own stories as well

[Anders]

Ah the memories.

The first computer I had in my room was an Amstrad. The screen only did green and black. I do not know what model it was, but it had the floppy drive in the monitor. On that I played some helicopter game, possibly called Apache which I loved. I would like to play it now, although it would probably suck and ruin my boy hood memories.

Around the same time, but I am not sure, my Dad had a 386 in his study. With him I used to play the classic that is Elite. For ages I insisted that he did all the flying, I simply wanted to press the fire button (space) . When I was old enough to understand the game I loved it even more. Recently I dug out Elite, remembering that I had never reached that elusive Elite status. Unfortunately it only took me a couple of days to do it, damn. The other game I played on that 386 was Captain Comic, a platform game.

The console progression began with a NES, I remember playing Duck Hunt all day to see if anything would happen if the score went all the way round to zero again, nothing did. Then onto a SNES, wow that was a good Christmas playing Mario World. I have never had that sense of “wow” since actually (playing games anyway ). I also got a Mega Drive, Sonic Spinball and Skitchin were favourites. Somewhere along the line I bought a Gameboy, I believe I only had Tetris and a Mario game though. I remember selling my SNES, Mega Drive and Gameboy, games and all, for not a lot at a car boot sale. Oh how I wish I had not . Then onto a PS1, wow, when I first played Ridge Racer round a friend’s house I HAD to have a PS1. In fact I did not like going round the guys house because it smelt, but he had a PS1 and Ridge Racer. Now I own a Gamecube, Burnout and Burnout 2 are awesome. Oh and I have a PC, but you’re all falling asleep so I’ll leave more recent PC history for another day.

[directhex]

I started off in the late 1980s on my dad's Dragon 32, a welsh BBC/Sinclair competitor. In 1989 I got a NES Action Pack, demanding it from my parents in order to play Duck Hunt. It came with 2 pads, the Zapper gun, and a dual-game cart containing Duck Hunt and Super Mario Bros. Once I got into Mario, I never touched Duck Hunt again. Over the years, my collection grew. In 1992, My dad (on a whim) bought a SNES, with a single pad & Street Fighter 2. The collection for THAT grew, although soon afterwards, in 1994, we got an AST Advantage Adventure 6066d 486-DX2 PC. I got along with that, playing games & learning the nuances of making DOS let you play games. Christmas 1996 saw the N64 arrive in the house, and man did I love it!1998 saw a new PC, which (once equipped with a Voodoo2) became a firm favourite next to the N64. In (i think) late 2000 I built my own PC, a Duron 750 with a Geforce2 MX, and kept playing away on that. I bought a Dreamcast to tide me over in the week before the Gamecube launch, 2002 I built a new P4 machine. Somewhere in it all I got a cheap game Boy Pocket from halifax for opening an account, a GBA for a christmas present, and a GP32 for DiVX & Doom

Sums it up really. Over 15 years of console and PC gameplay. What a wasted youth

[Devilbod]

Me it was a BBC model B with Repton, Joust, Felix in the Factory, Chucky Egg and Revs to name a few. Then I got a Master System with Alex Kid, Mortal Kombat, Sonic, R-Type, Phantasy Star, Gobal something? and a whole lot of other games I can't remember.
Then onto a Mega Drive with Sonic, John Madden Football, Psycho Pinball, Spiderman VS Venom and Super Street Fighter II being the most memorable but I had a load of games that would take some research. I then got the Mega 32x plug in with the amazing Virtual Racer ( I think it was called that) and Doom 32 and STAR WARS then rather stupidly swaped the whole lot for cash.
Then onto the PS one with just about every major game you care to mention, Battle Arena Toshinden, Resedent Evil, Tekken, Gran Toruismo etc etc and a few others Vargrant Story, Wu-Tang: Taste the Pain (which I still have) and every Final Fantasy game I can get my mits on.
Then around the same time I got my first PC - because I'm dyslexic I got it for free, and then played Hexen II, and discovered Quake II, Voodoo I garphics card and a modem followed by a sodding huge phone bill (or two).
And then they both sort of continued at the same time, now I have a dual 2.8gig Xeon, 1 Gig RAM, and a ATI Fire GL 256Pro work station and a PS2, oh and I picked up a Game boy with 20 games on one cartridge somewhere abroad.

I'd just like to say you've now gone and done it - I'm off to E-Bay to find an Mega Drive with a Mega 32x.

[Auron]

erm, my memory is poop but I can say I've had just about every console that came out in the UK, I LOVED "Kid Chameleon" on the MegaDrive not many people remember it but its fantastic . Not had a GBA or one of these GP32's though...

I remember the 386 we had.. wow I'll never forget the feeling of upgrading to Windows95 from 3.1... hehe

[Bunjiweb]

BBC Micro.... 286.... Gameboy.....Snes....Multimedia PC .....N64.......Mamooth PC (stuck to PC gaming from 2000 - 2003)..... bought a GBA SP, then a Gamecube, then an Xbox, THEN went back to my routes and bought a Sega Saturn....then a Snes

The BBC Micro was my first taste of games but i hated my parents for not letting me get any more games than the few we got with it....

The Gameboy was classic and i loved being able to play games whilst running about the house or outside in the garden. The gameboy truly was an innovation! Good old Nintendo...

The Snes really got me into gaming properly with games such as Zelda 3, Mario & Donkey Kong...

Then my gaming lacked enthusiasm and i stuck to the PC with the likes of Half Life, Soldier of Fortune etc etc...

But then when i got a job at Gamestation it really sparked my console gaming enthusiasm back up and now i have 5 great consoles

Ben

p.s. no i am not a nintendo fanboy...

[Flibb]

Right here we go, Started in the early 80's with the ZX81, yes you could play games if you had the 16k ram pack. Best game was called budgie. Then had a commodore 64, with a 5.25" floppy drive and tape, spent most of my time on lasersquad. Also had a NES at some point but sold it to put funds towards an Amiga 500. Best game on that was moonstone, this sells for around £50 today. Then PC in 1994, my firts flight sim and an xwing type game were good. Then PS1 in 1998, mainly played GT1+2 or mortal kombat, PS1 currently lives in my draw at work and is plugged in to my monitor for lunch time entertainment. Various PC upgrades and some rebuilds now have an Athlon 1500, 1gig ram, 9800pro AIW and play IL2 aces, various HL mods, UT2K3+4 (when it turns up) and mods for them including remote strike (a friend works on that one) and red orchestra another friend beta tests on that. Strategy is also another fav, have combat mission, close combat, etc. Also have an xbox, mainly PGR2 and mortal kombat.
Flibb

[Stoo]

Umm.. Dragon32, Speccy +2A (with a light-gun! wow ), Amiga 500 (which got heavily upgraded over the years with new rom's, more ram, etc etc), Sega GameGear, Amiga 1200 (which also got heavily upgraded with a HDD, SCSI, cdrom, 030 accelerator, 16meg ram, and it's own dedicated monitor), Playstation, PC (which slowly evolved into the PC I have today) PS2, and finally a GBA.

I've still got pretty much everything, but only the PC and PS2 get regular use, with the GBA standing by if I've got a long journey on a train or something.

[Raz316]

1986 - Mucked around with various computers at primary school.

1989 - First home PC, the Amstrad PPC-512. Apparently a portable PC, it weighed a tonne and had a tine monochrome screen that, if things on screen moved too fast, would just blur. The first game I played was Digger, and it was ruddy difficult, no matter how fast I pressed the keys, the monsters would always catch me. An hour passed and my dad wanders in and explains I am actually allowed to hold the keys down, everything became alot easier

1990 - First go on a console, a friends NES. We played Ducktales At this point I knew I needed a games console, but as a family we couldn't afford one *sob*

1993 - Played on my cousins SNES. Mario Kart for a whole day, I was in love! I also get a Master System for my birthday, and loved it The game I played the most on it was probably Psycho Fox.

1995 - Our Amstrad gets stolen, and the insurance payout gives us a spanky new Osicom Gold 486 66. I think the first game I played on it was the Worms demo, that or the Tekwar one (yuck). A mate lets me borrow his copy of DOOM2 (the one that comes on floppies). The game was actually scary to play, and I loved it!

Err from that point on, nothing mind blowing, it all got a bit samey

[Stoo]

Someone stole the amstrad? were they blind or just exceedingly stupid?

[Ferral]

For me it started with the Spectrum 48k, then Commodore 64 (My all time favourite with tape and floppy drive), Commodore Amiga 500 with memory expansion (Kickstart 1.3), Sega Megadrive & Gameboy, SNES, Atari Jaguar (AvP on this was amazing), N64, PS1 & Sega Saturn, PC, X-Box (Sold 3 months after purchase, nuff said !), PS2 & Camecube now.

As you can see I've had virtually all the different machines over the years, favourite being the Commodore 64. It was great for its time and the games were good value for money.

I got 10 games with the Spectrum but they were all pretty naff, best one I had for it was Outrun and Rastan Saga. Approx 6 months after getting the Speccy I got the 64, my all time fave machine to date. Games looked great and sound was decent also. First game I had on this was Hunchback, the side scroller were you had to jump over obstacles on the battlements. Then System 3 and Thalamus arrived giving us great titles like Vendetta, Last Ninja series, IK and +, Hawkeye, Armalyte, Retrograde and way to many others to mention.

It was then onto the Amiga, purchased due to the 64 being so good. More the same stuff as the 64 with better visuals and sound. All time fave on this had to be Rainbow Arts Turrican.

After that it was complete console fever ! Up until I got the PC about 6 yr ago, 1st PC was a 333 P2 with 128 Ram and an S3 Savage 8 Mb (Or something on those lines for the vga card) First game was Nocturne and it all but filled my 4 Gb hard disk as full installation was 1.7 Gb. Also remember buying Blood 2 the Chosen but I can't run that now as you can't run it on an NTFS file system (Darn, what an excellent game) At the same time I bought The Nomad Soul, couldn't run it to well at first but I tried it a few weeks ago and it looks really nice and runs perfect with todays technology.

Getting all nostalgic !!

[Raz316]

Someone stole the amstrad? were they blind or just exceedingly stupid?

It wasn't insurance fraud, honest! Exceedingly stupid I assume, seeing as they advertised the PC in the local newspaper market place a few weeks later, and got caught 2 weeks after that.