What game was a "Game Changer" for you?

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Incramus

Limp Gawd
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The threads "So what's your nostalgia game?" & "What GAME series do you wish they bring back?" got me thinking, What game(s) was a "Game Changer" for you?

Here my list: (just off the top)



*The very first super Mario bros. Smooth controls and the side-scrolling was amazing...lol

*ActRaiser (SNES) The background graphics were next-gen.

*Virtua Fighter & Daytona USA on Sega Saturn; both were ground breaking to me. First games I played that made me feel like I was playing at an arcade (but I wasn't I was home!!)

*Mario 64

*First NBA 2K



I'm sure more will come to mind.
 
For me at least in no particular order:

WoW - the first game that made me feel truly IN a world.
the original CoD. - intensity
UT2k4 - vehicle combat like WHOA
battlefield 1942 and subsequent Desert Combat mod. - huge multiplayer combat
SW:KOTOR - just something about this i adored.
quake - WHOA BLOOD COOL!!
 
Seeing the Original Contra in the Arcade =)

Then seeing Kung Fu on the NES demo in the store I was used to Atari games so anything better then Atari was amazing.

For PC seeing Playing Kings Quest on a friends PC was really moving.


Kung_Fu.JPG
 
The Original CoD. (I do not like FPS games but that one was just amazing online)
Street Fighter 2/Mortal Kombat (now I'm addicted to all 2d fighting games old and new)
Miracle Warriors on Sega Master System (first ever RPG and I have been hooked since)
Super Mario Mario 3/Sonic 2 (Side scrolling platformers for the win!)
Road Rash (nuff said)
Castlevania 2/3/SoTN (they need one's with true HD visuals)

There are so many good games that need HD remakes not (3D) but HD remakes.
 
The original DOOM for PC. It was the first PC game I ever played and even though the flying meatball monsters scared me, I couldn't turn away from the game design.
Grand Theft Auto:III. That's when I stopped playing side-scrollers and colorful Nintendo games so much.
Halo:Combat Evolved is when I started playing games competitively.
 
RaRaMe said:
The original DOOM for PC. It was the first PC game I ever played and even though the flying meatball monsters scared me, I couldn't turn away from the game design.
Grand Theft Auto:III. That's when I stopped playing side-scrollers and colorful Nintendo games so much.
Halo:Combat Evolved is when I started playing games competitively.
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I played Grand Theft Auto: III so much that I struggle with that Genre now.
 
A game changer was John Carmack. His engines were even more game changers. Quake 3 and the mods and other games that utilized the tech 3 engine, this almost perfect engine, were amazing to play. MOHAA + expansion, the OG COD1/2, Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Urban Terror MOD, Return to Castle Wolfenstein. So much awesomeness. And, who can forget the Quake engine, and what Valve was able to do with it with Gldsrc. Half-Life + Expansions which came TONs of mods (Scientist Hunt anyone?). Counter Strike alone was a game changer for me. Natural Selection... The list goes on.

ID Tech 2/3 engines and the work John Carmack did was the best thing to come to PC gaming. Bar none.

Think I might play some MOHAA....
 
Super smash bros
Mario 64
Final fantasy 7,8,9,10
Legend of dragoon
Everquest online adventures (first console mmorpg, back when EQ was still huge)
GTA 3 and Vice city
Call of duty modern warfare (never played online shooters before this was the start for me)
 
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Daggerfall is really what got me hooked on pc gaming. I couldn't believe how huge and expansive everything was.I was amazed at how it seemed like anything was possible.
 
Half life - The FPS game changer for me. Showed what could be done with a storyline and characters without resorting to cheesy cutscenes (at the time most games had really really cheesy cutscenes).


Myth II: Soulblighter - A departure from your usual RTS games, like Age of Empires and others around this era. Unlike those there was zero base building, no resource gathering, it was purely focused on the storyline and the battles, and it was amazing. Each level you had a set number of troops and had to make smart use of each of them to survive and make it to the next. The environment played a huge role in the gameplay, hills gave you longer aim for archers/dwarves, weather affected things (IE Fire arrows would randomly go out), and it made ample use of physics (one of the first games IIRC, this is in 98 btw).

Then there was mutliplayer, it was such a blast. It was like the "half life" of the RTS genre, ton of user-created maps, total conversions, lots of active players, a ranking system, you could play both competitive with a huge variety of game modes (CTF, last man on the hill, capture the bacon and others) and also do co op through the entire single player storyline.

Sadly, there really hasn't been any other games like it since then, most just focus on an age of empires/Civ style of gameplay or focus your control over a huge number of units you have to micromanage rather then the more personal style of the Myth games, where you focused more on direct orders and following a general "small" group under your control which let you focus more and didn't have to constantly jumping around a map.

Ultima Online - Got me into mmo's, to me THIS is what an mmoRPG should be. It felt like you were literally dropped into a living breathing world filled with other real people and you were free to play and do as YOU wanted, NOT as the game dictated or "Told" you to do. This is the truest form of "RPG" I experienced in an mmo setting, allowing players to be good or bad, or any shade in between. Sadly after UO, aside from some indie dev attempts there's really been no AAA mmo that went for that kind of game, just copy eq/wow and paste a new skin over it.

Severance (aka Blade of darkness)- to this day no game has came close to having as good melee combat as this game, sadly it seems that no developer has played it or knows about it enough to "Borrow" the framework it set for melee combat.
 
ITT: People think that games they really liked automatically make them game changers.
 
Megalith said:
ITT: People think that games they really liked automatically make them game changers.
Click to expand...

I think the thread was worded in a way that asked for personal game changers. Not games that changed gaming overall, so I think it's fair.
 
One on One (1983)

I had been playing Atari 2600 games for the last year or two and my uncle bought a C64 and this was the first game I ever saw on it. I was completely blown away by the graphics and gameplay. This one game did more to hook my on gaming than anything from the Atari did.
 
Test Drive 3: The Passion - when I first saw it on a PC, it blew me away that this is possible. All I had was a C64 at the time, so the difference was huge.
IndyCar - I first saw it on TV in some IT show. It was beyond everything I saw before both in realism, and in graphics.
Mafia - It showed me that an action game doesn't have to have dumbed down car action. This game had better physics, and utilized racing wheels and FF better than most HC simulators of the time.
Wing Commander 3 - The first time I saw FMV with actors and shit played on a computer. But I never actually played the game, just the rolling demo.
DeusEx - This game introduced me to the concept of RPGs, where you have to spend XP to get and upgrade abilities.
Mass Effect - Made me realize that emotional attachment to game characters is possible. Also made me an rpg fan for real. Before I hated games where you have to spend time on skill trees and selecting abilites, or commanding a squad. On my first playtrough I ignored all those things.
 
King's Quest (1984). Full color and animated? This to me is the game that proves that as gamers, we've always cared about graphics over gameplay. Adventure games were mostly text or static pictures at the time. All of the sudden, a game comes out that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon (at the time, granted it looks ugly today).

King's Quest V (1990). While it wasn't the first VGA game (I believe a Tex Murphy game was), it was the first popular one. 256 colors, and if you had a Roland MT-32 & SB, it was miles ahead of the NES. Not to mention it came out before the SNES and was still ahead of that in capabilities.

Ultima VII (1992). This game defined CRPGs for me. It was an open world that was incredibly interactive. Granted, the combat was terrible (it was one of the first mouse driven games, let alone RPGs), but quite honestly, the game blew me away even with that fault. Origin was one of those companies that you knew you needed a new $5000 machine every time they released a game, because it would run terribly otherwise. It was one of the few games that the world felt alive, and sadly imho, still hasn't been topped to this day.

Unreal Tournament (1999). Not the first FPS, nor the first 3D FPS, but it was good at everything it did. And it was a game that really only focused on multiplayer.
 
Wolfenstein and Doom (got me hooked on PC gaming)
Street Fighter 2 / Mortal Kombat / Killer Instinct
Warcraft II
Super Mario and Mario 64
Diablo
Unreal Tournament and Quake
Vanilla WoW
FF7
GTA III
Gran Turismo
 
Wolfenstein, this was my first experience with an FPS type game.

GTA III. Was over at a friends house and saw this game and then went to Best Buy to buy myself a copy for my PS2. Open world, do what you want, kill whoever you want, who doesn't like this kind of game?
 
For me Descent, I still play every now and then

After that, Everquest 1
 
Battlefield 1942. Remember watching a TechTV show where they were playing online and how awesome it looked. Went out and bought it, soon to realize my familys Pentium 4 pc's integreated graphics wouldn't cut it. Had to do my first upgrade and get a graphics card and 256mb extra ram. My Gateway PC only had PCI when AGP was really needed so I ran it at 720p on low and drooled at the max settings seen on tv. Soon after I started building my own PC's

Some other games:
COD
MOH: AA
CS 1.6
COD MW1- my gf at the time hated this bc I played it so much
Far Cry
Command and Conquer original
 
Yars Revenge
Double Dragon (pumped so many quarters into that machine. Finally got it on SMS).
CoD, Battlefield 1942. Original CoD, cranked up the speakers, and loved every second.
Altered Beast (and the entry into the 16-bit Genesis), also - Golden Axe
Super Mario World - first game I played on SNES. Excellent game. Builds on the earlier ones, but that one sticks with me.
Gauntlet. The original arcade version. Still love playing that.
Day of the Tentacle. Excellent game that I stuck with and played for a long time.
Far Cry. The original. The graphics were amazing.
Age of Empires, Flight Simulator - just addiction at a whole new level.

Those were the defining moments for gaming. A lot of other excellent games, but those ones were the ones that stick out as some of the best. The ones that had me addicted.
 
The big one for me was Morrowind. It was really the first high-fantasy game I'd played with any seriousness and any interest, and it convinced me to not inherently hate high-fantasy settings in games. Prior to that point, I really only liked far-future and neo-techno-gothic-type stuff, and nothing that involved the word "mana" or "magicka".

I'm still not a huge fan of it, but the Elder Scrolls series is at least solid stuff.
 
Even back in the day I recognized Goldeneye as a game changer of the FPS genre. Though it was a lowly console game, it ushered in game play elements like mission goals to achieve in each level. The multiplayer was over the top action even though it was a split screen TV. It may have introduced duel wielding weapons for your character as well. It definitely had the deepest story / plot of any FPS to date.
 
Diablo got me hooked on PC gaming after I had outgrown my Atari 2600.

Deus Ex and Half-Life for FPS.

Fallout 1 and 2 for RPGs.
 
Doom. Made me a diehard FPS player,as well as started me on the endless road of upgrading my PC.
STALKER:SoC. With its open world,non-linear game play,it revitalized my interest in shooters.
 
Diablo 2. I haven't been able to enjoy single player games as much since then.
 
Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. That is the biggest one for me.

CoD 4 would be the next one, it was very different from the others and one of the best multiplayer games I ever played.

BF2 gets an honorable mention though.
 
Super Mario Bros
Streets of Rage
Street Fighter 2
Legend of Zelda: LTTP
DOOM
Ocarina of Time
Quake 2
Final Fantasy 7
Half-Life/CSTRIKE
System Shock 2
Dreamcast
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Dark Souls
 
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Dragon Warrior, NES opened the door for rpg/jrpg
Defender of the Crown, Atari ST, OMG Strategy games!
Sim City, Mac SE... more strategy games!!!
LOZ: A Link to the Past.
Secret of Mana
Civilization II
FFVII *mindblown* The scope of the story was just unbelievable.
BF 1942, first FPS I played online in any real way.
GTA: SA
 
C&C: Red Alert 2

my first foray into multiplayer gaming...took this game for me realize how much fun playing against friends online could be...stayed up late with my dial up modem trying to beat my friend for bragging rights
 
Mario 64. Blew my mind when it dropped. Moving from SNES side scrollers to that was incredible. I must have watched that absurd N64 promo video a 100 times (and all the rest of the N64 promo videos that came with Nintendo Power). I never got one as a kid though (or I guess you could say the N64 generation), a rich friend of mine got one and I would go there constantly just to play it (and other N64 titles) or watch it being played.

Although the PS1 was overall more successful in terms of money, the N64 was a way more interesting console.

I honestly don't think I have anything else on the list. I would say there were other games I thought were really amazing, but not a 'game changer' so to speak.
 
To me, Street Fighter 2 changed everything. Probably the single game that has affected my life the most.
Mario Kart, Daggerfall, Unreal, and Final Fantasy 5 would be some others.
 
Super Mario Brothers 3
Descent
Freespace
Unreal Tournament
Mario Kart, SNES personally, but seeing my son play Mario Kart 8..... thats good stuff
 
Sim: Mechwarrior 2 - I've stayed enraptured by gaming in general ever since. Going to a distance world while controlling a mech that ways upwards to 100 tons was amazing. The music from it definitely kept me wanting more & more.

RTS: StarCraft - showed me what it's like to have a great story & control a large army with some personality to it.

FPS: Half-Life 2 - I probably played this one 20x on all difficulties. I loved the depth of the story & despite the fact that it's fairly linear, I could still approach each enemy with varying tactics.

RPG: Deus Ex - deep story, lots of customization & hacking one's way through the game was quite awesome. It sent me on a path for wanting non-linear RPGs that focused on customization.

Racing: NFS3: Hot Pursuit - the music, the cars, the locales... I loved it all. It started my love for imaginative arcade racing games. Sim racing doesn't cut it for me though...
 
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