Origins of a Gamer 02.16.10: Week Four – I’m a PC and I’m 28 Years Old

Posted by Chris Crowing on 02.16.2010

This week we hit on some of the key PC Games to influence my development as a gamer, from shoot em ups, RPGs, Sims and more. First you will read, and then there will be cake...



Failte,

Nice to see you folks, thanks for dropping by. This week I'll be reminiscing about my various joyous experiences as a PC Gamer, from the simplest first person shooters to some of the most involved role-playing games I've ever experienced.

However, in the interests of fairness, I want YOUR votes to set up my next column…

COMING SOON - 411 Deathmatch Championship

Right folks, this is your LAST chance to get involved in the 411 Deathmatch Championship as I'll be deciding on the qualifiers next week and setting them into brackets.

So, if you want to make your mark on the grandest competition ever run on this website, I want your suggestions as to the best/most beloved/favouritest computer Games, Characters and Franchises.

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I'm A PC and I'm 28 Years Old

Back when I was a teenager in the 90s, during the time of the Playstation's dominance, my uncle was a computer technician at a local college. Given that a home PC would be a useful tool for my schoolwork, he cobbled together a serviceable computer for me, and the period of my being a PC Gamer was born. That PC lasted until I was at university before finally burning out.

It was a few years till I had a PC of my own again, but I got by using my friends and girlfriend's PCs. Then four years ago I bought myself a new, reasonably top-of-the-range PC and proceeded to fill my hard drive up with games.

My current PC is of course now horribly outdated and all but incapable of playing new release games, unless I decide to get it seriously updated. It may well be easier and cheaper to just buy a new PC…

Given the fractured nature of my PC ownership, I think I'll break with my established format and discuss the games which have made an impact on my by genre, rather than by any attempt at a coherent timeline. BTW, these genre definitions aren't quite conventional, grouping the games more by how I consider myself to play them, rather than their supposed genre title.

Shoot em Ups

Any discussion of computer shoot ‘em ups for a child of the 90s simply MUST start with Doom (although mentions of the original Wolfenstein 3d or Duke Nukem are also allowable.)

Doom and Doom II revolutionised the shoot ‘em up, from being a platformer with guns to an immersive, addictive genre all of it's own. While the games (and their sequels, like Quake) visually haven't aged that well, as we are increasingly spoiled by beautifully rendered photo-realistic fantasy, they were INCREDIBLE for me as a 14 year old, when the most violent game we'd had before had been Duck Hunt or Mortal Kombat.

Younger gamers will not understand the emotional attachment these games have for me and my peers, seeing only the (by modern standards) clunky graphics, simplistic game-play and often formulaic storylines. However those of an age to remember Doom, Doom II, Quake, Quake II, Heretic, Hexxen, Duke Nukem and Wolfenstein 3d will remember a joyous time…

Put simply, do YOU remember the first time you saw that Cyber Demon and nearly filled your pants in fear and joyous gamer immersion?



In the early days of the internet (when I was a teenager, net access in homes was by NO means a standard thing – it's like Another World isn't it?) I remember seeing a video online, where some lunatics had managed to reduce the several hours of game-play which it usually took to complete Quake into around a quarter of an hour, by righteously abusing the physics system via rocket and grenade jumps and judiciously avoiding combat in favour of charging through the level as fast as possible.

Quake Done Quicker blew my mind, as I'd always been (and continue to be) a ‘kill everything in sight, then double check in case anything is hiding before proceeding to open the next door' kind of shoot ‘em up player. While I continue to be a bloodthirsty maniac, it at least showed me that even in this relatively linear gaming environment, there was more than one way to do it…



A few years later came Unreal Tournament, and via a home network which my friend set up we spent many hours killing each other and learning the true meaning of suspense via Last Man Standing games, the deep joy to be experience as, and intense annoyance caused by persistent camping snipers.

It was at this stage I developed my enduring preferences in these kind of games, where I will almost always prefer a brutal up-close gun (shotgun) and dive into combat with gleeful disregard for potential harm OR I will find a good spot and camp down with my sniper rifle and rack up the kills.

Aww, c'mon, who doesn't love the voice which calls you ‘god-like' when playing Unreal Tournament?



My more recent PC has shown me how far the FPS genre has come, with the games being MUCH prettier, game-play becoming smoother and more varied and the cut-scenes and styling drawing the games closer than ever to my beloved role-play genre, making them a far more interesting.

Games like Half Life 2, Bioshock and F.E.A.R are sometimes labelled as W-RPG – western role play games, but I prefer to think of them as shooters with extra story. I'll get into what I consider proper role play games later, and that is not intended to be as suggestive as it sounds…

Anyways, these games I've mentioned loom very high in my esteem to this day with little innovative tweaks to the shooter formula (gravity gun, plasmids) combining with entertaining better-than-most-action-movie stories giving them replay value over and above the average in either the shooter or RPG genres.

Role Play Games

One of my credo's for excellence in game quality is the way they overtake your life, and few things will suck up hours of your time which could otherwise be used for social interaction, holding down a proper job or washing than a well put together RPG.

My favourite series has proven to be the Elder Scrolls with the third instalment Morrowind and it's add-ons Tribunal and Bloodmoon turning me from a fantasy fan into an avid RPG-nut.



It's sequel, the utterly massive and beautiful Oblivion with it's deeply contrasting add-ons, the puritanical Knights of the Nine and utterly insane the Shivering Isles consumed a similar amount of my time.



I would say that while Oblivion is bigger and probably a bit more beautiful, Morrowind has the more interesting and engaging world, fitting more 'usable items' and story elements into a smaller map. Indeed, it is the sheer amount of background information, side-quests, and world development which sets these games apart from lesser, more formulaic RPGs, to a degree I haven't seen until last year's Dragon Age: Origins which is my current obsession on my new toy...(I'll come back to this next week.)

From the same company, Bethesda Softworks came the latest (third) instalment in the Fallout series, which took up a fair lump of my 2009 in gaming. While I'm not that familiar with the earlier incarnations of Fallout (although I hear good things) I loved the semi-retro, semi-futuristic setting and the control system and character creation features like V.A.T.S, the G.O.A.T and S.P.E.C.I.A.L. Gotta love the execution style head-shots!



Criticism would be a certain dullness in the landscape which is fitting given the post-apocalyptic setting (but couldn't a little more Mad Max or Judge Dredd colour have been splashed across the Capital Wasteland?) and a paucity of background fluff in comparison to the Elder Scrolls games, but that's a little pithy...

One more game I have to give props to at this stage is X2 which took the almost-open-world-character-building-RPG thing into space in a very enthralling kind of way. It looked beautiful, played immerisvely and completely defeated me, which takes some doing... For the record I've never really got into games like EVE or World of Warcraft because my internet connection isn't up to it. I really need to get that sorted...

Strategy Games

Just as I'm a huge fan of RPGs because they immerse you and take your life away, I'm a fan of strategy games for the same reason. From my first steps into the genre with games like Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Ascendancy and of course Civilisation and each one of those games helped to develop my tendencies in such games before the true test came later...

The series which dominates my history of strategy gaming is the Total War series. From the at-the-time awesome first instalment with Shogun through an almost exponential increase in awesomeness to Medieval.



I simply love the beautifully rendered campaign maps with all the usual strategy elements - building up your forces, managing your economy etc., but the clincher in this series was the ability to actually play general on the battle map. A failure to understand the concepts of either facet of gameplay would doom you to an early defeat, as it doesn't matter how good a general you are if you can't afford to train troops and it doesn't matter how good an economist you are if you can't win a battle when needed. Simple, effective, genius.

The franchise became a little shaky through the Rome and Medieval II period, with certain tweaks to the gameplay being less well received (by me at least) but it all came good in time for the reboot with Empire and this should hopefully continue with the soon to be released Napoleon.

Football Games

As much as football games, especially EA Sports' FIFA series have been important to me on consoles, when it's time to fire up the PC, football management games are the one's which stretch my hard drive, girlfriend's patience and my need to eat, sleep and remember how to talk.

From my initial experiences with the original Championship Manager series it has become an almost annual habit to buy the new Football Manager (which is the spiritual successor to the original Championship Manager) game every autumn, and it becomes the driving passion of my gaming life until at least Christmas...

Folks who aren't into football (that's soccer if you must be offensively American) really can't understand the abiding fascination which a game that pretty much amounts to a series of spreadsheets can inspire in people like me. You either get it, or you don't I guess...

Miscellaneous Games

Of course, some games don't fit into the above easy classifications, but have soaked up literally weeks of my life…

First up would be the Tiger Woods Golf series, especially the career mode which has at times become a near obsession for me. It's still a matter of some chagrin that I'm always awesome at the wide open spaces of many American courses but I always struggle to par on my ‘home' course – which is of course the Old Course at St. Andrews.

You have to wonder if the next instalment will have a ‘nineteenth hole' or ‘playing away from home' mode…

I've always been a fan of Sim games, (although I always used the Sims to build cool houses, rather than get involved with my fake person's actual life. Building a cool house, then locking your Sim in the basement and setting the house on fire was always quite a lot of fun though…) especially when a degree of God-game gets involved, and over the years I have an enduring affection for Rollercoaster Tycoon, although the rest of the …Tycoon series tends to not be as much fun.

This is because, while you tend to play the game ‘properly' for the first few hours after buying the game, that quickly gets old, and the real enjoyment in Rollercoaster Tycoon comes from building increasingly insane roller coasters, like these…



The on-board camera really makes this game, but it doesn't translate into a Zoo or Railroad setting, does it?

In recent years I've discovered the excellent wrestling and MMA promoter Sims from Adam Ryland's Grey Dog Software to be incredibly addictive and while I got bored of Total Extreme Warfare, I soon developed a near addiction to World of Mixed Martial Arts 2 although given I can now get almost any promotion to a quite ridiculous FIFA-like level of worldwide domination perhaps I need to step away from the keyboard…

The last game I really want to talk about is arguably not even a game in it's own right and I'm unsure whether to count it as a shooter, puzzle game, RPG or what… Portal is effectively a beta test for elements of Half Life 2 but the testing, enthralling game-play, alongside the ever entertaining voice of the computer GlaDos< (which is probably my most quoted game character ever with such gems as "first you will be boiled and then there will be cake….the cake is a lie."



Despite the fact that the guy who is playing through the video is a compleye nOOb and doesn't seem to understand the capabilities of the portal gun or the hints he receives, you'll see in that video some of the entertaining little touches where if you explore the cracks in the walls of the facility you seem to be locked in, you can see the theories and graffiti scrawlings of your predecessors. It might just be me, but that really struck a chord with me, and it's one reason that a BETA TEST which I only bought as part of The Orange Box (probably the best games compilation EVER) is possibly one of my ten favourite games experiences of all time. Attention to detail COUNTS.

Thanks for following me on this little trip down memory lane, and next week I'll round this Origin series off with the final rankings for the Deathmatch Championship, my rough guide to what makes a good game and what I see in my immediate gaming future.



el_pieablo said Your gaming history seems to mirror myself's a lot. I too branched into the orignal playstation and the PS2. Being Scottish also I had my fair share of footie games for the PSX but I had world cup 98 and enjoyed it. My WWE games started with the first on the PSX(I think!) WWF Raw(Stone cold on the front) and i was such a mark for the WWF that i bought every games they brought out right till i was a skint student in 2001. I also had the WCW games, WCW vs World and WCW Thunder which had the awesome promo videos(Nash's ruled).

Your list is missing some overlooked classics though, likes of Legacy of Kain, G Police, Dragon Quarter, Vandel Hearts and Sukioden. I have to say that the orignal PSX had a load of top quality games and the PS2 continued that tradition. Was a shame that the PS3 took a while to come out and my friend convinced me to get a 360.

I think that the pre Smackdown! WWE title on the PSX with Stone Cold on the cover was in fact WWF Attitude, because that was actually my first wrestling game, despite the over-fussy controls, sickeningly repetitive commentary and clunky graphics... For me the BEST wrestling game ever (aside from the Total Extreme Warfare series of promoter Sims) has to be RAW is WAR for the N64, except I only ever played that in small amounts, on friends' consoles.

Of the 'classics' you list, the only one I can even remember is Legacy of Kain - which makes them overlooked indeed! As for the current generation consoles, I'll discuss my choices there next week, suffice to say I feel like I'm cheating on my longtime relationship with Sony...



Slainte,
Chris Crowing

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