Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1915529-20120712125232/@comment-65.96.226.105-20120828123919

(EDIT: This is Deathstalker666, I was typing so long that it logged me out).

I feel you Vork, I know exactly how you feel and have the same issue. However, you seem to have gone to school during a time when old school games were popular (probably around the same time). My problem is that every kid loves Call of Duty and Xbox. Very rarely to I talk to a game enthusiast, yet when I do they always are obsessed with the Source Engine (They almost have a heart attack when I say I never touched the Source Engine). Earlier I showed some of my examples for what happened when I tried to get people into my interests.

Gamebooks? Never heard of it. I thought PC gaming would have become common by that time (I thought it took off around 1992). I'm kinda forced to look back on the games I enjoy instead of experiencing what it was like when it was popular (I didn't get into FPS gaming until 2005 or so with Doom 3, ironically I learned to dislike it as I compared it to older shooters).

I am a hardcore gamer and amatuer game designer (never released anything, but have tinkered with level designing and 3d modeling over the years and plan on getting into the industry). It appears casual gamers are the group designers attempt to appeal to, creating something just to replace last years title. When I start up Unreal, Quake, or Thief I can look at the game and see a different side of gaming. In those days it seems developers were enjoying making the games, they were extremely replayable and give the user an amazing experience unseen in the last 10 years or so.

There was a time when my parents played Duke Nukem and Wolfenstien 3d. Somehow they never heard of Quake, I have been told that Duke 3d was a lot more popular in those days. Doom 3 was originally bought as a father-son activity, I used to play it with my dad every day. Lately I have managed to get him to play Unreal. Still, he is not that much of a gamer and will usually attempt to play just to humor me every once in a while. My mother is an extreme casual gamer (she used to play quite a bit before she started working, most of my games as a child came from her collection), she likes the newest graphics and cannot stand oldschool style like Unreal.

Thief has a lot of memories as my first FPS before I got into them, as well as my favorite. That was one of my mother's (She had quite a variety of genres, yet most games that she had when I came around were from 1998-2002.). Thief II was my favorite game as a child and has never changed.

It also was a door opener for me. I played it at a young age during the same time I was playing Elmo games, so it could be very well my second or third video game (perhaps 4?), it was the thing always installed on my computer years after I began to hate Elmo. My mother, while a gamer at that time, was very leisurely in playing. The first level had an objective where the player couldn't kill anyone, so my mother thought it safe for me to play. What she didn't realize was that level 2 eliminated that objective on lesser difficulties (It took practice to get good at Thief, but years of playing that on the hardest difficulty is probably the reason I am so fluent at FPS games compared to other genres where I get easily lost). So I was using a sword and bow to massacre enemies left and right (lots of enemies on level 2 to practice on) without my mother realizing what was going on. Eventually she got to level 2 and saw that the game was more violent than she thought. It was too late for me to unsee anything, so from that point on I was pretty much allowed to see any violent thing I wanted (movie, game, ect). I was able to play M titles at age 4 as long as they didn't have nudity (It was uncommon back then unlike today's games, I am lucky as it took a couple more years for me to be allowed to see that and thus have free reign).

Tomb Raider 3 was another big game of my childhood (without the cutscenes, they never worked right and thus I never really understood what was going on). I kinda trained myself due to extreme replayability of the lower levels to explore completely and find every secret (thus the reason it is so easy by TR2). Funny, it only took 13 years to go from playing a demo of TR2 on Venice (came with Thief, explored it after embracing the game) to actually playing the game. Now I just got to play Deus Ex (the demo was quite enjoyable, why I never got the game is a mystery to me).

Shark: Hunting the Great White was my second FPS, the first one to use an actual gun. It is quite obscure sadly, but it was great for replayability. Then there was The Sims (I spent the early half of my teens playing this heavily, modifying it to the extreme and teaching my mother tricks for customization). Stronghold was another title I played back then, never got too far in the campaign but wasted so much time on free mode running around with a single archer due to his fast speed and fighting slower armies. Empire Earth was my other RTS back then, days would be spent merely looking at the factions as they improved with each epoch. Otherwise it was a lot of build up before being massacred by the british or robots that walk underwater. Deep Sea Fishing 2 was the only sports game I ever enjoyed, merely because I could drive around a boat for hours and could catch a large variety of fish with various sizes I would record on paper. Matchbox Emergency was a basic driving simulator with repetitious objectives, yet somehow I managed to spend hours on crazy stunts over rooftops. Dungeon Keeper 2 was where I would dig and dig as an Imp or attempt to combat overpowered enemies instead of using actual fighters that could fight them. Toontown was my first experience with MMORPGs and the first one I ever subscribed to. Star Wars Jedi Starfighter (I believe, never got far enough to really see anything) and Rebel Assault were the flight simulators I could never control and never learned how to. Star Wars Pod Racer was my racing title, while Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was where I improved my mouse movement from being forced to trace symbols. I played the original Tom Clancy game as well as America's Army, yet both bored me in gameplay as well as the war theme (never been one for war movies, I am into horror). Spiderman was great for combat training simulations, while Zoo Tycoon was the only buisness simulation game I ever enjoyed.

Ugh, I could go on with the titles back then that I spent so much time on before 2005, of which above is a small list of a couple of the titles I remember at the moment. 2004 began the era of FPS gaming, as well as something called the Doom 3 curse. That was a time period from 2005-2008 when I could not complete any video game as I desired to return to the earlier levels and replay them. It is named after Doom 3, which was the game that started and ended the curse as I stopped around Delta Labs Sector 3 due to wanting to see the end of the game with a functioning game. Before that time I was using some older technology that couldn't handle Doom 3 (or several titles that were in my mother's collection since my childhood yet could never be played), so in 2008 I upgraded all my technology.

Raadec, a pub?!? I think I just figured out what 3d Star Wars FPS I touched as a child. I know I touched Dark Forces (Made it 4 levels in Dark Forces before giving up on that level with the rediculous jumps without an ability to jump) and Republic Commando (Played during the Doom 3 curse) but there was always a third I could never remember. It was one of that series, but details were missing to remember the name. All I remember was some walkway, perhaps a pub. It was metal, eventually you got to some area overlooking a pit. You had to go to the right to reach a door, then you encountered your first storm trooper who would proceed to kill you in a couple of shots. That was where I stopped for some reason (probably was never good enough at my aim, this was before I was used to FPS).