Gaming virginity loss.

[syntheticgerbil]

Hugo's House of Horrors, bitches. That game's text parser taught me spelling and grammar when all the other kids my age were learning that square and round were not the same thing. I always got killed by the damn werewolf in the dining room, but fuck if I cared. I also had that sequel where Hugo's plane crash lands in the jungle and he stumbles upon some mystery, but House of Horrors was the shit.

I finished and played through all three of those games without a walkthrough (no internet!) along with my dad and his coworkers' help long ago and I remember hating almost every moment of it. I think I said this before and made you sad.

I remember the second game being especially painful in figuring out what to do. Especially the part where you go into a phone booth and are ported into some underground lab with a killer robot. And that maze! Yikes!

I do remember liking the Halloween atmosphere of the first game though. That dog scared the hell out of me.

[miffy495]

Yeah, I think I remember that. I have such fond memories of those games, but honestly I was only about 3 or 4 and my tolerance for shit was pretty high. I had no aspirations of getting past the third screen, so when I'd die by some cheap mechanic it never frustrated me.

[brkl]

I like how you remember the dog as a werewolf.

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha, I also should mention my dad convinced me to read the first Narnia book so I could tell him the answer to one of the trivia questions needed to cross the water in the first Hugo games.

[James]

I couldn't tell you what the first game I ever played was, but my first computer was an Amstrad CPC-464, and the main game I remember playing on that was Lost Caves:

It imagine it's from a genre of games, but I wasn't very versed in those things at the time, so the only other thing I knew like it was Repton for the BBC Micro:

You went around "eating" some stuff which I thought of as "sand", and avoiding boulders and enemy men. You could drop boulders on their heads. I found the mechanics quite confusing, as you could move in all directions, as though the perspective was from above, but the boulders fell downwards, as though it was from the side. I guess it was just a system that worked, but it bothered me. It (along with Tetris) was one of the few games my dad got really into (other than arcade machines before I was born), and he took to leaving the computer on in my room overnight so that he wouldn't lose his progress when he got stuck on a particularly hard level. Eventually we gave up, though.

It's weird, looking at screenshots and casting my mind back evokes a very particular if not especially clear feeling. I couldn't tell you what it is -- it's not really an emotion or a thought -- just that it's strongly associated with being at that age and playing that game. Very strange.

It might not even have been that similar to Repton. I'm not sure if I ever even played the latter, as it was my cousin who had the BBC Micros.

On my Amstrad I also had a game called Bomb Jack, Fast Food Dizzy (which was a Pac-Man clone with Dizzy characters), and two Postman Pat games. I liked the first Postman Pat game more than the second, because Postman Pat 2 was some sort of RPG-type thing with a lot of dialogue (boooooooooring), whereas the first game was a fun top-down thing where you had to shoot letters out of your van windows directly into people's postboxes. There was also a minigame where you had to help a farmer round his sheep (without leaving your van). Unfortunately it was possible to accidentally get your van stuck sideways in a thin bridge, at which point you would be unable to proceed. I think that's probably how every single one of my tries at that game ended.

I also had Contra (although it may have been called Gryzor because I'm in Europe, apparently), which was way too hard for me. It wasn't until a year or two ago that I realized that game wasn't entirely obscure, and this Contra thing everyone was talking about was something I'd actually played.

Sorry, I'm going on way too much. It's just interesting to remember my pre-PC pre-console days. After that it was all Prince of Persia, Lemmings and Keen on the former, and Sonic on the latter.

[Armchair General]

I was reading a bit about the mining elements of ME2 and I remembered this..

CLASSIC. Was really hard until you could level up to a mahoosive freighter that could just crash into attackers and then self repair. Great music too, still love listening to Grieg's in the hall of the mountain king.

Andy

[Fuzzy Lobster]

Haha, I also should mention my dad convinced me to read the first Narnia book so I could tell him the answer to one of the trivia questions needed to cross the water in the first Hugo games.

Awesome.

My brother and I spent so much time trying to get my mom hooked on adventure games to legitimize our gaming habits. We managed to get her to play an old Sierra game about a female reporter solving murder mysteries (I can't remember what it was called), otherwise we were unsuccessful. Sad. She wouldn't buy us anything after he got Duke Nukem.

[syntheticgerbil]

I think you are talking about Laura Bow. I used to have the second game and had a big crush on her. The death scenes were too scary though.

[Fuzzy Lobster]

I think you are talking about Laura Bow. I used to have the second game and had a big crush on her. The death scenes were too scary though.

They were extremely scary. I don't know which number it was, but in ours she went around in a museum and a guy in a reaper costume chased you at the end. That scared me so much that I made my brother turn off the music and I had to look away until he beat it.

[Kolzig]

I was reading a bit about the mining elements of ME2 and I remembered this..

CLASSIC. Was really hard until you could level up to a mahoosive freighter that could just crash into attackers and then self repair. Great music too, still love listening to Grieg's in the hall of the mountain king.

Andy

I remember Frontier. Shamed to admit, but that game was a pirated version on our old Amiga ages ago.

Don't know where we got it from, but I guess this one came from one of my brother's friends.

I never really understood how to play it as we didn't have the manual. I managed to get the police always arrive when I shot around the first city where the game started.

I loved the music, I was always humming the Amiga tunes when I was a kid.

[infovore]

oh, yeah, Rogue. That was one of my other first games, and I played it regularly for years and years and years. Never got near the amulet - usually down to about level 13/14 of the dungeon - but god it was good.

If you've not played Rogue, ever: play Rogue. Skip Nethack, skip ADOM, skip Angband, just play plain old simple Rogue. There's a nice iPhone version. It's awesome. And it's why I like Diablo. (Not because of loot).

[Sombre]