What's Your Online Gaming History?

[Spacedeck 920]

So another thread on another forum got me wondering this question yet again.  What's yours?

 

I first became aware of online gaming with Halo 2, now I didn't ever get to play this online because back then we probably couldn't afford the subscription, or we just generally didn't understand how it worked. I believe we did look in to it but in the end it wasn't achieved. During this time we had older consoles and even an W98 PC.  While the PC could access the internet, we usually played offline games, installing from discs and all that good stuff.

 

I can't fully remember when the journey started and I can't be 100% certain that it planned out this way, although I'm probably 90% sure.  The first time I got to experience online gaming was on Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.  This was early in 2005 and we still didn't have a great connection to the internet.  I was plagued by the common network error message of the time but I never let it put me off.

 

Later on, one of the first times I got to experience an FPS in first-person mode was a mod made for Enemy Territory, it was called TrueCombatElite (still going today).  It was an overhaul of the game and truly transformed the experience for me.

 

Not long after starting ET, I discovered Americas Army.  What a time this was, the game was around 1GB but back then due to my connection, it would take me an entire day to download the game.  Due to this I downloaded the game overnight, the first time I did this I made the mistake of letting my screen go to sleep.  I woke up super gutted to find out that the download had failed, luckily it worked on the second attempt.

 

Console wise I don't remember, I believe it was some game on the PS3.

 

I have recently found the old ET website I signed up on, using my old and now inaccessible ntlworld.com email address and a very simple, basic password I used for everything.  I joined Feb 25th, 2005.  So by this time I would have been 14.

 

It was either this or possible early RuneScape but it fails my mind when I started playing this, I know it was before 2006 (this is when I switched to WoW)

[The3rdWalker 1,271]

• It all started with Delta Force 2 on PC. I played for one of the best teams in North America where we participated in the Black Flag League (BFL)
• Diablo 1 and 2 were in there somewhere. Loved running hacks on D1 that let me attack people in town, and D2 was a serious obsession.
• Starcraft Brood War, Warcraft 3 Frozen Throne filled a lot of the gaps in here.
• Guild Wars, I focused on the competitive Guild vs Guild (GvG) scene. (This is where the Plastic name came from)
• Left 4 Dead on Xbox 360. Played exclusively on MLG's Gamebattles.
• League of Legends. I played the beta, took the game very seriously and competed against a lot of folks who know founded some of the most prestigious organizations in esports. I love the game to death but Christ do they have the worst community in all of gaming, hands down.
• My first big MMO since I missed out on the WoW craze was SW:TOR. Huge into progression raiding and we server sever No. 2. (Powertech Tank all day!)
• Hearthstone. Ran a local chapter of fireside gatherings in Dallas Texas, and almost qualified for the first Blizzcon hearthstone event. (lost in the Zotac cup)
• Starcraft 2 was in here somewhere.
• Destiny. Founder a small clan, Ishtar Electric Company which is where I met Tigerburge. (We had him in one of our pug groups)
  • Joined you guys!
• Rainbow Six Siege, which is my focus to this day.
• Overwatch here and there.
• Magic The Gathering: Arena

TL:DR I have to find a game I can play against others or compete in/ have a team goal.

[J4MES OX4D 10,033]

Towards the late 90's it was Counterstrike, Quake III and Unreal Tournament on PC. I then moved onto Halo on the Xbox along with Battlefield 1942 back on PC. 1998-2008 was a cracking decade for single player games so I mostly played those. COD 4 came along but I didn't get much of a chance to play that due to work.  I then played the shit out of MW2 and BO1 from 2009 to 2011 on Xbox and PS3. Great times!

 

I don't find many online games very good these days especially with the potential available. Horrendous business practices, shit developers and weak game design has left a lot big brands lacking for me. I also seem to get very bored of these g-fueled, sweatfest FPS games very quickly now. I can compete just fine with the kids and their £200 headsets and gaming chairs but I dunno if it's my age or if games are worse than what they were. 

[BO7H B4RRELS 2,453]

Diablo 2 (PC)

CoD: 3 ( Xbox)

CoD: 4 MW  & then all the CoDs (360) - This is when I joined MW2Forum.com (origin of FG during the MW2 days.)

Minecraft (PC) 

Destiny (PS4) 

League of Legends (PC) 

 

I don't play online that much these days.  Not a whole lot of free time.  

[GazzaGarratt 11,049]

I'll have to have a real think about this as I can't remember much these days! I'll check my PPR too and see if that jogs my memory, definitely was the Xbox Live that made me alive in the Online world, a little PC online before that but didn't fully understand it back then.

[techno 3,510]

It all started with CoD 4 all the way to ghosts where I hit BF4 ( my favourite fps of all time) then destiny. 

I did return to CoD with blops 3  and early bf1 but haven't touched it since first dlc drop.

[crispymorgan 1,054]

Counter strike 1.6 was my first PC game.  Played that a LOT.  Got pretty good too.  Then onto battlefield 2.  From there on in, it was consoles.  Modern warfare and the usual suspects.

[Diddums 4,346]

Christ, where to start.

 

We weren't well off in South Africa, in fact a computer was about as far out of reach for me then as a Chiron is today, but I managed to scrounge up whatever components I could from any source I could get them and eventually ended up with a working 386 with a monochrome monitor. This bad boy was my introduction to PC gaming and the hurdles I had to overcome (you have any idea how shit it was to build a PC back then? SCSI cables, jumpers, master / slave drives, DOS operating system, RAM sticks that had to be literally identical to work, drivers which were a complete and utter pain in the ass, remember, this was all offline so if you had the wrong driver you'd have to hop on your bicycle, go to a mate's place with internet, hope his internet works, download a tiny little file for about 3 hours, then copy it on to a floppy and hope to hell it still worked when you got home (floppies were unreliable as fuck). If the driver was still wrong you had to start all over again. it was like building a space ship back then) meant I grew some serious appreciation for it. I learned to code on it, the pinnacle of which was coding Snake by copying text from a magazine my cousin in the States used to send over with all his hand-me-down clothing. My aunt used to visit and give me loads of his old clothes and stuff and his magazines. Never had I experienced such excitement as when I got those magazines and together with those I learned how to code in Qbasic, as well as make batch files for DOS (which anyone of a certain age will know, remember autorun.bat? that was your PC's main batch file, the .bat suffix was short for batch). They were basically files which were lines of DOS command prompt commands, so you could literally automate your entire PC with them, or if you were naughty, give someone a floppy with a batch file on it which when ran would format their PC. The good ol' days. On this old 386 I started off with whatever I could find, mostly Commander Keen ( @McNasty I can't think of this game without thinking about you anymore, lol) and some other side scrollers, the names of which I can't remember right now, but those old demo floppies which came with magazines were like gold and shared primarily amongst the rich kids, occasionally I'd get one and this single 1.44mb floppy would have like 5 demos on it, it was unreal. Ah fuck, how could I forget Street Rod 2. There was a glitch in the game where you bought a specific used car and tuned it to a certain spec and it'd spank anything, so that was probably my first game cheat ever. Anyway...

 

Word obviously got around about my keenness and ability in the PC world and my grandparents eventually commissioned a PC to be built for me by a man named Jan Meulen, I'll never forget that name, lovely old man, I wonder if he's still alive. Anyway, thanks to the funds my grandparents gave him, he built me a Pentium 120mhz with 16mb of RAM, in a case which would barely fit in the back of a van. That was my true love and would remain with me for many, many years. I played mostly demos, whatever I could get my hands on, until one day I had enough money to put a CDRom drive in my PC. I'll never forget it, it was a 4x drive, my mate had a 12x in his parents' 486 but my budget never went that far. The 4x was still great and opened up a whole new world because I could now start playing the demos on those CDRoms you used to get with magazines back then. A magazine then was like buying a PS4 game today, they were expensive as fuck (all imported, Saffrica didn't have much in terms of PC tech back then) and the magazines we bought were dictated by the demos that were on the CD. My old friend Kevin Pretorius and I used to share everything, we'd even chip in our money together to buy magazines and share the discs. Occasionally we'd buy a South African magazine but those discs always had shit games on them, they were mostly word processors, internet software, all the boring stuff. There was a flea market quite close to me which had some stalls that sold shareware games (remember those? No DRM, just enjoy our products!) on floppies, some of them  having over 10 floppies per game (if I remember correctly, Blood was the record holder with 24 floppies, or was it Rise of the Triad? can't remember). They were fairly affordable and Kevin and I used to chip in and buy them together and copy the floppies at home. It would take a whole night to copy 10 floppies because the floppies we used were all shitty second hand, worn out, unreliable pieces of crap that others had consigned to the bins, but we weren't quitters, this was gold to us!

 

Games I played thanks to these floppies and CDs were Blood, Doom, Wolfenstein (all of them), Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Test Drive, Stunts, Quake, GTA 1 (bought from my computing teacher at school, Mr Brandon Hill-Jowett, he had a loaner from one of his pupils and copied discs for us at a price of R50 each). Eventually I bought my first ever non-pirated game, Dark Reign for R50 or R150, can't remember, but my mom drove me about an hour each way to pick it up, came with box and everything. This was my first proper PC gaming experience. No piracy, no copying floppies, no nothing. It was also the first ever game I played which had a proper cutscene. Around the same time I also bought my first ever sound card which I guess also elevated that game to a whole new level. I played the everliving hell out of this game, until I eventually sussed out that by editing a file called units.txt, you could alter the properties of every unit in the game, so I had little puny soldiers one-shotting tanks from across the map and whatnot, this eventually killed the game for me.

 

Then I moved to Holland and brought my PC with me, where it laid unused for a year or two because OMG NEW COUNTRY! Eventually I bought a new PC with the money I made from my paper round, it was an AMD Athlon 1600+ with I think 256mb of RAM. No graphics card mind you, but it was a start. This would eventually come with me to London, and right before I left I got what was then the most powerful graphics card for it, an Nvidia 6600GT. This thing was ridiculous. This was also during the time of torrents, Razor 1911 and TONS of other people all getting involved in this piracy boom, where games were literally everywhere you looked. You couldn't go past a friends' place without seeing at least a few Razor 1911 CDs lying next to their PC, often filled to the brim with not only the games, but also the software required to circumvent the very primitive (and offline, very important) DRM. We had all sorts of injectors, disc loaders / mounters, fake keys, hex key-generators, you name it, we had it all. We could install almost any game and get it to run without the disc, until Need for Speed came along. I think it was Most Wanted or Underground, can't remember, but this was the first game to put up a real fight. We had to use every trick in the book to get it to work  but we got there in the end and the sight of that E46 M3 GTR, together with that awesome soundtrack, whilst the CD drive was empty, was the most amazing feeling ever. We felt like Acid Burn on Hackers, we were the fuckin' bznz. 

 

Anyway, played shitloads of these games and eventually moved to London and brought my PC with me, the whole screen of NFS went blurry when you hit the nitrous which coupled with my trusty 6600gt looked fucking awesome and I blew most people out the water with it.

 

I should point out that in my entire gaming career until this point, I still didn't own a single console.

 

My PC career died when I moved to London. It went from being a pasttime to being Plan B, Plan A being getting pissed, taking drugs, trying to shag everything I could, it was basically one long party from the moment I landed to the moment I woke up from being asleep on the couch on Tuesday the 9th of November 2006 at 2am in the morning to the sound of my cousins' girlfriend screaming. I opened the door and there was my cousin, who'd fashioned a noose from his bed sheets and killed himself. 

 

Party over. We all moved out, I lost my PC somewhere, and life was just a huge haze. Eventually having met and married Kyla I bought my first ever console, a PS2. It wasn't played much but the internet started playing a more pivotal role in my life and then the PS3 came out, and having seen all the shenanigans people were having online, I finally bought MW2. I got it towards the end of its career and joined on MW2forum to ask something about claymores, and from that point of view, the rest is history. I met some of my fondest friends on there who I'm still great friends with today, and most of them will be reading this. 

 

I played on console pretty much exclusively with this lot for years, eventually moving on to the PS4, a brief stint on the Xbox 360 inbetween and a massive WoW stint which almost cost me my marriage but I really can't be arsed talking about that, this was right after my counsins' suicide and I think I just happened to turn to the most addictive game the world has ever seen to try and deal with it. 

 

I was given some games a couple of years ago which highlighted just how old my 2500k was getting, @phil bottle bought me Star Citizen which instantly killed PC gaming again because it killed my poor 2500k to the point I could almost hear it crying as it was pumping out 2fps. Thanks to building @Plumbers Crack's PC recently however I managed to bag some high end stuff which has reinvigorated PC gaming for me, which coupled with the current crop of shit games on the PS4 means I'm pretty much back on PC now. For current games I'm enjoying a bit of WoW now and again, DayZ, Star Citizen, probably going to install BF4 this weekend. It's great having all that choice again. Does this mean consoles are dead to me? Hell no, I think I just got burned out on it, and in gaming in general, so only time will tell if that one game comes along and reunites us all again. It's nice to see some others jumping on the PC bandwagon too, @phil bottle has been trying to convince me to get back on for ages, @tronic44 is now a member of the master race, @Plumbers Crack has now joined us whether he likes it or not, @GazzaGarratt has finally got his shit together too, @crispymorgan has a beast of a PC now as well, so we're growing. Obviously the console is still connected and will be used quite a bit but for now I'm just enjoying playing games again. 

 

As for your question, yes I would get there in the end

 

Modern Warfare 2, Black Ops, World of Warcraft, Black Ops 2, Destiny, Planetside 2, and many, many more, with hopefully many more to come!

 

 

Well that got out of hand didn't it? If you have 10% of the fun reading it as I did writing it then it's all worthwhile I guess!

 

Happy easter you bastards!

[Greboth 2,721]

Gaming history in general was sporadic of playing other peoples games.  Gaming for me really took off when I got a OG playstation.  Back then it was all about racing for me and I spent countless hours on Gran Turismo and Colin McRae Rally.  I then switched to PS2 and continued my racing with more Gran Turismo and NFS.  It was around the time of NFS, I think underground 2, I got a network adapter for my ps2 and tried online gaming.  It didn’t work too well and was a laggy mess with everyone teleporting all over the place.  I guess the infrastructure wasn’t really there so online gaming for me really took off with the Xbox 360.  Project Gotham Racing, Forza 2, 3 and 4 and Halo, Halo, Halo and a little bit more Halo.  I pretty much played Halo 3 from day of release until MW2 released.  It was around this time I bought and built my first PC (rather than scrounging hand me downs off other people) which is why I joined the OCUK forum.  

 

The PC allowed me to really get in to my sim racing, mostly Live for Speed though also played NKPro, rFactor and GTR2.  I joined several teams, took part in leagues and wasn’t all that successful.  I’d finish mid table so better than some but I never had a chance of winning.  I then set up my own team and ran than for a year or two before folding as I had lost interest in serious sim racing.  It was around this time I started playing CoD’s and Forza’s with some of the OCUK’ers.  Then came the PS4 and Destiny, that really got me in to gaming with the people from the OCUK forum.  It was good fun as it is a huge community so it meant there was always raids and NF’s going on.  Though generally played with the same small group.  This is where I got to know Diddums and TehBlueBear and ended up here.  The rest they say is history  

[phil bottle 9,755]

Somoe epic updates above^

 

For me, ‘video gaming’ in general started in the days of the Commodore 64. The 1980s.

 

Even in those days gamers were already dicks. There was (in the UK) a war of superiority between C64 and ZX Spectrum owners. Though this generally ended with both sets ganging up and mocking the solitary BBC microcomputer owner which had Elite and pretty much nothing else going for it. Though I did learn BASIC using a BBC machine, think they were made for the BBC by Acorn.

 

The C64 had the better graphics by the way. And was the superior machine. International Soccer loaded via a cartridge. And I’ll never forget the days of listening to the cassette player load Manic Miner or Way of the Exploding Fist. Plus, the very first football manager I ever played was on the C64 and is one of my favourite games of all time. The PSU would generally overheat before I got tired of playing that game. The Amiga followed the C64 but I had moved onto consoles by this stage. I loved the SNES and the Sega Megadrive (Genesis) and then the N64 and PlayStation.

 

At which point I was back on a PC. I had crap internet for years, so only played stuff like Black, early CODs and Conflict Desert Storm type games, oh and of course Football Manager. My mate Dan had a better PC and internet so my first experience of online play was around his playing Unreal Tournament and Quake.

 

Special mention to the PS2 slim, which is one of my favourite things of all time, it was tiny and awesome.

 

It wasn’t until the Xbox 360 that I finally experienced online play in my own home. COD4 and World at War were good games but it was MW2 that really grabbed me. I played with a bunch of work mates and used to dream of UAVs circling overhead. Great days, great console.

 

Then the DayZ mod for Arma 2 came along in 2012 and hammered the first nail into the console coffin. I watched those early vids of folk playing the mod and it blew me away, there was nothing like it at the time.  What a fucking game. The mod support was incredible, new maps, Namalsk, Lingor, Pantera and the awesome DayZ Origins on Taviana. I used to play with Aitchy and Battlefield John from the DayZ forums and I miss the mod a lot.

 

I only had a laptop but it played DayZ without any problems, except that it would overheat playing around the 90 minute mark. So I saved up my pennies and sorted myself a very nice PC. I did buy a PS4, a year after release, under duress from a certain South African.

 

It was actually from playing DayZ and meeting @Diddums on the DayZ forums that lead me here

 

[Diddums 4,346]

See? I spread my legs everywhere. Like a flower opening its petals to the gleeful sunshine on the first day of spring.

[NCA-Paendrag 2,758]

Fuck me Diddums, that's hard core, finding your cousin like that! 😲

 

Well, my gaming experience started on a Sega console with something that must have been a 8 bit graphics or something. Had a kind of casette with 10 games on it, one of them being a basketball game with stick figures and a square ball 😄

Think I was around 9 or 10 years old. 

 

A few years later a friend of mine got a C64 with games on casettes. Man, it took a long time to load! Can't remember which games we played though. 

But he got an Amiga 500 later and man what a difference! Floppy discs was heaven compared to tapes. Played the hell out of Sensible Soccer. Also remember Test Drive and Prince of Persia. 

This was around or a bit later when we also had arcade halls with pinball machines and some videogames. Great memories of Double Dragon! 

 

Then came the Nintendo and PS1, which I didn't get but played at a friends house a lot. Wrestling and Super Mario ferr dayz. 

 

Then came a few years with PC gaming as my then father-in-law built one for me and my ex girlfriend. He played mostly shooters like Wolfenstein, Doom and such. Still remember he playing the first Farcry game. He tried to crack and burn a copy but didn't work. But still had awesome games like Soldier of Fortune, Black Hawk Down, Wolfenstein etc. 

 

First real console I got was a PS2. Played mostly driving and fighting games. Didn't play that much on it and only had a couple games. GTA Vice City, which I didn't like. PC gaming took a baxk seat as my ex got sucked into WoW. Probably cost us the relationship. 

 

When I met my wife and move across the country she bought me a PS3 as a welcoming gift and I really started to play online, and found MW2.  And finally found MW2forum. 

And the rest is history as they say. 

Probably forgot some good memories here and there, but most is covered. 

[Nutcuttlit 359]

MoHAA was my first, played in a clan comprised mainly of Dutch dudes. Every Saturday Night was a clan war ,I was a very young lad but remember it fondly.

Via the FG App

[GazzaGarratt 11,049]

Great updates above and all down to your great thread @Spacedeck.

 

My gaming started far earlier than the days when I was bought my first PC (see my OG post in PPR for that) but I think my first ever online experience was on a dial up talktalk connection with Delta Force. It had a help guide that went over your keyboard so you knew which buttons to press and I managed to get a few sniper kills from afar with connection lagging all over the place. I used to keep playing offline with PC games like Hitman, incredibly hard and got past about 5 or 6 levels whilst playing Championship Manager (PC) and Super Mario Kart (SNES) round @Findmartin's house.

 

The next online experience that pretty much solidified my console love as the beautiful Xbox and Xbox live. Having to live with an amazing Grandad most of my life that was just like my Dad meant he got a better connection with Sky and I ended up on a couple of games initially - Rainbow 6 (yes, the one where your team would listen to set commands) and Halo 2. Both games were incredible online, the trolling was an experience to hear, especially when I could hold my own and won games regularly in TDM and Control. Xbox Live was possibly the best thing to happen to me. It doubled my games overnight as back then, games would have fantastic offline modes and then an incredible online experience. Links 2004 (golf game) was possibly the best one I was for being really good. I could race through 18 hole courses in minutes scoring birdies and eagles on every hole.

 

The connection meant I stayed loyal to Microsoft and got a 360. Played even more online. Then met the wife and going from a gaming front room with 4/5 TVs, all my consoles everywhere to nothing was...strange. but it's what I needed to grow up a little.

 

Come 7 years later, family created, house owned, mum bought me a PS4 after not ever having to buy me anything expensive over the years. I cried my eyes out, played for about a year with work peeps and then Destiny happened. Seen Stretch play it via a Facebook like. And then it's been FG ever since. Best. Ever. Place.

[McNasty 260]

@DiddumsDude if you want some throwback games to play again - go to https://playclassic.games

 

The DOS library is fantastic.  I saw your post and went on a DOS game hunt and found this place yesterday.  You can save/restore games all in the cloud without a login or anything.  I played a game yesterday, and then went back today and my saved file was still there.  Not sure how that works.  Sooooo many games

[GazzaGarratt 11,049]

On 4/25/2019 at 8:33 PM, McNasty said:

@DiddumsDude if you want some throwback games to play again - go to https://playclassic.games

 

The DOS library is fantastic.  I saw your post and went on a DOS game hunt and found this place yesterday.  You can save/restore games all in the cloud without a login or anything.  I played a game yesterday, and then went back today and my saved file was still there.  Not sure how that works.  Sooooo many games

 

That's a great find McNasty, gonna share that one with my boy so he has some more games to play that are free.