It's your 18th birthday. What were you playing, and what do you think of it now?

[danielpholt]

Think back to your 18th birthday. What games were you likely playing and more importantly, how have they aged and do you/would you still enjoy them now.

[TCP]

I was not playing any video games when I was 18. I was too busy having WILD SEX with various women. 

Though I think at some point when I was 18 I played a rom of the Minish Cap. I think it's the last truly great portable Zelda game.. unless you count BOTW.

Edited July 30, 2017 by The Cowboy Poet in English

[Eleven]

Neverwinter, Baldur's Gate, Arcanum, Lionheart. Those types of games. I specifically remember thinking Lionheart kind of sucked though, but I still played it because those are the games I wanted to play. I have not been introduced to the glory of the PS2.

In my head I think yeah I'll still play them. But I never found the time to play those types of games in recent years (although I do buy them on sale). I imagine they would still be good games today (except Lionheart!).

[toxicitizen]

Well, on the actual night of my 18th birthday I'm pretty sure I was drinking with friends and not playing video games. But that's around the time when I first got a decent PC and discovered torrenting, so I was playing all kinds of PC exclusives I'd never even heard of. It's when I first played games that are still among my favorites, like the original Deus Ex and Thief 1 and 2. Fun times.

[TheMightyEthan]

My friends and I were still regularly playing Halo 1.  Also looking back at the releases leading up, I was probably playing KotOR, Deus Ex Invisible War, Battle Engine Aquila, Crimson Skies, etc.  Halo and KotOR have held up surprisingly well, and I would love to play something like Battle Engine Aquila or Crimson Skies again.

[Thursday Next]

Perfect Dark was out in my 18th year. That was a pretty good game.

[CrowKnow]

18 was an interesting year.  Got a brand new computer, credit card for the first time and went through my first steam sale so luckily there's actual documentation.  TF2 is still one of my favourite games.  No other game has managed to capture the super dumb yet, super competitive feeling for me. I could still play it and still enjoy it but, there's also some bitterness in there.  Saw a ton of cool things come out of that community like an annual charity event for Children's Oncology Services, people crowdfunding teams so they could compete and organize an international lan.  It's where I met most of my steam friends.  I also saw valve kinda just use it as a guinea pig,  saw my community/server slowly die out, pros leaving the scene and the success of Overwatch which I feel TF2 had a shot at with some love from valve. 

[Mr. GOH!]

I was playing Half Life 1, Icewind Dale, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Deus Ex, and Diablo 2. Since these are considered classics of their genres, I think they mostly hold up.

Edited July 31, 2017 by Mr. GOH!

[Mal]

Metal Gear Solid 4 with my brand new PS3 in my birthday.. MGS4 is still great for fans (love letter to different eras) but it is a damn movie of a game which may turn people off. The PS3 on the other hand is a laggy piece of shit. God, I how did that slow UI get pass QA.

As for other games... maybe Uncharted and whatever other games I was into. I had yet to get a proper gaming PC. I don't think I ever put a GPU to a prebuilt either... or maybe I did. I don't recall.

[Hot Heart]

At this time, I was hanging out a lot with a close friend who lived nearby (and still is a close friend who lives nearby, except we've mostly switched to table top games) and we would play a lot of different things.

Forefront in my memory is Burnout 1 (2 would release later that year) which we played a whole bunch and loved the one feature that none of the later games continued: superlong tracks where they joined all the smaller ones together, so you had US tracks and EU tracks and it made "marathon runs" by combining them and reversing them, etc. which kept things fresh enough for us.

As for how it holds up, well, I think all the later Burnout games surpassed it but I did miss that feature.

Secondly, my dad had picked me up some chipped mini PSone and a bunch of games through someone he knew. Most of these games were pure PS1 shite, but there was this Bomberman game (I think it was "Party Edition") that supported 4 players and had loads of cool features. I think Bomberman Ultra back on XBLA was similar but it didn't quite have everything (and it was online and laggy as all fuck for me).

Basically, you could tweak all sorts of settings so you had crazy maps with conveyor belts, traps, etc. and you could get animals with special moves and even if you were knocked out, you could ride around the outside of the arena chucking bombs in (with an option to bring you back into the game if you got a kill).

I really wish someone would make a new version of that. It was amazing.

We also used to play Crash Bash and Poy Poy 2, with the former possibly being okay today (think Mario Party without all the loading)

Then there was Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, which was... alright at the time and probably unbearable now.

[deanb]

On 30/07/2017 at 7:26 PM, The Cowboy Poet in English said:

I was not playing any video games when I was 18. I was too busy having WILD SEX with various women. 

Though I think at some point when I was 18 I played a rom of the Minish Cap. I think it's the last truly great portable Zelda game.. unless you count BOTW.

How Cowboy imagines himself.

 

18th Birthday I'm not super sure what I'd have been playing. Maybe a bit of FFXII (EU release of Feb 2007, so yeah)..how time flies.

A few months beyond that though I start my first job, get my first proper gaming PC and start Uni. Which means I was playing Crysis, and with uni friends I was playing CS:S and...I don't want to Google this but I think DoW: Soulstorm had not long come out, but it might have been the one prior with the Necrons...feck it lets google: Dark Crusade (with the Necrons) came out in 2006 so yeah we'll have been playing that. Oh and SupCom: Forged Alliance. Not super sure what SP PC games I was playing back then. Probably still a bit of Casear III and Civ IV. 

I'd almost add my PS3 but I looked up my history with that and I actually got my PS3 as an early 19th birthday present for myself. And first thing on my "purchase" list (really wish Sony accounts wouldn't count these as "purchases") was....Haze Demo. The fateful game that fucked over the Timesplitters franchise. No idea what my first PS3 game was, it doesn't show physical purchases..oh wait it'll be GTAIV and GT5 since those came with the PS3.

 

[Zeo-Gold92]

I was 18 back in 2010, as for what I was playing at the time, I had started my love affair with Fallout 3, blitzed my way through that and the DLCs. Once I completed that I started getting into the Mass Effect series and the way the dialogue options coupled with actual voice over from the main character is what engaged me more than what Fallout had at that point. I loved that this character that I had created had a voice, a personality. It may seem trivial or superficial to some but in those sort of RPG styled games, having that mechanic makes the games more interesting and more involved for me. I tried New Vegas once it came out, because of my love of the 3rd game but it just wasn't enough anymore. Mass Effect did everything better in my eyes.