History Of Gaming

I’m not certain I could come up with a perfectly accurate list here as I’ve been gaming since Atari and Intellavision, but I wanted to share a little history about myself and playing video games for most of my life to kick off this blog. Share some of the more memorable initial experiences and thoughts on games to bring me to the place I am today. I believe that gaming (in moderation) is actually something that can be stimulating and educational (of course recreational), and that it has shaped in some small way the person I am today which I am proud of. I’ll try to make each section brief so this doesn’t spiral out of control :-) So without much more ado and in no particular order here we go:

City of Villains/City of Heroes:

Why does this get first mention? Simple, this game was THE best character creation game I’ve ever played. I designed themes with friends, themes of my own, and there were so many combos that there were probably literally a million different ways to make you character look. The powers in this game looked very amazing as well. The other thing I absolutely loved about this game was the lackey/malefactor system. With it I could play with my friends no matter what our level system, for the most part this was easy to accomplish and just required some zone travel (easy with super powers for traveling). It also featured global friends (could find a friend no matter what server they were playing on at the time), how come that is gone away, it was awesome! Only draw back to this game was the missions eventually got stale, and the end levels took an eternity to gain, IMO, a great game. Looking forward to see what Champions Online will hold.

World of Warcraft:

Of course I played it, and for a long time, who didn’t? This is still one of the greatest games ever for the sheer numbers it has produced and fun as well. Its just a really well built game, with many improvements over the years. I don’t have to go into all the great things about this game as probably most people already know them but I’ll just say it kept me around for quite some time. In the end I feel like I finally “completed” WoW. I did not buy the latest expansion, but I believe its more of the same. I’m not motivated to jump back on for another 10 levels, to hit the cap and grind arena or bg’s for more gear. Not that this idea wasn’t fun when I did it the first time at 70, but its played the course for me. Will I try it someday? Who knows, but for now I am wow’d out and currently more interested in other games. Still, I rate this one of the best games of all times at the moment, nothing brought together a lot of my friends like this one (even friends who don’t normally play video games ended up joining for a while).

Starcraft:

One of my first true loves in RTS games. I cannot wait to play SC2 if I could ever figure out when they will release it. This game had great balance, great fun in the amount of units, and a multi strategy concept that still lives on to this day. You could win the small battles, win the resource battle, take down bases, win in the open field. There were lots of great strategic points to this game that made me love it. I will be playing the second one when it comes out for sure (hopefully this year).

Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne:

Also a great RTS game. I actually loved this one the most for the amazing custom games (Tower Defense and Defense of the Ancients). But I also truly enjoyed the regular ranked games as well. My favorite race is Orc, though I had a really fun strategy I would do sometimes with Human of harassing with the ArchMage and speed teching to steam tanks. Overall was like a smaller scale version of Starcraft, you had less units and therefore each was that much more important, and the hero’s were especially important. I’ll never forget a match I was playing with friends where my good friend in real life and teammate had commanded his units to attack my hero (on accident) but could find them or draw them off despite me spamming the team chat to do so. Ah well I got over it (or did I? lol). Last great mention about this game, REPLAYS! Man did I love that it had replays, I could watch a match that I lost, and figure out what I could have done better. Did he micro better? Did he have an expansion? Did I just play poorly? Also could watch the better players in the world and see what they did like build orders and what not, very awesome.

Warhammer Online:

The game I’m currently playing the most. So far I really enjoy this game a lot (enough to keep me from trying wow expansion). It allows you to level by doing pvp which is an amazing idea that I truly enjoy. It still has quests if you feel the need, or PQ’s if you want to work towards a gear reward you are guaranteed to get by putting in the time. I started out on a server that was more desolate but after transfers (and starting over on a RP server) my experience has gone way up. Thanks to Keen and Graev for peaking my interest in this game and letting me join up with them in their guild. This game is definitely a winner in my book and will most likely be the topic of a lot of my posts since I’m playing it the most.

Well this is getting a little long so let me just list some of the rest. Maybe I’ll get back to them another day:

Lord of the Rings Online, Sacred, Diablo2, Diablo, Everquest 2, Battlefield 1942, Age of Conan, Demigod (beta still) and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting.

How about you? What games have shaped your gaming experience? Which games would you like to hear more about?