i played games a lot as a kid, but I think the first game I ever fell in love with was Age of Empires II. I’m not going to lie and say I had a deep understanding of the mechanics of the game at age 6 or whatever, but I sure as hell loved base building and army management. Strangely, as I’ve begun to learn more and more about RTS games and how they work, I’ve liked them less and less, and I tend to look more to Grand Strategy since they offer a little more than “hey go fight this thing”. AoE II still holds a special place for me, though.
Half-Life was another game that I just absolutely adored and continue to adore. I replay Half-Life at least once a year, not always completing it because the last 3rd of that game is actually bad, I think, but the entire game before getting to Xen is still an incredible atmospheric experience.
Another series of games that hold a huge place in my heart are the Initial D Arcade games and their home console versions for the PS2, PSP and PS3. There used to be an arcade in downtown Toronto that had four Initial D V. 2 cabinets (so 8 seats total) that I would go to pretty often in my youth, and while I was terrible at the game I still loved the shit out of it. Playing it was awesome, and watching the replays of the really skilled players was even better. There are very few games based on anime and manga that I think capture the spirit of the original text but I think Initial D is one of them. Stages 1-3 emulate the Initial D manga very well, and 4 on are pretty faithful to more exaggerated driving of the anime. They’re also just so damn fun to play even without a wheel. I’ll admit theres been a little bit of an Initial D resurgence going on in my friend group so that may be why I’m thinking about it so much, but the games are absolutely a big part of my childhood.
omg its weird u say that because i grew up in europe too (bulgaria specifically) and i started out with consoles first. Idk how it is in other countries in europe but here anti-piracy laws were non-existant. Literally everything we did was pirate. Our PS1 - chipped. Our PC games - pirated. Hell even our PS2 was chipped and it was BARELY OUT before it was chipped we had to use like those weird game shark boot-up/cheat disks to start up the game IT WAS WILD. I mean we were probably born in different times (for me its 1999) but yeah what ur saying was most likely the situation for the rest of europe but my country was all sorts of trash.
Ye, think it’s mainly about the time difference. I’m sure there probably were places chipping NES consoles but it was far less organised and obvious back then so most of us didn’t even know where we’d go to get it done (let alone the later console stuff around soft-mods that just required some technical know how and internet access - no internet back then for a start).
yall really grew up with pc games??? thats kinda new to me like everyone i know even the ones that aren’t gamers all had like a bootleg NES or whatever they played when they were little. barely anyone i know started off with pc games. But yeah half-life was legendary back in the day like people we’re seriously going “THIS IS A MOVIE THESE ARE REAL HD 9000K GRAPHICS” and like computer cards that look like a 3rd graders arts and crafts project cost like a shitload of money dslksdksdkl
and about the arcades - GORL - u should NEVER feel bad for sucking at an arcade game. U go to arcades to have fun and to have a good laugh with ur frenz. U don’t go there to be competitive. U play competitive when u go home and u grab the phone cable god gave you and u duct tape it to ur NES and u start competing with ANONS on super mario 2 player mode. The only time ur not allowed to have fun with in arcade game is if ur trying to get a perfect score on insane mode on a rhythm game like DDR or project diva other than that - HAVE FUN!!!
My family didn’t have a console until the PS2, even though I spent half my childhood in the PS1/N64 era and have two older siblings that grew up alongside the end of the NES and the SNES.
Parents were pretty skeptical of video games and kind of bought into a lot of the “this is ruining your children” bullshit.
Every once in a while though, my siblings and I would get a new game for our PC. We also emulated the hell out of some shit for the older consoles we never owned.
As for the “being bad at arcade games” thing. I never really cared at the time how bad or good I was, but Initial D does absolutely encourage skilled play since each car is different and the game is balanced much like a fighting game would be. It’s all about learning your car and finding the best lines down each course, but also about learning the intricacies of all the different cars in order to come out on top with yours. It’s kind of awesome, because the attract mode from Initial D isn’t a canned replay, but a replay of the last race run on that machine, so you’re basically always watching another person play. It really encourages you to get better by watching other people and I’ve always liked that (and of course they want you to put more money into the machine to test what you’ve learned. Lets not ignore that.)
i don’t get the whole “video games are bad for kids” agenda.
If i didnt have video games i dont wanna sound dark but i’d probably be GONE
like my second cousins would be getting anxious thats how GONE i would be
besides that i could never get into arcade racers because they had the think where they try to make ur seat and ur steering wheel all synced up with the game and when people would slam their cars into mine the steering wheel would send me flying across the atmosphere until i hit like a moon or another planet.
Crash Bandicoot 2/3 are probably the two games I have the earliest memories of playing.
Another early game that holds a special place in my heart is the original Roller Coaster Tycoon. It was the only PC game that would run on my family’s computer. I spent so many hours just building park after park, but I never finished any of the missions outside of the first one.
Thats literally the games i started out with and the games my best friend started out with.
I played crash bandicoot
she played roller coaster tycoon. she still does. i’m too lazy to deal with crash jasjkldasjkads like i can barely tolerate hard platformers.
What a coincidence!
Crash was hard, I wasn’t able to finish any of the trilogy until years later after many attempts. It was most likely due to Crash that I love hard platformers.
the first game i bought for myself was Fallout 3, and i was so haitty at shooters (still am) but i fell in love, because it was mine and i picked it and there was no one behind me (siblings mostly) dictating how i should play because it was My Game and My PS3
Myself, I’d probably say Sonic The Hedgehog, Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, Persona 4, The World Ends With You, and Always Sometimes Monsters. They’re all sort of landmark games for different points of my life (where I started, where I started to really form my preferences, the two games I played back to back who helped me form a critical eye and question who I was, and the first indie game to really leave me amazed and gushing with thoughts and readings).
Pokemon Red was the first video game I ever owned, because almost all video games I had were rented at that point or my brother would hog the N64 and I wouldn’t get to play a lot. Because of the nature of Pokemon games having only one save file, it meant that I got a whole game all to myself for the first time ever and, like…
I shared a room with my sister for most of my life, and I’ve been expected to share almost everything I own regardless of how that makes me feel; my time, my feelings and even my perception of self felt like they were all basically the property of various family members. Until I hit my teens and started to realize I could be my own person, it was pretty shit, actually!
That game is the first time it felt like I owned something that was just mine.
Yeah, Wrestlemania was probably my third favourite out of those, but all the other kids on my street had the superior 16 bit wrestling games so it didn’t get a lot of love.
Pac-Man 2 is definitely an interesting game and I respect it in theory. It’s got some good animations and can be funny, but it is incredibly frustrating. Once you figure out what you’re required to do for a puzzle, you need to hit a lot of your slingshot shots at the right moment, and if you don’t Pac-Man endures a rube goldberg machine of torture that you can’t really stop. Again, it’s really funny when it happens, until you would like to actually progress in the game. Also, My dad bought it because I was really into the original Pac-Man, so it was pretty much an immediate disappointment.
The first Ratchet and Clank was basically my introduction to gaming. I’d played PS1 games before but Ratchet was the first game that seemed like it was made for 8 year old me. It was the coolest thing ever and it also had some not completely awful messages about the dangers of hero worship, the hypocrisy of developed societies exploiting other people’s land because they polluted their own and the importance of letting things go for the sake of a friendship.
