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I'm in a reminiscing mood, prepare for a WALL OF TEXT

I first started writing this in reply to the "your gaming history" thread, but decided it deserved it's own blog.

Basically I'm going to go through most of the games I remember playing and the good impressions they left me with!

-Command and Conquer original
- Warcraft 2 then Warcraft 1
-Red alert 1
-Playstation: FF7, FF8, Gran Turismo 2 and Tekken 3 were the 4 main games I owned. Played a few other adventure/rpg PS games but these 4 were played to death.

I think I finished about 70% of GT2 which is about 9000 hours of playtime if anyone remembers the endurance races where it's like 200 2 minute laps etc... haha great way to spend a saturday. I absolutely loved the Laguna Seca track in my ol' Honda S2000 or for a challenge using my stupidly suped up Dodge Viper that would spin out at every turn. American cars... erk.

FF7 was one of the best RPGs of all time... so much feeling and atmosphere in this game. Even when I was like 10 years old I lol'd at the graphics at first, but within a few minutes was engrossed. Anyone that didn't cry when Aeris died is a monster.

Tekken was just an awesome social fighting game with hundreds of moves to memorise. Xiaoyu was really hard to use but friggin ridiculous once you figured her out.

Started getting back into PC with SC campaign. Man I loved that first hold-out till the dropships arrive level. It was just like the second Aliens movie. Also as it seems with all old games, the music, voice acting and sound effects just seems to suit the scene so damn well. Sorry SC2 but whenever I hear original SC terran I'll always feel more baller then listening to sc2 scvs and marines.

I never played SC online but did play multiplayer at lan with my brother a little bit. Never really understood the entire tech tree or how to spend resources/expand. Don't think I'd ever really heard of macro till sc2 came out so was pretty bad. Thought I was a genius for dropping zealots in his main to avoid his seige tanks and bunkers!

I remember before that we used to play warcraft 2 and redalert through direct IP link and get d/c whenever someone rang the phone lol. Our (me and my older brother's) parents kept getting annoyed at us for leaving the phone off the hook on weekends :P.

I think we played a lot of other games that were pretty awesome like Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2. I recently replayed these and wow, they are such awesome games. Really nice graphics for their time too. I remember playing a whole host of tech games. I recall my brother replaying over and over some hex-simulation of The Ardennes offensive (battle of the bulge, WWII). I preferred the Fantasy ones though and some were pretty epic. Sometime around here Warcraft 3 came out, goodbye the next 5 years of my life! This was the first online ladder I encountered and after learning how to do the basics in team games I got addicted to 1v1 as well, despite being pretty bad. I was never anything special but I got good at cheesy strats and timings. I always just used FE builds, hidden expansions and tried to win with unit compositions. I don't think I ever realised I was so slow and that if I put in more effort I could creep faster, anticipate their movements and creepjack them etc etc. But hey I was in school and doing standard High school stuff hanging around with friends and stuff so I always had breaks from playing and never really had a Day9 or anything to learn from. I pretty much just found some written up FE builds, as well as some Tillerman replays and copied what they did. Oh also I played random for the most part though my orc and human were strongest.

Best achievement in war3 was staying top 50 in 2v2 AT on US west with my mate. He had never been too strong at the game so after many frustrated team games I told him were gunna bloody well go double Nightelf, double KOTG. We ended up refining this to the point where both KOTGs would go straight to 1 player and kill the hero, we'd run back to 1 of our shops to get clarity pots and drink from our moon wells cos it took all our mana to do that. We'd then harass either seperately or together and pick off a unit here and there until one of us transitioned into glaivethrowers, (oh tier 1 seige how I love you!) and the other would bring 5 wisps and start building Ancient protectors outside one of their mains. This won us pretty much every game we played I remember we had like a 40-60 Win:loss and it went up to like 120-90 once we refined this build. I tell ya, people hated us, ALOT. It felt good to get raged at so much back then lol. We'd always be winning tourneys too then my mate would have to go pick up his gf or get her lunch or some bullshit and we'd barely drop out of the top 16 cos we were 2 matches less played then everyone else it didn't matter we won them all. Damn pussywhipped bastard.

Other games that now come to mind:
-Dark Reign: amazing RTS in terms of AI, terrain, mechanics. It was just a sick game. I'm sure multiplayer sucked but I just played campaign and it friggin rocked.
-Age of Empires: this was on all my primary school's pcs and we got to play it all the time and I'd always pwn everyone by being the only one who understood constant villager production lol. I'd end up with iron age Hoplites massacring dozens of axemen.

Oh and I almost forgot. Morrowind

The best game ever made and my favourite game. Where I could disappear into it and play for 12 hours straight without wanting to stop exploring and finishing quests. An RPG where there was actual mystery and atmosphere in a free-roam game. It allowed you to go to places where the enemy were simply too strong for your level so you'd just get killed. And SOMEHOW having not every bad guy being easily beatable made the game seem more REALISTIC and FUN?? Wow I wonder who figured that out.

Oh and my equally favourite RPG is Exile 3. You can download it it's like 3 megabytes and find a crack easily enough for the free shareware version. Tiny game made by a lone programmer but it has a long amount of playtime and is actually an amazing RPG once you get comfy with the interface. Replayed dozens of times, same as morrowind.

Finally: FPS.

CS1.3-1.5 + LAN cafe. Year 7-9 was spent mainly doing these two activities. It's all kind of a blur but I do remember killing 9 people on minidust with a single m4 colt clip. That was pretty baller. Got pretty good at this game but never liked doing the camping/lining up sights with walls/flashbang stuff. Sure if you played as an organised team all that stuff is probably fun. But I just played with random nubs at a net cafe and played for adrenaline and glory. I wanted to charge their fkn asses and shame people by knifing them.

Wallhacks got particularly popular at my net cafe for about 6 months where all the "hard" kids would use them so everyone stopped complaining. Whenever another dickhead would complain they'd just claim everyone was using it so it was only fair... of course most kids all started doing it and I remember being one of the few who straight up refused to. I took it as just another challenge to shame these useless fuckers. So I would usually in a game with 3-4 wallhackers end up first or second and then call them all ******* retards who can't win even with hacks.

Eventually actually played the original Half-life and Half-life 2 single players. And omg half-life 2 is amazing and new and beautiful... but it still has nothing on the original. That game is just the perfect single player FPS.

Favourite things about half-life: the mods!

Obviously CS was most popular half-life mod. But does anyone remember playing with warcraft 3 mod? In this mod you would level up as you got kills and get abilities.
Some of my favourites:

Invisibility - with each level you'd become hard to see until almost invisible completely.
Mass teleport - you could teleport to any of your teammates, hence rendering the "need backup!" command actually useful.
Chain lightning - just do a shitload of damage
Entangling roots - root a person in spot for rest of the level
-cluster grenades - suddenly a frag becomes alot better lol

Even better then the W3 mod for CS though, was Natural Selection. This is one of my favourite games to this day (though I haven't played it in over 5 years).

It's an RTS AND FPS COMBINED!!! Holy shit so good. Basically the levels are always like inside a spaceship/spacestation/mining facility or whatever and its the standard aliens vs marines. Except that you're all workers in an RTS game. The human side get 1 player to hop in the "command chair" and basically give everyone orders and allocate resources. The other players get orders popping up on their HUD such as "go build turret that way" "here's a gun and a big suit of armour" etc etc.

The aliens on the other hand didn't have a commander and had to have better teamwork where you all started as essentially drones and could evolve into all sorts of different aliens. My favourite was one of the most basic fighting aliens that could walk on walls and ceilings and were really small so you'd basically wait above doorways to drop onto marines. I remember one time doing this to two marines in the biggest armour you could get with miniguns. My lil teeth were pretty much just scratching their armour but I was so small and fast moving hopping around biting their faces that it took them a solid 2 minutes to actually hit me with their minigun spray.

Basically Natural Selection combined my 2 favourite genres and was really focused on teamwork. It was a bloody fantastic game that I really miss. Supposedly they've been working on reworking it for half
life 2 for years, dunno if it'll ever happen!

Anyway guys, think I'll leave it at that, I had loads of fun reminiscing!