leileilol wrote:I was 17 when Quake came out, so............................. when I was 8 I was playing Vette, driving around virtual San Fran rather than racing.
DUDE! I used to play ColorVette all the time in the years before we got a pc! I love bashing into the paperthin motorcycles when going really fast, and they slide like a whole block. Or hitting the pedestrians hard enough that they never get up again. YEAH!
Anyway, I'm not very old, relatively. I played a lot of old games, but they were old already when I was playing them. Our household didn't get a PC till 1998, and then I played the Quake2 demo from a PC Gamer cd. I probably played through that demo a hundred times. A year or two later my brother came home with a Quake CD which he had found in a bargain bin. It had never occurred to me before that there was a Quake "1" and I'd never heard of it before (we didn't have the internet). He paid $10 for it, and typically of him he said I had to pay a loonie each time to play it. I somehow came into the possession of $5 and gave it to him so that we could share co-ownership of the CD. I remember being freaked out by the first shambler, and not knowing how to beat Chthon (incredible as it may seem).
At that young age I would become immersed in any game automatically, with absolutely no pretensions or even awareness of how they work, or whether this or that mechanic sucks. But this immersion wasn't of the "I AM the player" sort, which I suspect is impossible except to seriously messed up nerd types. Instead, I accepted the game as a game, but completely. I thought the square-particle blood looked really cool without ever noticing that it was "crappy" or unrealistic as blood (I probably never even mentally associated it with real blood, it was just part of the game reality, red pixels that fly out when you shoot an enemy). This was a pure and invincible sort of immersion, since I simply didn't possess the level of brainwaves that could question or be aware of it. I also didn't notice that there were pentagrams on all the wall buttons until at least five years later, when it was pointed out to me by someone who noticed it right away.
So in short I was kind of an idiot, but a blissful one I guess. At least half of this effect was due to my retarded brain, rather than some immersive quality that old games had but new ones don't. (However, the other half of the effect probably is indeed such a now-lost quality, due to old games now trying to imitate reality so closely and feebly.)
What's interesting is that I was already programming by the time I first played Quake. I guess Quake was so far out of my league that I didn't realize that "real" games were, in fact, programmed just like my crappy ones were. (It wasn't until I got the internet, and maybe a year or two after that, that I realized that Quake could be something called "modded".) Anyway, you'd think that if I was programming I would be smart enough to take a critical approach when playing games. But perhaps my right brain was sharp but my left brain was retarded. Anyway, that cynicism came soon enough and has long since ruined all possibility of me truly enjoying a video game ever again.
F. A. Špork, an enlightened nobleman and a great patron of art, had a stately Baroque spa complex built on the banks of the River Labe.
Mon Mar 07, 2011 1:42 am 
Inquisitive minds want to know ! And if they don't -- well like that ever has stopped me before ..
at the time i was pretty well versed in duke nukem alongside a plethora of other old games using the build engine like redneck rampage.