I'm not quite old enough to have experienced the 70s and 80s arcades but I did play some arcade machines in the late 90s. There was a laundry mat my mom used to go to that had street fighter 2 turbo and some kind of pinball. Those are are earliest arcade memories along with playing the Simpsons arcade game with friends at Chuckie Cheese.

I only went a few times during birthdays and things at Chuckie Cheese.as I was to young to drive and only had what little my mom could affford. That laundry mat does't exist anymore but man those were good times.

Q: What is your earliest video game memories?

Back when I was still crawling about, I managed to climb a staircase and entered a room. There, my father was playing the Oregon Trail.

Years later, I played games on the Apple II GS: Thexder, various Softdisk games, Dangerous Dave, a Tolkein adventure game, and Shadowgate. That last game I destroyed, by deleting the files on the game disk. Kinda wish there was a decent Softdisk games archive, as there are some old stuff I would like to rediscover.

Ah well.

One of the softdisk games gave you control of a dinosaur of your choice, and you would try to reach a location without starving or being preyed upon. Kinda like a simulator of The Land Before Time.


Q: What was the first game that you bought yourself? No outside influences like hand-me-downs, presents, or parental preference.

The first game I bought myself, entirely on my own, was probably Dark Reign. Everything before that was parental money. Dark Reign still holds an important spot in my heart (and did plenty of things no other RTS does, like the during-play AI tuning).

The first game I influenced purchase of was probably Drakkhen.

Q: Have you ever participated in testing of a game -- like serious testing and taking your duty to find/report bugs, test out weird things, et cetera -- and not just using the "beta" as a demo or participating in a server stress test?

Did some pretty serious testing of Forsaken World for the 3 months or so that I played it, in 2011. Me and MMOs, since I started I had to find something interesting to do, as playing with others clearly is anything but for me. There was a big thread (actually 2 since I started from that... open closed beta at the end of the closed beta stage, when they allowed everyone who registered, then started a new one when they moved to actual open beta, so basically the release) where I was putting everything, in categories, color coded according to severity (as I saw it), with screenshots where applicable, including big piles of all the bad translations and typos I was finding. Forum mods were saying the posts I made there were going straight to the devs. So I think it'd count.

Q: Do you (still) buy any gaming magazine(s)?

No, my gaming magazine days died in the early to mid 90's. We didn't have a subscription, but a fair amount of lunch money went to Nintendo Power magazines at that time.

Unless you're counting the Prima guides for individual games. I bought the one for Morrowind in late 2004ish. Honestly, I only really got that because the manual for the game was so small and crappy. Things like "proper" manuals (the ones full of flavour text) and real cloth maps are what I miss from my childhood. I prefer digital for the games, but there's just something about physical copies for the extras.

Tangents aside, the gaming media ended up largely irrelevant to me. Anyone who's read a Nintendo Power (or your regional equivalent) knows how biased that magazine was. I got burned on a couple games and learned my lesson. I've found many (more reliable) sources of gaming info over the years.... which leads me to:

Q: How do you choose the games you buy and what information sources do you use when you're making that decision?

I mainly become aware of upcoming games through the forums I visit. But I also watch some developers directly. And, reddit is pretty useful for asking the question I like such-and-such a game. What else is out there like it that's any good?

Once something gets on my radar, I wait. I never pay full price for games. And Oblivion plus all DLCs for $23 still holds my highes ever payment for a game. So I wait, often 2 years from release even for the most-wanted games.

Once something gets in the price range, I start researching. I read reviews - both a sampling of online magazine reviews and a sampling of user reviews from different sources. And I watch some gameplay footage. I can usually tell pretty accurately whether I might enjoy smoething.

I think it helps to be old. My tastes are pretty familiar to me. The hype fools me less.

Q: How do you feel after a long gaming session - like 6+ hours? Do you feel good afterwards? Or kind of hungover? Do you think I'll never do that again? Or do you look forward to your next long session?

Depends on the game. If its a strategy game and I win it feels like victory. Lose, defeat. I like how you said hungover I've definetly felt that even after a victory in a long game of Rise of Nations (RTS stratgey game) and a few others.

MMOs are crazy with that stuff cause you can end up chatting a long time with friends and those games are designed with the idea of taking over your life to get you to invest in them. I have told myself I won't do that again but then I've got talking to my friends and night turns into day again. haha I really limit myself with that kind of thing though.

Sometimes by myself I can end up being on late but its much easier to leave it alone then wihen your with some friends deep in a dungeon in the middle of some great conversation.

If I do game with friends in the evening I find it much better instead of playing an mmo to play something thats short and intense so you can get several games in and if will feel like hours in minutes so you can still get a little rest after a nice gamming session. Those are the ones I look forward to now.

Q:You ever tried hard to like a game especially one that popular but you just can't get into it? What and why?

Well, I guess it depends on the definition of trying hard, but there are a few very popular games that I started more than once and always ended up abandoning again after a while, never really making that much progress (even though the second time I stick with them a little longer than the first time). Off the top of my head, these include:

Deus Ex: I've played through the long tutorial section at least twice and when I get to the actual game I'm already kind of exhausted. But the worst is that I'm presented with lots of supposedly great gameplay mechanics but lack any motivation in experimenting with them since the story and setting doesn't really appeal to me. The characters seem to look and talk all the same with bland voice acting and confusing but not all that interesting dialogue and the few I've seen of the first level wasn't that exciting either. The thing is, I haven't really seen anything yet, I just can't find any good reason to take an interest, other than the game's popularity. And actually, I already own the whole series because I thought I should be interested in playing these games, but it doesn't look like I actually am ... Tried Invisible War but was put off by the intro movie, tried Human Revolution for a bit but soon got bored as well. I don't know whether I'm too impatient with these games or if they just aren't for me.

The Witcher: This one has a long tutorial section that I played through twice as well. The setting and characters do sound kind of interesting, but the gameplay seems so average and tedious. The first chapter after the tutorial had lots of walking to and fro quests connected by long fenced off roads with nothing else happening on them, when the time to do all these quests could have been cut by half at least if the game would have allowed me to run straight across the meadows instead. The first boss fight was preluded by long unskippable dialogue and then I lost it within seconds, before I really knew what was happening, so I had to go through all the dialogue again. And again, until I learnt that you have to use potions in order to win this fight. Which would have been fine, if that mechanic had been present a lot before already, but that tactic was never really required before on Normal difficulty, and you don't have much time to adapt in the boss battle before you lose it. It's a matter of knowing what to do and getting a bit lucky, and if you don't you have to repeat the whole long dialogue sequence again and hope for the best next time. IIRC, you can't even save after the dialogue (or only if you do it in a very, very short time window, immediately after). So that already put me off quite a bit. I played on through the next chapter but got bored with the city quests after a while, and when I tried to get back into the game after a long break, I found that I couldn't because the journal overwrote entries that would have helped me orientate with useless ones that don't even tell me what I'm looking for anymore, so I don't know what to do. I also hated the loot system; so much loot crates everywhere, so few inventory space and so few actually useful things to pick up ...

Dark Souls: I keep hearing praise and that I should like it more than I do, but I find it so hard to get over the repetition when you die in a boss fight and have to backtrack all the way to the boss again, because there wasn't a checkpoint/bonfire close to its location. To me the thought of having to repeat everything up to that point if I fail adds to the stress of boss battles which I'm generally not fond of anyway, especially if they're arena fights in tightly confined spaces you can't run from and you have to struggle with the camera just as much as with your opponent. I think what I perceive as harsh punishment for failure discourages the experimentation necessary for finding the weakness of a boss and makes me lose patience and motivation. I've repeatedly been told that I'm wrong and that I need to change my way of thinking in order to enjoy it, but that's easier said than done.

If that's okay, I'll just echo the question in order to give others the chance to reply to it as well, so:
Q: You ever tried hard to like a game especially one that popular but you just can't get into it? What and why?

Two of them:

Final Fantasy 7: The way I see it, Final Fantasy 6 had many aspects, some rather good (the non-linear second half), some rather bad (excessive cutscenes in the first half, the game (particularly later on) is too easy). FF7 took FF6, threw out the good parts, made the bad parts worse, and did a few other not-so-nice things (reducing the party size), resulting in a game that, to me, fails to even qualify as even decent.

Baldur's Gate 2: I really wanted to get into this game, mainly because it offers high-level spells of a sort you rarely or never see in CRPGs. Unfortunately, the game suffers from some issues like a poor battle system (it should have been left turn-based), poor inventory handling (can't trade with faraway party members, characters drop inventory on death, arrows take up inventory space) and the worst one: The game interrupting you with party banter, and even worse, interrupting you to present side quests that often have a time limit.

(I could also mention Zelda: Ocarina of Time; the game is fun most of the time (especially in dungeons), but there are 2 stealth sections that completely ruin the game for me.)

Anyway, I'll continue to echo the question for now:
Q: You ever tried hard to like a game especially one that popular but you just can't get into it? What and why?

I see no one has replied for awhile so I'll try to keep this thing rolling. I would say the Civ games are my biggest disapointment. I love strategy games but after playing several especially the total war series Civ is just too slow and tedious, even on the faster paced settings. I really tried to get into it as well. But nope, I just got bored.

Q: Whats a game you did'nt expect to like but actually had alot of fun playing

I always try to read/watch reviews and gameplay videos before I purchase any particular game. So the chance of me buying a game about which I have low expectation hardly applies. (though I have sometimes bought games I expected to be good, but did not turn out to be that good)

However, there is the case of freebies or bonus games from different sales. The closest situation relating to the question would be my experience with Victor Vran. I received the game as a bonus title from a sale, and expectation was not that high. Yet, after I started playing it, the game turned out to be a real fun title. The gameplay was engaging and entertaining, the weapons and the gameplay mechanics were interesting. And the "narrator's" voice was a nice touch.

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Q: What is/are your favourite genre(s) of games and what elements in those games do you consider to be the sign of a polished and well made title?

Turn-based RPGs. (I miss the days when I could just say RPGs and there would be no confusion of what I meant.) The biggest sign of such a game being polished and well made is if there is a variety of viable strategies; for this to be the case, the game needs to provide plenty of options, and (the hard part) the options need to be well balanced.

Also, it helps if the game doesn't have elements that serve only to increase the amount of busywork without improving gameplay (Ultima games are an offender here).

Q: Are there any gameplay elements that, if present in a game, are dealbreakers for you? (For me, insta-fail stealth and permadeath would qualify.)

Foolish mini-games, grinding, or lootboxes/pay to win/whaling stuff.

Q: Do you like replaying games, and what makes you replay a finished game?

Yes, I do like replaying games, and one thing that makes me replay a game is coming up with a new strategy that might be interesting to try. (Learning about glitches can also have this effect, though not necessarily right away.)

Q: Have you ever not played a game, or stopped in the middle, becauese of ugly/inelegant game mechanics?