Formative Gaming Experiences

[Sky-Fox]

I thought it might be fun to share what everyone considers to be games that most influenced their current tastes whether it's something they played when they were younger, or something that had a profound effect when you got older. So I'll start first:

My first gaming experience where I was fully cognizant of what was going on was probably our Sega Genesis. We didn't have too many games for it, but one of the games that most impacted me was Streets of Rage 2. I remember spending days and days with my brothers trying out different characters, bowling through strangely named punks and brawlers, and all the while fighting to the EDM stylings of Yuzo Koshiro. It was an extremely stylish and solid game that embedded in me a love for brawlers 2D or otherwise.

I also have a fondness for RPGs and I attribute a lot of that to my stepfather being a big Dungeons and Dragons nerd. He would try and get little games set up for us when we were probably too young to fully understand what we were doing, but there was an allure to the freedom the game provided. We were building people out of nothing but dice rolls and character sheets, using our imaginations to decide what our character was like, and we got to make the decisions on what we wanted to do in the world. It was fascinating! Outside of D&D I would watch my stepfather play Final Fantasy late at night on a borrowed NES. It was a similar experience in a lot of ways. It was something I didn't fully understand but it had characters you had control over, a wide, mysterious world with little direction and the most common encounters were from strange, hostile monsters. It's a feeling I hearken back to when I encounter games with the same kind of atmosphere to it. It's also an atmosphere a lot of PC RPGs are home to, so I tend to stick there.

Phew! I hope that wasn't too personal :X, but I'd like to see what everyone else's experiences are.

[Zanreo]

My first game, or rather the first game that showed me just how great games are, was Pokémon Crystal. While the genre didn't influence me (I don't have a huge interest in RPGs or something)I'm still a big Pokemon fan and I love Nintendo games.

I also played Warioware: Mega Microgames a lot as a kid, and I just loved the wacky style of this. I suppose this might have gotten me into the more weird and wacky style of games?

Rhythm Heaven was the start of my rhythm game addiction as far as I could remember. Suddenly I was just like HEY PRESSING BUTTONS TO THE BEAT OF THE MUSIC IS REALLY FUN and went out to get EBA and Ouendan and the other Rhythm Heaven games and Gitaroo Man and Rhythm Thief and Project Diva and various other stuff.

[Golem]

Pokémon Crystal? Man, I feel old. Have you played any of the Pokemon spinoffs like Snap or Puzzle League?

Fox, one of your first console games was Streets of Rage 2? I can't imagine what growing up with that game would've been like.

Anyways, my first games were on my dad's Atari 2600. Among my favorites were Pitfall and Video Pinball. These games are neat to play now, but I've never been able to seriously get into them. I want to play Pitfall more.

My first real foray into gamedom was Super Mario World, which I think has shaped my tastes in a number of ways, including what genres I like, how I like games paced, what kinds of mechanics I enjoy, and what difficulty level I can handle. As a kid, I played Super Mario World, Super Mario All-Stars, and the DKC games into the ground, but Super Mario World was the most formative experience. Nowadays I consider SMB3 and DKC2 kind of cumbersome games I don't replay for fun, but I can always boot up Super Mario World for a good time. It's interesting to see how my opinions on the games of my childhood have changed.

As a kid, my genre pool was pretty thin--it was platformers, with the occasional Mario Kart or basketball game thrown in. I guess there were RPGs like SMRPG and Pokemon, too. Link's Awakening DX was my first time trying anything involving puzzles, and it totally went over my head. Although, in many ways, those kinds of games still do. Ico gave me serious trouble when I first played through it in 2011.