So the Dark Souls thread got me wondering if there are any other keen gamers on this forum.

I've been well into games since I was about 8yo. Went through gameboys, n64, gamecube, then migrated to PC. These days I don't get a whole lot of time to do it but sometimes I grab an hour or two before bed around my weighty MSc workload.

I especially love my 90s-00s games, my top picks through time in roughly chronological order have been:

N64 & gc Zelda games
Pokemon red (beats blue every day!)
Super smash bros
Age of empires series
Timesplitters 2 & 3
Resident evil 4
Counterstrike source
Garrys mod
Team fortress 2
Minecraft
Dragon age origins
Batman arkham asylum
Dark souls

Anyone else out there share any favourites from the list?

Currently I've gone full circle and am replaying Zelda: Ocarina of time, which amazingly, is 20 years old this year.

Sadly, my only options for gaming are a Mac, and my phone/iPad. I do have access to an Xbox, but my little brother hogs it like you wouldn’t believe. Despite this, I do consider myself a gamer, and I’ve also played TF2, Gmod, and Minecraft. As well as some other games, one being the first real mmo I played, called LEGO Universe. One that I recently got into was Hotline Miami, great game, I think you would enjoy it considering you have a taste for the retro style. It also has a amazing soundtrack, I found it so good I have most of the songs from it on my personal music playlist, but that might just be because it’s my sort of music. Also, I play a lot of apps. My previously downloaded app list is insanely long.

I love gaming. I follow all the news, I watch multiple let's play channels and I'm really interested in the games industry and how it operates. Playing games...

I haven't actually played any video games in quite a while. When I moved to Finland I couldn't bring my old Xbox 360 and I only have a laptop that can't really handle games. Not wanting to stump up the cash, not really having the time for it and then the games themselves being really too expensive for me, means the last game I played was The Darkness, a game from 2007, when I was over visiting my parents and I had the time to boot up the Xbox about 2 years ago :D

i don't play games anymore...


nintendo gameboy light : pokemon blue(most of the time) & silver
kirby's dream


PC games:
GUN
crossfire (free fps)
call of duty 1&4
Call of juarez bound in blood
sniper ghost warrior
far cry 2
unreal tournament 2004
Team fortress

most time spent in:

Battlefield bad company 2 :)
Mount and blade warbands
Age of empires 3(spain ;) )
Red alert 2

some of the worst waste of time but with good company ===> metin2 ,jade dynasty ,AVA

PSP games:i ve tried a lot but that i don't remember them
best ever : Monster hunter freedom 2 :o



JudoP wrote on Apr 4^th, 2018 at 2:19pm:

Pokemon red (beats blue every day!)

why do you say that ? Aren't they the same thing?

Nice list! The game for me that I have played since childhood and love dearly was the Halo series.

Well if you want my opinion , baldurs gate !!
Bg 1 or 2 . Expansion or not it's one of the greatest games .
And has slings !!! Ice wind dale also good but not as open world.
Final fantasy 7 is up there too but a little hard to play if your used to newer games and crisp graphics.

I played the hell out of Halo 1 and 2. COD 4 as well. The game I've played the most though is Star Wars Battlefront. I've spent years of my life playing it and I still contend I could best almost anyone on it. It's a shame they NEVER EVER made a remake of that game because it was great on the original Xbox...

Played video games since they were invented. Right from the original pong, analog space invaders through the very first black and white consoles.

nearly 30 years ago I was chief game mapper and article writer for the Atari Lynx user magazine. That was fun, used to get to go to atari HQ down in reading to see the new games on re-writable carts.
Every other company had  a big glass edifice on the main street - atari had  a small building down by a railway bridge. I was one of the first people in the country to see the jaguar console. 

The lynx was a great hand held, way ahead of it's time with 16bit chips.
Gates of zendor is still one of the best side scrolling shoot-em-up's ever written.  That and zarlor mercenary, by them selves made buying the lynx worthwhile
But the battery life sucked and the sega 8 bit handheld sold way more units. Particularly when they bought out the tv add-on.

After it all went tits-up and pc's started to make an appearance played games on them for a while.
But as i started working for myself as a pc expert,  playing games started to feel like working without being paid.

Shifted back to handheld and got a cracked psp. Great little console, some really great games on it.

Then got a gba - which some might think was a backward step. Really wasn't.
gates of baldur on the gba was fanatastic.
Great battery life, some great games and I added an internal screen-light so you could play it in daylight.

Then went though the Wii phase. the controllers were just totally innovative and made playing games on the big screen fresh again.

greatest video game ever made is zelda: twilight princess, on the wii.
Particularly if you had a cracked wii and a pirate version of twilight. So I never saw the box or manual. Which made everything that happened a total surprise.
When i got turned into a wolf - that blew me away. 

Then i saw nintendo 3ds in cost-co and the glasses free 3d screen just blew me away.
So now I just play games on my 3ds. Every time I try and play a 2d game - it's just disappointing. I'm used to looking through a window at a large 3d world. Not looking at a poor depiction of 3d on  a flat screen. No matter how large the screen it's just not as good.
Tried my mates sony vr helmet. weirdly not as good as a 3d screen. Plus makes you feel sick.

There haven't been many games you can really get your teeth into on the 3ds. But the ones that are, are usually extremely good.
And I do have 11 full 3d pinball tables on the 3ds. If I had nothing else - that'd do :-)

So these days video games are relegated to the odd hour or two in bed.
Just started steamworld dig 2 and on the last baddie in metroid: return of samus. Big old space pirate, bastard to kill, every now and then I have another go :-)

But games on pc and flat 2d screens - just don't bother anymore.

Plus it all went online and multiplayer. I hate playing with other humans, give me ai opponents every day of the week. Then it all went team player and co-op. Anyone who knows me will know I'm NOT a team player and never have been.
Also hate turn by turn - which rules out ALL the japanese rpgs on the 3ds.

With the exception of the wii - you can guarentee if I go for a console, it's usually on the technical specs , it just won't get the good games or be popular or be properly supported by the manufacturer lol

The other thing I hate are Retro games.
Look I played them the first time round, when they were all that could be done.
When a £30 tablet now has better graphics chips than pcs did 20 years ago - why on earth would i want crappy blocky graphics and dinky donky sound ?

Just Don't get it, lol

Drakolith wrote on Apr 4^th, 2018 at 2:33pm:

One that I recently got into was Hotline Miami, great game, I think you would enjoy it considering you have a taste for the retro style. It also has a amazing soundtrack.

I think I actually have that game, either that or it's on my wishlist. I have an enormous amount of steam games I haven't got round to playing on  :D


Sarosh wrote on Apr 4^th, 2018 at 3:25pm:

why do you say that ? Aren't they the same thing?

Well... yes I suppose. I'm just a little biased  8-)

I shouldn't even be that bothered because I always went bulbasaur starter anyway. Green would have been my game.

Mersa wrote on Apr 5^th, 2018 at 6:01am:

Well if you want my opinion , baldurs gate !! Bg 1 or 2 . Expansion or not it's one of the greatest games . And has slings !!! Ice wind dale also good but not as open world. Final fantasy 7 is up there too but a little hard to play if your used to newer games and crisp graphics.

I played baldurs gate dark alliance with my buddies which was great fun, had a try of the early ones but they seem hard to get into.


Kick wrote on Apr 5^th, 2018 at 8:11am:

I played the hell out of Halo 1 and 2. COD 4 as well. The game I've played the most though is Star Wars Battlefront. I've spent years of my life playing it and I still contend I could best almost anyone on it.

I kinda felt that way in team fortress 2 for a time, that was pretty much the only game I played for about 4 years and I got so good at it. However, I occasionally came across the odd division 1 comp player who would just completely trash me. It was a pretty damn competitive game at the time and the guys at the top of the top just had almost magical levels of skill.

Curious Aardvark wrote on Apr 5^th, 2018 at 10:26am:

Played video games since they were invented. Right from the original pong, analog space invaders through the very first black and white consoles. nearly 30 years ago I was chief game mapper and article writer for the Atari Lynx user magazine. That was fun, used to get to go to atari HQ down in reading to see the new games on re-writable carts. Every other company had  a big glass edifice on the main street - atari had  a small building down by a railway bridge. I was one of the first people in the country to see the jaguar console.  The lynx was a great hand held, way ahead of it's time with 16bit chips. Gates of zendor is still one of the best side scrolling shoot-em-up's ever written.  That and zarlor mercenary, by them selves made buying the lynx worthwhile But the battery life sucked and the sega 8 bit handheld sold way more units. Particularly when they bought out the tv add-on. After it all went tits-up and pc's started to make an appearance played games on them for a while. But as i started working for myself as a pc expert,  playing games started to feel like working without being paid. Shifted back to handheld and got a cracked psp. Great little console, some really great games on it. Then got a gba - which some might think was a backward step. Really wasn't. gates of baldur on the gba was fanatastic. Great battery life, some great games and I added an internal screen-light so you could play it in daylight. Then went though the Wii phase. the controllers were just totally innovative and made playing games on the big screen fresh again. greatest video game ever made is zelda: twilight princess, on the wii. Particularly if you had a cracked wii and a pirate version of twilight. So I never saw the box or manual. Which made everything that happened a total surprise. When i got turned into a wolf - that blew me away.  Then i saw nintendo 3ds in cost-co and the glasses free 3d screen just blew me away. So now I just play games on my 3ds. Every time I try and play a 2d game - it's just disappointing. I'm used to looking through a window at a large 3d world. Not looking at a poor depiction of 3d on  a flat screen. No matter how large the screen it's just not as good. Tried my mates sony vr helmet. weirdly not as good as a 3d screen. Plus makes you feel sick. There haven't been many games you can really get your teeth into on the 3ds. But the ones that are, are usually extremely good. And I do have 11 full 3d pinball tables on the 3ds. If I had nothing else - that'd do :-) So these days video games are relegated to the odd hour or two in bed. Just started steamworld dig 2 and on the last baddie in metroid: return of samus. Big old space pirate, bastard to kill, every now and then I have another go :-) But games on pc and flat 2d screens - just don't bother anymore. Plus it all went online and multiplayer. I hate playing with other humans, give me ai opponents every day of the week. Then it all went team player and co-op. Anyone who knows me will know I'm NOT a team player and never have been. Also hate turn by turn - which rules out ALL the japanese rpgs on the 3ds. With the exception of the wii - you can guarentee if I go for a console, it's usually on the technical specs , it just won't get the good games or be popular or be properly supported by the manufacturer lol The other thing I hate are Retro games. Look I played them the first time round, when they were all that could be done. When a £30 tablet now has better graphics chips than pcs did 20 years ago - why on earth would i want crappy blocky graphics and dinky donky sound ? Just Don't get it, lol

That's an interesting read.

I have to say that for me retro appeals despite the poor graphics/performance not because of them, I would love to see ocarina of time (for example) with amazing graphics however it doesn't bother me much that it hasn't.

To be fair a huge part of retro is also nostalgia (born 1990 and rarely play games from before 95) and the inherent selection bias in simply picking the best games of whatever given decade and ignoring the hordes of rubbish games.
There is a certain style to old games though and generally speaking I'm not so happy about the direction of gaming over the past 10 years or so, though still great games are coming out occasionally.

Twilight princess I agree is a great game (actually replaying now alongside Ocarina) though I have to say for me it's actually the least favourite of the 4 zelda games I've completed. My favourite has to be Majoras Mask. I'd say it's by far the most emotionally affecting zelda game (or even just game in general). The combination of the 3-day cycle with the deep and intricate world built around, all against the backdrop of impending doom is just a masterstroke and I haven't seen such effective innovation in gaming since. For me it took the zelda 'world' to a place never seen since, and due to the unique nature of the story I don't think it can be replicated.

ah then you want ocarina of time on the 3ds.
:-)
majora's mask also on the 3ds.
It's good. But twilight princess has everything. Shooting bits, fighting bits, puzzle bits, fishing bits, upgradeable stuff. The graphics are brilliant, the control system is unbeatable.
And every time you think you've come to the end of the game - it just keeps going with another big baddie you knew nothing about.

Wish they'd port it over the the 3ds. But now they've got the new console/tablet thing, the 3ds will just get left behind. Nintendo only really ever support one platform at a time. 

If they'd put  a 3d screen on the switch I'd have hocked the family silver and got one in a heartbeat.
But 2d gaming screens just holds no appeal for me any more :-(

There are some truly awesome games that could be easily ported to the 3ds.
Top of my list is MDK.
The first game that had semi-intelligent baddies.
Also was total 3d modelled.

Probably 20 years ago or more, I had a 3d setup on my pc with lcd glasses.
It was great, any 3d modelled game was automatically converted.
Then nvida bought the company and shut the 3d down, flat screens came out and they didn't have fast enough refresh rates to do 2-screen 3d and the whole 3d on pc's died a quiet death.

Weirdly it was the faster refresh rate and higher resolutions of a good crt screen (my mate worked for hewlett packard in the returns dept - so i got good gear at silly prices.) That let 3d work properly.

Even today most flatscreens won't refresh fast enough to make it worth doing. You need it to be around 80hz. And because flat screens only refresh the pixels that change - not the entire screen - they don't need fast refresh.
Most budget screens these days won't go much over 60hz and even the expensive ones tend not to go much beyong 70.

My old 17inch trinitron tube monitor in my workshop, will go up to 120hz refresh and a stupidly high resolution. Why I still have it.
Best monitors ever made.

One of the best things I ever read in a manual came with a big crt screen I installed for client.
It said: 'if you have any problems, first thing to do is to apply firm force to the monitor case with your hand.'

In other words, if it goes wrong - hit it !
This was a £400 monitor.

Almost as good as the classic: 'no keyboard present, press f1 to continue.'

I think people had more fun at work back then - plus most of them were permamently stoned. You don't come up with the keyboard error message while drinking red-bull :whistle: 

The other thing we don't have any more are amusement arcades with video games.
Spent most of my time at college in the arcade in stoke.
That and playing pinball in the students union. Grew up playing pinball.
I could stick 50p in the union pinball machine, play for a couple ofm hours and leave it with a few credits for someone else.
The best one had  a 5 ball multiball.

Wish they'd release more tables for the 3ds - but can't see it happening :-( 

It's true what they say: even nostalgia was better back then :whistle:

I remember playing Teamfortress when it was just a mod for Quake 1 (a game I still love to this day.) TF was a great game!! So many well wasted hours on that game. Quake as well was and is to me the greatest FPS game I've ever played.

I was heavily into the NES, SNES, and to a lesser extent N64.
I loved Final Fantasy 1 and 4. Street fighter 2 was also a favorite. I only played a bit on N64 before switching to computers. Played Quake for years and got pretty good, near tier 1 at my best but not quite as good as the Quake gods. (Some of those guys I'm convinced are not quite human).

Also played Ultima Online for a few years and then moved on to EverQuest. Great games. UO was like the wild west of MMOs. Roaming bands of PKs killing everyone in sight. Going into dungeons and always keeping one eye on the mobs and the other on other players. Fun times.

I can't get interested in console gaming as much as I used to. Now I mostly play Chess. It never seems to get boring even when certain people catch me with the same damn knight sacrifice half a dozen times lol.

Quake was good, first game where you had 360 aiming (or was duke nukem first ?) either way quake was the firt game with fully 3d modelled creatures and environments AND free form aiming.

Speaking of which - the best game of it's type of the era and groundbreaking in soooo many ways: Unreal.

Oh man, the first time you fired a shot into the sky and it just kept on going. That blew you away.
Really atmospheric.
That would work well on the 3ds as well. So would quake for that matter.

Plus the arena side of both Unreal and quake were also excellent. As long as you just played the computer lol Other Humans always spoil games :whistle:

Never finished Unreal - just too damn hard. Even with cheats and level jumping I don't think I ever saw the end.

The other really groundbreaking game was System Shock.
the first time the evil computer spoke to you, you nearly wet yourself lol

I like exploring games and games with a more free form plot to them.
If any of you have played steamworld dig 1 - get 2 !
Much bigger game, loads more upgrades and different ways to do them and good story so far.
I'm going to lose a lot of sleep this week - a drawback with playing games in bed :whistle:
Also a benefit of being single :-) 

Born in 1990 - lol I'm getting old.
We got our very first games console in the mid 70's. Black and white (like the telly) guessing my dad got it because it came with a GUN !
You had to turn the brightness and contrast on the telly right up, draw the curtains and switch the lights off. The white dot travelling around the screen left trails on your retina. But the gun could see it.
Also had variations of pong with different numbers of paddles for the different games.

Oddly we never had an atari, freinds did. In fact our next console that got plugged into the tv was the wii.
Games were much better in the arcades. And if - like me - you lived in germany but occasionally went to the uk. You could get loads of 5 pence pieces, which back then were the exact same size and weight as a german deutschmark. So I used to stock up on 5p's and spend a lot of time but very little money playing arcade machines.

Also Read  a lot of books
Then when we moved back to the uk when I was 14, I got a zx81. With a 16kb memory expansion !
Wrote a lot of my own games, they weren't great - but they did work.
Then got  a dragon 32. And that added sound and colour and writing games just got too complicated for me.
But it was very good for playing games on.
Went from the dragon (still under my bed I think) to an amstrad pcw - and got into word processing and desktop publishing - wrote the definitive guide to a couple of dtp programs for the pcw.
Which was also the time the atari lynx came out and i got into that and the user magazine.

Built my first pc after college while i was working at the mcvities biscuit factory (cookies for you yanks) and things just kind of snowballed from there.

Right off to do some cooking.

Unreal tournament is sort of like Quake in that it has a huge following of hardcore fans. I have never seen it but I hear great things about it.

Duke Nukem 3d may have been the first, I believe that was it's big selling point. But Quake perfected the concept and adding multiplayer to it was like gasoline on a fire. Those were good days! Quake 3 was also extremely well made.

One of my friends Dad at the time worked for Id, the makers of Quake, and had his house built after the exact design of the level he created. He also created the Fiends in that game if that rings a bell.

Yeah duke nukem had the first free form aiming. But all the critters were bitmaps, got really blocky when you got up close.

A house based on a quake level ?
Doesn't sound like a good idea - although the teleports and secret passages and rooms would be cool :-)

We can't forget DOOM.

The first 3d shoot em up and still one of the best to play. Got doom 1& 2 on the gba. Surprisingly good platform for it.
One of the best things about doom was the customiser. At one point I had a shotgun that would take down even a big boss with one shot - but that fired about 50 rounds a minute.
You could make it fire faster, but the reload animation couldn't keep up.

How old is doom ?
I remember you needed a 386 with a maths co-processor (yep they used to be seperate chips), or a 486 processor to run it.

Here's another thing to think about.
What do you think is the best noise a 'gun' has ever made in a video game.

For me it's the plasma cannon in the atari jaguar version of DooM.
I think I was the first non-atari employee in the uk to see the prototype controllers for the jaguar console. Had programmable buttons which was very new.
They were lying around atari hq when we went down there one day.

Unfortunately like all their later consoles. Atari had the best hardware but couldn't get independant games development going.
It was a 64 bit console when the rest of the world was still running on 16 bit.
Likewise the lynx was 16bit when everybody else was 8bit.

But the plasma cannon sound on jaguar doom - oh man ! 

Just had a quick search and the guy who used to run atari uk way back then - darryl still - now runs kiss ltd, a games company. Great bloke.
Was very good to a couple of young chaps publishing a small press niche magazine.
Actually so was everybody else. We visited a games developer in manchester - probably 1991. Who not only showed us the game in development - power factor - but sat us down in front of a blackboard and gave us a very instructive lecture on the three principles of video games.
Was a fun couple of years.

And no matter the game, or when it was written all video games boil down to these three principles.
1) collision
2) avoidance
3) interaction

Every single thing that happens in every video game ever made uses one or more of those three principles. 

OH. MY. GOD Just did a quick search for the lynx - There's a forum with a section on the magazine. So I can say the guy's name who gave us the lecture was Jim Gregory.
Just saw this post: 'I had the 2 page interview/feature with Jim Gregory/Hand Made Software scanned and i sent it to Atarimania for their WIP Lynx section.'

Looks like I came onboard around issue 5.

The other awesome thing with doom and doom 2 is that the modding community is still active!

I still regularly play Doom from time to time, with differing wads depending on my gaming preferences. Brutal Doom has been my general 'go-to' mod for around two years now, though, as well as the metal music packs et cetera. It is probably the closest thing to what the original makers wanted Doom to be like.

I still play fairly regularly.

With the (relatively) new high speed internet I can play with my siblings ~1000 miles away regularly. Beats the crap out of a regular phone call. Our default is Team Fortress II. Still a great game.

Bioshock I and II were excellent excellent games. Wonderful exploration of gaming itself, individualism vs collectivism, and a few other serious philosophical questions. All done in an incredibly immersive environment and compelling story. The internet disagrees with me but bioshock infinite was crap. The first two are very very worth playing through.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the recent Xcom Enemy Unknown. It's really more a complex board game (turn based) but I really enjoyed it.

There was a Star Trek game based on the quake engine (Star Trek Voyager Elite Force) that was a surprisingly solid FPS.

Of course classics like Tetris and Asteroids. Red Alert and Red Alert II.

Steam got me back into gaming. With their sales? I can play games for <10 bucks a pop. And they have old games so even if your rig is trailing edge, you can find a game you can run.

Steam scares me. I've said earlier that I don't actually play games anymore but if I got Steam I might never leave my computer. Far too dangerous to have them that easily available :D

Kick wrote on Apr 24^th, 2018 at 1:59pm:

Steam scares me. I've said earlier that I don't actually play games anymore but if I got Steam I might never leave my computer. Far too dangerous to have them that easily available :D

Not even to go Slinging?!?!  ;D

Well maybe to go slinging :D

I love that Steam let's people experience otherwise dead games from years past in an accessible way. I found a game called Arx Fatalis on there for something like 5 dollars at the time and tried it out. It was quite good. Never heard of it before Steam.

Speaking of dead games, one of my childhood favorites was on Steam, the Age of Empires II Star Wars reskin called, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

Funditor406 wrote on May 10^th, 2018 at 9:01pm:

Speaking of dead games, one of my childhood favorites was on Steam, the Age of Empires II Star Wars reskin called, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds.

That was one of my favourite games! It's a shame they haven't made a modern remake of it like they did with Age of Empires II.

I know right?! There's a modding team making something close enough to that called, "Expanding Fronts." I have it, it's a great mod, it can feel pretty dated once you play it long enough though as it's WIP.

There's lots of old games that it would be amazing if they remake it... then I remember stuff like the COD 4 remaster and Star Wars: Battlefront and Battlefront 2 and... yeah maybe I'm ok with just playing them on old consoles with dirt graphics.

I can recommend Witcher (only played first game, my PC is old and can't run other two) - great RPG fantasy game. It's based on books by Andrzej Sapkowski, full of unusual Slavic mythology creatures and folklore. Also, great books =)

Also, Clive Barker's Undying - great horror game (makes sense, because Clive Barker is crazy writer of horror/fantasy novels), lots of freaky monsters and weapons to kill them with. It's old, but still creepy.

Of course, if you have some Nintendo and a couple of friends - Mario kart is always good option =D

Nothing wrong with liking old games and consoles.

In some ways I think there was more elegance in the old games. There had to be because there were only so many options for both the players and the programmers. You had to find elegant solutions. Now it feels like the emphasis is on "look at these beautiful graphics" instead of "here's a fun game". And spoonfeeding. Spoonfeeding everywhere. Not just "here's a map". Here's a lit up portion of the area that has what you're looking for. Not enough? We'll make it light up too.

For old style elegance, "Gunpoint" on steam was a lot of fun. Also Portal and Portal 2 (though portal 2 somewhat less) for a really inventive and entertaining game.