A History of my Personal Video games!

What was my history of games, Where did I start?

Well with me it all started thanks to my brother’s interest in games as he was the one asking my dad to buy this and that, and soon the Gameboy. Oh yes the first games console I had was the original grey and purple Gameboy, and my first game was…. TETRIS! Whey!

I started gaming when I was about 4 years old as far as I can remember, though I couldn’t understand most games back at that age.. especially “Links Awakening” I did understand Super Mario and Tetris.

As the years went by, my brother had gotten a Super Nintendo which opened up a whole new set of games, IN COLOUR and they had better graphics and sound effects compared to the tiny hand held Gameboy I had. I just found games really fun and interesting compared to other things I did. I did draw back then but it wasn’t anything great. I think what made me get addicted to gaming at such an early age was the challenges that it would give me, and I would always love taking on something someone told me I couldn’t do.

The Super Nintendo

Anyway would play on the SNES for hours and hours and my parents would often complain about how much time I was spending on there and I would often cry when they tried to get me off just to buy myself extra time with my precious SNES. My favourite games from the SNES had to be Megaman X, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, F-Zero, Starwing, Super Mario Allstars, Pilotwings, Firepower 2000, Super Air Diver and A link to the past. 

F-ZERO Gameplay

All the games back then had such awesome soundtracks and catchy tunes, I would just sometimes go on the pause screen just to listen to the awesome music in the background.

After the SNES, we had bought our first big PC from a company called “Tiny” and it was operating windows 98. This was the start of something truly amazing and epic… My PC gaming history, we had a lot of bundle discs that came with our first PC, and all I cared about was the gaming bundles, my brother and I split up the games we each wanted to play, he took the strategy games while I had all the racing games. 

The first PC game I played was something called Moto GP2 or something by the name of that, it was a 3D motorbike racing game, I soon followed that up with Powerboat racing, and Plane crazy, more epic 3D racing games with cool soundtracks on. I soon started to play his strategy games such as Rollercoaster Tycoon and my favourite RTS, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, it was a medieval style RTS which involved training swordsman, mages, undead armies, animal savages, and tons of other cool units to annihilate each others bases.

Total Annihilation: Kingdoms Gameplay

After we’d both beaten nearly all of the games we had, we bought broadband internet! Which opened up a whole new world of gaming online, I would often play really crappy flash games online while my brother would download ROMS and play on emulators and tease me about playing a better game than me. He had downloaded all the Megaman X games up to X5, and I was a diehard fan of Megaman X by then so I was on a mission to play all the Megaman games all the way back from the original NES ones, which I obtained through some methods… online.. J I LOVE THE WHOLE MEGAMAN SERIES! All the way through to ZX on the Nintendo DS.

  I started to discover all the retro games because of the internet and thanks to emulators, I played the Sonic games up until the GameBoy Advance ones and Castlevania as well as playing through all of the Zelda games, apart from majora’s mask and any of the DS games. I would always need a tutorial for the Zelda games as there was no indication of what to do next and I didn’t bother reading through all the dialogue of the game so it was walkthrough’s to the rescue!

I love the internet so much. Just thought I’d mention that here.

After a few years we had replaced our PC with a brand new Windows XP PC which meant we could play some of the new games that had been released and everything would run faster and not crash every 10 minutes… Damn you windows 98 and your errors. We had to replace it because a Trojan literally nuked our PC and it wouldn’t even turn on at that point.

By this time I had moved onto playing Gameboy Advance ROM's and went through a phase of playing all the new Sonic Advance games, the new Zelda games, like Minish Cap and Four swords, The new Metroid games as well such as Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission and lets not forget all the Megaman games, which included Battle Network 1-6 and Megaman Zero 1-4. I was basically finding all the genres from the SNES and NES which were remade into Gameboy advance games. There were some really bad remakes of old games but most of them were amazing.

Zelda, Megaman Zero and Metroid Fusion for the Game boy Advance

I had moved onto playing Nintendo 64 games with an emulator and my favourites were Super smash bros. the original version, I would always pick Samus Aran or Link, Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Banjo and Kazooie, Star fox 64 and F zero X. Those were the first big open world games I absolutely loved to play! There was even Castlevania 64! which was one of the first scary 3D games i've played

Super Smash Bros. N64

I remember the first big new game I played that was just released at the time was Need for speed Underground 2, my brother had bought it from a friend, as you see the common theme; my brother is responsible for all my gaming! I got into a Car Hype for about a few months till it died down.

And by 2004 I was still playing random online games and emulator games, until I started to get into MMO’s from going into gaming chat rooms on Maidmarian and playing Moonbase online, I started my first proper MMORPG, Runescape!

Runescape - Someone's rich

Now I was addicted to this game like glue, I would spend hours and hours grinding and killings things, losing all my items and going apeshit over it. I had made a lot of good friends on that game and while I did quit from time to time to play some other crappy MMO chat rooms like Habbo hotel and IMVU, I would always return to Runescape, as there was something about the whole medieval theme which gripped me and got me addicted.

Until the end of 2006 I was hooked on Runescape, but I was slowly getting tired and bored of countless hours of grinding, just to level up or get gold pence in game I was sick of it and wanted to replace it with something else.

That was when I heard about World of Warcraft… Oh my god that game was the most fun game I had ever played in my entire life, while my parents were very reluctant to pay the monthly subscription fee of 8.99 a month I begged them to let me continue playing. Usually a long gaming session for me was about 3 -4 hours, I would spend about 6-8 hours on this game every day. It was that addictive.

The whole friendly environment of the game back then was amazing and I had never seen a game with a world so huge and big with that many players in, I had formed new friends and bonds. And I still to this day are friends with many of my WoW friends, I had A LOT of good memories of that game. It had me hooked on for 4 and a half years, until 2010

World of Warcraft - Stormwind keep

During summer 2010 my brother had bought a PS3 and we often played a lot of CoD Modern Warfare 2 special ops missions together, while he wasn’t an avid gamer like me at all, he was more of a social person now, it was me playing online a lot, but not as much as I would play WoW, cause I would get bored easily of just shooting players without interacting properly.

When college started at the end of summer, I seized all gaming completely until in 2011 when I bought a new expensive laptop. Where I was gifted on my Birthday, Xmas and Valentines Day with Deadspace 1 & 2, Darksiders and Amnesia the Dark Descent, but I haven’t properly gamed in a while since the end of WoW.  I really got into Starcraft 2 over 2011 Summer break though, but it was more of watching professional players play against each other on YouTube, as I was rubbish at the game. It’s the hardest game I’ve ever played. I have been playing a lot of the free games on steam and when portal and TF2 came out as F2P I was pretty excited since I’ve always wanted to play, I just couldn’t be bothered to pay for it, oh god I’m so cheap.

Darksiders - War riding his Steed Ruin, The first horsemen of the Apocalypse

 I think I over saturated myself with WoW and I don’t really want to get back into the full swing of gaming just yet. At the moment I’m still not playing hardcore at all due to a lot of other things in real life although I am casually playing Blacklight: Retribution a free awesome futuristic FPS.

I don’t really know what type of games I would like to play at the moment, I don’t really want to go back into MMO’s as I wasted too much time on there, when I could have done other things, I guess I would like to play more linear type games at the moment so I can finish them and get them out the way and feel accomplished.

One of the most awesome new FPS games I've played in a while, it beats CoD in my opinion. AND its Free to play!

The future of games… hmm I’m thinking hopefully in about 10 or 20 years from now they will have perfected virtual reality, and if that’s going to be true I can’t wait to start playing virtual reality games, and not the crappy virtual reality ones, I mean like a full-fledged open world MMO inside a virtual reality helmet, like the game in the anime “Sword Art Online” That would be pretty awesome to see! 

Concept for a Virtual reality helmet

So there you have it, my brief personal gaming history, whilst I didn’t list all the games I played, I just wanted to show you the ones that were important to me and the ones I really remembered well.