#oneaday Day 499: Pinching a Meme

Thought I'd steal a meme from Twitter as a prompt for today's post. You can find the original here.

HyperX, whoever they are, wanted to know the first games people played in various genres. I thought I'd list them and elaborate a bit. Feel free to share your lists in the comments!

🥇 First/Third Person-Shooter: Wolfenstein 3D

I'd played 3D games prior to this — most notably the Mercenary series on Atari 8-bit and ST platforms — but so far as actual first-person shooters go, I was there pretty much from the beginning. Wolfenstein 3D was the first I played; I also played the Catacomb games quite early on, too.

So far as my personal tastes go, I love '90s style single-player first-person shooters — stuff like Doom and the Build engine games. I also very much like the modern Shadow Warrior games. Call of Duty can suck a fat one, though.

⚔️ MOBA: League of Legends

I played this for a few minutes and knew I was not going to get along with it. I tried Dota 2 and felt the same, but even more strongly. I tried Heroes of the Storm with friends, and fared a little better, but didn't like it enough to want to pursue it further. MOBA is not a genre for me. Multiplayer in general isn't, in fact. I get frustrated when people are mean. And people are mean a lot in competitive multiplayer. And in cooperative multiplayer. You'd think being mean was antithetical to the concept of cooperative multiplayer, but no. That's another story though.

🛡️ RPG: The Temple of Apshai Trilogy

I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on in this game when I played it as a kid. The concept of RPGs was completely alien to me. The first RPG I played and understood was Final Fantasy VII, many years later! Now I'm a diehard fan of the genre.

🔮 MMO: Everquest

I was absolutely fascinated by the idea of Everquest, though I found that the actual expectation didn't live up to my expectations. I had no idea what to expect when I finally got the damn thing working on my old clunker of a PC and a dial-up connection, so I played it completely "wrong".

I'd roleplay my character making grunts and noises in /say chat while I was fighting, much to the amusement of people around me; I didn't understand the whole "level-stratified" structure of the world, so took it as a personal challenge to make it to the next town over without dying (and succeeded) rather than stabbing rats outside the city gates for 16 hours; and I had no idea what I was "supposed" to be doing without a central narrative to follow.

Later dives into the genre (World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Final Fantasy XIV) went much better, largely thanks to having people who knew what they were doing showing me the ropes!

🎶 Rhythm: Bust-a-Groove

Amazing game. Well, amazing music; gameplay-wise it doesn't quite hold up as the central competitive mechanic is fairly flawed, but I'll always have a soft spot for this game.

This game also taught me that Japanese and PAL PlayStations run at different speeds, even when both playing a PAL game. I was playing against my friend Woody, who was making a real hash of things, and insisted it was "my PlayStation" that was the problem. He was so convinced of this that he cycled seven miles back to his house to get his PlayStation (and then seven miles back again) to prove it. He was right.

 

♟ Strategy: Legionnaire

Another game I fired up for the first time as a kid and had absolutely no idea what was going on. This was a very early strategy game for Atari 8-bit by (I think) the legendary Chris Crawford, and I did not know how to play it at all. I did, however, like the scrolling map and the thumping sound effects.

First strategy game I played and vaguely understood was the original Command & Conquer. I've never been good at strategy games, but I did manage to beat Command & Conquer on the GDI side, as well as nuke my friend Ed a few times on networked PlayStation games.

🥊 Fighting: International Karate

This game is evidence of how differently fighting games were back in the very early days of home computer gaming. There were no life bars, no special moves, just you against a friend with an eight-directional joystick and a single fire button, with every direction (and every direction with the fire button pressed) doing something different.

To this day, I don't really understand how the mechanics of this work — i.e. how it determines who "wins" — but I always liked the graphics and the animations in this one at least.

So what are your "firsts"?