What game has left an lasting impression on you guys?

jonanthan boakes , " the lost crown" can't wait for his next installment "the last crown"

For me it's definitely the Monkey Island series. These games have really left the biggest impression on me ever since the good ol' Amiga 500 days. I remember playing through the first two games in the beginning of the 90's with a dictionary next to the mouse in order for me to understand everything that was said in the games. I was probably around 11 years old at the time and had only had English in school for a year or so although I knew a lot of English already based on a lot of C64 gaming

I remember Monkey 1 came on 4 discs whereas Monkey 2 came on 11 discs. It was hell to juggle through Monkey 2 as one screen could sometimes mean I had to use 3 different discs to even load that one screen. But that didn't bring me down ... I kept at it until the end!

Today I can still find it nostalgic and amusing to load up the old games and play through them - and now with the new Special Edition remakes with voice-over and better graphics, it's even better than before!

Aarghh, I hate it when a plural is absent! If I really had to think about it and think of the true meaning of "lasting impression", i'd say it would have to be between Super Mario Brothers and Doom 2. While my tastes in gaming have widened immensely since my childhood, those two games triggered my obsession with gaming and to this day rank amongst my favourites. So much so, I continue to purchase subsequent ports of Doom 2 (the latest being the iPod Touch version) and the various Mario side scrollers for DS/3DS.

When it comes to those two games, i'm a purist. I'm not interested in the re-imagining no matter how good the graphics are. I want them in the original format. I don't mind if they're remakes but it has to be faithful to the control and feel of the originals. It's strange and perhaps a bit of a concern that after about 20 years, I love those games as much, if not more, than I did back then.

The Donkey Kong Country series. My favorite childhood memory, going on Christmas vacation and always having a new Donkey Kong game to spend hours and hours with.

Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight (the material in 3 was good long before Dan Brown), King's Quest (except the last one--what happened?), some of the Indiana Jones games, and Laura Bow.


Kait

The Grim Fandango. Wonderful concept for a game. Burrowed deep into my mind and made a home there.

The biggest impact? DigDug. I saw it on a Commodore 64 my brother had borrowed off a friend when I got home from kindergarten at the tender age of... four or five I suppose.

I saw this weird machine hooked up to the television and realized that, with the stick my brother held, he could control that thing moving on the screen. I was amazed!

But as for the best game I've ever played? Grim Fandango. No contest.

However, I did shed a tear during the ending sequence to Final Fantasy VIII.

-Fred

Oh this is a tough one. For me, there's obviously the Zork series. Those were some of the first games I played and really got me into gaming. I also love the quirky humor in them.

I thought the stories in the Final Fantasy games were pretty good. And, the Baldur's Gate games in my mind are some of the best RPG games ever made.

The last game is the Gran Turismo series. GT3 was the entire reason I bought a PS2 and really got back into gaming.

I am sure I'm missing some great games, but those are the ones that come to mind right now.

I have to agree with Plumgas regarding The Lost Crown. I love Jonathan Boakes' work, including the Dark Fall series.

As DCat said, the Zork series is also one that I regard very highly.

The original Alone in the Dark from 1991 also holds a special place for me, as it was the first adventure game I played with my dad. I still play it from time to time.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is also a favorite. The story material, the dialog, and the music in that one were captivating.

Eesh, that's a tough one.

I guess any game i've completed more than once qualifies.

Perhaps the original Police Quest is a good answer. My introduction to adventure gaming and i've gone back to it many a time throughout the years.

Games like Bubble Bobble and Up'n'Down on the Commodore 64 have also been played an insane amount of times in my household ... But then again - I could go on forever with nostalgic games I've played ever since the tender age of 3 (1983) or so.

Atomicvegetable wrote:Perhaps the original Police Quest is a good answer. My introduction to adventure gaming and i've gone back to it many a time throughout the years.

Whoa! The original EGA Police Quest was my introduction to adventure games, too! It may even have been my first video game of any kind! I played it on a very old PC, an XT, maybe, with a big red flipper power switch on the right side, near the back. I loved the buzz of the 5.25" floppy drive during boot-up.

Due to my weak English skills back then, I didn't understand everything that was going on. That wasn't what stonewalled me, though. It was a mysterious, incomprehensible card game called five-card draw poker.

I was so angry. I was so close to the end, and this dumb, totally unfair grown-up card game stopped me cold! My encyclopedia set was no help at all—I couldn't comprehend its description of poker. It took many, many years before I finally figured out the basics of that confounded game. Ugh...

Well, anyway, I like to think games like that raised me to view video games as the greatest storytelling medium currently in existence. No other medium can enthrall me like a video game does. Many have expanded my mind, given me all kinds of new viewpoints to consider. They've even helped me learn English. I credit Sierra and Dynamix adventure games and the Super NES RPGs Final Fantasy III (actually Final Fantasy VI renumbered), Chrono Trigger, and EarthBound for refining my understanding of basic English grammar, greatly expanding my vocabulary, and improving my flexibility with the language.

The first game to come to mind that left a lasting impression on me was Terranigma, a Japanese Super NES action-RPG released in English in the U.K. and Australia only, as far as I know. The main story of Terranigma is a story of good versus evil with many, many twists, turns, and layers. An optional part of the story involves being the key catalyst influencing several world events, each of which illustrates a different philosophy of life. As a teenager, I was quite fascinated by the balanced portrayal of each viewpoint.

For example, in a small country town, your vote in an election will decide whether a democratic politician or a communistic politician will lead. If you choose the democratic politician, the town will grow into a big city and prosper. A gifted seamstress will leave the tyranny of her taskmistress and open her own boutique, quickly ruining her former taskmistress and allowing the seamstress to flourish. However, the city's prosperity will condemn the resident artist to producing art like a factory, no longer for his love of art, to meet the growing worldwide demand for his works.

If you choose the communistic politician, the town will never grow. However, the gifted seamstress' cruel taskmistress will change her ways to adapt to the new communist economy, becoming much kinder to her seamstresses in the process. The gifted seamstress will decide to stay with her taskmistress, but this means her talent will never flourish independently. The artist, meanwhile, will blissfully continue making art to his heart's content.

Another example is a small, sunny little island town. Although it is a very inviting place, nobody else in the world knows about it. By advertising the town around the world as a tourist destination, you can bring it new prosperity and growth. However, the newly grown tourist town will then capture many of your animal friends from an earlier chapter of the game to populate its new zoo. Their vast former habitats become as ghost towns, the zoo, a stifling prison.

The most affecting part for me, however, was the ending. After struggling so long, from beginning to end, with the hero, the game kicked us in the teeth with a bittersweet ending that was far more bitter than sweet. It shook me to the core. I wanted to cry, but I didn't know how. It didn't help that my high-school graduation party was the next day. To this day, I have trouble replaying Terranigma because I'm afraid of reaching the ending again.

Many in the world will dismiss what I've just described as nothing, even less than nothing, compared to the world's literary, theatrical, film, and television masterworks. As a teenager, however, I felt I was learning some important lessons, although I wasn't exactly sure what they were. The hero's struggles were my struggles. His happiness was my happiness. His despair was my despair. His lessons were my lessons. No other medium could have touched me this deeply.

I felt strongly then, just as I do now, that video games were an emerging medium of expression with its own growing body of masterworks. I yearn for the day humans in general, including gamers themselves, will finally see video games as more than just playthings. Then, video games will finally stand tall among literature, theater, film, and television.

really nice comment mate, and a good read
i feal the same way about lerning english too, as english is my second language, i REALLY had to try to learn it at school to beat the game at home and for that i thank DOTT and FOA.

Deco Bryl wrote:

Atomicvegetable wrote:Perhaps the original Police Quest is a good answer. My introduction to adventure gaming and i've gone back to it many a time throughout the years.

Whoa! The original EGA Police Quest was my introduction to adventure games, too! It may even have been my first video game of any kind! I played it on a very old PC, an XT, maybe, with a big red flipper power switch on the right side, near the back. I loved the buzz of the 5.25" floppy drive during boot-up.

Due to my weak English skills back then, I didn't understand everything that was going on.

Haha yeah, my copy was on three 5.25" floppies too. I've heard many awesome stories about adventure games and RPGs helping to teach English as a second language. Believe it or not, Police Quest aided me with English as a native language. Thanks to that game, i learned (and never forgot) how to spell 'license'