Fringe on 20/9/2008 at 15:35

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Baldur's Gate. Hated it when I first got in. Didn't have much D&D experience and was still in Planescape: Torment mode of pumping Intelligence, Charisma, and Wisdom at the expense of everything else. Eaten by wolves over and over again.

Now it's one of my favorite games.

Yakoob on 20/9/2008 at 20:16

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Arcanum. When I first started playing, got past the opening FMV and saw the game, I was like "wtf?" The graphics were shit, the interface was weird, animations looked odd and the premise was just uninteresting.

And it was when I was running around Tarant at 3am searching trashcans for old rags to make molotov cocktails that I realized I love that game.

june gloom on 20/9/2008 at 20:39

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Quake 2.

Bjossi on 20/9/2008 at 20:52

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I knew you were gonna say Quake 2, dethtoll. ;)

The first two Thief games were quite the bumpy road for me. I didn't start to truly get into the first one until Bonehoard. After that each mission was lots of fun, until I hit Escape!. To me the game ended at the start of Escape!, I just can't stand that mission and the 2 remaining ones. But thank god I didn't pass the blame to TMA and gave it a shot after beating TDP. I liked it a lot more, even Casing/Masks and Soulforge were pretty fun imo.

And of course there is SS2. It wasn't a love at first sight. In fact my first runthrough almost a decade ago consisted of heavy cheating. :p

baeuchlein on 20/9/2008 at 23:16

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For me, Tomb Raider fits into this category.

Sometime in 1996, the games magazine my brother and I read regularly contained a CD on which one could find demos, patches and the like. One demo was a movie where one could watch someone else play Tomb Raider. The playable demos were not published at that time. There had been a preview of the game in the magazine, and from what I read, it sounded as if two large breasts with a small woman attached went on a gun-blazing rage against... well, almost everything else. Not sex and crime, but tits and bang-bang.

The non-playable demo seemed to confirm my worst fears: Indeed, the female hero in that movie was always running, had two guns always drawn, and shot everything in sight. And she jumped around a lot. That was all one could see, and it was in 320x200 VGA resolution and somehow looked very ugly. "What a piece of sh*t", I thought at that time.

I do not know why I played the first playable demo when the same magazine brought it to me with another CD in February of 1997. But although the 486 PC I used at that time could only run the game at 320x200 (due to its poor little 66 MHz processor), I liked what I got from the demo - after I learned how to dispatch of the large pack of wolves which attacked me in the beginning. In late August of the same year, I bought the first Tomb Raider game, and became an addict in a few minutes.

About one year later, I had played through the first game. The demo of the second one had been published but required Windows 95 instead of my trusty MS-DOS 6.20, and until then I had not found enough reason to use a new operating system. Seeing the demo run on another computer with Win95 on it, and recognizing that Windows would be the OS gamers had to become acquainted with in the coming years, I seriously thought about buying Windows 95.

Finally, Win95 was installed, the demo followed, and then I decided that Tomb Raider II had to be mine as well. It was not the only reason for switching to Windows 95 and its successors, but an important one. Furthermore, a friend sold a Pentium mainboard to me, the board being equipped with a Pentium running at 100 MHz and a card providing PCI graphics and a Sound Blaster 16 at the same time. That was enough to see the redesigned forward hills of Lara Croft in full 640x480 resolution, together with the rest of the landscape.

Thus, Tomb Raider II occupied large parts of my free time in 1998. After that, the first game just had to be replayed - that Pentium finally was powerful enough to do 640x480 for large parts of the first game as well.

February, 1999. One of the last issues of our beloved games magazine, and this time a demo of Tomb Raider III waited on the magazine's CD. I even tried it on the Pentium computer with no 3D graphics card, but had to admit finally that I either needed a 3D card or a much faster computer. Seeing that the second game would have profited from such a card already, and recognizing that this was the future, I became interested in such a card. I bought the standard of that time (and at least the following year), a Diamond Monster 3D II with 12 MB RAM on it. Tomb Raider III followed and kept me occupied for several months, after which a replay of the first game became interesting - there was a 3D patch for the Monster 3D (my card's predecessor) on one of the old CDs from the games magazine which started it all with those two demos years ago. Although there was a problem with that 3D patch - everything was painted pink because of differences between the two Monster 3D cards -, I still played
the first levels of the first game again. A few other games, mostly with patches which made them use the 3D card, were played in late 1999 as well.

Then, however, the family got access to the internet. Suddenly, getting a playable game demo became a lot easier as well as deciding whether to buy a certain game or not. A Thief demo was among these demos, and I finally had a new addiction that lasts until today. I even built a very poor piece of electronics which served as a voltage regulation module, allowing me to use a Cyrix made Pentium CPU clone at about 125-166 MHz. Together with the 3D card, that was enough to play the Thief demo and the game itself afterwards.

The internet gave me access to add-ons for Tomb Raider ("Unfinished Business") and Tomb Raider II as well, which came and went near the end of 1999.

Later on, Tomb Raider IV was approaching the stores' shelves, but this time I was cautious. The first game introduced me to this kind of action 3D games, the second continued that with a few small changes (mostly cosmetic), and the third game had far better visuals due to being developed with 3D graphics cards in mind. But all three games were essentially the same - the female heroine would run through the game's levels equipped with an assortment of guns, mowing down hordes of weaker enemies and battling heavier opposition with larger firepower and some bits of tactic. In between, there were large stone blocks to be pushed around and lots of levers to pull, and a few visually impressive locations along the road.

But that was all, and the fourth game did not promise anything else. However, it was said to be situated completely in ancient egyptian ruins, instead of several different locations like the first three games. A step back, I thought, and after getting a demo once again and seeing my fears confirmed, I decided not to pursue Lara's adventures further. The other Tomb Raider games that followed afterwards did not seem to be very interesting to me either, so I played all the demos (I think), but none of them completely. And none made me buy any of these games anymore.

I played through the first three games once again a few years ago and liked that again, but that's it. I do not hate the newer Tomb Raider games, but I'm not much interested in them either. Besides, Soul Reaver and some other games of the Legacy of Kain series provided me with a game experience that was not much different from Tomb Raider's, but I got sucked in by the darker story already visible in the Soul Reaver PC demo. Together with Thief and its sequels as well as the fan missions, that was enough to fill in any gap that the Tomb Raider games might have left. Sure, neither Soul Reaver's Raziel nor Thief's Garrett had large polygonic breasts, but these were not really what interested me in Tomb Raider either. Honestly! I swear! :cheeky:

I guess I will play one or two of the Tomb Raider games again sometime in the future, but unless Eidos has some pretty new ideas for Lara Croft's next adventures, I guess these will not get me excited anymore. I have evolved beyond that point by now.