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Johnatone

the path of the gamer

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i remember as a little boy not owning any videogame systems. we owned a computer and i enjoyed the games on that, such as lemmings, simcity, and a game i think was called contraption zack. i had many friends in this city, and the one down the street owned a variety of systems: nes, snes, sega genesis. i travled to his house almost everyday to play games. my parents, for one of my birthdays, bought me a gameboy. it was great fun. summer 1994 we moved, and my location in the country provided me with nothing but my computer and gameboy. as if this was enough, i recieved constant torture from the other kids at school for not owning a console system, so to this day i have almost no friends. back then i was a hardcore gamer, and up until 2001 i was. in 2001 i somehow faded away from games and ever since i've been a hardcore music junkie. this year i picked back up on games and have been an avid hardcore gamer since, espcecially doom. i played doom hardcore back in my early days, but now i play it even moreso. this is my gamer's story.

now i turn the time over to you, to recount your travles and journies (wait, are these the same thing?) as a gamer.

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Uh, I'm sure you would have found other friends if you didn't try to make friends with gamer-elitists. Gotta try other types of people. Sucks those people would be such shits to you because you don't have an assload of time and/or money to keep up with console gaming, though.

Trying other types of people also means that you have to talk about stuff that is not game related. Remember that. You may have to expand your interests (don't fake interests, find stuff you are actually interested in that you just didn't know about before) to have something to talk about. I don't know you, so I don't know.

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Hmm. Started life playing games with my old Atari 7800 and TI 99/4A. I actually never got a computer 'till I was in 7th grade. Before that, I had Genesis (with Sega Channel!), GameBoy, GameGear, and I think another one. I grew up with a friend with an ungodly amount of systems and games. Then we had a big fight (involving his harrasment of me, which involved the cops pretty soon), we went our seperate ways, I then had a computer, and started my own collection of games and systems. Now, out of all my friends, I have the most.

I grew up a console gamer, and pretty much still am. I can hold my weight on a PC, but consoles, and now the arcade, are still my best areas, and most preferred.

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Hmm, lets see.

I started with an NES when I was about 6 years old. Everyone else had one also so that wasnt a big deal. A few years later, my apartment was robbed and my NES was stolen, so my mother bought me another one. Shortly thereafter, the SNES was released but mom wouldnt buy it cuz she had just bought me the second NES (if only I had waited a little longer). In about he sixth grade I got a Genesis. I recieved alot of flak for that one from friends because they all had an SNES. But Im glad I chose Sega, I prefer their games, and Sonic beats Mario's ass any day.

At some point in high school I bought myself a Gameboy pocket.
In my senior year (1998) I got my first computer. However by this point, I'd mucked around with my friends PCs enough to know what I was doing , so thee was no adjustment period.

Finally, in 2000, I stood in a game store and assaulted a clerk with questions on the PS2 and Dreamcast. PS2 looked pretty cool, but Dreamcast meant more Sonic games, so I bought a DC (which I dont regret). I doubt I'll ever buy another system again unless Sega makes a new one.

As far as relationships go concerning gaming, Ive never found it was much of an issue. In fact it was usually a pretty good way to make friends in a new place. Since its something many people have an opinion on. My last girlfriend also enjoyed gaming, so it was also something to do for us.

As far as those elite gamer types, I usually stay away from them. Often, someone who obsesses over games like that has absolutely no life. They recognize this and become bitter people because of it. I cant be bothered with that kind of thing. If you wanna lord over me with your amazing gaming skills, go ahead. I'll just go out and party while you boast.

EDIT: Although I grew up on consoles, I prefer PC games because Ive gotten so used to keyboards. I find PC games are usuall more complex (with exceptions). Also, strafing is usually tougher on a gamepad.

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The first games I played were pinball machines, since back then there were no video games around. The local 7-11/laundromat had this old pinball machine with a playing card theme (I forgot the name). Getting over a thousand points on that thing was considered a major achievement, and I got good enough to get nearly 2000 points many times.

One day, I went to a Zero's that I had not been to before, and I saw what is now a classic pinball machine, The Black Knight, and right next to it was a video game. This was somewhere around 1976 and I had no idea what the thing was called at the time. It was either Avalanche or a variation of it, and I spent about a dollar and a half on it before I left. It was the only time I played that particular game.

Then around 1978 I started going to the local boy's club. It was actually a large house on the beach easily within walking distance. There were a couple of video games there, but none of them were interesting for very long. Also there were pool tables, air hockey tables which used sand to make the tables slippery instead of a cushion of air, a shuffleboard table, bumper pool, and a pinball machine that would always (and I mean always) give a free game if the last two digits ended up on '90' when the third (or was it fifth?) ball was lost. We ended up regularly tilting the game when it hit '90' on the last ball. The owner naturally got annoyed by it and told us to stop. Soon after he replaced it with a Breakout video game. It was fun, but I wasn't very good at the time.


Then I got an Atari 2600, and the fun really began. Along with the Atari 2600, I also got Combat, Breakout, Video Olympics, Slot Racers, and Space Invaders. Most of the fun I had was competing with my brother or sister. At first I always lost, but I was soon good enough to consistently beat them.

Not long after we moved to a bigger house a few miles away, and we got an Apple 2E. Although I played it sometimes, it wasn't nearly as fun as the Atari, except maybe for Wings of Fury and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text game.

So it was back to Atari for me...until around 1986 when I got an NES. I had about thirty games, but I had played over five times as much because by then I could rent games from the local video store (it wasn't Blockbusters). I played nearly all of the classics, and beat most of those by the time I had to return the games. Many times I would rent them several times in a row, either because it was tough to beat or because I enjoyed it so much.

In 1990 there was a tournament of a sort. First I had to qualify by getting a certain number of points in three games within a certain time limit. It went something like this:

1 - Collect 22 coins in Super Mario Bros.
2 - Complete the first lap in Rad Racer
3 - Get as many points as possible in Tetris (Nintendo version)

Somehow, I was given this information a few days before the contest began, so I decided to make full use of it and practice. I already owned Super Mario Bros. and Tetris (Tengen version), but I had to rent Rad Racer. All the practicing paid off because in the qualifying round, I got one of the highest scores, but I didn't want to exert myself at this stage. I did in the quarterfinals however, and I got the highest score by far, and as a result, I got to sit waaaaayy up on the 'throne' for the semifinals, with the other seven in front, but lower. Then I made it to the finals, where I competed with two others (I moved down to one of the lower seats for this). Unfortunately, I had some bad luck in Tetris. It seems there was a shortage of long, skinny pieces that day, and I wasn't able to get enough points to win. I did manage to get second place, and I got a nice Game Boy and headphones out of the whole thing.

To be continued...

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Game-elitists are just like every other brand of social elitist: fucking gay and best left well alone.

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yip. i hate it when people show off their gameness to you or when they have a game and said can a pc game do that? no!! i dont like that.i dont like consoles. mainly because i will end up throwing it away or giving it away or selling it ( not my snes, i love it!)

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Ok, where was I?....Oh yeah, the Game Boy was fun, but as you know, it only had four colors: black, dark gray, light gray, and very light gray (the green screen doesn't count). The cartriges are also very small and easily lost. Fortunately, I didn't lose any of them. Still, I didn't play it that much.

The next year I got a Super Nintendo and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had about 30 games (mostly role playing games like Final Fantasy 2 and 3) and like with the NES, I rented a whole lot more. It was also where I first saw Doom. At the time, I thought it was just another game. Nice, but I didn't buy it. Instead, I just rented a few times before I got tired of it. Out of all the SNES games I played, my favorites are Castlevania 4, Final Fantasy 3, and Chrono Trigger.

All this went on for about five years, during which time I started making boomerangs to throw whenever I got bored. I still have nearly all of them, and they all work. Some of them have odd shapes, like a scythe (good for Halloween, but doesn't fly too well), rotor blades, and shurikens. One such design was a large seven pointed star with a hole in the middle, and is by far the best looking and best flying out of all of them.

In 1996 I got a PC. It was a super fast 100 MHz (Ok, at the time it was) and it had 1 GB of space. It came with a bunch of cheesy games that I never played, so I decided to get a few good ones. I couldn't find anything decent, until I remembered about Doom. I heard that the PC version was bigger and much better than the SNES version, and it most certainly was. I had to go to DOS mode for it to play faster, but it was still worth it. Later, I played ROTT over the modem with my brother. I won most of the time, but he had his share of good games. He also showed me a weird game which came with ROTT. It was called Heretic (shareware of course), and I liked the game so much that I decided to buy it. I got the Shadow of the Serpent Riders version because of the two extra episodes.

Around this time I was looking around a bookstore and ran across a huge book called Tricks of the Doom Gurus. I've been thinking about making maps, and this would provide all the information I needed, along with some editors that I could use. My first maps were atrocious, mostly because I was using Waded. It got so bad that I very nearly gave up the whole thing. Then I tried other editors. Most were almost as bad. Then I tried DCK. At first it was sort of hard to get used to, but once I did, I could make maps far easier than I could ever hope to with Waded. After a lot of experimenting I decided to create an actual map, which was hepta.wad. It was more of a novelty than anything, and it was patterned after that seven pointed boomerang design that worked so well. I had fun with it for a while, so I made some more deathmatch maps, but this time I wanted to use Heretic. Out of all of them, I considered only one was good enough to be released to cdrom.com.

Soon, I wanted to try making a single player map for Heretic. I changed my mind and decidedd to make an entire episode instead. At this time I still didn't know all that much about making maps, but I was discovering quite a lot of things (usually the hard way) and eventually I finished Carnage Galore. The last map was a big variation of the old hepta.wad with a pattern that more accurately shows the what that old boomerang design looked like. Don't ask where I came up with the name. I have long since forgotten. I did not know anything about adding new textures, sounds, or anything, so the original version was without all of that. It was never released to cdrom.com and no one has ever seen it, but I still have it somewhere. Then I learned about DMGraph and DMAud. The good news is I was able to add new sprites and sounds. The bad news is that it made the zip file enourmous and cluttered with tons of pictures and sound files. Eventually, I figured out how to get Wintex to work, and I took all of those pictures, and put them into the wadfile itself. The zip file was so much neater now, and I decided to try out all the new things I have learned by making some more maps.

Right about this time I started playing Quake over the internet. I was still using the joystick at this time so I was awful at deathmatch. Then I found Team Fortress. I was still bad, but at least it didn't show quite as bad. I was also on IRC quite a bit at the time, and one of the people was in a clan called Nerd. After a couple of weeks, I finally got around to joining in one of their practices, and eventually joined the clan (using the name [Nerd]Brain). I had some wild games back then, and I even made a map for Quake Team Fortress. The most recent (which is still four years old) version is invade4a and to this day, I have no idea why the map is still popular. It was originally meant to be a practice map. Anyway, the clan eventually fell apart (that's another long story), but I still played on for a while using my clan name until I got bored of the game.

I went back to map making and I finished the second Heretic episode, which was the sequel to the first one. This one was many times better than the first one, and I even used HHE to make the Iron Liches fly around like Cacodemons like I think they should have been in the original Heretic. I also made a few minor changes like map names.

When I heard about Hexen I knew I had to get it. The first four maps looked far better than Heretic, so I could only imagine what the full version was like. I certainly was not disappointed. I also found another book called 3D Game Alchemy which contained information about Hexen maps that has proven extremely useful. I decided to make a deathmatch map for Hexen. I didn't know much about scripts, but I learned by reading the original scripts, so I managed to turn out a halfway decent map.

Hexen had far more possibilities for map editing that I decided to make the next episode for Hexen instead of Heretic (which is one reason why I switched from Doom to Heretic editing). However, because Hexen was set up like Doom 2, I decided to make a 32 map megawad instead. I'm on map 8 now.

Since then I bought quite a few games like all of the Baldur's Gate series (except Tales From the Sword Coast), all Diablos (I didn't like the first one so I sold it, but kept the other two), Hexen 2 and Portal of Praevus, Heretic 2, and numerous older games like Blood and Shadow Warrior. I sold my SNES and Gameboy a couple of years ago because I wasn't playing them anymore and I could play the same games with an emulator, along with a few I couldn't, like Final Fantasy 5 and Terranigma. If I never did get a PC, I probably would have bought an N64 and then maybe the Game Cube, but I like the PC much better. The games are cheaper (especially when they get older) and more complicated. As for Quake, I still play Team Fortress sometimes using my old clan name (probably because I've been using it for so long).

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pritch said:

Game-elitists are just like every other brand of social elitist: fucking gay and best left well alone.


That's not nice to say

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what do you remember of gaming when you were really young.
I remember that you had a console because of the games being fun, not because of the hardware it has, besides, kids don't know the difference.

I rememember when my parents rented a NES, and I watched them play donkey kong, I wanted to play. In super mario borthers 3, we couldn't get past the first castle because the colour on the tv hid the door from us. when I first played, I had no idea what to do, I didn't even know how to enter a level.

I remember getting excited when my parents rented a SNES for me, then I got one for christmas.

FF6, I am so good at that game, when I first played, I couldn't get past whelk.. (for those who don't know, he is the first boss, more of one to ease you into the game, but still challenging). I would just play the other save files.

doom64, which was really my first real doom experience that I didn't cheat. I could not get past level four on skill 1. Now I own at that game.



there, pasted from my vgshock topic.

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