Favorite video games, anyone?

[quicksand_for_life]

Hello fellow quicksand lovers! Does anyone here have any favorite video games and/or video game series that they like to talk about? As you can tell from my avatar, I'm a HUGE Super Mario fan and have been since I was five years old. I own at least a dozen game consoles (three of them are Japanese versions so in other words they're imports) and they're all Nintendo based consoles. I used to have three Atari 2600's, a Sega Genesis, and a Sega Saturn but I sold all of them off as I needed the money (the Sega Saturn died on me years ago but I did sell off the games I had for it).

[Magic Engineer]

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[SarahMichelle]

Hello fellow quicksand lovers! Does anyone here have any favorite video games and/or video game series that they like to talk about? As you can tell from my avatar, I'm a HUGE Super Mario fan and have been since I was five years old. I own at least a dozen game consoles (three of them are Japanese versions so in other words they're imports) and they're all Nintendo based consoles. I used to have three Atari 2600's, a Sega Genesis, and a Sega Saturn but I sold all of them off as I needed the money (the Sega Saturn died on me years ago but I did sell off the games I had for it).

Oh wow a dozen consoles?! That's pretty cool! I own a GameCube, xBox360, & a PS3. I haven't turned on my 360 though since it was given to me as a gift; I really love my PS3.

One of my all time favorite games is Final Fantasy IX. I also love Tales of Symphonia. I'm currently playing BioShock Infinite, whenever I have a free second. (Which is rare)

I'm a former World of Warcraft player. That is the best game EVER, hands down. I miss it so much.

[Mynock]

If I had to pick one, just one, it would have to be Left 4 Dead 2 for PC. I've been a fan of two things for almost my entire life--the FPS Genre of video games and zombie movies. This mixes the two in an infinitely replayable package that I still play regularly 3 years after it's been released.

[quicksand_for_life]

How did you manage to own 3 Atari 2600's?
And I gotta ask this, what was your favorite/least favorite/most bizarre game you ever played for the 2600?

I recall fondly the days of 'Atari hand' and 'Nintendo thumb'. My best friend growing up actually developed a blister on his palm from Decathalon.

Well my grandparents somehow misplaced my first Atari 2600 so that was when I bought the second one until my first one was later found. I did end up selling my first two Atari's before being given my third one as a gift but I sold that one off too due to money issues.

My most favorite game would be a tie between Donkey Kong and Pac-Man (yes I liked the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man...I really have no idea why people are saying that this game caused the video game crash of 1983). My least favorite...not too sure. I really didn't have any games that were considered bizarre to me but I have heard about a bunch of porn games that were made for the Atari 2600 if that counts.

[Magic Engineer]

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[nachtjaeger]

Favorite game? Hmm, let's start at the beginning.

Of the early Arcade games, my favorite was probably Star Castle. (Yeah, that does go back aways.)

I bought an Atari 2600 with my paper route earnings, but didn't really have a favorite game. The 2600 version of "Defender" wasn't as good as the Arcade version. And after all the hype, "Sword Quest" was a huuuge disappointment.

Probably my favorite Arcade game of all time was "Galaga." I usually stunk at games, but I could rock that one. When my daughter (born in '95) was little, I took her to an arcade and they had Galaga. When I told her I was good at it, she gave me the "Yeah, right Dad. . ." Not much later it was "Wow, Dad! You really are good!

For early PC games, I loved Microprose's "F-15 Strike Eagle II" and "F-19 Stealth Fighter." The graphics were laughable by today's standards, but for the '90s they rocked. And the realism of the gameplay was incredible. I would get so "into" flying the F-15 that at the end of a mission I would be drenched in sweat.

Later, there was Monster Truck Madness. And Mechwarrior II with the Clan Ghost Bear expansion. Loved those.

My daughter worked and saved to buy a Gamecube. Then there was X-men: Legends (we never did beat the game) and Soul Calibur 2. So frustrating to keep getting your butt kicked by your kid!

Somewhere around this time there were Warcraft II and its Tides of Darkness expansion set, and Starcraft and its Brood War expansion. Even played that online. Had the best luck playing as the Protoss. My life for Aiur!

And the whole family- my wife, my daughter and myself, got hooked on Diablo II. Barbarians are cool, but Paladins rule! My Lady Wife and I played "Lords of the Realm II" to death.

Did the whole MMORPG thing for awhile- my daughter and I played a lot of Disney's Pirates of the Carribean for awhile. Then later on it was LOTRO. Finally got burned out on crafting and leveling.

Forgot the Railroad Tycoon series. 1 was great for an ancient DOS game, 2 was okay, 3 was awesome. Then instead of RRT4 we got "Sid Meier's Railroads" which was a huge flop.

Oh, yeah- there was SimCity 4, Civilization II and III (Civ IV didn't add any value, just better graphics.)

And how could I forget the other family addiction- PokE'mon! When I think back, I can still hear the 8-bit strains of the "happy traveling music".

After LOTRO I just burned out totally on gaming. Every so often I check out Steam or GameStop to see if there's anything new, but there isn't.

[water_bug_62208]

My video games days were WAY BACK in college and graduate school, and even before that time period when the department and grocery stores would occasionally have a video game machine set up to play on (like Pong and Tank Battle... told ya it was WAY BACK ).

I spent quite some time in college in the "game room" in the lower levels of the student union building (as they called it at the time). It was filled with arcade games, pool tables, and ping pong tables. I don't recall the name, but my all-time favorite was an arcade game (ancient by today's standards) that featured a simple black and white TV screen with a simple outline of a Federation starship (I always called it, "Enterprise") and what everyone called the "Delta Ship" because it was shaped as a simple, elongated delta notched at the end. It was kind of like a spin-off of the original Asteroids arcade game. You could play against the machine or play against a friend. How long the game lasted depended on how many quarters you were willing to put into the machine. Basically, you pressed buttons to manuever your ship and fired upon one another with what resembled photon torpedoes. If you hit your opponent square on, they blew up into pieces. If you nicked them, they might still be able to somewhat manuever and fire on you. If you played against the same person long enough, you enjoyed those moments where you nicked them just enough they couldn't manuever to fire on you and you took your time coming around behind your opponent and savoring the moment before you poured round after round into them! You were also limited to the number a rounds you had to shoot with, but we'd hit the restart button at the end of each encounter to return our ships to their full compliment of torpedoes for the next round. I believe you could also introduce black holes and asteroids into the mix to up the challenge.

I also enjoyed the really primative tank battle video games as well as Space Invaders and the original Asteroids. I also enjoyed the arcade game where you defended against incoming missiles and had to destroy them before they MIRVed, and there was one wher you had to enter a area and had to face off against a robot that kept saying, "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert!" There was one pizza place across the campus that my friends and I liked to frequent, and it had some sort of primative, black and white TV arcade machine featuring a moon landing game where you had a limited amount of fuel to land your lunar module. If you landed too hard, your lunar module either blew up into pieces or bounced on the lunar surface with feedback words describing the damage to your vessel. Also, as you landed, as you approached the surface, the game would go into magnification mode for a close up of your simple lunar module. Sometimes if you weren't careful, you'd clip the edge of a lunar mountain and end up tumbling in pieces.

That's the extent of my video game days. I stopped messing with them after graduate school. I see what comes out in terms of video games these days on the TV, am amazed at the details and complexities of these compared to what I grew up with, and change channels.

[Nessie]

The only video game I have ever played more than a handful of times is Tetris. It's on my cell phone.

Nessie

[Magic Engineer]

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