What games do you remember from your child-hood?

Adrian Ţepeş · November 25th, 2012

Just anything you remember fondly and what consoles you played on.

My first console was the Sega Genesis with Jurassic Park and some random football game.

Then when I was about 7, we got a Nintendo 64 and really the only games we had were Goldeneye 007, Mission: Impossible, Donkey Kong 64, and Super Smash Bros. I still play my N64 occasionally, and I might take pictures soon.

The last console I ever owned was an original Xbox with Halo 1 & 2, Nightfire, Everything or Nothing, Splinter Cell, and a few racing games.

I honestly didn't care much for the majority of games on either console because, let's face it, there weren't really that many good games for either console.

So what games did you play and what did you play them on?

MrFancypants · November 25th, 2012

First console I used was an Atari 2600, it had some standard games like pong. Later on I owned a few other consoles such as NES, Super Nintendo and Playstation. I always preferred gaming on PCs though. One of the first games I played on PC was Silent Service II.

Adrian Ţepeş · November 25th, 2012

Yeah, I can agree with that. I started actively playing when I was about 11 when I bought Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. I've played that game so much I can tell you everything about it

Then of course, I went on to JKA and eventually JKO and started visiting JK3Files. And now here I am

***Mr. Matt*** · November 25th, 2012

The first game I have any memory of playing was some kind of space invaders clone on the Dragon32. I was very young at the time, perhaps four or five. My dad still has it, I believe.

Following that, I played a multitude of games on my dad's Nixdorf portable computer (which wasn't portable - I've described it on this forum before, but I've recently learned that it was based on the Panasonic Senior Partner computer, explained with a picture here. To summarise, this 'portable' computer had a CRT screen, a built-in thermal printer, two 5 1/4" floppy disk drives, a full-size detachable keyboard, and offered free hernias to anybody who dared try picking it up). These games included Zork, some rubbishy golf game, and Pacman. I still have this beast of a machine in the loft somewhere.

After my dad's business collapsed, he 'acquired' a desktop PC with Windows 3.1 on it, which we kept at home. On here, I played Commander Keen, Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, Another World, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, and a few others I can't really remember at the moment.

The first games console of my very own was the Sega Mega Drive, which I got for Christmas at the start of the 90s after pestering my folks for one. I still have it, and all of the games I had on it, so I can give a reasonably detailed list of what I played: Alien Storm, Batman Returns, Bubsy, Buster's Hidden Treasure, Captain America, Cool Spot, Daffy Duck in Hollywood, both Earthworm Jims, Eternal Champions, Jurassic Park: Rampage Edition, Mega Games I & II, Mickey Mania, Ristar, every Sonic the Hedgehog game released on the console (including Spinball), Talmit's Adventure, Toejam & Earl, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkatron, Virtua Racing, and Worms.

Since then, I played PC games primarily, though I have had a Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, a Nintendo Game Boy, a Nintendo64, a Gamecube, a Wii, a PlayStation, a PlayStation 2, a PlayStation 3, a PlayStation Vita, an Xbox 360, all of which I still own, games and all. I have never sold or disposed of a video game or console. I still break 'em out every now and then, in fact - my nephew has recently been playing Mario64, for example.

I recently also picked up a Sega Master System, so I could claim to have a complete collection of Sega consoles (I do miss those crazy bastards dearly).

Throughout all those consoles I continued to play PC games extensively. Primarily, even. Right the way through the PC gaming Golden Age of 1995 - 2004, until 2008. At that point, this PC (which I spent about a grand on in 2004) finally became obsolete and wouldn't run games well any more, and I invested in current-generation games consoles instead of upgrading it. I saw no need to keep up with PC hardware any longer.

I have a lot of clutter here, by the way. It's like a frickin' museum.

Adrian Ţepeş · November 25th, 2012

Where do you live? I'll drop by sometime

Nemmerle · November 25th, 2012

This is by no means an exhaustive list:

The first games I played, though I only dimly remember them, were educational games on the BBC Micro model B. You know the whole, spell the word and put the elephant in the back of the truck style things. This would probably be late 80s early 90s.

After that I vaguely remember playing little moon landing games and the like on the ZX Spectrum. Which were really annoying because the tapes never lasted long and you had to keep changing the cords.

Before we got a PC - and certainly before I was ten when I remember using a PC - I played a variety of games on various Amiga systems, most notably the Amiga 500. Paperboy and the first Xcom game spring to mind - the former was nothing special, the latter was absolutely fantastic. Though looking back on it now the incredible loading times and the fact it came on six floppy disks is a bit painful.

I've still got a magazine guide I remember reading from around the time I was playing that. This is May of '98, so I'd've been nine years old at the time.

Spoiler:

I remember the terror missions - hunting aliens in cities - learning how to section your troops off into fireteams and to take your time and so on. Resource management, research priorities.... And it was all new to you, you were a kid - you didn't know shit about squad tactics and that sort of stuff. It was a glorious time to be playing games and learning stuff from them.

We got a PC, I believe, around '96-97. I can't recall quite when. I do remember that StarTrek Starship creator was out we had both computers still setup downstairs - and I couldn't afford it, so I tried programming something similar on the Amiga in Amos. Retrospectively, my version was better. Theirs worked on maps and mine played stories in the manner of a choose your own adventure visual novel depending on how you'd designed your ship.

I remember we were driving back from somewhere - Rugby I believe - and there was some man talking about the web on the radio, and the parents were wheedled into getting a modem. This was way back before 56k became possible. I've played a lot of games on the PC. I played a lot of demos back when those used to be offered too.

Syndicate and Commandos spring to mind as the earliest from that age. I also enjoyed the Master of Orion games, for which I still have a dog-eared strategy guide, (back from when strategy guides were huge books worth the money.) It probably helps to get some handle on me that I spent many a happy hour, at what I'd estimate to be between the ages of ~10-12, playing the game to which this books relates:

Spoiler:

I played Homeworld quite some time after it was out I believe, picking it up in the bargain bins. It was definitely sometime before Homeworld 2 came out though. Memories of that time - the burning of Kharak and the church in the nebula. It was a cinematic experience. No... come to think of it it wasn't. It rarely took the control away from the player. We keep using that word when what we actually mean is breathtaking; having the capacity to move us emotionally.

The trailer really doesn't do it justice.

An interesting item of trivia, however, for those too young to remember, is that those trailers used to come packed out on your demo CDs that came glued to the front of magazines, or on the CDs of other games.

This, in my opinion as one of the defining moments of gaming as art, shows it off better:

That's your planet they just burned - and at that point in the story you don't really know who they are. You're basically in your people's first interstellar capable shiip, just warping back to set up the defences for some vaguely hostile threat you've bumped into on the edge of your system. And that's what you expect to be doing - you come in having just shot a bunch of ships up, loaded for nasty. You'd think that'd be the game - but it's not. Burning worlds to Agnus Dei and Adagio for Strings.

I also invested many an hour into StarTrek Starfleet Command.

I used to play that game online over our crappy dialup modem. From time to time my sister would pick up the phone to call her friend and I'd just be dropped from a game for hours. My favourite, cheap, tactic was to buy a light cruiser when everyone else was spending all their points on heavy battleships and outfit it with the very best drones. Just head for the border of the map when they started fighting each other.

Drones were an always hit (provided they didn't get shot down by point defence or captured by tractor beams) weapon with an infinite range and huge damage. Their main limiting factor was that your ship's computer would only let you keep so many in the air at once.

What inevitably happened was that the one that survived then had to come after you, with half his phasers shot out - making point defence difficult - in a slow ship, with all your missiles flying down range at him. It was cheap and horrible and frustrating to people who had no idea what they were doing, and I loved it. They all discounted the heavy cruiser, rather than ganging up on it at the start before it could get out of range, as they should have.

In a similar manner to Master of Orion, this was a fairly deep game. There were entire magazine series related purely to the game and the virtues of various tactics and races and so on.

I got Homeworld 2 in 2003 - god it was a gorgeous game for the time it was out, quite engaging too. This was only four years after Homeworld by the way:

For those of us who lived through that time of incredibly rapid advance you'll understand why we don't think Graphics are that important. The advance of Homeworld 2 over Homeworld 1 was significant. The advance of something made with today's graphics? The extra value you could draw from that advance would be far less. Even if you compare a game from four years ago to one from today, no-one's really topped Crysis significantly - the money's just not there to make competition worthwhile. There won't be significant improvements in graphics until the next generation of consoles come out and people can brute-force many of the problems away at an associated lower cost to the developers/producers.

But I digress. The only real let-down in HW2 was its story; which was thrown together in somewhat of a rush. While it was an interesting gorgeous game... it never quite lived up to the ability to move me that the first one had.

Knights of the Old Republic springs to mind as a game out around that time as well. KOTOR was the best Star Wars game for me, in the same way that Bridge Commander is the best Star Trek game. It certainly had its flaws - frankly I think basing it on what's essentially D&D's mechanics was a mistake, D&D as a system is a bad one. Taris was originally a much larger part of the game, and very different - with Bastilla playing a different role as more of a mentor figure. And the levels you picked up on Taris as a non-Jedi class could easily amount to half your level cap, crippling you in later stages. Just the same however. The voice acting, (Mmm, Bastilla's accent, YUM,) the writing, the story - for all it was a little clichéd - all excellent. The characters were likeable, people rarely ended up holding the idiot ball, it made many innovations in mechanics compared to less refined role playing games that had been out before. The way they handled getting to know your fellow characters, having them come out with things while you were going around, was quite good to keep character exploration going. I can't think of another game that's done companion characters that well. Dragon Age didn't, they locked all that away behind the fucking gift system. Dragon Age 2? Seriously now?

It's not a coincidence that KOTOR produced some of the best fan-fics, in volume and quality, that have ever been out - even if many of them aren't online anymore.

I could go on for some time. There's a lot of stuff I just haven't written about. Orbital drops taking entire countries in a handful of turns in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - the best game he's ever made, stompy stompy Mech goodness in MechWarrior 3, (the presentation they did with that game was quite clever too.) I haven't even mentioned Max Payne, or the original Deus Ex, or how the first Call of Duty was actually a really good game (for many of the reasons that the latter Call of Duties have not been - bad theatre is bad theatre.)

Aww hell, I can't help it. MechWarrior 3 was and still is in many ways the best example of presentation for a military shooter I've seen.

A lot of games these days take the control away from you and make you watch this sort of stuff in the engine as a direct interruption of gameplay. What they actually have here isn't that stunning, but the way they've packaged it is, IMO, very clever.

Also the game was quite good.

As someone who didn't care that much for MechWarrior 4 this is, so far, the high-tide mark of Mech games.

#

People like myself, who grew up in what, so far, seems to be the golden age of gaming, talk about deep games, games with good presentation, games as art and things like that.... And I worry: a lot of people who've come along even a few years later will have had a very different experience with games. I struggle to think of a recent game that moved me in any way. What's it supposed to be?

Deus Ex HR? That was a game full of morons with fancy arms, there were no really moving stories in it and the characters themselves were fundamentally unlikeable idiots. Dishonoured? You're pretty honey, but you ain't no Thief - you don't have that tension and background of horror, and your stealth mechanics are so-so by comparison. I struggle to think of the last time I could call a game deep or particularly engaging either. I remember thinking KOTOR was a short, relatively shallow, game, these days 20hrs would be fairly long and the replay value that something like Kotor had is a thing basically unheard of. (Dishonoured was 4-12 depending on how you went through it, Portal was 3.)

Many of the games on that, in no ways exhaustive, list I've spent thousands of hours with. So I worry, when we bitch about things like graphics not making the game, that people just aren't gonna get what we're talking about. Because increasingly with the gamers just coming through the middle of their teen years, and even some of the older ones, they've not really had games as an expressive, or even particularly engaging, medium in the same sense we have.

There's little these days that I'd want to call art - because art's an expressive medium.

[/Grouchy old man

]

Adrian Ţepeş · November 25th, 2012

Old man? I'd say.......seasoned

I still have Master of Orion II, but it doesn't work on this OS. It used to be pretty fun; however, I found it quite uneventful, so maybe it's not as good as the first (which I've never played).

To be honest, most of the games I had growing up, I looked up every cheat code or learned hex with gamesharking to find ways to be invincible or destroy everything, simply because I didn't like to lose

I don't really play a lot of new games, mostly because they generally suck or aren't well-designed. Battlefield 3 immediately springs to mind. My..............god, is it busted. Multiplayer is absolute shit, and it keeps jittering and freezing all the time, not to mention EA releases an update every 2 weeks that either nerfs or overpowers a weapon or vehicle.

I think the most engaging, memorable game(-series) for me is Legend of Zelda; specifically Ocarina of Time. I don't know what it is, but games nowadays just aren't really don't appeal to me at all. Cryostasis is kind of neat in a sort of 2001: A Space Odyssey type thing where you look at pretty things and explore unknown territory, but that's about it.

Commissar MercZ · November 25th, 2012

My first video game console was a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive that my father got me back in 1993 because I had nothing to do at home that kept me entertained. It came bundled with Sonic the Hedgehog 2, though in those days I was more a casual players of game. I probably expanded my collection to about 20 or so titles. Some of those titles that I can remember are Sonic 3 and Knuckles, Streets of Rage 2, Rocket Knight Adventures, Phantom 2040, Ristar, X-Men 2: Clone Wars, and ToeJam & Earl. I even had Battletoads but I could never finish it because of that damn jetski level which got me raging as a kid.

I got more active in the N64/PS1 era, having gotten the N64 first and the PS1 later. After that though I only kept with one console. Only console of mine that had a limited life span was the Dreamcast which I liked but pretty much died due to Sega's own issues.

I had been playing computer games since at least 1998, mostly C&C, but didn't really seriously start playing them until Unreal Tournament and as much as it embarrasses me to say it through C&C Renegade because I got a taste for multiplayer gaming that was difficult to get in consoles at the time.

There's a lot of computer games I've played, classic and old, but that's after I passed 13.

Red Menace · November 25th, 2012

My first system was a Nintendo Entertainment System, handed down to me from my cousin. So, it came with an assortment of games and I picked up more along the way, I remember The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros., Bucky O'Hare, Paperboy, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!, Metroid, Rygar, Kirby's Adventure, R.C. Pro-Am and Contra. Those aren't all the games that formed my childhood, but they were the earliest.

One of the saddest days of my life was when my NES broke.