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Defining moments in your gaming life

Tomatohead

Learned
Joined
Jul 15, 2017
Messages
212
Location
Matsuyama Castle
What are your great personal moments in gaming, those magical moments when you realized games can be more...something which creates new worlds? Or maybe which titles gave you sense of wonder and excitment?

I know lot of this has to do with your age because when you are younger and hear that great tune for the first time in your life you haven't ever even imagined, that's so groundbreaking feeling. But after that when you grow older it is impossible to get excited the same way. All the different experiences have been accumulating inside you and it's very rare to face something new.

I know this might sound bit cliched but back then there was no internet etc and information came from mostly foreign gaming magazines and from friends. Reading about them did create a sense of mystery because everything wasn't instantly accessible unlike now.

The packaging was awesome as well. Nice manual, maps and small novellas etc. This is probably something what I miss the most these days. Games have become very disposable in this sense that you download them and there is no sense of being a real object. In my opinion you commit more to a beautiful object than just a game which can be deleted in matter of seconds. But maybe this is my own rose-tinted nostalgia faggotry.

For me those moments were probably both Ultima V and Dungeon Master. Thinking about them makes me miserable beacuse now when getting older nothing really compares to the feeling being trapped in dungeon while it's getting increasingly dark when the torch light is dimming. I have been trying to change the dragon though.

Looking at these shots from Dungeon Master I'm thinking about it's been at least few years since I last finished it but not sure if I want to pick it up again. Also these just happen to be RPGs by the way.

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(also if this is in wrong place or not relevant please nuke the thread)
 
Joined
Feb 6, 2015
Messages
97
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015
I was playing the Doom demo with a friend in his 486 computer, and while it was his turn of playing. I grabbed a bunch of game CDs. One in particular took my attention. It was game with a pink duotone image of a treasure and a sword. It was a game with a strange name: Wizardry 7: Crusaders of the Dark Savant. I asked my friend about it and he said: "It's a fucking boring game". I asked him to lend it to me, and he said: "Fuck. Take it, I give it to you".

Later that night, when I got to my house, I installed Wizardry 7, restarted the PC in DOS, and ran the game. After the typical intro and main menu, I was welcome with the character creation screen. Holy fuck! I never knew a game could be so complex, so cool and so intriguing from the start. I remember I just randomly chose characters just to start the game, and after the initial encounter, I restarted the game and then I spent two or three days just in the char creation screen, trying to understand everything, taking notes, reading the .txt manual and just randomly rolling char after char just to see what new profession I could use.

It was the defining moment in my gaming life. Nothing before, and nothing after that.
 
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Razzoriel

Genos Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 3, 2016
Messages
104
I remember being a kid, and going to my dad's office. It was dull as heck, but somehow, I needed to know how his work was like. I was what, 13 years old, don't remember well. Anyway, there was this vacant desktop, and for whatever reason I can't remember, this Diablo II CD pack was in my backpack. Purging my boredom and my idling, I boot it up, and play it. Remember that this is back when Battle.net was huge, and while everyone was too busy playing Shenmue and praising it as the best game ever.

So, I booted up the game, and started playing as a Necromancer. Standard Act I stuff; summon stuff, whack fallen ones... now, at the end of the act, in the Cathedral, bam, Unique Dagger. Well, as much as I knew that Daggers were crap, and an unique dagger could be worth something, I identified it, and it was Gull. It had this quite interesting stat where it read: "+100% chance to find magical items". My best item was what, +7%. And this dagger had +100%. Well, that's a huge amount, I'll wield it! Man, it was such a huge point in my life, where Diablo II started to become "How much MF can you put into a single character". Then came Sorceress builds. And Meph runs. And anything that can add MF should go there.

Good times, good times.
 

Epsilon

Cipher
Joined
Jul 11, 2009
Messages
428
First memory is going with my parents to the shop to pick up a C64. I had no idea thats what we were going for. Then getting home and not being allowed to touch it, until my father had unpacked it, and finished reading the instruction manual and explained to me which way the tape should be turned. I remember my mother was quite adamant about that. Then watching all the colors flowing down the television as choplifter loaded for the first time.
A few years later I came home from school, my birthday was a week off. But there was a package waiting for me, because my parents couldn't wait. It was the original NES, it had just come out. My father and I were both quite anxious in trying out Super Mario Bros.

A couple more years down the line I got an Amiga. A friend of a friend who had had one for some time, stayed until the early hours, we spent those hours watching the little dots in X-Copy fill out as we copied one game after another. Setting me up with free games for some time to come.
I remember later on, playing X-Com with a friend, he had brought his amiga over, and a television. We each played our seperate X-Com on our seperate Amiga's, but we discussed strategies and explored the ufopedia for the first time together.
He got a PC a few months after that, and thats where I saw a first person shooter for the first time. It was Blake Stone, and I was stunned at how smooth it scrolled on the screen, and the digitized voices of the enemies as they cried out.
 

Falksi

Arcane
Joined
Feb 14, 2017
Messages
10,538
Location
Nottingham
The most "wow" moment I ever had was through circumstance as much as it was brilliance. I'd a Jap import copy of Super Mario World, and so - back in the days of instruction booklets, and never having played a Mario game before other than Donkey Kong - had little clue of Mario's abilities. I sussed out the basics fairly swiftly, but that game held mystery upon mystery, with each sesh unveiling something new.

Then came the moment. I'd already sussed out that holding jump allowed me to float when I was "Super" Mario with the cape, but through sheer fortune I find myself running fast, jumping and somehow now flying! I gotten a bit lucky with the controls and figured you could "bounce-fly", but it still took some tries to get it down. Suddenly this unleashed all kinds of possibilities regards secrets & extra locations which I could go to in the game. And being so superbly designed it didn't fail to deliver either :)

Of course modern games make moments like these fade into nothingness when an alien-elf puts his penis in you.
 

Lady_Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
Patron
Joined
Oct 14, 2012
Messages
1,879,250
First CRPG I played: Eye of the Beholder 2 (couldn't figure out how to attack other than throwing things)

First game I bought: Monkey Island 2
First CRPG I bought: Wizardry 7

Most time spent in any game: probably Civilization 1

Getting my maps for Realms of Arkania 2 published in a major gaming mag was pretty sweet too and it's still one of my favorite games.
 

ERYFKRAD

Barbarian
Patron
Joined
Sep 25, 2012
Messages
28,240
Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Betrayal at Krondor.
First I just waltzed through the first chapter, clueless as can be, figuring out some stuff on my own. At some point I figured out what the game was about, and then the game just, I dunno, clicked in place.
Gothic, getting back at fucking Bullitt.

Realms of Arkania HD.
 

DemonKing

Arcane
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
5,958
Quite a few:

* Hanging out with a kid I didn't even like so I could play Wizardry Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord in green screen on his Apple II

* Installing a 3DFX card and then firing up Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II - it was like night and day.

* 1998 - I had my first full time job, plenty of free time and dropped a ton of cash on a monster PC (Pentium MMX 200!). Thief, Baldur's Gate, Half Life...I remember getting HL and playing for a few hours on a Friday night and then instantly emailing all my friends along the lines of OMFG get this now!

* Medal of Honor Multiplayer - pretty primitive stuff but it was tight and the SFX were great.

* Company of Heroes. I remember an intense multiplayer battle ending and looking around at the screen to see every, single building in the vicinity of the action had been demolished by a combination of artillery, tanks (shells and tracks) and out of control fires. Bliss!
 
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sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,662
I never lost a game of NFL Blitz. The only game I ever got close, I had to return a kick for a TD which, until that point, I thought was physically fucking impossible in that game. I returned that kick. My buddy got somewhat seriously depressed :lol:
 

Outlander

Custom Tags Are For Fags.
Patron
Joined
Nov 18, 2011
Messages
4,479
Location
Valley of Mines
Divinity: Original Sin Wasteland 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Spending entire afternoons at the arcades, to the point my parents had to go pick me up.

When I got the NES (not an actual NES but one of those cheap Chinese knock-offs)

When I got the SNES (original!)

When I played Wolfenstein 3D and Maniac Mansion on my dad's PC -> sold the consoles

Playing some Arkanoid version on a PC at my cousins' house (5 of them, all girls), they saw me shooting at the blocks after getting that red power-up, they went 'Wait, what? We didn't know it was possible to do that!' That moment I knew I was 'special' (as in a bit more geek than a regular person)

Dark Sun: Shattered Lands.

Gothic 1 demo.
 
Joined
Oct 5, 2014
Messages
4,748
Location
New Zealand - Pronouns: HE/HIM
sound design in half life 2

pretty much everything in deus ex

picking a fight with the checkpoint dudes in Stalker; SoC at the very start then watching as they lay waste to the camp; even going so far as killing a major NPC quest-giver

stephen heck

shooting wrex in the face hahahaha (then reloading because im a soft cock :negative:)
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,706
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
There are a lot of them.
* I remember seeing Wizardry 1 for the first time when I was a young teen and becoming obsessed with it.
* I remember getting Bard's Tale for the first time because I couldn't play Wizardry 1 on a C64 (couldn't afford an Apple) and spending every waking moment on that game.
* I remember playing Ultima 4 which my friend stole from a local Target, and feeling like shit for the first half of the game.
* I remember being obsessed with Dungeon Master and saving every nickle for an Amiga, selling almost all my worldly possessions, then still having to get a 512K expansion. Then waiting 6-8 weeks for that to arrive.
* I remember seeing Ultima 7 ads in gaming magazines and losing my shit, selling my Amiga (argh) and eventually getting a 486 to play Ultima VII, but not being able to hear speech, and couldn't get a mouse to run with it. I spent months editing config.sys and autoexec.bat just for that game!
* I remember, trading U7 disks for TES: Arena with a friend and falling in love with that game. The manual said it would take days real time to walk between cities, but i did it anyways and heard the most beautiful music while the snow fell while walking between cities.
* I remember playing Lands of Lore, and not having the green sword, the first time I ever had to scrounge for a clue.

I wish there were more defining moments now, but I guess my best parts are wrapped around the C64.
 

AetherVagrant

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Apr 12, 2015
Messages
519
QFG4 was the first time I saw character creation, or even some freedom of choice in a game. Qeue trying every fail option to read the amusing consequences.
Renting Earthbound over and over and making my friend let me spend the night at his house constantly.
Getting an Ultima Megapack but none of them would work due to dos ems memory issues with Win95....except Ultima Underworld and being enthralled for the next 4 months. Being concerned that games may have reached their peak in 1992 since Id seen nothing better since.

then Fallout came out.
 

Abhay

Augur
Joined
Aug 12, 2013
Messages
204
Location
India
Passing hitman 2 "at the gates" - suit only/all zeros/pro!
Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hypOk94P9t4

Hitman 2's experimental gameplay design still draws me back towards the game to give another playthrough in figuring out new ways of completing the mission with AZ/SO, which resulted in few important defining moments of the game for me. Like the "At the Gates" mission. Still nobody has managed to pass on youtube or anywhere else being achieved with the same pre-conditions to "At the gates" mission as attempted myself. It took a lot of tries but to finally get that accomplished has been one of the defining moments for me.
 

AetherVagrant

Arbiter
Patron
Joined
Apr 12, 2015
Messages
519
There are a lot of them.

* I remember seeing Ultima 7 ads in gaming magazines and losing my shit, selling my Amiga (argh) and eventually getting a 486 to play Ultima VII, but not being able to hear speech, and couldn't get a mouse to run with it. I spent months editing config.sys and autoexec.bat just for that game!
* I remember, trading U7 disks for TES: Arena with a friend and falling in love with that game. The manual said it would take days real time to walk between cities, but i did it anyways and heard the most beautiful music while the snow fell while walking between cities.
.
THIS. U7 was the game I always wanted to play and could never get working on any computer I had as a kid. I even got 8 to run, but 6/7 : no way. even with a boot disk and scrubbing all kinds of shit from win95, and I wasnt willing to go back to dos completely. My craving and startstruck love was only finally satisfied with Exult back in 2005 when I was able to not just play it, but play all the way through it. And it was good.
 

Daemongar

Arcane
Joined
Nov 21, 2010
Messages
4,706
Location
Wisconsin
Codex Year of the Donut
There are a lot of them.

* I remember seeing Ultima 7 ads in gaming magazines and losing my shit, selling my Amiga (argh) and eventually getting a 486 to play Ultima VII, but not being able to hear speech, and couldn't get a mouse to run with it. I spent months editing config.sys and autoexec.bat just for that game!
* I remember, trading U7 disks for TES: Arena with a friend and falling in love with that game. The manual said it would take days real time to walk between cities, but i did it anyways and heard the most beautiful music while the snow fell while walking between cities.
.
THIS. U7 was the game I always wanted to play and could never get working on any computer I had as a kid. I even got 8 to run, but 6/7 : no way. even with a boot disk and scrubbing all kinds of shit from win95, and I wasnt willing to go back to dos completely. My craving and startstruck love was only finally satisfied with Exult back in 2005 when I was able to not just play it, but play all the way through it. And it was good.
See? Ultima 7 made my job better - I was doing PC Support and had to use himem.sys to shuffle memory to get it all working. These skills made me a better IT guy, because I was obsessed with this. Also, there eventually was a program called cutemouse or whatever, that only took 7K for a mouse driver. Holy crap taht made U8 and U7 and SI better.
 

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