I remember the first video game I played only vaguely - some text adventure. The strong memories are of DOS games like Bumpy and Continuum that we had on the 286 my dad brought home. I didn't know back then that having a computer was anything special. It was just a natural thing, and learning to use to use it came naturally. I must have read the GW-BASIC manual cover to cover a dozen times (not understanding most of it, naturally). One day my dad brought home a laptop - the first I had ever seen in person. It was massive and even for the time slow, but somehow it ran a demo of Spear of Destiny - the first 3d first person shooter I had ever seen, and to this day the most magical gaming experience I've ever had. Ever since then I've been chasing that dragon. Doom, Quake, Unreal, Half-Life, all of them. Love them. Can't get enough. The games I've fallen in love with have been pretty typical of most gamers. Quake, Half-life, Bioshock, and whatnot. All still hold a special place, and all I still play through at least once a year. I just finished my yearly run of HL2 and Portal.
MMOs are a different beast. My first MMO was Ultima Online, but not in the traditional sense. By the time I got into it a few folks had figured out how to emulate the servers, so I cut my teeth on The Alter Realm UO shard, which ran Sphere Server. I played that for years. I still jump into UO from time to time, but not on TAR since that went belly up about seven years ago. In Por Ylem is pretty good, but again - chasing the dragon.
Since UO I've tried (the official versions of) Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, EVE, Anarchy Online, Age of Conan, and Star Wars: Galaxies. I played Galaxies for about three years and loved it - the best crafting of any MMO to date. It's a damned shame what happened to it, and I'll never trust SOE with a game again. Jeez, I'm still bitter about that.
I recently started playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I liked the Knights of the Old Republic series. Good stuff all around. It's translated to MMO format fairly well, but I have some complaints (as per tradition of all MMO players). First is the crafting. It's asinine. You just gather resources and click a recipe to craft. There is no personal influence at all, and every Widget A you craft is identical in every way to everyone else's Widget A. Yes, you can sometimes roll a 20 and make a Superior Widget A, but it's still the same as everyone else. The second is that this game has somehow driven people to hit the max level as soon as humanely possible. Everyone is either level 12 or level 50. This worries me because I'm not leveling very fast (I'm a filthy casual player) and all the patches are heavy on the end-game content that I won't see for a long time. Third is that so much of the missions are the same old "kill X space-rats". But that's MMOs for you. I'm enjoying the attention to detail in the worlds. Balmorra has wrecked ships sprinkled in the landscape. It's quite fascinating. Will I keep it up after a few months? It depends on how social I get. Right now I'm playing very solo due to not having a regular schedule. I might roll an alt to play some different storyline, but unless some major reworks to the crafting, space, and in-game market are in the pipeline I'll lose interest by the summer.
I'm not sure how I started this post. I think I've been irritated at myself for owning a lot of games I haven't played all the way through. I need to finish Skyrim. I loved Oblivion. Skyrim is fantastic, but it's turning into a chore. Battlefield 3 was a day 1 purchase, but it's the first game I've ever played that's made me feel old. I just can't compete with the current generation of gamers. Mass Effect was good. I'm about 90% through ME2, just gotta buckle down and knock out the last few parts. Same with Bioshock 2. I don't play Team Fortress 2 anymore - too many new things to keep up with.
The last game I really sank into was Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I likely won't play through it again, but it was a good time.
Ok, I'm going to bed. I could write about games all night.
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