Games that changed your life as a kid?

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Probably Fable: The Lost Chapters. The music still makes me cri. The first Mercenaries game was good too. Oh, and Star Wars: Republic Commando. That shit was coooooooool
 
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abcdefg

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garrysmod and im fucking serious, made me realize how a lot of power and authority can get to ur head
im a server admin on my tf2 server would you like to join it's saxton hale and jailbreak and deathrun !
 

Hudson

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Delta Force 2 on NovaLogic's cheat-ridden multiplayer. Tons of fun which had little or no competition as an experience at the time. That game did things that others still haven't repeated. I think there was a call of duty game that advertised "reactive fish" which was one of the hundreds of things DF2 did all the way back in the late 90's. More forgotten than groundbreaking.

Runescape, for giving me a stimulating and immersive escape when I had too many life issues to cope with. Eventually the 2nd version came out, and skill capes were released, sparking a rush for people to reach level 99 in something. I was one of the first to get 99 cooking, which is a great satisfaction to wear the cape, and you'd get players following you asking you to do the cape emote. I'd grow up and see the 3rd version of the game come out, splitting the playerbase between that version and the 07 "oldschool" one, but the original classic will always be my favorite for being there when I needed it. Getting 99 in something these days would probably get you called a "no-lifer" but for awhile chasing a 99 was a cool thing to do.
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Aliens vs Predator singleplayer which was disturbing for the 11 year old me at the time, being stranded in dark maps with aliens coming after you while you're trying to figure out how to escape. It was in 3D with lighting and graphics and sounds realistic enough to immerse you into a state of fear. The multiplayer on gamespy arcade was excellent being very fast paced and bloody in player v player, or relaxed fun in co-op.

Rainbow Six was the one for tactics. Graphics were still primitive back then, but what the developers managed to do with limited tools was amazing in delivering a real taste of something. Rainbow Six was one of the few games(like Day of Defeat) to have a dynamic crosshair and weapons that could drop you in one shot. It made you think about what you were doing in your positioning and approach to a mission or situation, rather than run in a hold mouse 1, because you'd easily get killed.

Simcity 3000, Age of Empires 2, and Celtic Kings offering great feelings of building up functioning towns, and often giving some historic(however crude) insights into life in the last 2,000 years. Tons of growth, beneficial research, overcoming problems and conflicts. Age of Empires 3 would come along being the most complete game as a product in my opinion, only once encountering a glitch in all of 2,000 hours played, and never crashing to desktop. Custom scenarios in AOE2 on msn gaming zone was an amazing time.

Half-Life mods. Counter-Strike was huge, bringing so many players to the Steam beta. I remember playing in a CS LAN tournament in 2003 and winning for the region. I recently came across a newsletter that mentioned our clan victory(suicidal).
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Team Fortress Classic had(and I think still has) the biggest skill ceiling in an fps. Try it, and you've got rocket jumpers priming nades to your movement path, killing you almost instantly with no hope of being able to fight back. The learning curve for the meta is horrible, but having played when it was a young game was plenty of fun when you were able to survive and master a specific weapon or playstyle. So many decent Half-Life mods had small playerbases but offered unique experiences and cool gameplay. Zombie Panic, Battlegrounds, Brain Bread, Digital Paintball, Day of Defeat, The Trenches, The Specialists, Natural Selection, and several others.

I dipped into console gaming often, starting with the SNES and probably trying every console in the European market after that. Bomberman on the SNES and Goldeneye for the N64 were great for split-screen multiplayer, with Halo CE for fantastic co-op, and Halo 2 for the Xbox Live internet fun in custom matches and matchmaking. Halo 3 and Gears of War were my last serious console games before I focused back mainly on PC, as the limits for console entertainment seemed to be reached for me. I wanted bigger battles, the dynamics of RTS matches, and modified simracing games.

Red Orchestra, for representing the expanding functions of the Steam platform. There were a few platforms around, but RO was one of the first decent non-Valve games to be made available on Steam. Considering that there's thousands of games on Steam now, it was an important one in my eyes. Being in a large realistic WW2 battle was stimulating on a level not many games seem to have, so it was a good early addition to Steam. DoD was a lot less realistic, but maybe a bit more entertaining.
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Race07 would be another of the early non-Valve games I got into, being a proper racing game. The word "simulator" gets thrown around these days, but games like Race07 and rFactor had proper physics like a simulator should(compared to an unrealistic arcade game that calls itself a sim). My brother got me a wheel, and my experience of racing games took on a new life. You can actually feel the car with the force feedback motor in the wheel when playing a realistic racing game. I'd end up racing in multiple leagues, helping count the scores for the championships, and enjoying the meaningful events that were tied to a gripping level of competition. I raced my brother enough to make a video of us in various games.


Battlefield 2 was a game that struck a balance between realism and arcade, vehicles and infantry, balancing and the raw overpowered nature of the more efficient weapons and roles in combat. Tanks, jets, and choppers weren't too disporportionately strong, but after the playerbase moved on and the servers shut down I doubt we'll see a populated game like that again. Environments were getting destructible, cockpit glass was penetrable, ranks were implemented, and stats tracked your activity. It felt properly groundbreaking, and the place to be. These days games are either balanced out to feel completely arcade, or you've got the clunky realism of Arma. My favorite screenshot was of my friends in the =UE= clan, often acting as a fireteam going behind enemy lines to steal outposts or destroy assets.
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Kerbal Space Program broadened my grasp of physics, scale, time, significance, and changing my senses of what I felt life was about. I feel like it changed my experience more completely than any game ever has, in ways I doubt I could articulate. Leaving a planet in a tiny rocket, and finding that the planet was a tiny ball, and that if I zoomed out then even the solar system was a few specs of dust in an epic sea of emotionless void.

I don't know where I'd draw the line and say that I grew up between playing a certain game and moving to the next one, but I didn't suddenly turn into an adult or be immune to games changing my life.

Gmod roleplay expanded games for me as a social experience. Spending hundreds of hours on downtown(extremeRP/darkRP) hanging out with the regulars who often became good friends. The interactivity of a social playerbase, in a functioning economy driven by a hunger bar for the constant purchasing and supply of food, and the desire for expensive weapons which produced a thriving guns and ammunition market, with the whole cops and robbers thing going on was like living in a dream world. You really got to know people through that system. HL2RP would come along, fleshing out the roleplay aspect but butchering the economy. As long as there wasn't abuse, it was fun for me.
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For me since then it's been more Counter-Strike, more simracing, more Gmod. Trying to ignore the feelings of wanting to go back to the grind of Runescape.
 
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Angel

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Pokemon
Anything gameboy

GTA 3/Vice City
Sly Cooper
Runescape
Fable 2

So many great games I used to love man... gamecube was awesome.
 

swagile

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Same as @Hudson

Runescape.

I have absolutely no shame about it. I still vividly remember the first time I got scammed was when I was like ten years old; I lost that big ass maul hammer that cost like 500K back then and I was crying my heart out about it because I earned that after a entire week of grinding flax. Cringy I know but it was the first time I got fucked over.

I also remember the good ol' quests I went about doing, the crazy events I got myself into, and Castlewars with my buddies.

Fuck Runescape sucks now and bringing back the old 2007 edition will never bring back the old feels; its just there as a cash grab for people who are way too nostalgic of those times.
 
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Expax

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Warcraft, All stronghold games, Mount and Blade, Original Starcraft, GTA Vice City on the PSP
 
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Silent Hill- series, especially at young age the first one.
My big brother was about 16 and I was 7 and we owned a PS1 together.
When I was alone at home after my school, I got this from his shelf and played it.
After starting to play these series, nothing really scared me anymore, even at young age and people thought I was going to grow up to be a complete psychopath, turned out just fine.
 
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Inspector Bandito

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Cold Winter deserves the top spot

Then there's Shadow of the Colosseus, Mario Kart, CB, GTA 3/VC/SA and the Matrix

Ofc there's more of them but I've forgot