Videogames!

[wonder]

Let's talk about videogames!

Do you like to play them? Do you like to create them? What's your favorite genre? Your Top 3, Top 5 or Top 10? Which one was your first game? Let's share our experiences!

For me games are one of the best forms of entertainment ever created. Just like music, movies and books, games provide you with a variety of emotions, while mainly focused on fun on their early days. I imagine a game as an half-written book, where you, as the player, have the task to complete the narrative.

Being this time of the year, I'm sure a lot of you must have fond memories of unwrapping consoles and/or videogames on Xmas eve/morning.

EDIT: http://www.cnet.com/news/play-2314-classic-games-in-your-browser-for-free/
You can freely and legally play your old DOS games online.

My experience:

Chapter One - Early days
My first games must have been Space Invaders and Hangman on the ZX Spectrum at the age of four. From that point on, my interest grew and when my father and uncle both bought PC's, I found myself hooked on Prince of Persia, Grand Prix and Simcity. This was the CGA era and my family couldn't afford color monitors, so everything was back and white (actually yellow phosphorous).

​

 

[Erel]

The last time that I "seriously" played a video game was Civ 3. The Civilizations series and Dune 2 were my favorite.

 

[MikeH]

Im hopeless at games! When I watch my 14 yr old son playing COD etc most of my thoughts are wondering how they were coded.... parallax, texture mapping, etc.

The closest thing to a game I ever play is probably MS Flight Sim.... or Dont Tip the Tree!

 

[andymc]

I just bought Elite dangerous, but don't really have time for games.

I've played the following over the last year that I remember:
Don't starve
Minecraft
Limbo
Little Inferno
Aliens colonial marines

 

[wonder]

I just bought Elite dangerous, but don't really have time for games.

It's a pity that adulthood constrains a lot of our time, but I'm still able to play a few hours per week!

Im hopeless at games! When I watch my 14 yr old son playing COD etc most of my thoughts are wondering how they were coded.... parallax, texture mapping, etc.

Indeed we can learn a lot from games, one of the most interesting parts for me is the AI, which has many real world applications.

The last time that I "seriously" played a video game was Civ 3. The Civilizations series and Dune 2 were my favorite.

Nice that you mentioned those 2 games, Erel. I was just going to talk about them.

Chapter Two - Colors
Back in 1994, we finally upgraded to a 486 DX2 @ 66Mhz and a stunning SVGA monitor! After playing Nintendo for one year, this change focused my interest on the PC again. At this point in my life, my favorites were The Lion King, Flight Simulator, F15 Strike Eagle and of course Civilization and Dune. This was also the time I started to mess around with Turbo Basic, creating simple programs at the age of 12. I wanted to create games, but it was too complicated for me at the time.​

 

[KMatle]

Sometimes I play (WIN8.1 !)

MAME is cool (playing the original arcade games)

We'Ve got an XBOX and a PS4, too but only my sons are playing.

 

[wonder]

Great stuff there!!! Nice to see someone else dedicated to emulation as well!!

 

[HotShoe]

I'm not sure what the first game I played was, but the first i played on my own machine was probably Pong on the Atari 2600. That would have been in the mid 70's. I'm pretty sure the first game I played on an IBM system was the original MicroSoft Flight Simulator on a Columbia Data Products IBM XT clone in about 1983. Columbia, like Compaq got sued by IBM about every week back then.

I haven't had a new game in years. I still play the Mechwarrior series sometimes, but I don't really game anymore. Sad really.

--- Jem

 

[sorex]

not sure which one was the first but in '80 the arcade cabs started popping up at fairs/carnivals and pubs.

breakout with paddle, pacman, donkey kong, baggitman and the likes is what I grew up with.

as private toy the first game was a pong clone that was a box with 2 sliding resitors like on a mixing panel.

game & watch donkey kong 2, a yellow pacman handheld is what I had too.

videopac from philips (Odessey in another case) had a friend.

cabs drastically dissapeared around 95 or so as most people had a snes, psx or something else
and got replaced with even more of these "try to grab a watch/cellphone/doll" machine as they
bring up even more money in less time. (one could play half an hour or more on a game)

I gave up on gaming in 94 as all the wolfenstein & doom clones came out and only 1 type of gameplay seemed to exist anymore.

 

[WAZUMBi]

Personally I always liked the Zoo Tycoon and Roller Coaster Tycoon games.
When my son was younger we played Final Fantasy and just about any Star Wars title and racing game we could get our hands on.

As for now I don't really play any video games unless I am with my grand kids.
Any of the Lego games, Madden, Skate 2/3, Batman Arkham Asylum/City, Call of Duty with my grandson.
If it's my granddaughter then it's Just Dance or anything on nickjr.com.
They both like Mortal Kombat, Injustice, and Transformers.

 

[LucaMs]

 

[Cableguy]

ZX spectrum:
Marauder
Out Run
Super Hang-On

PC: not much

Arcades:
Street Fighter
Double Dragon
Metal Slug
Pac-man 3D

Tablet:
"King soft" series
Travian (MMOG)

 

[Peter Simpson]

And here we have my Jet Set Willy T-Shirt. Yes Jet Set Willy was one of my favourite games on the ZX Spectrum way back in the 80's.

I'm sure that @Cableguy remembers this game...

 

[RandomCoder]

My personal thought is that your never too old to play games. I have an XBox these days and tend to dedicate two nights a week to getting together with a few mates online and playing whatever takes our fancy. One of my mates now lives several hours away, we've known each other from school and this is a good way of keeping in touch. I have other friends that live practically next door and I never see or make time for them.
For me gaming is a very good way just to chill out and forget about all the stresses of being an adult.
My favourite game was TOCA and I still love to play Grid and Dirt and pretty much any racing sim. World of Tanks is also very good as it's a game I find easy to relax with, some games just tend to get me frustrated (Call Of Duty online lag really gets my back up).

 

[Cableguy]

W

And here we have my Jet Set Willy T-Shirt. Yes Jet Set Willy was one of my favourite games on the ZX Spectrum way back in the 80's.

I'm sure that @Cableguy remembers this game...

Wasn't that the guy that had to climb a lot of ladders to escape the baddies?

 

[Peter Simpson]

That's the fella @Cableguy
I purchased the T-Shirt last year on eBay, it's great...

 

[udg]

Early 80s, arcade cabs..never lasted more than 30 seconds a game
Then I programmed my personal version of pac-man on my Olivetti M20, a machine born together IBM's first pc but far superior under most aspects.
Anyway, since I couldn't beat my friends even on the game I created, I cheated defining a secret position where my pac-man could accumulate points
The only videogame I somehow excelled at was the one showed by LucaMs on post #11 above.

30 years later I programmed a simple 15 tiles game for the Xmas compo..and as you can read in its dedicated post I'm still far away from the top score!

 

[Informatix]

I don't remember the name of the games that I created in the 80's so it's even harder to remember the name of games I played ! I just remember that I played on an Atari 2600 console and on the Sinclair's computers (ZX81, Spectrum). I played a lot of video games in the 80's and 90's then stopped progressively. Mainly because I prefer to play around a table with friends. Nowadays, I don't really have the time to play. I try to keep time to play board games with friends from time to time. However, each year, I select one video game and I play it a lot in a short period of time (it's my gaming week of the year ). This year it's Age of Wonders 3. Past years: Civ 5, Skyrim, Bioshock Infinite. All these games are really impressive and addictive. Under Android, I played so many games (mainly to know what's done by others) that I cannot list them all. On one of my tablets, there are probably more than 40 games still installed. But I rarely spent more than half an hour on each of them. Most of these little games are definitely not my cup of tea. My latest disappointements are "Out there" and "Frederic Resurection of Music". I don't understand their excellent rating.

 

[moster67]

I have never been much of a gamer except for a period many, many years ago when I used to play Elite (or perhaps it was Frontier) a lot on my Amiga. Before that, on my Commodore 64, I used to play Red Storm Rising (a submarine sim-game). I must say, I enjoyed those games but since they required a lot of time due to their type of game-play, I eventually quit.

However, after seeing @andymc's post above about Elite Dangerous, I just bought it Hopefully I will find some time in these days to have a go at it.

 

[LucaMs]

As we start again to talk about ancient electronic trinkets as ZX81,
I wanted to post a few pictures: my first pocket calculator (I would say my first electronic game) and my first digital watch wrist (it was really very practical: to see the time, you had to turn on the screen ).

I did not find the images; these are vaguely similar:

Looking back on those times, I find similarities with today's times.

From pocket calculator we arrived to smartphones; from those simple digital watches, to Android watches.

"Corsi e ricorsi storici" ["Courses and historical claims"?]


Who knows that I can not see the future, remembering those years (in Italy the following years were rather gloomy:
kidnappings, murders, massacres: everything of "political" nature. It's nice to think positive )



[P.S.] I forgot another toy (although this is only very similar).