Video Games are awesome

[Shockwave]

Hot damn, that sounds awesome. I'm definately gonna check that out at some point. I'm pretty sure I could track down windows 98 somewhere. Then when I get a new computer (after I renovate my house) I can load it on my laptop.

[onslaught86]

Hey, vidya games!

There's a few specific games that've made a big difference to me over the years. I've never been a huge gamer, but currently probably play quite a bit more than I used to. That's thanks to thieving the girlfriend's Xbox 360, and us playing endless co-op.

Shadowman, having already been brought up, goes first. I got my good ol' PSX when one set of grandparents bought a new loungesuite and it came with as a bonus. They promptly gave it to me as a christmas present. After getting sick of the included games (Gran Turismo, yaaaay, I am so not a racing game fan. Car combat is a different story. The A Bug's Life game, however, is surprisingly fun. And hard in places.) I rushed out to buy some of my own. A friend had had a PSX for years, so I was familiar with the selection. What did I find on sale? Shadowman.

The game really grabbed me. It's hard to imagine in retrospect, given how immersive and movie-like modern games are. But I really felt like I was playing through a movie, or some kind of epic story. It was dark and twisted and atmospheric, combining platformer elements with survival horror. Ranging fram navigating traps in an ancient temple to dodging undead serial killers in a prison. Ultimately, I think it was the soundtrack and the visuals that stuck with me the most. It has a soundtrack that has yet to be topped in my experience. The walls made of skin, rivers of blood, and giant looming towers made for a very cinematic experience. It was a hard game in places - and no cheats, so it made me stick with it. I beat the game, and have now done so three or four times on various platforms. As O6 mentioned, there's a lot hacked out of the PSX version. It was this first beating of a hard game without cheating that had a lasting effect on me.

Ended up researching it extensively with O6 and finding about cancelled segments of the game, among other things. Scripts, early shots with different and extra material, it's a subject I have yet to tire of after ten years or so. They came out with a lacklustre sequel, which I never played a lot of. The original is well worth a look.
I still use Shadowman's shotgun reload sound effect as my text sound on my phone.

Now, to backtrack..

Quake and Quake II: I went to a primary school to the far right of nowhere, two hours' drive away from civilisation. We used awful Apple IIs, and the most exciting game on any of them by the time I was ten was Zombinis. Good times. A few friends had Sega Mastersystems, since NES oddly didn't have a huge prescence here, but it was never anything big. One friend had a Commodore 64. We played a few arcade games, they had them in one of the local fish and chip shops. Back then, video games were still the realm of the Nintendo Hard generation, who had to get really good at repetitive actions and develop an extensive knowledge of boss moves and combos. Before the internet was widespread, information did not travel easily or fast, and anyone could say anything and make it seem credible.

My first experience with non-crap games that I could actually play and enjoy playing was Duke Nukem 3D. My uncle, then at university, took me to a LAN party and I enjoyed busting out the RPG and moving in more than two dimensions. Still, that was brief. It wasn't until my father started living in a place used infrequently by a friend of his for business that I had access to a PC semi-regularly, and experienced all the joys of 28.8k dial-up. Woo! The first game we got into was Quake I. Only had the shareware version for ages, heh. Fits on 8 floppy discs, y'know. The graphics and models were a step above Duke's, especially with actual polygonal enemies instead of sprites. The environments grabbed me - especially when I discovered the cheats, and found all these extra parts I'd never seen before. Quake gave me a taste for a certain kind of FPS, and I'm glad it did.

This carried on when Quake II came out. The above-mentioned friend with a PSX used to get the magazines with demo discs, and we'd spend hours playing the demos and reading up on the latest releases we'd never own. He did, however, buy Q2. This gave us another dimension in multiplayer deathmatch, as we were fairly evenly matched. No co-op, but whatchagonnado. We took turns, and although the setting had changed, it had the same Quake polish. Cyborg aliens are almost universally regarded as awesome. It was, funnily enough, Quake II that helped me get into Beast Machines, since the Vehicons were of a similar aesthetic. Also, the kickass industrial metal soundtrack by Sonic Mayhem helped get me into a lot of the music I like today.

If you've never played either of these, you've missed a chunk of game history. Quake I was the first true 3-D FPS, and the level design still stands up well today. The whole game, all four chapters, is only 30MB. Go forth and download! I can even run it on my phone.

I shall follow this up, for there's a few more big influences. One of these is Half-Life 2, which is the only game I own a shirt for.

[Sparky Prime]

Little update with my Megaman X6 gameplay... Still a really annoying game to play but now that I have most of the power-ups it's a lot easier. Metal Shark Player is the only Maverick I haven't defeated yet because I'm trying to get the 9999 Nightmare souls so I can get 5 parts equippable to each X and Zero. Seems a bit ridiculous to require that many but at least they made it so you could fight Dynamo over and over again who drops a lot of souls.

[Sparky Prime]

After taking a bit of a break from X6, I finally decided to beat the game tonight with both X and Zero. The Gate's Lab levels weren't as bad as I was expecting them to be compared to what the rest of the game was. I found using the Shadow Armor with its invulnerability to spikes and the Ultimate Buster part equipped makes those stages a bit easier with how powerful the Shadow Armor's charged buster saber attack is. The only tricky part about using the Shadow Armor here is this one jump in Gate's Lab 2. Because that armor has no air dash, you have to have the Hyper Dash part equipped to make it across.

Still, X6 I'd have to say is the most difficult game of the 6 games on the Mega Man X Collection.

So having beat all the games (twice in some cases) on the X Collection, I was thinking I had unlocked all the bonus stuff but was surprised to find "Images 2" is still locked. After a bit of research, I find out the way to unlock it is to beat X6 with out beating Nightmare Zero.... In other words, I'll have to replay that game over again in order to get that. :/

[Onslaught Six]

86 has been playing Audiosurf lately. It makes levels from your MP3 files. Awesome. I wanted to try it, but my computer sucks...so I'm loading it onto an SD card to play on the school computers. Hell yeah.

[Shockwave]

That sounds so freakin awesome.

[Onslaught Six]

And it won't load off the card right! Hooray! Oh well.

[Shockwave]

So it would be freakin awesome if you could get it working.

[Onslaught Six]

From the books thread:

-Actually thought this would make a good Mortal Kombat style fighting game at one point.

Now that Midway is selling off all its assets, I've been slowly waiting for them to try and hock off Mortal Kombat. And there's one group I want to see get it: Capcom. Then, finally, we can have what everyone wanted since 1993. Street Fighter Vs. Mortal Kombat.

[Shockwave]

vs. Mega Man, vs. Resident Evil...

Ok, I'll stop now.