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Games that Defined You

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    Games that Defined You

    Everyone's familiar with the usual list of games that everyone and the gaming media roll out as games that are considered the greatest ever made. Often these games were major hits that also represented innovations or changes in trends within the industry which is why they held so much impact.

    To quite a few extents it will mean that a good number of those games still apply to this thread but what we're looking at here is more to do with games that were personally defining to you and your love of this hobby.

    It may be the first game you ever enjoyed, one that most ignored but for various reasons it's remained in your memory as a stand out experience ever since or something that clicks in a way that higher praised titles haven't.

    So, rather than the games that defined gaming:

    In all your time as a gamer, which games were defining ones to you and your interest for the hobby and why?

    #2
    This might take a little time to write out... a few ideas heh...
    Lie with passion and be forever damned...

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      #3
      This is such a hard question.

      Maybe we should narrow it down to three of five choices?

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        #4
        I'm not sure any game defines me (Journey comes close, partly because the theme and style of the game resonate with me and partly because it's my go-to game when very, very high - and therefore at my most impressionable) but Equinox: Soltice II on the SNES is a game that, more than most, greatly influenced my taste in games and got me interested in games as an art form and not merely entertainment. The isometric view, even though I'd seen it before in games like Knight Lore, and, particularly the music, which to this day I consider one of the great video game soundtracks, combined to create a game that made a deep impression on me.



        Gorgeous.
        Last edited by Zen Monkey; 22-08-2018, 12:53.

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          #5
          Originally posted by Zen Monkey View Post
          Journey comes close, partly because the theme and style of the game resonate with me and partly because it's my go-to game when very, very high

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            #6
            I can think of one, but its going to seem like a cliche...

            Final Fantasy 7.

            A kid at school was going on about this game, so i convinced him to lend me it. Now, up until this point i had NEVER played an RPG. Not one. When i borrowed it and played it for the first time, i didn't understand the menu system, the fact you had to level up, the combat system. Nothing. It was all alien to me, and i hated it. I gave it back and told him he was a fool.
            But after a few days I began thinking of it again and I figured maybe I had been to harsh, so I went and bought it myself.
            I now consider RPGs one of my favorite genres. That game, and other RPGs has genuinely has taught me to be more patient in life and not seek instant gratification.

            Also, Duke Nukem 3D taught me the 12 times table...

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              #7
              Ok, here goes.

              My first video game experience was on my dad's mate's Atari 2600, but my first gaming love was Wonderboy at the arcade. We had a ZX Spectrum around that time and when Wonderboy was released I saved up my pennies and it was mine! Other games came and went, and then an Amiga, NES, Master System, Atari ST (not all ours, but between my mates we had it covered), but the next title that genuinely changed me was Street Fighter 2. I still clearly remember the first day it appeared at the local arcade. You couldn't even see the cabinet due to the crowd! I'd squeeze passed the bigger lads just to get a tiny glimpse of the screen. And that was it - addicted. All my money went on this cab until it was released on the snes. Odd jobs, sofa coins, and, i'm ashamed to say, some pinched money from Dad's key and pocket change tray, later, and an American import was mine. Looking back, that may actually be my happiest living moment. Opening the box. Street Fighter 2 was in my house!! Street Fighter 2. Everyone came round to play. I was the ****ing don. There are so many other great games from this era that it's hard to single a few out, so I won't. Apart from Secret of Mana. Another import I had to sell a kidney to get. Playing that with my brother over a seemingly endless summer holiday is one of my most cherished memories.

              And while all this was happening there was the PC. Gradually starting to take over. That and the N64. To get that out the way - Mario 64, Golden Eye and Perfect Dark. Nothing else needs to be said! Wolfenstein became Doom, which then became Quake and finally Half-Life. And more specifically, Half-Life mods. TFC, DoD, CS. Online multiplayer was born. Then Quake 3, and then fps I've spent more time playing than any other - Return to Castle Wolfenstein. To this day there has yet to be an better crafted, more balanced, skill and team based fps. Years in clan and tourney play was lost to this. Eventually RTCW became ET (a free, not quite as good sequel of sorts) and I failed my degree as a result! There's also the WoW lost years, but I don't want to think about those.

              There have been so many great games over so many great systems, but these are the ones that really changed me as a gamer.

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                #8
                Originally posted by Zen Monkey View Post
                ..particularly the music, which to this day I consider one of the great video game soundtracks....
                Damn straight. I used to leave the attract mode on sometimes, just because of the wonderful vibe.

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                  #9
                  Maybe Mercenary on the C64.
                  First time I'd ever really felt in another world, and discovering new areas was a real delight.

                  Nintendo have since taken that thrill and distilled it into Zelda, Metroid etc...

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                    #10
                    Wii Fit!

                    Am I right?!

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                      #11
                      Metal Gear Solid for me. It was really shockingly different to a lot of the stuff I'd played before. First game I probably played that had a story beyond 'Collect all the doinks' or 'Escape the planet', with actual characters. So compulsive to play and so delightfully weird, too. Really crystallised my love of J-gaming, although I didn't realise it at the time. Hugely influential on me as a gamer.

                      I did get a bit confused with all the stuff Kenneth Baker bangs on about with the president signing the START2 protocol and so forth when I was 8 though.

                      THEY JUST THROW NUCLEAR WASTE IN BARRELS AND PRETEND LIKE ITS GONNA GO AWAY HUH

                      Me: O.O

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                        #12
                        Mine is probably Tower of Babel on the Amiga. Unusual choice, I suspect, because it wasn't a great game - it was a 3D puzzle game, very slow-paced, which was based around logic puzzles. You controlled several robots from first/third-person and moved them around to reach the exit, in the process you activated switches, found keys, etc.

                        The most interesting part of it, though, was that the game had a level editor. It was tile-based and quite simple to use, and I was able to build some basic scenarios for it, which my dad would later play through, as he quite liked the game.

                        I think it was more the idea that you could craft interactive experiences, and you could express yourself in them. Up until then I'd never really thought much about how videogames were made, or how the end product reflects the people who made it, and this sparked the idea that all media - from the books I read to the cartoons I watched on TV - were the same. I was barely six years old, so I had never really questioned where these things came from - I mean I knew authors wrote books, that artists drew comics and so on - but I'd never really thought about those things before.

                        As someone who went onto a creative career, I think this was a big moment in my childhood, and part of what makes me the person I am today.

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                          #13
                          A Link to the Past.

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                            #14
                            The Count by Scott Adams on the VIC-20. I fished it out of a bargain bin when out shopping with my mum in the local Co-op (department store rather than the janky 24 hour, Spar-bothering low-end minimarkets that sport the brand these days). I had to beg her to buy it because it was £3.99, by explaining that it would have usually been £14.99 or more and it was a cartridge, ergo an undeniable bargain!

                            I pestered her to hurry with the shopping and got home as soon as was possible. Powered up and plugged it in and started to play. It was your standard text adventure of the time: two-word verb-noun style text parser, short location descriptions and absolutely no gfx. I hammered that game, dying multiple times and having to start from scratch over and over again due to the design irk du jour: sudden death! But within 4 hours it was completed! The first text adventure I had completed without magazine hints or walkthroughs or tips from friends. It was to be the first of many. I punched the air with joy and proceeded to run and tell my mum, who was deeply unimpressed with the value of her 3.99 outlay!

                            Still love text adventures or IF, as the bourgois like to call it. They still evoke such great memories of making maps and cursing the puzzles you get stuck on. I am still trying to get the kids interested with mixed success.
                            Last edited by gunrock; 23-08-2018, 08:27.

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                              #15
                              From an initial stand point:

                              Ghostbusters
                              The first game I owned, some two and a half months before I got my Amstrad CPC464. I spent ages on it, mostly from the view that I didn't have much to play on the machine at first. Despite the time I spent on it I never really got what you were meant to do at the time but it didn't stop me repeating the same early sections over and over. As the first key title I had to play it would have been easy for me to get bored and not really be that bothered by gaming so it played an important role in the following decades of play.

                              Stunt Race FX
                              I think one of the reasons I've always held a soft spot for this game is because of the impact hit subtly had. Whilst being aware that it was technically limited in many ways I was at the time still unconvinced by the shift to 3D, more interested in the next generations possibilities for advancing sprite based games that wouldn't end up coming. Virtua Racing, Fighter etc were known of by then but they hadn't quite bowled me over because despite the visual differences over 2D incarnations they didn't feel like they offered anything that justified the jump. It's the small touches in Stunt Race FX that sold it, deer running across the road, tube sections in the road, a feeling of weighted physics to the handling animations, falling boulders etc Stuff that 2D entries lacked and it opened the crack in the door to what was possible more than the better regarded 3D titles did at the time.

                              Panzer Dragoon Saga
                              History will always remember FFVII's Aerith storyline more for this but that turn always fell flat for me because the character was a dull one. Saga wasn't just a surprisingly strong game, its story was probably the first time I'd ever experienced a game were the storyline pulled out an emotional response. The pacing of the game is excellent but it builds towards an ending that pays off the time you've spent with characters but had the guts to not cop out and in doing so left the player feeling affected by the outcome. It's a shame the story was unable to be followed up on properly leaving Orta to fill in some blanks in a less satisfying manner.

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