Jasyla has been doing a bunch of blogging about non-WoW games lately, and recently posted this questionnaire to get people talking about games. I’ll take a little break from work and Warlords today to muse on my favorite games and talk about some of my background with them.
When did you start playing video games?
What is the first game you remember playing?
The first game I remember playing is Space Invaders on an old Texas Instruments-made computer. So that’s technically when I started playing games, but what’s probably more meaningful is the Sega Master System I got soon after, which I started playing regularly. The first game I played a lot on it was Missile Defense 3-D, a lightgun-based Missile Command remake which was in 3D. As you probably wouldn’t expect for a console made in 1985, the SMS had a 3D feature that worked rather well (the glasses plugged into the console and synchronized with alternating frames on the display). So that was pretty cool.
Just to throw it out there, the SMS game I got into the most was Zillion, a pretty great 2-D combat/exploration game that was somewhat like Metroid. I’ve gone back and beaten it later.
PC or Console?
XBox, PlayStation, or Wii?
I’ve always played games on both and don’t have strong feelings; in recent years it’s been mostly PC just because of WoW. I haven’t bought recent-generation consoles because not I’m sure I’d play them enough, given how I don’t get to play games as much as I’d like. I also have a strong tendency to play a small number of games a huge amount rather than play a bunch of different games, so consoles feel hard to justify. This might be a bad decision if it cuts me off from finding console exclusives that would sweep me away. That said, the games that did so came to PC anyway (XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dark Souls). Dark Souls is a notable example because it was PS3 exclusive, but became so famous that the clamor for a PC release caused a company with no PC experience to just release it anyway.
There’s no general answer to what console I would buy; it’s whatever one had an exclusive that gave me a desire to play which I couldn’t get out of my head. Nintendo is probably the most likely, since I’ve always loved their games (their first-party ones in particular) and for the most part you can’t play them on PC. If Zelda ever went back to its roots, there’s probably no way I could resist.
Oh wait, Zelda did go back to its roots with A Link Between Worlds, which was for 3DS, a system I have. So there you go.