Childhood games

[METALMAN]

5 hours ago, Bobfoc said:

Hogs of War?

yes that's it!

[stokeriño]

Played SO MUCH Worms 2. Endless games of me, my brother and step-siblings each taking turns on the keyboard.

[Lineker]

4 minutes ago, stokeriño said:

Played SO MUCH Worms 2. Endless games of me, my brother and step-siblings each taking turns on the keyboard.

Concrete Donkey!

[Bobfoc]

I played all the old Worms games. Armageddon was the one I got the most out of, though. I repurchased it a few years ago on Steam and introduced it to my nephew, who thought it was great. He even recorded his own lines for the sound bank editor.

[Mick]

Bless those crazy, genodical bastards. 

[Monkey D. Lars]

I miss that damn game! Played so many split screen battles! and the story mode was fun too

[probablyoliver]

This game was the absolute tits.

[MalaCloudy Black]

My friend had that on SNES (I don't think it was Desert Strike, but I wanna say there's multiple ___ Strike games?) and I remember us playing the shit out of it.

Oregon Trail on the Apple IIe may have been the first video game I ever played. When I was in kindergarten (age 5) my classroom was across the hallway from the computer lab, which was outfitted with like, 30 Apple IIe computers and a whole host of educational games. There's another one I remember liking but I don't remember the name, you were some sort of professor or archaeologist going around learning about and recovering stolen artifacts.

[FLiam]

Spy vs. Spy on Commodore 64 was also an absolute banger.

[Chris2K]

This is an appropriately timed thread, because I was thinking of one of the games I played most in my childhood, Sensible World of Soccer 96/97, the other day, and found out there's a mod with up-to-date teams which works perfectly. I've been playing that a bit over the weekend.

That led me to find and download Grand Prix 2, something I played just as much when I was a bit older, and modded it to make it a "legends" series of 80s, 90s and 2000s teams and drivers. I've done one race so far, won by Alain Prost in a 1993 Williams.

As for others...

Amiga
Microprose Grand Prix
Championship Manager 92/93
Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket
Lemmings

N64/Game Boy
Pokémon, Red, Yellow and Stadium in particular
GoldenEye
Super Mario 64
Mario Kart 64
Mario Party
WWF No Mercy
WWF WrestleMania 2000

PC
Championship Manager 97/98 (I mean, just years of playing it)
FIFA 98: Road to World Cup
Worms
International Cricket Captain
The Sims
A British rally game I can't remember the name of

And many more that aren't coming to mind. I've not really changed my gaming philosophy much, you'd just need to throw in countless mobile games nowadays.

 

[Kaney]

1 hour ago, How The Cloud Stole Christ said:

My friend had that on SNES (I don't think it was Desert Strike, but I wanna say there's multiple ___ Strike games?) and I remember us playing the shit out of it.

I remember Jungle Strike and Soviet Strike. One of them you had to defend the White House in the first level, I played that so much.

[RazorsEdge]

Sonic 2
Jazz Jackrabbit
Championship Manager *Something*
NBA Jam
WWF Attitude
Warcraft I & II
Starcraft
Command & Conquer
FIFA 2000
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

[MalaCloudy Black]

Starcraft is good shout too. Starcraft and Diablo II were two of the first PC games I owned.

[Benjamin]

Cops and robbers

[Pooker]

On the PC, Civ II and Diablo 2 were big ones. As were Simcity 2000 and EW9000 and EWD.

On the NES, Double Dribble was probably my favorite game on it. It really started my love of sports games.

On the N64, WCW/NWO Revenge and WWF No Mercy got a ton of playing time.

[OctoberRaven]

Off the top of my head:

Graham Gooch's World Class Cricket (had no idea what I was actually doing in it though)

A sci-fi maze shooter that I don't remember the name of

Super Street Fighter II Turbo

Biker Mice From Mars

Super Mario Kart

Super Mario World

Wolfenstein 3D

Classic Concentration

Killer Instinct

Mortal Kombat 1

Super Star Wars

Shadows of the Empire

The N64 era wrestling games

Ogre Battle 64

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

[METALMAN]

See if we go really far back - my dad had an ancient Apple computer in the early 90s. It had a couple of games. I spent ages playing this game called Factory (I think) where you basically run a factory. It’s a kind of puzzle game: you have to make stuff and make sure it follows the right procedure. That game was great.

There was also one called Castles:Siege and Conquest which was a really ugly resource gathering and fighting thing set in France. That was a really cool game.

My parents were teachers so they used to bring me loads of educational “games” home from their schools during holiday. Some of them were amazing.

I spent a lot of time as a child making Excel spreadsheets (well, more precisely ClarisWorks spreadsheets, Apple’s then Excel equivalent) because it was genuinely my third most interesting option. 

[Naitch]

Talk of Worms has reminded me that I also had Worms World Party on the PS1.

I've also seen a few mentions which reminded me about the Acorn computer I used to have in the early 2000s. No internet, very few functions in fact, but it did play quite a few floppy disk games. Sensible Soccer, James Pond: Robocod, Zool, Chuck Rock, The Crystal Rainforest, and disc 1 of Simon the Sorcerer (because disc 2 was corrupted and rendered discs 3-9 useless) are the ones a quick scan of an Acorn games list that stand out.

[Skummy]

My first gaming memories were on the Commodore 64 - I'm almost certain the first games I ever played were Rainbow Chaser, a fairly generic platformer in which you play a purple egg, and a game I knew as "Space Frogs", but a Google search just now has taught me was actually called "Frogs In Space"; an inexplicably space-themed Frogger rip-off. The reason I knew it as "Space Frogs" is because that's what was handwritten on the cassette sleeve - I'm not sure we had a single game for the C64 that wasn't on a bootleg cassette, with my brother writing whatever he thought it was called on the sleeve. That's made some of the games of my childhood impossible to track down, as it turns out that football game wasn't really called "Crap Footy".

Beyond that, my older brother had a Master System. It lived in my brothers' room most of the time, and was only rarely brought into the living room - I wasn't allowed in that room, so rarely got a chance to play it at first. My first memory of it is a rare instance of my brother allowing me in, to play Altered Beast on a black and white TV. Main memory of the console is of Alex Kidd In Miracle World, though, which I still play to death.

Somewhere around here I had experience of other old home computers - a BBC Micro at school, a friend's Acorn Electron, and at some point we briefly had a ZX81 Spectrum. I say briefly, it was honestly in the house only for a matter of days, and I think it was a "fell off the back of a lorry" deal with one of my Dad's mates. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game, a Spider-Man text adventure, Dizzy, and a fantasy dungeon-crawler thing I was obsessed with getting the chance to play on the BBC at school but can't for the life of me remember the name of.

My Mum was a youth worker when I was a kid, and the Youth Club was at the village hall, just round the corner from our house. They had a Mega Drive there, and after a couple of games were stolen, the Mega Drive started coming home with us - so de facto free Mega Drive for us. This is when most of my real memories of "properly" playing video games came in, starting to get Sega Power magazine every month, watching Gamesmaster, spending as much of my free time as possible playing games. Main games here were Sonic The Hedgehog and Sonic 3 (never owned Sonic 2!), the Mega Games pack of Super Hang-On, Columns & World Cup Italia '90, Urban Strike and of course Streets of Rage 2, which might be the game I've sunk the most hours into collectively over the course of my life.

Two of my childhood best friends moved to the village I lived in around then, and were the first people I knew with a PC at home. From them over the years, I discovered Warcraft, Starcraft, Age Of Empires and The Secret Of Monkey Island. Add in Lemmings, Diablo, Worms and Theme Hospital once we got our own PC at home, and that sums up my PC gaming experience pretty well. Their Mum was American, and they would spend every Summer over there, meaning they had a few US-exclusive games for the Game Gear, and a bunch of Sega advertising stuff - I'd see the "Sega Genesis" mentioned, not realising it was the same console as the Mega Drive, and think it was some exotic new machine. I think I got into my head that it was a handheld version of the Mega Drive, so I don't know if I had it confused with the Nomad, or just completely made that up. Other PC games I played a lot, but don't think of as fitting in with my formative experience of gaming quite as much as everything else I've mentioned, were Blood, Duke Nukem 3D, Little Big Adventure 2 (which is probably the closest I came to an RPG at that time) and Jazz Jackrabbit, which was emblematic of the kind of shareware stuff we played hours of but is mostly forgotten these days. 
 

The PS1 I would consider my last "childhood" console. I remember being at school excitedly talking about Gran Turismo, and friends at secondary school getting me into Final Fantasy VII, which is probably the first game I properly obsessed over. Other games that stand out from that period are Metal Gear Solid, Abe's Oddysee and Rayman. Mostly I played demo discs, though! WWF SmackDown! was a transformative experience, though.

 

An aside is arcade gaming - I didn't get to do it often, so it's amazing how much of it stands out as a significant childhood experience. We didn't really go on holiday when I was a kid, so would just have the odd day trip to Bridlington, Hornsea or Scarborough, and I would always just want to go to the arcades. The Simpsons and Asterix side-scrollers still stand out to this day. 

[Gazz]

12 hours ago, Chris2K said:

A British rally game I can't remember the name of

Network Q RAC Rally Championship, had the Prodrive 555 Subaru Impreza on the front.

That fucking 25 minute stage through Pundershaw was always the end of 11 year old me.

32 minutes ago, Skummy said:

Main memory of the console is of Alex Kidd In Miracle World, though, which I still play to death.

You have no idea how much it aggrieved me to get past a world, only to then die in a game of rock, paper, scissors.