my journey of gaming
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
As per the indirect wishes of Ben, i might as well also state how i got introduced to gaming.
Gaming started late for the two of us, and we usually occupied ourselves at young ages with solid games like Micro Machines and Lego. One very memorable point was when our older brother created a lego war for us, where joel and i built up machines and the like, taking turn-based gameplay to a new level. Each turn we could move one troop so far, and attacking was really subjective, such as how easily a creation fell apart.
When we played Micro Machines, Isaac made these paper maps for us to lay the MicroMachine bases on, and we also played in a similar fashion, though i cant't remember how attacks and victory were decided. We gave away our micro machines a long time ago, but while i won't play it in a similar way, i still have a penchant for such things.
The very first computer game that we played was this submarine game, on a Windows 95 PC located in my parents' room. It was an educational game of a journey of a sub, like those explorere types, having to dodge sea creatures and along the way, solving math puzzles. The end of the stage would always be this huge undersea lock that woukd require a mathematical puzzle to open.
Reader Rabbit and the like came soon after, and Joel and I really had a swell time playing them in the past. The computer games that we eventually managed to get a hold of, were all introduced by my older brothers, and the one game that hooked us all was Isaac playing FFVII. We would sit at the computer table for hours on end, watching him play, and when my dad saw, he would chide us for wasting our lives away.
Progressively, i got introduced to games like Red Alert and its ancestoral travesty, but at that time i thought both were pretty swell. Remember the bloody slow hulk of a mammoth tank, the tank that revolutionised imba? Yeah. It was pretty damn slow. And anyone who knew not of the atom bomb but saw it in RA would think it was another mere missile, what with the pathetic damage.
Mark and Ben can testify to our total strangeness to the whole concept of multiplayer, in a time when so many were playing warcraft already, I was overly fascinated by the fact that i could actually play Red Alert 2 with a Human player. In fact, they both found it pretty irritating that i kept pestering them to play. They once sent a gigantic human wave of conscripts to my tanya. It was pretty amusing. Needless to say, the inability to play on the internet was due to my parents, who felt the internet should be kept as far away from us for as long as possible, seeing as how we would slave ourselves to watching our brother play a game already.
Besides. It was a 56kbps uplink.
posted by joseph at 7:46 AM