Games you learned to love.

Koki on 22/9/2008 at 19:07

Quote Posted by Fringe

With bows and slings (for characters who can't use bows), you get to take out most enemies before they can touch you, and, for some reason, fighters specialized in ranged weapons get more attacks per round at low levels than they do specializing in a melee weapon.

That's because the number of attacks per round for bows is fixed at 2, and for everything else it starts at 1 plus mastery, offhand, spells, etc. which won't happen much till BG2.

I dunno, I don't think 2ED is really that complicated(It's basically a case of having everything - thAC0, AC, saving throws, etc. - as low as possible, and you're saved all the actual counting as the computer does it for you), but I spent so much time with BG saga that I know it inside out anyway.

polytourist97 on 22/9/2008 at 19:33

Chalk up another tally for Deus Ex. I thought the demo wasn't very good. All you had to do to pick locks and "hack" things was pull out a tool, go up and click on them? (as opposed to the SS games where you actually had a hacking interface). It also felt really clunky and none of the real character building aspects were apparent to me in the demo. About a year later, a friend of mine was talking about how he had cranked up the sniper skill and the run boost so he could jump from building to building picking off people along the way and I said... 'wha..skills? character building? you can do that in Deus Ex?" I think I picked it up the VERY next day, and of course, loved it from beginning to end.

The other one that took me a while was Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. I tried the demo so many times and never got into it because I couldn't figure out what I was doing (I was pretty young), and the resolution was terrible. I came back to it a few years later, realized I could crank the resolution and the game looked great, realized there was an actual objective to accomplish rather than just running around picking off the bad guys, and as soon as I started accomplishing objectives I was hooked. That game was the one that really got me into playing smarter more interesting games. Definitely one of my favorites.

ZymeAddict on 23/9/2008 at 03:24

Quote Posted by polytourist97

I played DX before SS2, and it was the first game of its sort I ever played, so I didn't really have anything to compare the hacking/lock-picking elements to. I just thought it was cool you could do things like that in a first-person shooter game at all.

Looking back though, I agree it doesn't really make sense that they didn't try to incorporate some sort of active gameplay into those elements, especially given that games like System Shock 2 had already done it years before.

Angel Dust on 23/9/2008 at 04:01

You know I can't really think of any. I can think of plenty of films and CD's that fall into this criteria but not games. SS, Thief, Baldur's Gate etc clicked with me immediately and obviously SS2 and Deus Ex were no problem after playing those games. It might have taken me a while sometimes to get up to speed with the gameplay mechanics, for example it wasn't until about 1/2 the way through Thief did I realise how to use the blackjack properly :o , but I was hooked from the very beginning. Perhaps it's just that instead of getting frustrated when a game seemed complex, new etc and then blaming the game for sucking I instead blame myself for sucking and resolve myself to getting better. Or maybe I just can't remember not liking these wonderful games!

Fragony on 23/9/2008 at 06:59

Another Planescape Torment, it was my first pc rpg, had always neglected the genre completily. At first the slow pace and difficulty put me off, but once the story kicked it in I was hooked. After that I went on a pc-rpg rampage.

Deus ex, liberty island didn't impress me at all, but my brother told me to press on. Glad I did.

Malf on 23/9/2008 at 08:49

Tough question; most games I own, I've bought being well-advised, so I suspected I would like them from the off and wasn't really surprised about when I did start loving them.

Although if I dig about, there's a few that deserve a mention.

Bungie's Marathon springs to mind.
I had a Mac in the early nineties for college work, and thought that Macs just didn't get games. Then a friend said I should try Marathon, and thinking it couldn't be better than Doom, I begrudgingly gave it a try.
To this day, the Marathon games are still some of my favourites, with what I still consider one of the best stories in gaming history.
Once Durandal kidnapped me and teleported me into hostile territory, I wasn't able to let go. And he's still the best, most entertaining example of AI gone bad I've ever come across. Stuff yer Shodan, Durandal is the man.

Sticking with the Bungie theme, when Myth was initially announced, I thought there was no way in hell Bungie could pull it off. A 3D real-time strategy without resource management and terrain deformation? A complete departure from their established genres? Colour me dubious.
And yet again, they proved with a mix of superior story-telling and compelling gameplay that they knew what they were on about.

Shame they went and broke my faith in them with Halo.

And of course, the most recent example, although here I had to force myself somewhat, is Dwarf Fortress. And this is a game that's going to be with me for the rest of my life. But you already know how I feel about DF ;)

Muzman on 24/9/2008 at 01:58

Unreal:
I was into Thief by the time I played it and it seemed like that world of FPSs was done with and it was an interesting looking relic. Plus, after the beginning the first few levels are kinda annoying. But it grew on me over the years. Even if the shooting's fairly incidental, its sweeping, adventurous scope is pretty hard to ignore and some really nice music to go along with it.

Deus Ex: Invisible War
Oh god, get the comfy chair and heat up the pariah tongs, I'm going there.
'Love' is a bit strong, but I've played this game a hell of a lot and I really like it. Everything that annoys people about it is true, I thought it was really meh the first time as well. But I didn't have anything else to play at the time and it had some fun aspects (baton clonking is hilariously fun, don't ask me why; walk into that 'mugging' at the inclinator and clean house like some Milla Jovovich character, then toss them in the dumpster as the robot turns up to see what's going on. Tickles me every time), exploring the options was still amusing even if you are conveniently necessary to everyone and there's few consequences for your actions. But after a while, computers get faster and the experience is smoother and mucking around with all the possibilities yields a sort of meta-atmosphere (horrid, but I can't think what else to call it). The music is good and there some decent sci-fi world building and theorising in there and the over all effect gradually becomes a rather well realised, detached, heartless, lonely Bladerunner-like place. And it works.
Having to play it many times years after the fact says nothing to recommend it really. Maybe I'm just filling in the blanks. Either way, compressed and truncated though it is, it's a game with worthy heart, or perhaps kernel is a better word for it.

june gloom on 24/9/2008 at 03:17

I'm the same way with TDS, though I liked it a lot better than I did IW even on my first play. I didn't finish it, but I revisited it a year later with the Minimalist mod and found it really quite good. Consolitis and a few niggles I have with the engine aside, it's a solid game.

BlackCapedManX on 24/9/2008 at 05:41

Rainbow 6 (the original, as in Rainbow 6 One, before Rouge Spear even, which was basically the same game but way better). I first played it when I was like, I don't know 10, I guess? Totally didn't click with me, my relatives bought it for me, I thought it was one of those dumb "they don't know what I'm interested in" things. A couple years laterI picked it up again and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever. My intro to FPS games (also why I hate Doom, and the piss-ass excuse for a tactical shooter that is Counter-Strike.)

Ironically it was Rouge Spear that got me into Deus Ex via a game trade with a drama teacher (of all people) who actually got me into the game the year it came out (this isn't a retroactive find for me, which is amazing, considering I was about 12/13 at the time, and I actually knew enough to appreciate it.) DX was hard for me to get into, initially, but again, I was very young, and I fought through Liberty Island, and after that it all started making sense.

Armored Core 3. Played it and sucked, and played it and sucked, again and again and finally ran into AC3:Nexus where they remapped the controls to the analog sticks and then I figured out how the hell to play this game. Went back and mapped movement and flight controls to the arrows and symbols buttons (on a PS2 controller) and could play this and the older games worth a damn (looking up and down with the shoulder buttons is just atrocious, and should never happen.) After that point went on to play whatever games I could find in the series. I want to get more into AC3: Silent Line, if only for the AI trainer.

june gloom on 24/9/2008 at 05:59

Quote Posted by BlackCapedManX

My intro to FPS games (also why I hate Doom, and the piss-ass excuse for a tactical shooter that is Counter-Strike.)

Get out.