Are You a Gamer?

[DGUtley]

My oldest is 26. When she was in a walker, we lived in Slavic Village in Cleveland. We were the second owners of a 100+ year old home -- I was a cub-lawyer and didn't have two nickels to my name. Her father, brother and I (mostly them) had gutted the attic, insulated and drywalled it. We carpeted it and turned it into a TV room. Anyways, Mrs. U was across the street at her sister's home and the baby was in the walker. This country-boy had barricaded the steps and was playing river raider on Nintendo. Well, the Polish-Little-Pampered-Princess #1* managed to push the barricade over and fell down the steps in her walker.

She could've broken her neck. I disconnected the video game right then and there. I haven't played a video game since. That was 1991.


* - Calling them princesses comes honestly -- family lore has that my wife's great (or great-great) grandmother was queen of the Hohenzollern Empire and fled Europe at the turn of the century. If true, and Mrs. U swears it is, then P1 and P2 are truly legally Princesses.

[Captain Obvious]

How can you play a game with such unrealistic graphics?

lol... kids

[Standing Wolf]

lol... kids

I think the first game I ever saw - and I was in my twenties then - was Pong. After that, it was that one where the cowboys are shooting through spinning wagon wheels or something like that.

[Amadeus]

How can you play a game with such unrealistic graphics?

I see very little difference between those graphics and the real world. And who doesn't get turned on when playing Leisure Suit Larry?

[Captain Obvious]

I see very little difference between those graphics and the real world. And who doesn't get turned on when playing Leisure Suit Larry?

[IMPress Polly]

Hmmm...well one of my suspicions has been confirmed: it looks like there are a lot of people who used to play video games commonly back in the '80s and '90s, but have not continued into this century. I think I can understand why that may be and the one-word summation may be boredom. Around that same juncture -- the turn of the century -- is when I found myself beginning to slowly gravitate away from "mainstream" games out of this general feeling that I'd done it all before and a want of more experimental approaches to game play and presentation. Overall, the basic things one does in video games really hasn't changed substantially in decades now. Only a few games really try new things.

FindersKeepers wrote:
I'm not a gamer as you know but I'm tickled to death that you helped me pick out my niece's Christmas gift.

My son plays games, and he's asked me to play before, and I have, but his skill level is so much more advanced than mine that I always feel like I'm holding up the game. Racing games are the hardest. Especially the ones where others are playing against you. I always came in last on those until he hacked one game and I got a gold star that never stopped so I could go really fast and my little character would not die even if I ran off the road. I don't remember what game that was but I know some of the other players got mad about it. I only did that a couple of times before my son said "that's enough, mom." It was fun while it lasted.

The other thing I don't like is bloody games. He has one where you drive around and run into people, car-jack them and shoot them. That's icky.

I might ask my niece if she wants to let me have a turn on her game, though.

Well I'm glad I was able to help with the Christmas shopping! Yeah, I think you might like Ori too! You might give it a shot! However, I'll add that if indeed your principal struggle with getting into video games is that you find them too violent and too difficult, then maybe a good starting place would be something like Gone Home or That Dragon, Cancer. Those are both excellent games (Gone Home I consider my absolute favorite game ever anymore, as a matter of fact!) that contain no violence, moving stories, and offer challenges that are not per se "gamey" in the conventional sense at all.

The racing game you describe sounds like it might've been a Mario Kart installment or other kart racer to me. I mean if you're able to use invincibility stars in it, that is. What I tend to really struggle with are shooting games. I don't have the best aim.

William wrote:
How can you play a game with such unrealistic graphics?

Captain Obvious wrote:
lol... kids

I hate to ever side with Captain Obvious on anything, but honestly I don't care about realistic graphics either. I find that realistic graphics a great game do not make. When it comes to visual presentation, what I like more than realism is a creative art direction that conveys feeling. Like Oxenfree's visual style, for example, I find to be really exceptional:



Or the style in the upcoming game Night in the Woods really increases that game's appeal to me:

[Captain Obvious]

A big part of the reason for me, the newer games comment, is that most new games require a $#@!load of memory. I don't want to have to drop $5k on a computer to run them and buying an X-box isn't something I want to do either because I really don't play that much.

And the older games are just fine for the odd time I want to play.

I've bought a bunch of games from GOG.com like Edna & Harvey, Deponia, stuff like that and we've played them.

[Green Arrow]

Right now my game of choice (when I'm not playing World of Warcraft or The Lord of the Rings Online, of course) is Dragon's Dogma.

[stjames1_53]

Morrowind. You can write code in the game
Oblivion. You can write code in the game
Skyrim. I'm on a hot spot so I had to take it off. It requires 6 gigs of transfer every month. Ate my bandwidth
I play the old NES and Sega games on my pc. Run an emulator and yer all the way back. All of the NE, SNES,Sega, Super Sega, and the hand-helds are available on line. They are not hacked so they are legitimate down loads.