3 games that changed your life

purist said:

3. Championship Manager 2. Many here will be oblivious to this game and most others will just roll your eyes.

Not quite oblivious, since I'm aware of the genre since the early days of Football Manager on the 8-bit/16-bit era. Though, to be honest, I never did like footies or sports games in general, and I could never understand how a game that revolved around managing said sports could have any appeal whatsoever. Then again I liked "Ports of Call"...but at least that one had the occasional action scene ;-)

Doom (PSX) introduced me to gaming which has been my number one time wasting hobby ever since.

Timesplitters 2 (xbox) started my somewhat bumpy mapping process.

Duke Nukem Forever (xbox 360) taught me a lesson in how not to spend money.

mrthejoshmon said:

gaming ... has been my number one time wasting hobby

Don't you ever, ever talk about videogames like that!

Videogames that changed my life into a time wasting one:

Quake 2: played this game so many hours online back in the days its not even funny.

Heroes of Might and Magic 2 and 3: sooo many hours wasted indoors with these.

Doom: wasted so much time playing/mapping/thinking of/dreaming of this games I wanna cry.

Doom - This was pretty much the first game that I ever played & needless to say it had a long lasting impression.
Spyro The Dragon - Pretty much the first game that I fell in love with after Doom, it's the only other game series that I still play constantly.
Halo - Far less important than Doom or Spyro, but as far as multiplayer goes I'd be crazy not to list this series. It's pretty much the only game series where I was ever decent at multiplayer.

Doom 2 - My entire family used to gather around the computer and play this game. It was the closest thing to "family bonding" we ever had. Me, my dad, and my brother were never very close.

Pokemon Blue - I made my first friends at school because we wanted to catch them all together.

Mother 3 - I looked at the world differently after playing this game. It made me think about what life would be like if my mom were not there. I know its cliché to say this, but I will never be ready.

1. DooM-II : I'm here aren't I?

2. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Got me into Visual Novels

3. Lufia: The Fortress of Doom: Got me into RPG's and story heavy games in general.

Maes said:

Not quite oblivious, since I'm aware of the genre since the early days of Football Manager on the 8-bit/16-bit era. Though, to be honest, I never did like footies or sports games in general, and I could never understand how a game that revolved around managing said sports could have any appeal whatsoever. Then again I liked "Ports of Call"...but at least that one had the occasional action scene ;-)

Well it's a flat out strategy game. The 'action' is the matches, described in text commentary. The content obviously has to have some appeal first and formost and even then I can see why people would think it's just a sporty text adventurer. It's the immersion that gets me. There were real life players that I disliked or had a soft spot for simply because of how they behaved in the game, haha.

Doom - For more or less obvious reasons.

Quake III Arena - Thanks to it (and Fatal1ty), I wanted to become a pro gamer at some point.

Skyrim - Made my life non-existent... for a week.

Nah.

Half-Life and Deus Ex. First ones. Both of them have given me a glimpse of what video games can be. Too bad the progression has stopped ever since.

Doom
Mortal Kombat (or Kingpin: Life of Crime. Can't decide.)
Resident Evil 2

Super Mario Bros 3 - First game I've ever played

Doom - pretty obvious :P

Dragon Warrior - first game that got me into RPGs

Half Life / Half Life Opposing Force
Doom
Driver 1 / Driver 2 (PSX) / Driver Parallel Lines (PS2)

Aside from Doom...

1. Deus Ex series
2. Mass Effect series
3. (vacant)

Rygar (arcade) - kept me from boring myself to death while living far away from home, late 80's.

Doom II. Resurrecting monster mini bosses, heat seeking skeleton missiles and a double barrel, on TOP of everything else already Doom? Yes please.

Twilight Zone pinball. Bought one at an auction and humped it into multiple borderline tilts, serial jackpots and ridiculous high scores. And that's without the gumball dispensary even working right. That machine is a feat of engineering art and I'm proud to have owned one, even if only for a short amount of time. "You unlock this door with the key of imagination!".

Aside from Doom:

Descent 3 - First multiplayer game I ever played. I was blown away by just the concept of playing with other people around the country/world.

Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow/Chaos Theory - Played a shit ton of Spies vs. Mercenaries, the two man team nature of the game led me to meet lots of people online during my adolescence.

Chrono Trigger - I played this when I was about 10. I think it was the first time a story really captured my imagination. I absolutely loved this game.

mrthejoshmon said:

Timesplitters 2 (xbox) started my somewhat bumpy mapping process.

Ooh good call. Timesplitters changed my life in the fact that I played 100s of hours with the neighborhood kids playing Timesplitters 1 & 2 for PS2. The map editor for both games was pretty amazing. I never picked up the third game for whatever reason, but I heard it might have been the best in the series. Here's hoping some developer acquires the creative rights and makes a decent sequel/reboot.

Super Mario 64. Even though I find Mario Sunshine to be "the" 3D Mario game, M64 changed my view on games altogether. Ever since infancy I knew what Wolf3D, and very shortly after Doom looked like, but this was next level. Fnnily enough, all the maps in Mario 64 could new be accurately recreated in GZDoom or heck, even Doom Legacy. The thing that really set it apart for me was the 3D actors. Playing with that Mario face at the beginning is still fun and funny today.

Grant Theft Auto 4. I loved GTA3 for as long as I can remember, and played it quite thoruoughly, but GTA4 was the only game where I ever felt any sort of attachment to the main character. Niko is such a lovable "anti hero". He's a smart guy in a sea of nutcases and morons, and he's got that lovable Serbian accent to top it all off. This game's controls are miles ahead of the older GTA titles, I don;t give a damn what anyone says. Both in car and on foot, it controls seamlessly with both the controller or keyboard/mouse. This is my absolute favorite entry in the series for all the reasons menitoned. (Honestly though, this whole goddamn series kicks ass.)

Left 4 Dead. This game was the one that convinced me not all modern FPS games are shitty. The guns are satisfying and it's a ton of fun to play with friends. I see this as a co-op game - I had fun beating all the campaigns once thru in single players, but I can play them a lot in multi with my wife and my friends. Really, this is the only game that even attempts to come close to Doom in the realm of FPS, as far as modern titles are concerned. It's not primarily about realism. It's primarily about fun.

EDIT: Wtf... All these games have 4 in the title...

first one has to be Doom. obviously. i mean if i'm still here after all these years it sure must've left one hell of an impact on me, right? it was one of the first "forbidden" games i played when i was, uhh, maybe 4 years or so? after discovering how awesome it was and convincing my parents that it wouldn't be harmful to me, i discovered more FPS games such as Dark Forces, Quake and Unreal, and i quickly found one of my niches of gaming.

another big influence has to be the Advance Wars games. cheerful nature and addictive gameplay aside, i think it's the music that got to me the most. i think some of the compositional styles in the games has bled over into my own.

uhh, i guess the other game that changed my life has to be... i dunno, the Mother series? it has great music too and the games are fun but i dunno if it was that mindblowing as the previous two mentioned.

Every early game you play in your life is some kind of watershed, but DOOM has to be the biggest early-life revelation for me. There was nothing remotely like it. It looked and sounded so much cooler than any other game in the world and it was pretty fun, too.

Final Fantasy VII. This wasn't my first RPG or even JRPG, but I remember when the promotional art started coming out for it in late 1995 (I think?), my aesthetic tastes were sated in just the right way. I bought Tobal no. 1, a completely shitty fighting game, only because it came with an FF7 demo. And I played the fuck out of that demo. In short, the game opened me up to RPGs in a way that previous RPGs hadn't and it profoundly affected my taste in games, even though at this point in my life, it's hard to imagine playing a JRPG for more than an hour at a time. Gameplay-wise, as this community will surely understand, they're quite boring.

Next would be World oF Warcraft. The memories and experiences I've created playing this game over the last decade have been the most thrilling entertainment in my life. Unless you've been a top-level raider, it's hard to read descriptions of having to attempt a boss 500 times and finally kill him and understand why that experience is so fucking amazing. I guess if you're a Souls series player, you have a tiny fraction of what that feels like. For the hardest bosses in WoW, multiply the required time to ascend the learning curve by 20 or so, and share it with 20-40 other people at the same time. It's an incredible experience. On top of the experiences in-game, the candid public discourse coming from WoW's designers over the last several years has been invaluable to anyone interested in making games. An absolute industry changer, and in that way, similar to DOOM.

Runner-up: MGS2. I was absolutely obsessed with this game for two years leading up to its release and devoured the fuck out of it upon release. The official Konami site used to allow you to input a code generated after you completed the game. I was completing the game 4-5 times a day for a couple of weeks and managed to get a top-10 US speedrunning record during that time. I absorbed every game mechanic you could think of. It was an awesome experience. And despite the whole Raiden thing being absolutely the wrong move on Konami's part, and the usual cavalcade of embarrassing plot moments, signature of Kojima, the game's main themes have proven to be relevant in today's world. Yes, the AI in the Plant Chapter is long-winded as fuck, but go back and listen to the AI conversations pre-Solidus and watch the ending. You'll find the characters, in detail, talking about the world of 2015 back in 2001. Pretty interesting concepts at work. Awesome game, though reviled by many.

Q U A K E
U
A
K
E

Doom, Mortal Kombat, Heroes Of Might & Magic / Might & Magic, Fallout, Deus Ex.

1. Doom - my first real taste of level design (after some DOS Hearts Puzzle/Boulder Dash-ish game and this C64 game I used to make levels on.)


2. Dransik/Ashen Empires - very early MMORPG (still around) that acquainted me with hardcore, full looting, safe-zone-less PVP and helped me to up my skills and, believe it or not, become a better businessman. (I had the first Darksword, a mind-blowingly rare uber-weapon. Everyone wanted it. Everyone wanted to kill me for it. Entire guilds tried. I managed to hold it for months through skill and through negotiation.)


2.5 Dark Souls - helped me to fall back in love with games


3. Terraria - I built some cool stuff. People really liked it. It started a new career for me.

(Doom is obvious)

1. Jazz Jackrabbit - because soundtrack... and a early introduction to trackers and all that demoscene stuff. I am a musician thanks to this game.

2. Quake 1 - because soundtrack (2)

3. I Have No Mouth And I Want to Scream - the first adventure game that really stands out for me

I like DOS games in general, but I think these three had a major impact... some others are extremely nostalgic for being different of everything else, principally in terms of art style, like Blake Stone and Boppin'. BS is such a Wolf 3D clone, but I never see a fps look like this, so colorful and unreal.

Atari 2600 games probably made me like abstract art as well (even if some of them tried to be figurative).

-

gta san andreas
DOOM
the last of us

Gunstar Heroes. The game that taught me once and for all that Mode 7 really wasn't that big a deal.

Quake III Arena. First game I ever played proper multiplayer on. And the mods. My God, the mods!

GTA San Andreas. Still in the top five of games I've clocked up the most hours on, behind Doom and Q3A, although GTAV is rapidly catching it.

To cut down the list of games to three is really hard for me, but ok:

1. DooM
The game that made me tell my family i need a PC for school.

2. Metal Gear Solid
The game that made me try to think more outside the box regarding gaming.

3. Deus Ex
I really wanna know who just reinstalled it because i mentioned it.

Doom is obvious so..

Hexen - My first FPS and the reason I play FPS at all. Bar none. It will always be my personal favorite FPS as a result even if Doom is a better game.

Sonic the Hedgehog (side scroller era) - Netted me my longest known friend to this day and is still a universe that I really admire and is from a time my innocence still existed, even though Sonic games have gone to total shit and Sonic is something of a mockery now.

Silent Hill (1-4) - Gave me a deep appreciation for dark and morbid artworks, very inspiring stuff and was also a big part of my maturing and coming-to in my teenage years.

BONUS: Manhunt (The R* game, not the dating site) - Netted me my best friend turned BF on the one sole forum that exists for it out there still. It's absolutely horrible though and almost everything wrong with the Internet so best advised to simply stay away.