My life in games

Warning: A lot of youtube videos and images are included!

my life in games

Hi everyone. My name is virpi and I'm 26 years old. Today I'm going to tell you the story of my life - in games. I've been playing video games since my childhood, they've always been a very important part of my life. So let's descend into the abyss called "the stone age of computing"...

Chapter I: The Beginning (C64 and Sega Master System II)
It all started when I was 6 years old. I used to visit my older cousin (he was 11 back then) regularly, and he owned a miraculous machine: The Commodore 64. It looked like this:
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I still remember the very first video game of my life, it was called "Moon Patrol". You had to steer a little moon buggy through a parcours of various obstacles. To make things worse, there were shitloads of UFOs shooting at you. Check it out:

Other fantastic games of my earliest days were "Maniac Mansion" and a very strange "Donald Duck" game, which I can't remember exactly. (It consisted of several different minigames)

In 1991, I got a Sega Master System II as a christmas present. The package included "Alex Kidd in Miracle World" and "Sonic: The Hedgehog".
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Alex Kidd was ridiculously hard - at least for a 6 year old boy. I don't remember the story of the game, I think it was something about the usual evil king. The most awesome feature of the game was, that the boss fights consisted of a BO3 in "Stone Paper Scissors".

Sonic was the first game I was able to beat. (with a little help from my older nephew - yes that is possible, if you oldest brother is 22 years older than you

) I always preferred Sonic over Mario, even though all of my friends were having Nintendo stuff - I was the only "Sega kid". Sonic was faster. Way faster.

Other SMS II games I played are: "Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap" (very hard jump'n'run / rpg mix) and "Super Tennis" (lol)

Chapter II: 80286
In 1992, my father (may he rest in peace...), who was working at an office at that time, gave me the most awesome thing I have ever owned: An 80286 PC (It was called "AT", to be exactly

).
This machine had a lot of super powers: A 5,25" floppy disk drive, a 20 MB HDD, 1 MB RAM, on-board "graphics" (VGA), a pc-speaker and a gigantic 14" monitor. It didn't have a mouse, so I had to learn all those funny dos commands. (dir, ren, mkdir, del, copy, chkdsk...)

The most interesting thing about my first PC was the OS: Instead of the common MSDOS 5.0, DRDOS 5.0 was pre-installed. The OS came along with "ViewMax", which was some kind of graphical DOS-Shell.

In the very beginning, there were no games installed on the PC, so all I could do was using the office program "Sanyo First". (Even this was completely fascinating...)

The first PC game I bought was "Commander Keen IV: Goodbye Galaxy", one of the best jump'n'runs ever. The protagonist was a little boy with a pogo stick. (not what you might think...) In the game you had to rescue 8 wise council members to perform a ritual. (something with an oracle)
The graphics were nice and the gameplay was very smooth. The most intriguing aspect of Keen IV was the "hidden level":

Hard as hell, but funny.

I was attending primary school in those years, so I made contact with my first real friends. Luckily, two of them were little nerds, too, so we could exchange games and chat about them in our spare time. I played a lot of stuff, here are my three favourites of that period:

Ski or Die
"Ski or Die" was an arcade ski game, which included several disciplines like "Acro Aerials", "Downhill Blitz" and "Snowboard Halfpipe". The pc speaker music was...special:

Slicks'n'Slide 2
This was a finnish racing game, in which you were looking at the track from the top. A fun game, which I often played with my oldest nephew. (not the older one, this one is actually 3 years younger than I am.)

SimCity
A real classic. I think, everyone knows this game. Most of the time, I was cheating like hell and watching things burn. (earthquakes...)

The citizens demand a stadium!

In 1995, my PC was "upgraded": I got a 50 MB HDD, a mouse, a sound card and some speakers. (I knew that I was using a relict of the dark ages, but my family didn't have that much money to buy me a better machine.) I also switched the OS, from that day I was using MSDOS 5.0 with Windows 3.1. (I had owned Win 3.0 before, it was a HUGE pain in the ass...)

Now it's time to intoduce two of the greatest games I've ever played:

Microprose Formula One Grand Prix
GP1 is a formula one simulation from 1991. The graphics were awesome (for that time) and the tracks almost felt "real". I don't know how many hours I've played this one, but I think that it must be hundreds of them.

The multiplayer mode kinda sucked, because it only consisted of a very flawed hot seat mode, in which you had to hope that the AI wouldn‘t fuck up your race, while you were not driving by yourself. Record hunting was pretty funny, though. (There was a modem mode, too, but it was even worse than the hot seat stuff

)

Might and Magic III: The Isles of Terra
MM3 is my favourite RPG of all time. Of course, there's a lot of nostalgia involved, but after all...it's just plain awesome. A gigantic open world, very hard puzzles and fights and a pretty dumb story - MM3 had everything you'd expect from an RPG. (Orcs, dragons, knights and... spaceships.)

Other games I owned: Captain Comic, Prehistorik, The Wheel of Fortune, Tetris, Road Kill, Colgate...

I used the 80286 until 1999 - on the 1st of January 1999 it died. And so I had to live 1,5 years without a PC...

Chapter III: No gear, no game.
Between 1999 and 2000 I didn't have a PC, but I managed to survive that "down time" without too much problems. (I was playing the piano like a madman and I also started playing Darts. (I got pretty good in both professions.

)

Chapter IV: Athlon 800
As all of my friends had PCs, my parents decided to end my suffering in the year 2000. On my 15th birthday I got a brand new shiny Athlon 800 with 128 MB RAM, an ATI Rage 128 Pro, a CDROM drive and a new 17" monitor. This computer surely wasn't "state of the art", but it was about 1000 times better than my old rig.

Of course, I had to play ALL THE GAMES I'd missed, so you can imagine how I spent my free time during that period. My favourite genres were RPGs, racing games and sport simulations.

FIFA 2001
I loved playing football in real life, so it was a natural thing that I played football games on the PC. FIFA 2001 was by far the best of them, even though it was possible to score hundreds of goals with bicycle kicks.

(it's hard to find good videos, sry for that shitty one.)

Rally Championship 2000
My first rally game. It wasn't very realistic, but the graphics were OK and the stages were veeery long and difficult.

(Personal note: This dude sucks, I finished this stage in 9:59.

)

Baldur's Gate / Baldur's Gate II
These ones don't need to be introduced, because I think that everyone knows, how awesome they are.

I didn't have that much money, so unfortunately, I wasn't able to buy new games for quite some time. My primary source for new games were computer magazines. It may sound awkward, but I managed to miss Half-Life, Starcraft and Diablo. True story.

Chapter V: Friends and games
At the age of 17, me and my friends were hanging around a lot in a local "youth house", where we were gaming most of the time. (the girls were playing, too) We used to play ONE game for a long period of time. Four special games have to be mentioned:

Tank Blaster 1.51
I think you all know these "artillery games". TB was a shareware program, if I remember correctly, it was developed by a german hobby programmer.

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(this screenshot is from tank blaster 2)

Street Fighter II
What a game. Maybe the best fighting game ever. In my last school years, we played SF2 every weekend, we even made tournaments. My favourite characters were Chun-Li and Ryu.

Worms (2, Armaggeddon, World Party)
This. is. perfect. Put some nerds in front of a PC, give them beer and snacks and install Worms. They won't leave until they fall asleep. Worms is addicting as hell, especially when you're playing it with some buddies. I used to be the "rope king", no one else was that skilled with the ninja rope. (A friend of mine was extremely good with grenades.) I also remember that Worms is a very psychological game. I always tried to trick my mates into attacking everyone else but me. It worked better than it should have.

Ghouls'n'Ghosts (Genesis version)
Oh my god, I almost forgot one of the coolest games ever made. GnG is pretty tough, the funniest aspect of the game is that you have to beat it twice, if you really want to meet the final boss. Playing GnG can be a transcendental experience, because death will become your most beloved companion. %)

Chapter VI: The LAN era (and Starcraft!)
My buddies were really into gaming, one of them had played CS 1.6 in a semi-professional clan for some time. So it was just natural for us, to come together and play video games. We often had LAN parties, and on one of those I was introduced to the game we all love: Starcraft Broodwar.

I had never played any RTS games until 2003, so I didn't understand broodwar at first. I used to think that some of my friends were insanely good at starcraft, but they...sucked. (which didn't matter, cause we all sucked.) We mostly used to play money maps (BGH etc.) and most of the games consisted of mindless massing of air units. Spellcasters were almost never used, and of course, the most important building of every protoss base is the photon cannon. There are never enough photon cannons. NEVER.

And remember the 10 golden rules of every LAN party:
1. Pizza is ideal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
2. If you don't sleep, you play.
3. Everyone owns at least five broodwar CDs, but if one is needed, nobody can find one, which leads to rule 4:
4. On every LAN a minimum of 4 broodwar CDs has to be burned.
5. Vessels and defilers suck, because they can't shoot (EMP doesn't count)
6. Beer is ideal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
7. The night starts at 8am.
8. At least one computer has to stop working during the LAN.
9. The weather outside has no effect on the people inside the house.
10. One does not simply stop playing.

PS: Our longest LAN lasted for three weeks. You can imagine in which mental and physical state we were, when we finally decided to stop gaming. (we were cavemen!)

Other LAN classics:

Counter-Strike 1.6
Well, it is tough. When you're a newbie and most of your friends are hardcore shooter nerds, scoring a frag can be as hard as meeting the pope's wife. But CS is an awesome game, and I still play it from time to time with some friends. (It‘s especially awesome, when you‘re drunk, because you can blame your bad aiming on the amount of alcohol inside your body)

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this menu is badass.

Warcraft 3: TFT
When I first tried WC3 I hated it. It looked crappy, it felt slow (compared to Starcraft!) and the fights took four weeks and three seconds. Luckily, my friends were thinking the same, so we wasted a lot of hours with custom maps. (tower wars, tower defense, hero defense...casual paradise!) For me, WC3 always was the "custom map game", even after I had started to play BW "seriously", WC3 felt inferior and bland.

Dungeon Siege II
So. boring. The only positive aspect of this game is the cooperative mode. Everything else is generic and repetitive. To make things worse, the game is far too easy. With some friends (and a lot of beer), DS2 becomes somewhat playable, though - the co-op mode is well designed.

Chapter VIII: Welcome to the jungle
I finished school in 2004 and tried to become a student in the following years. (it took some time until it actually worked, but that story doesn‘t belong here.)
Games continued to be an important part of my life, and finally I had enough money to buy a fast computer.

I tried hundreds of games during that period, and I realized that most of them were utter crap. But of course there were a few real gems I discovered:

Mafia
Imho one of the best shooters of all time. Challenging gameplay, a cool setting with nice characters, awesome music and classic cars - Mafia had it all! The mission design was pretty awesome, even though some of the missions were ridiculously hard for me. (The docks!) I also remember that you had to win a car race, which was pretty hard to beat on higher difficulty levels.

Sadly, Mafia II wasn‘t as amazing as its predecessor.

Pro Evolution Soccer 6
This was my first REAL addiction. It was the first really realistic football game I ever played, and I grinded matches like crazy. (In the beginning, I played against AI and switched to online mode later) PES6 was also the first game that I played competitively, even though I didn‘t manage to reach a high level of play.

Deluxe Ski Jump 3
Ok, now it‘s getting a little more obscure. I‘ve always been a huge ski jumping fan - Janne Ahonen was one of my absolute heroes. A finnish programmer called Jussi Koskela is developing ski jumping games since 1998, he‘s programming them completely alone. DSJ is a nice mix of realistic physics and arcade gameplay, especially the latest version (DSJ4) is the best and most realistic ski jumping game ever.

DSJ3 wasn‘t that realistic, but it was really addicting.

The Witcher
This one is based on a polish fantasy story, and it‘s definitely the most „adult“ rpg since Plancescape Torment. The hero is called Geralt, he‘s a very powerful witcher, but also an outcast. The game really shines when it comes to storytelling, decision making and quest design. Even though it is pretty linear, the way the story unfolds still is unmatched. The Witcher also comes along with lots of dirty jokes, hot women and drinking, so it‘s surely nothing for your little brother.

Trackmania Nations Forever
When I first played TMNF I thought „well, that‘s a game for noobs. it‘s unrealistic and easy! I can beat the author time on almost every track!“ Then I tried to play the game online. It was a shock - the records on most maps seemed to be completely out of reach. How the fuck are you supposed to be that fast? I decided to find it out on the hard way, and began to practice. Funnily, Trackmania is the only game where I‘ve played in a clan for a while. While I never got really good in Starcraft, I managed to become a pretty decent player in Trackmania. (made some dedimania records on standard maps) I never was skilled enough to compete with the top players, they were just too precise for me.
After reaching my personal limits, Trackmania became boring very quickly. (I really tried to push my boundaries, but the amount of time I had to put into the game was just too much for me. I had a real life, too!

)
I still play TM from time to time.

(my pb on this track was 35.47, this guy here is extremely good.)

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
What a fantastic waste of time! Basically, Oblivion is one of the dumbest games ever made. It's gigantic and it has got hundreds of quests, but basically it's repetitive, generic and dumb. But what can I say - I loved the epic dumbness of Oblivion. (Morrowind btw was also fantastic, and a bit less dumb than Oblivion) The main storyline of TES IV wasn't that great, but I absolutely loved the dark brotherhood and the thieves guild. The addon "Shivering Isles" was also pretty cool, especially Sheogorath is definitely the funniest god you'll ever meet in a game.

Chapter IX: A new perspective - how I REALLY got into starcraft
In 2008, I moved to a house with some of my friends. (the house was basically a ruin, but we were free

) It was in the fall of 2008, when I really discovered broodwar and e-sports. I started to watch korean tournaments, and I also became a member of this amazing site here. Jaedong was my hero, and Iccup was my drug. I played about 1000 games in a few months, and even though I only reached C, it felt awesome. The depth and variety of broodwar still is unique and astounding.

Since then, I‘m a starcraft fan. I‘m still watching pro league, and of course, I‘m also still playing BW and SC2. Starcraft isn‘t just another game, it‘s the best game of all time. It‘s the most challenging, but also the most rewarding game I‘ve ever played, and it also has got the nicest community. Starcraft is the perfect combination of strategic thinking, manual dexterity and madness.

Chapter X: Present and Future
Well, we‘re in 2012 now. I‘ve been playing video games for 20 years, and still there‘s no end in sight. I love gaming, and I always will. Games are an important part of our culture, and it‘s amazing to see how much video gaming has evolved during the last decades. Especially the growing indie market makes me really happy, because unique ideas are becoming more and more important again. (I‘ve never been a fan of „sequelism“, in fact I really hate those annual update franchises like COD.)

I‘m approaching my finals pretty fast and soon will be released into the „real world“, and I‘m also looking forward to that new and hopefully exicting phase of my life.

Thank you for reading, here's some Jaedong for you.

+ Show Spoiler +

Appendix: My personal Top 10 of all time
1. Starcraft: Broodwar
2. Grand Prix I
3. Might and Magic III: The Isles of Terra
4. Worms (2, Armaggeddon, World Party)
5. Pro Evolution Soccer 6
6. Trackmania Nations (Forever)
7. Street Fighter II (SSF II Turbo)
8. Starcraft II (WoL)
9. The Witcher
10. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

CBNC: Counter-Strike 1.6, Warcraft III, Mafia, Max Payne, Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate II, Morrowind, Portal, Tank Blaster.

PS: There were a lot of other games I played, but I think that it just would have been too much, if I had included them here. Maybe I'll do a second part, if you like this post here.

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