Fatal, Shinobi has WAY better graphics than the game I played. In fact, the whole game would only take about 30 minutes to play the entire way through, and I'm not sure that it even had 8-bit graphics.

Hm, I had an SNES and I loved playing Chrono Trigger, I would always rent it at our local gamestore, which I can't even remember now. Thinking back, I should have just bought all those SNES games, would have been awesome. Then my brother bought Starcraft, and I've been hooked ever since. I think what made me go online was discovering the map editor and it's capabilities (even though it was just regular staredit lol).

You guys are all so young...

I started gaming when I was 4 with Duke Nukum, or 3-4 with wing commander, probably duke though. After Doom came the sequels, heretic, hexen, and other games like wacky wheels, raptor + other apogee software. About this time I also made friends with my roommate who had an NES and later SNES. We played the shit out of some TMNT2. Then my dad found Diablo online somewhere and we spend 3 days trying to download the spawn version of it off our 28.8k modem. Finally my dad bought it, and I fell in love with the game, but I swear I could never get past level 30. Jesus that shit was hard. In '98 I bought starcraft with my own money, since I saw the trailer in Diablo, I decided to buy it on sale at EB for $25, which was the best buy I've ever made for a game. My dad got brood war soon after, and I got Baldur's Gate + sequels. The latest game I have is Oblivion, or heroes of newerth if you really call that a game.

I started online play through modem play on Doom. Diablo was the first real online game play, though.

First game I ever played...
Could be a Pong console for TV from my father (1 console for 1 game... woot?). Or Super Mario Land on my brother's GameBoy.

First bought computer game I played: C&C Red Alert 1

First online game which was no java application: uhm... a counterstrike game in 2D. With faster internet I was able to play RTCW: Enemy Territory. But I made a lot LANs before with my friends...

I wonder where to start for this, because my gaming 'career' has had a lot of stops and starts.

I can first remember playing computer games in the early 90s on a Commodore Amiga A520. It used floppy disks and I would watch my dad play games on it like Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, F/A-18 Hornet and what I used to call the 'Chicken Game', which was actually a quite complex platformer called 'The New Zealand Story'. I also used the Amiga's limited creative applications, such as a primitive paint program. We moved house in 1995 and the Amiga was packed up and I didn't see it again until years later. Around this time I also played the Sega GameGear handheld, with Sonic, Shinobi and Streets of Rage.

Around this time the family had an Apple Macintosh Performa 5300 and I was instantly hooked by it - I didn't even use it to play games that much to begin with. I used to play about in this painting program called KidPix, and mess about with the OS in general (Macs being fairly childproof at the time). We also had a bunch of CD-ROMs which came with the computer, including an interactive Atlas and encyclopaedia; Myst; Return to Zork; a musical composition program; a typing tutor; several ones on aquatic life; How Stuff Works and various other things. Come to think of it, my time on the Performa as a child probably turned me into the intellectual type. At primary school I was well ahead of everyone else. It was at secondary school that the truly intelligent people caught me up and overtook me. I'm not a particularly smart person; I just had a very learning-based upbringing.

Some time in the mid-90s I went to my dad's work, and to keep me occupied he sat me at a spare Mac and told me where to find the games. There was one game in particular which caught my attention - Escape Velocity. For an 8 or 9 year old it was just a magical experience. It was a free-form 2D sprite based space adventure game in the style of Elite, but very accessible. I was intrigued by the fact that the game wasn't linear. I'll come back to EV later. After much pestering my dad brought home some of the games from his work on an external HD, and I put them on the Performa.

In 1996 the PlayStation came out and my dad bought it. I wasn't really allowed to play it unless I was supervised, and my time on it was strictly rationed until I got older. Ridge Racer and its sequels, Gran Turismo, WWF Smackdown, C&C Red Alert, Medal of Honor and Final Fantasy VII (and IX) were the games which really stood out for me. Around 1999 the Performa was destroyed by my dad because I didn't come off it when he asked me to. I was playing a game called Damage Inc. (similar to Marathon I guess) at the time, which I'd become quite addicted to. Well, my dad tore the computer out of the wall and threw it into the garage, and that was the end of that era.

Soon that year we got one of the first generation iBooks to replace the Performa. We had a dialup connection at the time and I was suddenly reminded of Escape Velocity by something else on the computer. My dad had installed a game called Apeiron (a humourous Centipede clone) which he used to play frequently. The game was made by a company called Ambrosia Software, who I remembered were the same people who had made EV, so I waited until my parents were out (I wasn't allowed on the computer except for 30 min periods) and then accessed the dialup connection in the room downstairs where we had the socket. I found the game and it was a 6MB download. At 5.6KB per second it took forever. By the time it had downloaded my parents were back so I had to wait until they went out again to play it. Now that I could dedicate more time to it it was everything I wanted in a game, and I played it whenever I had the chance.

I'll finish this history later, with 2000-2009.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 27 2009, 6:57 pm by CaptainWill.

<3

i started out on the humble nes, soon upgraded to sega genesis, which kept me busy with mortal kombat and such, and upgraded through to n64, which is when i really started to get into it, with ocarana of time(beat it 3 times when i was 10) and it just started snowballin from there...