Gaming Confessions & Blasphemy

Liking FF8 is blasphemy though.

While I respect WOWs success, I can't see how the current game appeals to anyone over the age of 14.

Not only do I have zero interest with a game with Kung fu pandas and pokemon, but I feel WOW has no respect for my time and money compared to games like GW 2. If I was preteen again I would eat it up with a spoon.

Ive put in 125 hours into Skyrim and am nowhere near beating the campaign.

I have never played any of the FF games.

I have never played any of the Ultima games.

I have never played any of the Metal Gear Solid games.

I feel *no* disappointment in the above and I do not feel that my gaming "resume" has suffered in the slightest.

According to the times recorded on my saves (those that have them), I have spent over three months of my life playing games in the pokemon franchise.

I regret nothing.

I have a Team Rocket uniform I frequently wore to work when I ran a Pokemon Gym (trading card game) at the toy store I worked at.

Does that mean I've cosplayed professionally? :p

Quintin_Stone wrote:

Liking FF8 is blasphemy though.

I like Final Fantasy VIII

mudbunny wrote:

I feel *no* disappointment in the above and I do not feel that my gaming "resume" has suffered in the slightest.

It has. You just give the correct amount of importance to "gaming resumés"; i.e. none.

Tanglebones wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

Just remembered one while listening to the podcast.

Mario Kart Double Dash!! is the best Mario Kart (on console at least), including being superior to Mario Kart 64.

I will always have fond memories of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, yes. But the technology for those games has shown their age, in particular Mario 64 (as have any games on the Playstation and N64 that relied on 3D backgrounds with God awful eye-bleeding textures).

Mario Kart Double Dash!! manages to stand the test of time. It still looks good, you can tell what you're looking at, the environment feels alive and, while it did have the Blue Shell, it was not yet as common and damning as it has become in recent Mario Kart games. It is the only Mario Kart that, to this day, I can plug in, play and still have a smile on my face, succumbing to the illusion that it is a flawless experience.

That's not a confession, it's a KNOWN FACT™

Y'all are my new best friends.

Onto Final Fantasy? Well...

FFXII is my favourite mainline FF. FFVIII is my second. FFIX is my least.

FF7 Crisis Core on PSP is a better FF7 than FF7 ever was.

I haven't been able to finish Journey due to boredom.
The gameplay feels like a chore, and that's not fun. My son felt the same way. I don't believe that the pay-off from the ending is going to make up for the lack of enjoyment of the journey itself.

I played all five episode of The Walking Dead ... and thought the story-telling was sophomoric. And the gameplay was not very entertaining.And I never invested anything into other than money. I often found myself looking at my watch while some supposedly emotional cut-scene was playing. Ultimately, it felt to me like a glorified choose-your-own-plot-cliche adventure.

Okay, I saw this thread when it was started, but I'll admit, I was too much of a chicken to jump in. Hearing it mentioned in the podcast convinced me to come clean.

Confessions!
I used to be a pirate.
I was in school, and I was poor, I know it's a terrible excuse, and I'm certainly making amends now.

I have spent over a thousand hours on Elder Scrolls games.
And I regret nothing. (Even though I probably should)

I have never played any of the Halo, Gears of War, or Call of Duty games.
True fact.

Blasphemies!
I'm not a fan of the Fallout games, and I never got out of the vault in Fallout 3.
I tried, really I did. I really wanted to like those games, but it never clicked with me. I own them all, but they just won't let me in.

I have never owned a single console. Ever.
My parents never allowed us to own any, to my great dismay (I wanted a SNES and then a Genesis sooooo baaaaaad). And ever since, I've only played on my PC. Sad, but true.

Phew, I feel so much better now!

Eleima wrote:

Phew, I feel so much better now! :D

JillSammich wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Liking FF8 is blasphemy though.

I like Final Fantasy VIII

Final Fantasy 8 is my second favourite after 7.
True story.

I find most of the video gaming community hard to relate to
Generally their tastes rarely match mine and when they do they like things I like for very different (wrong) reasons. Though this forum more than most seem to have opinions I can agree with.

I'm basically a snob
Yep.

If achievements were removed from all games I wouldn't mind
In fact, for story heavy games I wish I could switch off the ever distracting/mood ruining notifications for these 'achievements' if I could. Walking Dead for example.

I've never played XCOM or any other XCOM/UFO game nor Baldurs Gate
I've rectified this with XCOM: Enemy Unknown, my favourite game this year by far and will rectify Baldurs Gate when it is out on iOS next week.

I think Nintendo no longer caters to my generation on the whole
Probably just ignorance, haven't owned a Nintendo product since the 64.

I don't have a working PC
Hoping to remedy this if the new generation doesn't impress. Currently cant afford to drop a grand on a PC...

I don't think videogames have matured as a medium yet

hbi2k wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

Just remembered one while listening to the podcast.

Mario Kart Double Dash!! is the best Mario Kart (on console at least), including being superior to Mario Kart 64.

I will always have fond memories of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, yes. But the technology for those games has shown their age, in particular Mario 64 (as have any games on the Playstation and N64 that relied on 3D backgrounds with God awful eye-bleeding textures).

Mario Kart Double Dash!! manages to stand the test of time. It still looks good, you can tell what you're looking at, the environment feels alive and, while it did have the Blue Shell, it was not yet as common and damning as it has become in recent Mario Kart games. It is the only Mario Kart that, to this day, I can plug in, play and still have a smile on my face, succumbing to the illusion that it is a flawless experience.

That's not a confession, it's a KNOWN FACT™

Y'all are my new best friends.

WORD! The hours Stylez, his former housemates and I put into Double Dash!!, man that game was so good! I actually tracked down and bought two of the coveted Gamecube LAN adapters at one point. You ain't played Double Dash!! proper until you've played it with 8 people!

Despite my feminist principles I've found myself enjoying Saints Row.

It was the little touches that made that game so great. Stuff like actually having to fire a green shell behind you in order to defend against a red shell (thus requiring just a little more skill and timing than holding the button down to keep the green shell behind you like in other MK games). Or the risk/reward of deciding whether to fire off both of your items at the guy in front of you or keep one in reserve in case the guy behind you got any ideas. Such a great game.

Awesome thread. I don't think I would have stumbled into it if it weren't for the Conference Call, so thanks guys!

Here are mine:

I enjoy playing a wide range of game genres, including strategy, RPG, simulation, action, and adventure, but a disproportionately large percentage of most memorable gaming moments come from sports games.

I can still remember dancing silently around my living room, pumping my fist in the air and trying not to wake my wife and newborn son at 2:30 in the morning after my Blackburn side won the FA Cup in Championship Manager. There are countless other examples, including winning the World Series in an OOTP online league, scoring a Game 7 overtime winner in the NHL series, and so on. Maybe it has to do with the inherent drama in sports games or that we bring a lot of backstory to the games ourselves since we know the teams and players or that unlike most other games (where I know I will eventually beat that final boss and win the game), there are plenty of moments in good sports games where achieving the final objective is very much in doubt.

I find playing open world games incredibly stressful.

I become paralyzed with in action. What do I do next? Or first even? Most often, I just pursue the main story line and only briefly sample the "open worldness." Linear game structures provide less freedom and exploration, but they are more relaxing and enjoyable for me. I like to be on a clear path, I guess.

I often enjoy learning how to play a game much more than playing the game.

This is particularly true with Paradox games. I love tutorials (!), reading the tooltips and game manual, watching Let's Play videos, and learning the ins and outs of the game mechanics. Those first few hours of discovery are pure gold. Once that's over, I often lose interest in playing the game. Not because it isn't enjoyable, but it no longer scratches the discovery and learning itch.

I play almost everything on easy because i enjoy the mechanics and the gameplay, not the challenge.

This is probably a corollary to the confession above. I want to see what the game has to offer, what unique choices the developers have made, how things work, and what surprises are in store for me. I'm much less interested in competition, challenge or mastery—and I definitely don't want to be frustrated.

I find the fantasy and sci-fi subject matter of most games silly, not to mention predictable and boring.

I enjoy sci-fi and fantasy books and movies, but for some reason it all seems really silly to me in games. Especially when it is taking itself super seriously. I often skip the story to get on with the gameplay. Reapers, Dark Spawn, Dark Brotherhood, yeah yeah, whatever.

I have almost no interest in multiplayer gaming.

Again, a bit of a corollary to the "easy" confession above, but I have little interest in video games as competition. Even when playing against friends or in co-op, I find the experience stressful. I want my gaming to be relaxing and enjoyable, and for me, that almost always means single player. Talk of the gaming industry moving decisively toward multiplayer experiences in the future always makes me a bit sad.

Eleima wrote:

I have spent over a thousand hours on Elder Scrolls games.
And I regret nothing. (Even though I probably should)

Why? They are great. I have at least that many as well across the series, starting with Arena.

Eleima wrote:

I have never owned a single console. Ever.
My parents never allowed us to own any, to my great dismay (I wanted a SNES and then a Genesis sooooo baaaaaad). And ever since, I've only played on my PC. Sad, but true.

Is that a blasphemy? Really? I never owned one until I got my oldest an XBox in approx. 2003 (I started gaming in the late 70s). Now we have a Gamecube, Wii, and 360, but I have probably logged a total of 50 hours on all of them combined, mostly playing with my kids. Oh, and I have a PS2 I picked up to play Guitar Hero when that was a thing not included in that 50 hours.

Eleima wrote:

Phew, I feel so much better now! :D

So another gaming confession/blasphemy from me:

4) I hate console controllers. Every one I have ever used makes me feel clumsy and long for my M+KB. I have no idea how people play FPSes using the damn things. When I see people playing PC games saying that using a controller makes the game better, I wonder if we are living in the same universe.

tboon wrote:

So another gaming confession/blasphemy from me:

4) I hate console controllers. Every one I have ever used makes me feel clumsy and long for my M+KB. I have no idea how people play FPSes using the damn things. When I see people playing PC games saying that using a controller makes the game better, I wonder if we are living in the same universe.

I haven't been here for THAT long, but I don't see this as really a blasphemy... I find that it's difficult to get into the conversation sometimes on here. For instance, in the Skyrim thread, the convo has shifted more to mods and I'm a console player. I think a lot of people here are PC purists, or that's at least their platform of choice.

I happen to be one of those people that you speak of, though. There was a time when I played CS back when it was a mod, and I was boss with a M+KB, but there was a point where consoles were the better financial option, and so my play just shifted over to a controller and now I'm just garbage. I can still play stuff like Portal on my laptop, but I'm no longer any type of competitive in any shooters. I just feel right with a controller in my hand.

With controllers, I think there's some where it matters, some where it doesn't and comes down to personal preference, and where preference is involved it invites everyone into a holy war over which is better.

Scratched wrote:

With controllers, I think there's some where it matters, some where it doesn't and comes down to personal preference, and where preference is involved it invites everyone into a holy war over which is better.

This is the thing I hate most about the gaming community.

Not that I enjoyed the hand-to-hand combat or the parkour in the game any less or anything, but I really enjoyed the shooting in Mirror's Edge. Especially because I loved the way they handled gun audio, but also because I liked the complete lack of an interface, crosshairs, and all that mumbo jumbo I usually see in mainstream games that involve guns.

bo dp

Pikey26 wrote:

Not that I enjoyed the hand-to-hand combat or the parkour in the game any less or anything, but I really enjoyed the shooting in Mirror's Edge. Especially because I loved the way they handled gun audio, but also because I liked the complete lack of an interface, crosshairs, and all that mumbo jumbo I usually see in mainstream games that involve guns.

I wonder how many people would be shocked enough to slip into a coma if next year's big shooter (COD10 or whatever) worked like ArmA on realistic difficulties, although cleaned up a bit. No magic crosshair, and only looking down sights when you're still, etc.

I guess I just find the whole "realistic" and "authentic" shooters to be a bit weird in how easy they make marksmanship.

Dysplastic wrote:

I hate watching other people play video games.

Lots of people have great stories about playing single-player games as a team, or going through a narrative together with one person holding the controller. Well, unless I'm the one holding the controller/mouse, I hate it. And even then, I'm not a fan. Maybe its my inner control freak coming out, but if I'm an active participant in the game I need to be the one doing stuff, and if I'm not I'm just bored. I always hated when I had to participate in a fighting game tournament and just watch while waiting for my turn. This is also why I don't understand the appeal of E-sports.

Agreed, but the reverse is also true, because then you have someone with a completely different playstyle from you shouting out commands of what you "should" be doing all the time. Even the fact that she was willing to talk through cutscenes because she usually just skips them got on my nerves.

Fighting games should be the most popular e-sport.

I'm not sure why they haven't taken off in the same way that Starcraft and mobas have, but they're far more intuitive to watch and they go just as deep. Plus you get a ton of action in a relatively quick package, instead of the much longer RTS matches. The amount of excitement in that time frame is insane. Hopefully as the community continues to clean itself up and become more welcoming, this'll happen.

tboon wrote:
Eleima wrote:

I have spent over a thousand hours on Elder Scrolls games.
And I regret nothing. (Even though I probably should)

Why? They are great. I have at least that many as well across the series, starting with Arena.

Probably because I should have been doing something more productive with my time (or maybe I'm just channeling my mother ). I'm seriously afraid to try and count exactly how many hours I've spent on TES, I'm probably closer to 1,500, but I like it here in Denialland.

tboon wrote:
Eleima wrote:

I have never owned a single console. Ever.
My parents never allowed us to own any, to my great dismay (I wanted a SNES and then a Genesis sooooo baaaaaad). And ever since, I've only played on my PC. Sad, but true.

Is that a blasphemy? Really? I never owned one until I got my oldest an XBox in approx. 2003 (I started gaming in the late 70s). Now we have a Gamecube, Wii, and 360, but I have probably logged a total of 50 hours on all of them combined, mostly playing with my kids. Oh, and I have a PS2 I picked up to play Guitar Hero when that was a thing not included in that 50 hours. :)

Well it seems like most everyone nowadays has a console or a handheld of some sorts. Don't get me wrong, I've been eying the PS3 (really want to play Journey), the Wii (ever since it came out and we all played on a friend's) for a while now, I've just never been able to justify the purchase.

kuddles wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

I hate watching other people play video games.

Agreed, but the reverse is also true, because then you have someone with a completely different playstyle from you shouting out commands of what you "should" be doing all the time. Even the fact that she was willing to talk through cutscenes because she usually just skips them got on my nerves.

Oh gosh, that's so true!!! I hate both of those! That doesn't seem like much of a confession or a blasphemy though.

JillSammich wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Liking FF8 is blasphemy though.

I like Final Fantasy VIII

Ditto, at least up until we got into the crazy save the world from world-ending evil craziness.

Having done back and read the whole thing about how Squall died with the ice spike and everything after is like Purgatory or something (which is why that's when the crazy monsters, cactaur, and hallucinations of the other dude's life begin) actually resonated for me too and seemed like a much cooler story after going back and replaying the game.

kuddles wrote:
Dysplastic wrote:

I hate watching other people play video games.

Agreed, but the reverse is also true, because then you have someone with a completely different playstyle from you shouting out commands of what you "should" be doing all the time. Even the fact that she was willing to talk through cutscenes because she usually just skips them got on my nerves.

Oh gosh, that's so true!!! I hate both of those! That doesn't seem like much of a confession or a blasphemy though.

Given the amount of love that's being heaped on E-sports, living room gaming with the family, etc. these days, I certainly feel like my dislike of experiencing games passively puts me in the minority these days.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:
hbi2k wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
ccesarano wrote:

Just remembered one while listening to the podcast.

Mario Kart Double Dash!! is the best Mario Kart (on console at least), including being superior to Mario Kart 64.

I will always have fond memories of Super Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64, yes. But the technology for those games has shown their age, in particular Mario 64 (as have any games on the Playstation and N64 that relied on 3D backgrounds with God awful eye-bleeding textures).

Mario Kart Double Dash!! manages to stand the test of time. It still looks good, you can tell what you're looking at, the environment feels alive and, while it did have the Blue Shell, it was not yet as common and damning as it has become in recent Mario Kart games. It is the only Mario Kart that, to this day, I can plug in, play and still have a smile on my face, succumbing to the illusion that it is a flawless experience.

That's not a confession, it's a KNOWN FACT™

Y'all are my new best friends.

WORD! The hours Stylez, his former housemates and I put into Double Dash!!, man that game was so good! I actually tracked down and bought two of the coveted Gamecube LAN adapters at one point. You ain't played Double Dash!! proper until you've played it with 8 people!

Blue Shell was often my only opponent. Man I put a lot of time into Double Dash.

JillSammich wrote:
Quintin_Stone wrote:

Liking FF8 is blasphemy though.

I like Final Fantasy VIII

Hell it's my favorite out of the bunch. I can't stand 7 either. Oh and 6 which a lot of people love just was boring to me.