Video games that changed your life
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
By request…
@Jeroen said:
@FleaMarket said:
@Jeroen The difference is we ask "What video game changed your life?"Maybe a subject for another thread? Although I think you’d have to ask along with it “why did it change your life”, its not always so straightforward with game titles to get a feel for what the game is about.
I will kick things off…
Panzer General (1994): I spent way too much time playing this, marshalling little WW2 armies in the desert near Tobruk and in the European theatre. It led to a fascination that lasted decades about generalship and armies and game systems.
Ultima Underworld 1 and 2 (1992-1993): The first fully 3D games that I played, way ahead of their time. In the end I ended up programming 3D game engines professionally, and made a career out of it.
World of Warcraft (2005): The first massively multiplayer online game I played, I got quite severely addicted to this, it was not healthy the amount of time I played this in its Vanilla incarnation. Led to a fascination with game analysis.
Comments
The last game I played was Red Dead Redemption II. It was being a great adventure... but if we go to the past past past....
World of Warcraft (2005-2013)- dwarf hunter, night elf druid..zomfg... I seek refuge in the Light, Ironforge and the Alliance...
Super SMASH Brothers Meleeeeeeeeeeee - Nintendo Gamecube's best game by far.
Legend of Zelda and The Ocarina of Time
I will never forget meeting the Great Fairy for the first time! This was back in 1998-1999
MarioKart 64 / MarioTennis / Super Mario 64. CHildhood memories. Playing with my friend while my parents made us sandwiches.
Metal Gear Solid 2 - Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear 3 - Snake Eater. Both of them for their superb story and graphics.
I saw a quote on a twitch stream today.
"I am a gamer not because I don't have a life, but because I choose to have many."
I have never played a single Game in my life. Have no plans to alter that.
Same here...
Does Pac-Man count? It did indeed change my life, and it did so by bringing me to the clear realization that I needed to stay far, far away from video games.
I have a strongly ambivalent take on games. They did change my life when I was young, but much later in life I realised that they were actually all illusory environments, things that were not real and that were taking my focus away from understanding what is real.
The thing is, every game is a limited, fake and crafted-by-humans illusion. They give you a slice of insight into the designer’s mind, but there is no guarantee you will actually learn something about the real world, or about your own mind, or about the nature of reality.
For me the pinnacle of games was Mass Effect, a strong sci-fi story combined with shooting and combat mechanics. It was enjoyable as an entertainment, and when you were finished with it you put it away, unlike the endless treadmill that is World of Warcraft.
But because so many games focus on conflict and combat, they take you away from being in the real world, where we solve problems without resorting to fighting. The first precept is not to kill; I literally could not count the number of computer-generated creatures and humans I have slain, you can’t say this is good for the mind.
I was a kid right when home gaming systems started, I had an Intellevision and then a Nintendo. It was also the golden age of arcade video games and I dropped a fair bit of money there too.
I remember the first game that really blew my mind was the first Final Fantasy game for Nintendo. Up until then games were just point based skill challenges, shoot enough things and get past the boss. Final Fantasy was the first real game with a story and meaningful characters.
I fell away from video games in my early 20s for maybe a decade, but then got back into them with some of the computer games from Blizzard in particular, Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, then the multiplayer online versions including World of Warcraft. They were fun and engrossing but also addictive to the point of not properly taking care of my real life.
I still think video games are fun, but the addictive mental state they put me in is too uncomfortable for me now. I do play some less engrossing games a little bit like Candy Crush, Hidden Object or Word games.
I've talked about it here plenty before, but when I was a teen I played Dungeons and Dragons. A little over a year ago I picked up the hobby again and found there was a lot of ability to play online. I find the game a lot more creative and thoughtful and the people way less toxic (well mostly). I think it comes from the more social, cooperative and ongoing style of interaction. Coming from a gaming background the mechanics of that aspect I still find fun and interesting, but its the same sort of thing, you learn the rules and how to use them effectively, apply them in game, then... bored with it. What I'm enjoying way more is the ability to imagine and develop characters that I can give personalities and they can change and grow over time. I play once or twice a week but spend about as much time outside of the game thinking or making writeups of how my hermit druid astronomer's culture thinks about death or how I can incorporate the night sky into the game story. Or I was just making a character for a one time game (as opposed to ongoing) and the character is a bard (who uses music, or art of some kind to work their magic) but in this case is based off an 80s hair metal trope. I spent about an hour matching rock lyrics to his spells and abilities. Just doing that is fun, but what makes it really great is getting laughs from other people in game when I sing (really badly) a line from Welcome to the Jungle.
Anyway, that's all pretty nerdy, but I guess I'm at a place where I don't really care anymore. It's fun for me and I can find enough like minded others too.
I will talk about one genre of games I like that doesn't involve slaying monsters but rather puzzles and thinking. The first of these games I played with my family together including my cousins and they were text based adventures. You type in a command and see if the game even recognizes the command and then see what happens if it does recognize. For example "Go east" and the game will recognize that command but it might say back "you cannot go that way because it's blocked by overgrowth". If you say "open the drawer" it might say "you slide the drawer open and find a machete". Or if you say "contemplate the universe" it might say "I do not recognize that command" etc. I can't remember the brand of text adventures we used but we had great fun. I was under the age of 10. There was no going online to find the answers either. Me and my Dad to this day sometimes reminisce and talk about "the purple worm" which was a monster blocking our progress that we never figured out how to defeat. I read about it later and it was not beatable and was a decoy puzzle that was unsolvable and not necessary to solve to beat that game.
Some brands I remember (don't remember the ones I played with family): Moonmist (another text only), the Kings Quest series (now with dated graphics), Maniac Mansion, Myst, and Riven.
I remember Zork… but it wasn’t really a turning point in my life, just a reasonably fun game that I never finished.