Apologies for the long wait since my last post. I'm still here, just trying to get myself more interested in posting here.
I should have a more substantial post soon.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Friday, April 4, 2008
10 games that have been very influential on me
Hi, sorry for the long wait since my last post. I suppose updates will be reasonably sporadic, but I'll try my best to keep this updated at least a couple times a month. Anyway today we're doing something a little special- ten games (or series) that have been particularly influential on me, whether its my tastes, my creativity, et cetera. These are in chronological order, from my earliest years as a gamer to more recently. This is by no means a comprehensive list- there are many other games that are influential on me but I wanted to stick with 10 or this entry would take up half a dozen pages.
Original Megaman series, particularly 2, 3, 4 and 5. I had spent my early gaming years with a NES, and while I had Mario, Superman, and a few other games it wasn't until I had played Megaman that I'd found a series that I deeply loved. I loved the idea that I could pick which level to go to and that the bosses all had weaknesses to some other boss weapon (which took me a while to figure out). I loved the enemy design, the music, the level design, everything. To this day 4 and 5 are my favourites; probably 'cuz they were the ones I actually owned.
Sonic the Hedgehog series. My mom had friends in Michigan (we lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, so they were quite some distance away and we only saw them a few times a year), and their daughter had a Genesis. I wound up discovering the Sonic games there, and being totally blown away by the gameplay, the bright lush colours, and of course the music. I liked the fast-paced gameplay edged with the sense that if you fucked up it could kill you. It pretty much quickly developed into an obsession that would stay with me for some 8 or 9 years. I wouldn't get my own Genesis until Christmas 1995, but that didn't stop me from having the Game Gear games and buying the comics every month. Pity the series has fallen so out of favour in the last 10 years.
Wolfenstein 3D. In the early years of the 1990s I didn't have a real PC, just an old Tandy from the 80s we used as a word processor. But my neighbor had a PC. I would go over there and play Simcity and this random game where you were a space probe on some ship and there was something out there that killed you. One day I sat down at his PC and there was a little something called Wolfenstein. Now, earlier that year we had bought a used PC, it was a 386 with no sound card, and I played lots of Apogee and Epic shareware games on it. I had heard of something called Wolfenstein 3D and the concept intrigued me somewhat- shooting Nazis always does, though I didn't really fully understand WW2, even after seeing Schindler's List and reading Elie Weisel's Night, until I had seen Saving Private Ryan. My neighbor had it, though, and I went and started it up, and was completely sucked in. It was just the shareware, but I spent many an afternoon sneaking my way through what I thought was this brilliantly-depicted Nazi dungeon, stabbing Nazi thugs in the back. Spent a lot of time wallhumping, as well. This was my first FPS, so of course it's significant.
Doom. Again, this was something I had on my neighbor's PC, and again it was just the shareware but I spent many an afternoon working my way through Phobos, shooting monsters in the face. I think this game gave me a sense of dread not even Wolfenstein did, and I would constantly come back to it over the next 3 years to play it. Around the time my parents divorced, I got a disc of shareware FPS games, Doom being one of them, and I've... never really looked back since. I've been playing this thing pretty much since 1994 and I really don't intend to stop, even though I rarely actually play the original maps anymore. (Just FYI: Doom 64 = best official Doom game ever.)
Duke Nukem 3D. The shareware version of this little gem I'd picked up the same year I got the shareware disc with Doom on it, and I loved it. I had no sound thanks to Quake, but I played through it so often I knew the maps like the back of my hand. I think my teenage self was thrilled by the idea of porn shops and a stripjoint, but that was only the first two levels; but the mere idea of a realistic-looking (at the time) environment in which to shoot things thrilled me. I've been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever ever since.
Half-Life 1 (and its expansions, particularly Opposing Force.) I did not get a chance to play this until 2000, when my mom bought me a brand new Gateway computer (which I named Zayats) to replace the crappy eMachine (and the other, broken crappy eMachine that it replaced) I'd been using for the past year, and before that was the 486 that I'd broken the sound on to get Quake 1 working (and it worked!) I had saved enough money from doing stuff for my grandfather in the afternoons so I went to EB and bought a used copy of HL1, and despite having to play in software mode with 64mb of RAM (which led to stuttering every few minutes, similar to what has plagued some HL2 owners) I was blown the fuck away. For years I'd been playing Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and, hell, I'd just bought Redneck Rampage earlier that year. I had no idea that there were games like this- an emphasis on story, with a slow-paced progression that focused on tension rather than KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES RARRRGH like we all grew up on. I played this bitch so much- and all the singleplayer mods for it I could bring down over my poopy little 56k modem on fucking AOL- that I burned myself out on it for a couple years. (HL2 would later revive my interest in the series.) The irony is, the Starship Troopers TC for Duke Nukem 3D had just come out when I bought Half-Life, and in its own way is very much inspired by Half-Life at times- even using some of its music. There are a few vanilla Duke3D usermaps that have the same feel and progression, as well- I think at least one of them is called Holiday Holocaust and I remember the contest that spawned it and a few other great maps. So it was a lucky thing for me that after playing all these Duke 3D maps I discovered where their style had come from.
Fallout 1. My first real foray into cRPGs, and I was just blown away. I think I was really pulled in by the intro; it was just so damned DARK. The rest was just incredibly fun. I'll never understand the die-hard fans, but I certainly know why they're fans in the first place. I bought Fallout around the same time I bought Half-Life, and the two of them are pretty much forever intertwined for me thanks to it, along with Duke Nukem 3D. But more than that, it kicked off my fascination with retro as well as the post-apocalypse. I doubt I'd ever be interested in the TV series Jericho if it weren't for Fallout. (Jericho just got cancelled, too, it's not coming back for a 3rd season, which has me so pissed I could skullfuck someone. CBS are a bunch of dickslaving barrel rolling twatdivers.) I'm never going to be a die-hard cRPG player (for one thing, I bathe) but I'll always find myself coming back to FO1 every few years.
Deus Ex. This was one of the first games I played after upgrading Zayats in 2002. I still did not have a video card (I'm not even sure I understood the concept of it at the time) but when I tripled my RAM Deus Ex was suddenly playable, though the sound was frequently fucked up and fuzzy. My first playthrough ended sometime in Hong Kong; I didn't really know what I was doing. A few months later I fired it up again and played through it, still having no idea what the fuck I was doing but I managed to beat it, and was frankly blown away by the fairly deep choice of endings. I particularly liked Paul's final discussion with you at the end (having gone out of my way to save him the second time around)... there was just something so FINAL about the last hour of Deus Ex. That's probably why Invisible War was such a fucking disappointment. But you know what? The 2nd time through (discounting the first, unfinished play that ended in Hong Kong) on a new PC (Dagon)? Now that I knew what I was doing, the 2nd time was a fucking TRIP. You notice so many things that you didn't the first time; somehow only the 2nd one is that trippy, the first is just wtfwtf what am i doing and the third is like yeah yeah i've seen this before. This game has proven quite influential on me because I see quite a few of the little things in it happening today.
Thief series. I admit it. My first contact with this series was an ISO of Thief Gold I got off of Suprnova. Same for Thief 2. This was back in 2004; I've since bought physical copies of all the Thief games (Thief 1 excluded, never saw any point), but I kept the Gold and 2 ISOs so I don't have to mess with the discs and worry myself half to death every time I want to play. But when I first played TG way back in March 2004 my mind was blown. I had been interested in the series after reading reviews of Thief 3, and I was like "that sounds cool, I should try it!" Not wanting to play 3 until I'd played the others (not like I could at the time anyway) I gave Gold a try and frankly I've never stopped being a fan since. Hell, that's how I found my way here- I was googling for help on the game locking up on me! I was completely drawn in by the steampunk world and the heady feeling of stealing stuff and getting away with it. Garrett was a great protagonist/anti-hero, and frankly the Haunted Cathedral (and the Old Quarter surrounding it) are one of my favourite parts of a game. I love a good stealth game, but Thief was more than just that, it was this amazing universe that just sucked me right the fuck in.
Half-Life 2 (and the episodes.) Well, uh, what can I say about this game? It's one of the best games I've ever played. It takes everything great about HL1 and makes it better, and it's obvious that the 8 years or so in between have also had their influence. You can tell Counter-Strike has had a bit of influence in the game as well, and possibly Day of Defeat. When the game first came out I didn't really care- having burnt myself out on HL1 I was too obsessed with Thief at the time to give a shit. Then a couple of friends of mine told me about Ravenholm and I was immediately intrigued, being the faggot for zombie horror that I am. So I bought it, with my first paycheck at my new job at the time. After discovering how much I hated Steam, and that the installer was a piece of shit, I finally got the game going and while it wasn't the best thing ever on my poopy little GeForce FX 5200, it was good enough for me to keep playing. I was SUCKED IN. It engrossed me on a level only Thief had done before. I think when I was on the airboat (a favourite sequence of mine, btw) and I was like oh shit that tower is about to fall on me oh shit oh shit then WHAM it slams down behind me, I realized, holy fuck this is the best game ever. Yeah, HL2 has its flaws (which I think the Episodes fix nicely) and yeah, not everyone likes rail shooters (and some of them think Halo is better which entitles them to death by AIDS fire) but for sheer atmosphere, presentation, et cetera... well, this game will continue to be one of my favourites for years. No, it's not all that innovative, being merely a refinement of HL1, but what it does, it does so well you can't help but not care about its flaws, particularly the rather shaky performance and other issues it had in the year or so after its release.
Games and series that would've been on this list but I really had to pick and choose: Metal Gear, Stalker, Silent Hill, Blood, Metroid, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7 (my first true jRPG), Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike (a very negative influence until a couple years ago, actually), several others. I may do another list with these games in the near future.
Original Megaman series, particularly 2, 3, 4 and 5. I had spent my early gaming years with a NES, and while I had Mario, Superman, and a few other games it wasn't until I had played Megaman that I'd found a series that I deeply loved. I loved the idea that I could pick which level to go to and that the bosses all had weaknesses to some other boss weapon (which took me a while to figure out). I loved the enemy design, the music, the level design, everything. To this day 4 and 5 are my favourites; probably 'cuz they were the ones I actually owned.
Sonic the Hedgehog series. My mom had friends in Michigan (we lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, so they were quite some distance away and we only saw them a few times a year), and their daughter had a Genesis. I wound up discovering the Sonic games there, and being totally blown away by the gameplay, the bright lush colours, and of course the music. I liked the fast-paced gameplay edged with the sense that if you fucked up it could kill you. It pretty much quickly developed into an obsession that would stay with me for some 8 or 9 years. I wouldn't get my own Genesis until Christmas 1995, but that didn't stop me from having the Game Gear games and buying the comics every month. Pity the series has fallen so out of favour in the last 10 years.
Wolfenstein 3D. In the early years of the 1990s I didn't have a real PC, just an old Tandy from the 80s we used as a word processor. But my neighbor had a PC. I would go over there and play Simcity and this random game where you were a space probe on some ship and there was something out there that killed you. One day I sat down at his PC and there was a little something called Wolfenstein. Now, earlier that year we had bought a used PC, it was a 386 with no sound card, and I played lots of Apogee and Epic shareware games on it. I had heard of something called Wolfenstein 3D and the concept intrigued me somewhat- shooting Nazis always does, though I didn't really fully understand WW2, even after seeing Schindler's List and reading Elie Weisel's Night, until I had seen Saving Private Ryan. My neighbor had it, though, and I went and started it up, and was completely sucked in. It was just the shareware, but I spent many an afternoon sneaking my way through what I thought was this brilliantly-depicted Nazi dungeon, stabbing Nazi thugs in the back. Spent a lot of time wallhumping, as well. This was my first FPS, so of course it's significant.
Doom. Again, this was something I had on my neighbor's PC, and again it was just the shareware but I spent many an afternoon working my way through Phobos, shooting monsters in the face. I think this game gave me a sense of dread not even Wolfenstein did, and I would constantly come back to it over the next 3 years to play it. Around the time my parents divorced, I got a disc of shareware FPS games, Doom being one of them, and I've... never really looked back since. I've been playing this thing pretty much since 1994 and I really don't intend to stop, even though I rarely actually play the original maps anymore. (Just FYI: Doom 64 = best official Doom game ever.)
Duke Nukem 3D. The shareware version of this little gem I'd picked up the same year I got the shareware disc with Doom on it, and I loved it. I had no sound thanks to Quake, but I played through it so often I knew the maps like the back of my hand. I think my teenage self was thrilled by the idea of porn shops and a stripjoint, but that was only the first two levels; but the mere idea of a realistic-looking (at the time) environment in which to shoot things thrilled me. I've been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever ever since.
Half-Life 1 (and its expansions, particularly Opposing Force.) I did not get a chance to play this until 2000, when my mom bought me a brand new Gateway computer (which I named Zayats) to replace the crappy eMachine (and the other, broken crappy eMachine that it replaced) I'd been using for the past year, and before that was the 486 that I'd broken the sound on to get Quake 1 working (and it worked!) I had saved enough money from doing stuff for my grandfather in the afternoons so I went to EB and bought a used copy of HL1, and despite having to play in software mode with 64mb of RAM (which led to stuttering every few minutes, similar to what has plagued some HL2 owners) I was blown the fuck away. For years I'd been playing Doom and Quake and Duke Nukem 3D and, hell, I'd just bought Redneck Rampage earlier that year. I had no idea that there were games like this- an emphasis on story, with a slow-paced progression that focused on tension rather than KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES RARRRGH like we all grew up on. I played this bitch so much- and all the singleplayer mods for it I could bring down over my poopy little 56k modem on fucking AOL- that I burned myself out on it for a couple years. (HL2 would later revive my interest in the series.) The irony is, the Starship Troopers TC for Duke Nukem 3D had just come out when I bought Half-Life, and in its own way is very much inspired by Half-Life at times- even using some of its music. There are a few vanilla Duke3D usermaps that have the same feel and progression, as well- I think at least one of them is called Holiday Holocaust and I remember the contest that spawned it and a few other great maps. So it was a lucky thing for me that after playing all these Duke 3D maps I discovered where their style had come from.
Fallout 1. My first real foray into cRPGs, and I was just blown away. I think I was really pulled in by the intro; it was just so damned DARK. The rest was just incredibly fun. I'll never understand the die-hard fans, but I certainly know why they're fans in the first place. I bought Fallout around the same time I bought Half-Life, and the two of them are pretty much forever intertwined for me thanks to it, along with Duke Nukem 3D. But more than that, it kicked off my fascination with retro as well as the post-apocalypse. I doubt I'd ever be interested in the TV series Jericho if it weren't for Fallout. (Jericho just got cancelled, too, it's not coming back for a 3rd season, which has me so pissed I could skullfuck someone. CBS are a bunch of dickslaving barrel rolling twatdivers.) I'm never going to be a die-hard cRPG player (for one thing, I bathe) but I'll always find myself coming back to FO1 every few years.
Deus Ex. This was one of the first games I played after upgrading Zayats in 2002. I still did not have a video card (I'm not even sure I understood the concept of it at the time) but when I tripled my RAM Deus Ex was suddenly playable, though the sound was frequently fucked up and fuzzy. My first playthrough ended sometime in Hong Kong; I didn't really know what I was doing. A few months later I fired it up again and played through it, still having no idea what the fuck I was doing but I managed to beat it, and was frankly blown away by the fairly deep choice of endings. I particularly liked Paul's final discussion with you at the end (having gone out of my way to save him the second time around)... there was just something so FINAL about the last hour of Deus Ex. That's probably why Invisible War was such a fucking disappointment. But you know what? The 2nd time through (discounting the first, unfinished play that ended in Hong Kong) on a new PC (Dagon)? Now that I knew what I was doing, the 2nd time was a fucking TRIP. You notice so many things that you didn't the first time; somehow only the 2nd one is that trippy, the first is just wtfwtf what am i doing and the third is like yeah yeah i've seen this before. This game has proven quite influential on me because I see quite a few of the little things in it happening today.
Thief series. I admit it. My first contact with this series was an ISO of Thief Gold I got off of Suprnova. Same for Thief 2. This was back in 2004; I've since bought physical copies of all the Thief games (Thief 1 excluded, never saw any point), but I kept the Gold and 2 ISOs so I don't have to mess with the discs and worry myself half to death every time I want to play. But when I first played TG way back in March 2004 my mind was blown. I had been interested in the series after reading reviews of Thief 3, and I was like "that sounds cool, I should try it!" Not wanting to play 3 until I'd played the others (not like I could at the time anyway) I gave Gold a try and frankly I've never stopped being a fan since. Hell, that's how I found my way here- I was googling for help on the game locking up on me! I was completely drawn in by the steampunk world and the heady feeling of stealing stuff and getting away with it. Garrett was a great protagonist/anti-hero, and frankly the Haunted Cathedral (and the Old Quarter surrounding it) are one of my favourite parts of a game. I love a good stealth game, but Thief was more than just that, it was this amazing universe that just sucked me right the fuck in.
Half-Life 2 (and the episodes.) Well, uh, what can I say about this game? It's one of the best games I've ever played. It takes everything great about HL1 and makes it better, and it's obvious that the 8 years or so in between have also had their influence. You can tell Counter-Strike has had a bit of influence in the game as well, and possibly Day of Defeat. When the game first came out I didn't really care- having burnt myself out on HL1 I was too obsessed with Thief at the time to give a shit. Then a couple of friends of mine told me about Ravenholm and I was immediately intrigued, being the faggot for zombie horror that I am. So I bought it, with my first paycheck at my new job at the time. After discovering how much I hated Steam, and that the installer was a piece of shit, I finally got the game going and while it wasn't the best thing ever on my poopy little GeForce FX 5200, it was good enough for me to keep playing. I was SUCKED IN. It engrossed me on a level only Thief had done before. I think when I was on the airboat (a favourite sequence of mine, btw) and I was like oh shit that tower is about to fall on me oh shit oh shit then WHAM it slams down behind me, I realized, holy fuck this is the best game ever. Yeah, HL2 has its flaws (which I think the Episodes fix nicely) and yeah, not everyone likes rail shooters (and some of them think Halo is better which entitles them to death by AIDS fire) but for sheer atmosphere, presentation, et cetera... well, this game will continue to be one of my favourites for years. No, it's not all that innovative, being merely a refinement of HL1, but what it does, it does so well you can't help but not care about its flaws, particularly the rather shaky performance and other issues it had in the year or so after its release.
Games and series that would've been on this list but I really had to pick and choose: Metal Gear, Stalker, Silent Hill, Blood, Metroid, Resident Evil, Final Fantasy 7 (my first true jRPG), Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike (a very negative influence until a couple years ago, actually), several others. I may do another list with these games in the near future.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)