Slashdot Mirror
What Games Have Actually Affected You?
FortKnox asks: "What games have affected you simply by playing them? What games immersed you so well into its environment that you actually felt different after playing it? For me, I'd have to go with System Shock 2. Basically the predecessor to Deus Ex, it was the only game that made me so afraid that the minute I heard a matron mother, I turned the other way and ran. What game scared you to death, or made you think after playing it?"
I'd have to say the game that most affected me is Global Thermonuclear War.
I swear, I'll never play that game in the dark again. Damned headcrabs scared the hell out of me, jumping out of dark corners and attacking me in air ducts.
Afterwards I hard a hard time getting to sleep since there was a storm outside and it sounded like the headcrabs were coming to get me.
"They told me it was impossible. I replied with maniacal laughter." http://www.mydailyrant.com/
There are times now in traffic when I get that unimistakable urge to just pull into the oncoming lane to pass some slow moron in front of me, or to pull the guy who cut me off out of his car at the next red light and lay a beating on his ass.
I don't do it, of course, but one can dream... and I know I'm not alone, because I've seen other posts on here from people similarly afflicted.
tony hawk's pro skater: everything is a grind or jump these days...
-- ribbit
Yeah it was 1983...yeah it was on the Commodore, but who needs more than 64k anyway?
I can't seem to quit playing this god forsaken game no matter how hard I try. On the other hand, it has taught to me to double check everything before you accept a trade. :)
I played it for 72 hours straight and got severely dehydrated. If I hadn't looked at the clock I, might have died.
I always got scared playing that... it was too quiet... I was always expecting someone to come out from around a corner shooting... :o
The worst part was that my brothers would always come in and scare the shit out of me.
But I guess I'm just a pussy... :\
Once I was talking to someone about the benefits of recycling and solar power and then I realized I was basing my entire discussion on what I had learned from playing Sim City 4.
If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Oh boo hoo
When I started playing it, it switched my allegiance from strongly Star Trek to strongly Star Wars. I've since acheived a comfortable geequalibrium between Star Trek, Star Wars and Tolkien.
I've noticed a 10 mph or so increase in my driving speed after an evening of Gran Turismo. I don't notice going faster, I just realize that I'm getting places earlier.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Its really the simple games that get me the most. To really play minesweeper well, you have to commit complex patterns to instinct and then defocus your eyes a little so that you see and comprehend all of the field at one time. Then you sort of make your world one with the field and shut out everything else. After a few hours of minesweeper, I'm a very dangerous driver because turning off that pattern matching logic is difficult. I tend to find myself instinctively relating the cars to the cells of the field and wondering which are the bombs.
Nothing else comes close. Several months ago my machine crashed and I had to reformat my hard drive. By this time I was already having dreams ascii dungeons, monsters, and a 'd' following me around hoping for '%'. I decided maybe it was best if I didn't reinstall nethack. Though there's still those darn public nethack machines....
I don't know if I'm the best example, though. I've spent tortured nights dreaming of physics problems, one or two particularly bad nights dreaming of C++, and even come up with a Pascal algorithm or two in my sleep.
Of course, I have also come upon the secret of life once or twice in my sleep, but can never seem to remember it when I wake up...
Tweet, tweet.
I think I'll stay away from those fire flowers, I can't imagine what those would do to me.
take off every sig for great justice
It introduced me to sleeping with hookers. I've never felt so diseased!
When I heard the sound of that little white square hitting that white line, knowing that the little white square was now headed toward my white line, I was so frightened I turned and ran.
But then they stopped keeping score.
DUDE! I was playing Duke3D for the first time, and I was just about to end the first level, when my Weird Al CD playing (which had "ended" quite a while ago), played a bonus 10 second snippet of weird al screaming and a lot of weird sounds going on.
Scared the shit out of me.
Talk about nearly peeing yourself.
MORTAR COMBAT!
That damn dog. I shot him for hours on end. Fucker always just laughed. DIEDIEDIE
If it wasn't for Leisure Suit Larry, I wouldn't know that failing to take a condom off after sex results in terrible disease.
Thanks Al!
Not long after the DOOM phenomenon began, I had to sleep in my basement during the period after I gutted my bedroom and before my new furniture for it arrived. The basement has wood-paneled walls, and a lot of stuff hanging on them. One night as I was sleeping down there, one corner of a "frameless" picture frame decided to let go of the nail upon which it was hanging at about 3am one morning. It began swinging back and forth on the remaining nail, scraping against the paneling. It made a noise that was practically indistinguishable from the tearing noise you heard when one of the baddies in DOOM (the guy on the right side in this screenshot) got too close to you and started inflicting damage by clawing at you.
That noise immediately triggered said DOOM character's appearance in a dream, and about 10 seconds later I bolted upright, wide awake and feeling around for my gun, any gun-- what woke me up was the feeling panic that I was taking damage from that guy, and I couldn't see where he was to shoot him. Then I realized it was a dream. THEN I realized I still heard the sound, even though I was awake. Finally, I noticed the swinging picture frame, laughed sheepishly and pulled it off the wall before going back to sleep.
Might have been responsible for me and my roomate dropping out if college. My old roomate to this day claims he "became Darth Vader".
Playing a marathon game, co-op with a friend... got to the Flood at 4AM on a stormy night. Geez, that was crazy. Likewise w/ Eternal Darkness... the sanity stat was the craziest thing I ever saw. That and the fact that most of the sanity effects were geared at the PLAYER. I still remember seeing a BSOD come up... man that was wierd. That and the fact that I got so into it that I actually went and answered the knocking door... not in game but at my house...
When you had to rail a car RIGHT on to get it to do a 360.
The announcer yells,"Threeeeee SIXTEEEEEE!"
Its awesome... So I'm driving home after 6 hours, and see someone pulling out of his driveway.
Now since the timing in the game is like under a second which way you need to aim, you don't really have much time to think about your actions.
I almost deliberately turned into the back of this person coming out of their driveway because I was in an almost hypnotic state, thinking of the game.
So to get people suggestive:
#1: Use lots of loud and cool noises in your game to reward people for doing cool things.
#2: Have the cool thing be something very similar and realistic to real life.
#3: Leave the window for the action to be under a second, so conscious thought can not control a reflex action.
Then guaranteed at least 1 or 2 people out there would do the shit in real life.
God spoke to me
...or at least its introductiory sequence. When something unexpected happens, I now say "what happen?" by force of habit. Toaplan hath set me up the bomb.
"Screw slashdot." -- Linus Torvalds
For a few weeks i was stuck in a rather remote location with a Compaq II as company.
It had this 'Tetris' game on it and I started playing it but found it rather impossible, the 'highest scores' showed several hundreds of points by some unknown predecessor and I could not even reach 100...
I figured they had 'edited' the list.
After about 10 days of playing I scored in the 10's of thousands and went loopy, even ordinary daily problems seemed like a bunch of falling blocks that only needed organising before hitting the floor.
Scary, I laid off of the game for more than a year before I tried again.
But I had several calls of collegues if it was me that had got to these high Tetris scores on that field computer...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'll never forget after one all night Doom session, leaving work down a hallway when the elevator door opened. I literally jumped to the side of it before realizing that I was no longer playing.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
My friends and I still say the infamous "Casualty" whenever we accidentally break/destroy something.
Many times it would have made everything better when you accidentally fry some CPU/expensive component if only the great deep voice from the sky stated loud and clear: "Casualty."
And when you spill your entire cup of coffee into your computer, you'd get a high-quality "Casualties!" to put a smile on your face. Genius, I say.
Jesus ! for all this years i thougt it was just me !
I remember having recurring nightmares in which i was playing an impossible level, every piece was falling fast and when at last i was downing the pile. Suddenly a bright blue sphere apeared falling.. slow, very slow. And then I started to think desperately.. where the f*ck can i put the sphere ! where ! and every time i woke up sweating with my heart sounding as a train..
After some nights like this i quit playing tetris, i loved it, but it was too dangerous.. i was't playing it, it was the game who was playing with my mind.
True Story
It's the first Hawk game I played of the series, and I still fire it up from time-to-time.
It affected me to the point where, walking down the street, I'd notice a rail or a bench or what-have-you, and think "I could darkslide that, no problem!"
Even worse, I'd be watching one of those extreme sports shows, and anytime I'd see someone do some crazy trick in the halfpipe, I'd be, like, "Whatever! I can do that. That dude sucks."
Of course, after a minute, I'd remember: Oh yeah, that guy's doing it for real...
=)
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
nice link. I like how it gives you an error message. I now understand why you were very, very angry. If you want, you can try the html version. Not that there is much ado on that page, but whatever.
YOU SUCK BALLS!
I mean, be honest, does anyone here want to meet a grue? It may have just been text, but it surely changed my life.
Civ, for letting me spectaculary fail an RE exam
I believe the question was "Descibe a cration theory".
I wrote
"In the begining, the earth was without form, and void
but the sun shone upon the sleeping Earth
and deep inside the brittle crust
massive forces waited to be unleashed...."
About ten years ago, I was home from college during the summer, and making a little extra cash by being a receptionist at an insurance company office.
...and play Tetris on the 386 running Windows 3.1 on my desk. So I played it a lot. For hours on end, day in and day out: racking up some pretty impressive scores, and spending almost entire days in the Tetris Zone.
Being the middle of summer, half of the adjusters were on vacation, and the rest of them were taking as many personal days as they could manage. There was nothing to do except answer the phone when it rang twice a day...
This went on for about three weeks, until one afternoon I had to put a particularly intense game on hold to go answer the call of nature. I ambled into the bathroom, sat down in one of the stalls and was all set to do my business, until I made a fatal mistake: I looked down...at the floor made out of thousands and thousands of 1.5" white square tiles.
I swear to god the entire room tilted sideways, and if I hadn't been sitting down, I would have fallen. I could feel the parts of my brain that had been doing nothing but tetris pattern recognition for the previous four hours having a near-meltdown as they looked at this solid mass of blocks and tried to map tetris shapes onto each of them. For about 15 seconds, it was like watching a thousand games of tetris played at once, transparently overlaid on each other. I imagine that the sensation was a little bit like what epileptics feel: a firestorm of neurons triggering all at once.
As drug experiences go, it had a lot to recommend it, but I have never really wanted to play Tetris since. Just say no.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
People are mad at me when I enact the game.
.smell my feet.
It made me so damn dizzy i puked in the washroom and could walk straight back to my comp to finish the first level.
Aside from the many hours of my life sunk into the game, there was more than one occasion when driving home after playing netrek for too long I felt the quite natural urge to ogg the oncoming traffic.
Ships coming the other direction, must latch onto them and blow up!
Ignoring the first, are we? Hell, the story to the original Dragon Quest/Warrior was more coherent than the three or four paradoxes that one caused...
- If I killed Garland in the beginning of the game, who got sent back in time?
- If I killed the Four Fiends, who sends Garland back in time?
- If I go back in time and kill Garland then, who spawns the Four Fiends?
- If I killed the Four Fiends in the past on my way to killing Garland for the second (first?) time, how come they manage to make it to the present unscathed?
Square: Um... uh... Hey, look! There's a hidden tile game in it!In Soviet Russia, Tetris plays YOU.
hours and hours of fun. I almost failed high school because of it...
:)
The sounds of barney throughout the levels!
Scary shit
huh?
Jones in the Fast Lane... This game scarred me for life.
I used to play it when I was little, and when "Wiley Willy" used to pop-out of nowhere and steal all your money - I'd get so freaked out I'd cry.
Hardcore baby.
Truly, the only way to win this game was not to play
that might have been the point
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Once I played Sim City 2000 for 11 hours straight. Afterwards I was seeing people as mixtures of commercial, residential, and industrial zoning. Took a few hours for that to wear off.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Zork taught me never to wander about in the dark, period. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
make world, not war
My three reactions to this:
1. Geez, some loser geek fanboy wannabe poser pretending he knows...oh, right, that's Wil Wheaton.
2. Too young? Too YOUNG? Too shy, maybe, but certainly not too young.
3. It's probably a lot easier to fill the skyline in now that the two long tetrads are gone =(
After hours of Quake CTF online, I remember watching TV and seeing an ad where you were looking down a tube with a down-escalator in it, with a guy standing on it in a suit reading a paper. I commented to my buddy, damn! I've an urge to jump down into that tube and blast a rocket up his ass!
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
I had the Warcraft 2 CD in there when I started Quake up one time. I remember thinking "What the fuck has Trent been smoking?"
... if the definition is 'wasted a semester of my education on it', I'd have to say Netrek or Civ would qualify.
Games like Civ and SimCity definitely affected my worldview though.