about 12 1/2 years now. Started with the Orange Box I bought at Target, got home and had to install this thing called Steam to use it. Never heard of it before then lol
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Only 6 years, shame shame. Apparently my first game was Garry's Mod then Always Sometimes Monsters.
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edit : sorry its almost 2or 3 years but using the steam from last year Actively :)
i was in battle.net almost 8 years i was playing wow
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Had an account for 12 years, but only really started using it about 4 years ago.
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Little known fact that Valve doesn't want you to know is that it's been used for thousands of years for various purposes. I have personally been cooking with it for about 20 years or so.
Oh, you mean the gaming platform... a bit under two and a half years. Before that I took about a 7 year hiatus from gaming, and before that I was primarily on consoles.
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Wow it's been 6 years since i started playing games at Steam. Looked at my first purchase. But i opened it around 8 years ago to play dota 2 at that time. I didn't use it for 2 years.
Btw i first opened an account around when Half Life 2 was released. I wonder if it's still active gonna check it out. :p I can't remember the mail i had used. :(
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We have electrickery here, no need for steam operated things any more
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According to the badge I've registered 25 June, 2008. However, I didn't actually start using it then. It was some weak attempt to crack something and get "all possible games"... or something... I don't really remember. XD
I actually used Steam for real for the first time around Christmas 2010 when I got The Orange Box. Still didn't really play stuff there much though. Gradually started paying more and more attention to it though. (Ironically most of the games that I bought were ones that I had played cracked and really liked before that.)
Moved to Steam as my main place for games around 2012-2013 when Jagex (who had already completely ditched FunOrb...) finally managed to shit the bed with RuneScape so hard that I couldn't stand the smell anymore.
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About 5.5 years, I think? I was super suspicious of it at first, but couldn't resist the siren song of FTL. Then I thought, 'As long as I'm here, maybe I should check out this "Half Life" thing everyone keeps raving about?' and it just went on from there...
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2 years; been using it most of that time, because I never really got a handle on the preinstalled backlog.
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You beat me by one day! https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197969796120/badges/1
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Almost 7 years (will be later this month). It took me a month before I activated anything, at first I created and account and installed Steam just because I needed to configure a gamepad in Linux and it was the easiest way to get the config file the game required. It's a bit more complicated, I wanted to play a (pirated) copy of a game that runned into conflicts with the then current version of the nvidia drivers on windows but worked just fine on linux, looking back I can't believe the sort of hoops I was willing to jump through just to play a game without paying.
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16 years, I beta tested half-life before Steam existed.
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16 years was playing cs before steam. bring back func vehicles
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Not very long, I'm actually quite new to the gaming scene in general. I used to repeatedly play old classics like RollerCoaster Tycoon and Sim City 4 along with a ton of flash games, of course... before discovering the wonders of "Steam sales".
According to Steam, I've been a user for 7 years now.
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created my account on October 19th 2015, so i'm at the four year mark. didn't have decent enough internet until then to even think of downloading games to play them, so i was stuck with GameStop hardcopies and replaying the same PSX and DreamCast games. dark, dark times, those days of dial-up.
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Coming up on 9 years. I made my account in June of 2011. I held out on getting an account for a while; stuck with old-fashioned disk gaming until then. ;-)
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id be more interested in how did you come to use steam
as a student i couldnt afford buying games, but then a friend sent me a gift from something called steam in 2012
then i was told about HB in DEC 2012.
and now i buy games i cant play :D
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I am not sure I can remember that far back. I believe this August will make about 18 (active) years. I say "about" because my first Steam account was lost not long after 2000. "Khalaq" is actually my second attempt at a Steam account.
As for the "why" of it, Steam was required in order to play Half-Life 2. We were not given a choice in the matter. Before then, I did my best to avoid using Steam. (I played Half-Life deathmatch and Counter-Strike beta, though.)
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Steam was released in September 2003 so 16 years (and 6 months) is the limit if you started playing when Steam came out.
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It seems I need to narrow down my guesstimate. Very well.
I remember there being a beta release before the "official" release. Various figures floating around the internet put that at March 22, 2002. I also remember playing Half-Life deathmatch and Counter-Strike beta while still disliking and avoiding Steam in general. I do not remember when it became necessary to update Half-Life through Steam (instead of just downloading patches and applying them), but I definitely remember being forced to use Steam for Half-Life 2.
If all of the above is correct, it would seem I started using Steam in 2002 sometime after the beta launch, lost my original Steam account in 2004, and then created my second Steam account replace it. That would add up to 17+ years on Steam, 15+ years as Khalaq.
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I'm honestly not really up to date how the whole Steam thing started, just wanted to inform you. Neither Counter-Strike nor Half-Life interested me greatly. Though I did play the entire Half-Life series eventually, I thought it was ok though not all it was hyped up to be.
I fought off Steam a long as I could but eventually they won.
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Though I did play the entire Half-Life series eventually, I thought it was ok though not all it was hyped up to be.
If you came late to the party, the hype would have been misplaced. It would be like reading the hype about floppy disks ("Holds a whopping 113KB on a rewritable surface!") when you grew up with DVD's.
Half-Life introduced a lot of things to the FPS genre that had not existed before. Look at games like Turok 2, Unreal, and Thief: The Dark Project. FPS games were following the same pattern laid down in the original Doom. Spawn in map, search for key X, find key X, bring to door X, go to next level. Enemies spawned in one place, and they stayed in that spot until they "saw" you. At that time, they ran straight at you until dead. Even Sin, a competitor to Half-Life, had the same, limited AI. Some things Half-Life introduced were:
- Advanced NPC and World Scripting
- Contiguous Exploration (not separate levels)
- Story-Integrated Health and Shield System (not "pickups")
- Much More Sophisticated A.I.
- Narrative and Background (i.e. Story) Given by Level Design (not cut-scenes and/or walls of text)
- Diversity of Weapons (including everyday objects used as weapons due to in-game physics)
- In-Game Physics (something later expanded on in HL2)
- Heightened Realism (including friendly NPC's)
- Dynamic Play (not just "kill everything in this corridor to procede")
I could go on, but you get the idea. So many things that are considered essential in an FPS today were introduced by Valve in Half-Life. If you really want to get an idea of what it was like to play Half-Life when it first came out, compare it to Final Doom.
I fought off Steam a long as I could but eventually they won.
Yeah... The dirty rats. (
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I do think you have a point about not having played it when it came out. It's very hard to judge a game fairly in it's time period without disregarding the experience from newer, more advanced games. I've noticed this with several other popular games as well, while other games do stand the test of time and are still amazing to play today.
Half-Life introduced a lot of things to the FPS genre that had not existed before.
I wouldn't say they "introduced" all of those elements, they popularized some elements and possibly introduced them to others who weren't familiar with titles that already had these kind of elements. But I can agree they introduced some of those. I think the enemy AI was the biggest achievement for Half-Life, from what I can remember it must have been one of the most advanced ones at the time. And In-Game Physics for Half-Life 2.
My favorite game of all time (Strife) which was released in 1996 already had many of these elements for example:
- Advanced NPC Scripting and World Scripting
- Contiguous Exploration (not separate levels). I think Heretic/Hexen also had this but I haven't played those games much.
- Diversity of Weapons
- Heightened Realism (including friendly NPC's)
- Dynamic Play (not just "kill everything in this corridor to procede")
Also I wouldn't say Half-Life or Half-Life 2 has a very diverse/original set of weapons compared to other games of the time. Duke Nukem 3D (1996) had a shrink ray, Redneck Rampage (1997) has a bowling ball, System Shock (1999) & Halo (2001) have a bunch of alien weapons. The only truly original weapon they introduce was probably the Gravity gun.
This is all very debatable though and I get your point. Final Doom is unfair comparison though, it was already using a very outdated engine when it was released in 1996 (2 years before Half Life), it's closer to Quake II which still validates most of your points.
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This is all very debatable though and I get your point.
Debatable, indeed. I would say that Strife (which also uses the outdated engine) does not approach Half-Life in the elements you listed (aside from perhaps contiguous exploration), but I believe arguing about it would be pointless. Most of the elements are scaled by degree and therefore subjective. That, and exact details are largely irrelevant to the original point.
A much more interesting discussion along these lines would be which FPS games have aged well. There are many of those, and they are dirt cheap. Perhaps someone will make a post about that, someday.
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I won't try to convince you otherwise, we both have our own points of view. Strife is actually the last game to use the Doom engine, but it still manages to do a lot with it (IMO). Still the conversation gave me some insight into why it may be one of my favorite games, for me it was probably one of the earliest games to change all that, like Half-Life was possibly for others.
I fear any such list would also be very subjective, I've come to learn it also depends a great deal what a person is looking for in a game that differentiates what makes or breaks a good game. Also nostalgia is huge influence, ideally you'd want someone who has never played any of these games to give a fair opinion. I would, in all fairness, not be a good judge whether "Strife" aged well because of this.
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Looking at my friend profile, I saw his 10 year badge. So I looked at mine and it was 12 years.
So I got to wondering, how long have you been using steam?
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