What game do you have the fondest memories of? No GAs here sorry bots, only reading for bored humans

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I was walking past my younger autistic son on his computer and he was watching a video of some gameplay from Nascar Racing 2003, mainly for its crashes as he is really into demolitions ;) This reminded me of the good old days where my mates and I would all take our computers to someones house, plug them all together via LAN and hammer old games like Warcraft 3, Starcraft etc (I'm also old enough to remember doing it with the old connectors which needed terminators to close the network at the end computers).

But my favourite (his video reminded me) was the Nascar Racing series, we'd paint our cars up (mine looked exactly like my street car, bonnet stripes and all) and we'd race hard...for all of a handful of laps until someone screwed up badly enough that we had to restart the race. You could add bots so we would have a full field of cars to race against, there was 4 or 5 of us and the game included an awesome replay camera that allowed you to watch crashes from any cars view, or various camera views from the track etc The physics may have been a bit hit and miss but the cars were destructible to a fair degree and parts would end up strewn all over the track. We found we could cheat at the start of the race by racing up the middle of the two columns of starting cars and just as the leaders hit the start line we would race through at full speed and get a huge lead. Great idea in theory but with 4 or 5 blokes trying to do it all it took was one tiny screw up and you'd pinball between both lines of cars and create a huge mess for everyone. The amount of prangs we recorded was huge and I so wish I still had those recordings, it quite often reduced us all to tears in laughter at what had happened. It's a pity EA then got their hands on the series and the next release didn't even have bots...

Between games like that and Warcraft 3 where we would start playing in the afternoon and wonder what the bright light was outside only to realise it was dawn of the next day there was some awesome classic games I really miss. We don't connect our computers on a LAN any more, hell I don't even see any of those guys I used to play with now, we all grew up and had families, but playing with friends online is nowhere near as fun as that used to be, and I can't say I've played a game with mates all night for many years (although I am 45 now so if I stay awake past 9pm I feel like a party animal these days).

For you young-lings who are wondering what a network terminator was here is an image of how a network was set up back then, and no the terminators didn't look as cool as Arnold. You had a T-connector plugged into each computers network card (none of this built into the motherboard madness back then!) a cable would connect two computers and the network would be set up in a serial line, with a terminator at each end computer. http://www.dewassoc.com/support/networking/images/wirecoax.gif

So what game do you have the fondest memories of? and tell us your favourite gaming memory!

5 years ago

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92 Comments

Jordanlol

Halo 3 is by far and large my favourite video game of all time for a gargantuan mountain of reasons, most of which involve the social aspects of the multiplayer itself as I was and am still very much a shut in. Hours, days, weeks, months, years spent together with friend and foe alike, all sharing a common interest in an entertainment medium. I love video games in general but Halo 3 was the pinnacle for me, though that's not to say it is or was for any specific reason other than mine own. It was a fantastic game but I'd wager many wouldn't hold it up against other more influential titles as a pinnacle of gaming.

5 years ago