Civilization II
Just one more turn and I’ll go to bed…
Hmmm… what’s that light outside the window? Oh… that’s the sun rising.
Chrono Trigger. I couldn’t even tell you the number of hours I spent playing and replaying that game over and over as a kid.
This game has a special place in my heart. It’s like my Lord of the Rings of video games. I’ll play it again from time to time just to indulge myself.
I wouldn’t say too many hours. More like the right amount of hours. But for me it was Super Mario World, DK 64, and Donkey Kong Country.
Childhood….uh…… Oregon trail? Anything on the OG Nintendo system, or Atari. I loved the original Mario and Zelda games. Spent a lot of time in front of them for sure.
Frogger. 1 quarter at a time. My part time job as a young teen paid for 1000’s of hours…
Starcraft Brood War.
UMS was crazy with how many games people would make for it. Cat and mouse… zergbound… The craziest one I played was a Hyrule war map where everyone picked a race and held back a player controlled Ganon army while Link runs around completing actual dungeons and prepping for the final showdown. Anything and everything was in UMS.
Yeah there were some awesome custom maps for that. The Battle for Helm’s Deep one was really cool too. Insane how well balanced that was. There were many times the Orcs (Zerg natch) broke through and we’d be fighting in the caves when Gandalf would show up.
Even though they were obviously marines, zealots, zerglings, etc, I’d get into it and could imagine them all as human archers, elves, and orcs.
I also liked to start games on “fastest possible map ever” and call it “7v1 comp stomp bsers welcome”. It would be a crazy game of diplomacy everyone BSing (back stabbing) each other as soon as the computer player was eliminated. Sometimes before. And of course someone stays allied but unchecks “allied victory” so everyone sitting on ridiculous amounts of resources (it was FPME) accusing each other, forming alliances, killing off a player suspected to be the one (based on nothing LOL) then finding out we didn’t get the right one. It was so hilarious.
Dungeon Keeper. It’s old now, and basically just a pixel on modern hardware, but I LOVED that game. Still do. I bought it on GOG and still play it even though it’s almost 30 years old.
Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts
I loved this game, but gosh was it difficult…
During my childhood i had a commodore64 and My favorite games were boulder dash and oils well. In my early teens i just had a gameboy. Adventure island and darkwing duck were my two go to games. In my teen years during the mid 90s i was all about lucas arts adventure games… special mention for sam n max and day of the tentacle
Powder Game, still available https://dan-ball.jp/en/javagame/dust2/
Many lol. But the first that came to mind was Smash Melee. That game was my entire 8th grade.
A strategy game called Dark Colony. I have yet to meet someone who has heard of it but I spent many nights weekends and mornings before school playing that game.
Diablo 2, counter strike source, world of warcraft
Plenty more but these are probably the most serious offenders when it comes to overplaying them
Metroid Prime Hunters, Pokemon games and Animal Crossing I guess !
Quake was one of my earliest online gaming experiences. I still remember the first server I joined. It was the starting map of the single player campaign modified into a Capture The Flag map. The melee axe was also a grappling hook, people where zipping around, shooting and exploding into gibs. The chaos was instantly addicting.
I ended up spending many hours on quake and it’s mods. I played a lot of CTF and deathmatches before finding Team Fortress. Then it was a whole new world of maps and mods for TF.
Each class had two grenades and abilities that added a lot of depth compared to the modern TF2 game. Maps sometimes came with destructible areas for the demonan’s detonation pack. Scouts had caltrops for slowing people down. Spies had hallucination grenades that bounced you around as your view filled with random explosions and noises. Medics and scouts had concussion grenades that could be used on themselves to fly around the map (custom maps were also made around this). Rocket/pipe grenade/hand grenade jumping was also quite common with maps made around those too.
There were maps with 4 teams with 4 bases. Maps where you must protect the civilian VIP that’s armed with only a crowbar. Or my favourite variation which was a “cross the border” map. One team were all civilians, another who protected half the map trying to prevent the civilians from reaching the safe point, and the last team had access to the whole map trying to escort all the civilians.
The whole modding scene was such a huge draw for me because it kept the game fresh and unique. It’s why I ended up spending so much more time on Half-Life and all it’s mods. In a way, I feel game mods have heavily influenced the way I view and use open source software today. There’s freedom in that sort of creativity.
I also spent a lot of time in World of Warcraft. In the beginning when you had to work to get around, it made finding friends a fun experience. You struggled to move around the world and that struggle made the random encounters with people that much better of a bonding experience. As time went on and MMO’s aimed to connect people as quickly as possible that bonding experience kind of diminished. People can come and go so quickly on online games now that I can’t seem to form a decent connection with people these days. The games I play today are all fun but I do miss the type of community I felt in my past gaming days.
