When Civilization first came out, it ran 24 hours a day on my roomate’s computer, rotated between 3 addicts: I worked during the day, and upon coming home would play all evening. When my roomate got home from his 2nd shift job, I’d go to bed and he would play all night. Then in the morning, as I was leaving for work again, my roomate would go to sleep and a friend of ours showed up to take over during the day. My other roomate at the time, seeing the awesome grip this game had on us, refused to play at all for fear of becoming another addict in the chain. (He’s currently hooked on Evercrack …)
Ohhh… I was thinking Caesar III too, and I don’t even like strategy games much.
Carrier Command on my old Amiga 500 was a ton of fun that constantly had me coming back for more and more.
Huh. Am I the only one with a fascination for Lemmings?
Right now, though, it’s Civ III. My wife and I had a minor argument the day before yesterday because I’m frequently not coming to bed before 1am. “No, hon, I just have to finish this section. Half an hour.” Then, an hour later, I’m hurrying production on a cathedral to expand my cultural border and pin those goddamn Aztecs up on the peninsula, while simultaneously gnawing my lip as a settler crawls across the desert toward a prime bit of real estate the Romans have also been exploring. I just gotta complete this road and colonize the saltpeter, and then I’ll go to bed, I tell myself. Oh, shit, barbarians again? Okay, set these three cities building cavalry, and aren’t those dumb-bastard workers done clearing that freakin’ jungle yet?
I’m not really a computer game sort of person. I think I could be, I’ve just never really been hooked…
but the Sims, I (like many other players) had that moment where I realized that I hadn’t bathed myself, eaten, or changed clothes (I live alone, I can get away with that) because I was too involved in trying to make little animated people do exactly those things. (OTOH, they have maids. I don’t. And much cooler furniture.)
I am looking for a new obsession (Roller Coaster Tycoon was ok, but… and I can’t get the expansion packs to install on XP.) so I’m looking here for suggestions…especially ones that don’t really involve eye-hand coordination.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Hack / Nethack. Just cause it’s been around so long, I’ve easily spent more time on that than anything else.
Another old game that hooked me was the original Descent.
And some of the other standards - Heroes III, Civ 2, Diablo II, Starcraft.
I wonder if I’m getting picky in my old age - I’ve been greatly disappointed by my last three purchases - Heroes IV, Civ 3 and Warcraft III. I just don’t see what makes them better than earlier versions (admittedly comparing Warcraft III to Starcraft, not the earlier Warcrafts).
It’s gotta be Everquest. I got it for my birthday in 99, I haven’t played another computer game for any length of time since.
<-- Erollisi Marr server!!
- Wing Commander 2
- Civ
- X-Com
- Civ 2
- Alpha Centauri
Showing my age, but Dungeon Master on ye olde Atari ST still owes me about 4 months of my life. Also, a couple of platform games I played to death back then, Rick Dangerous and the brilliant Nebulus on the C64. And I still love Galaga and Mr.Do, courtesy of MAME these days.
“I had to make up a special boot disc (I have it still, for old times’ sake)…”
Ah yes, the charming days of DOS. I used to have over 50 different autoexec.bat and config.sys configurations on my C:\ drive, each one painstakingly prepared so that the particular game game that I wanted to play would be able to play with all the bells and whistles. I also had a little batch program written so that I could type in 1 command line to copy two files.
Each one of these files had extensions that corresponded to the game, ala
Autoexec.civ, config.civ
Autoexec.moo, config.moo
Autoexec.xen, config.xen
Autoexec.xcm, config.xcm
Autoexec.org, config.org (ORG meant “original”)
etc, etc.
To get the proper files to load, I would type in
Autocopy *.moo
which would run the following .bat command:
“Copy %1 *.sys
Copy %1 *.bat”
Yeah, I’d end up with a config.sys and a config.bat files (same thing with autoexec), but screw it. It worked and it was easy.*
Those were the days… NOT!
*If I messed up the batch program, it has been quite a while since I’ve had to do this so the memory is a bit hazy.
Should be “would run the autocopy.bat command:”
So, I picked up Black & White.
I’ve brought every single stone on the damn island to the stupid sculptor, his house looks like a rock garden, but despite having been squished by several of them (I got frustrated after a while) he hasn’t actually taken notice of any of them. That’s a very good way to have someone lose interest in the game.
Glory, I play on E Marr too… My name here is my character name there…
Also, I would have to say that the reason you don’t see many people naming EverQuest is because they are too busy on the XP treadmill to spend any length of time here at the SDMB… Me? I’ve got three computers on my desk… heh…
I had this game and loved it. When I first had it, though, there was a problem with my install, I believe with the graphics for the wraiths, because every time I had a tactical battle with wraiths the game crashed - I would have to switch it into strategic battles before I attacked with them, and be on the constant lookout for enemy wraiths…very frustrating, but not enough to make me not like the game.
I agree that halfling slingers are one of the most powerful units in the game. I would play red and white magic, give them chaos mutations and holy weapon + eldritch weapon, and have flying halfling slingers that could take out almost any unit with one or two attacks (the big advantage of halflings was that there were 8 per unit, instead of the 6 or 4 of other types).
BTW, I got MoM to work on an NT system at work at my old job, with sound as well! I downloaded it from an abandonware site and that sure made working nights go faster.
I don’t get addicted to games as much as I used to, but Europa Universalis II is damn addictive. I lent it to my friend because I had another new game that I wanted to play but never did, because every time I would sit down to play it I would fire up EUII instead.
BF1942 also has a way of sucking away your hours, especially once you find a good server - you get to know the other players, develop grudges, and start working together, it makes you hate to log off because you might have to suffer through several servers of plane campers and TKing idiots before finding another sweet server.
So this is what a 12-step program is like.
Hello. My name is Ol’Gaffer and I’m a Civilization 2 addict. Additionally, I have, at various times, also been addicted to Alpha Centauri, Fallout 2, and X-Wing.
I can also remember a 36-hour marathon of Curse of the Azure Bonds once we exchanged the 5.25" floppies for the new and improved 3.5" disks.
I believe games such as Diablo II have hidden graphics in them that stimulate the human brain to create a crack-like high as you play them. Otherwise, why would I abandon family, sleep, work & friends to pump up my Amazon Pinky to yet another level by doing yet another Bloody Run?
When I first got Doom I use to play until I was dizzy, bug-eyed and babbling aloud. Them monsters scairt me!
And of course I kept going back. <shrugs>
Final Fantasy 1
Final Fantasy 7 (Really hurt ny college GPA. I never could get into 8)
Diablo II - I’ve been playing it for over 2 years now, and still play several hours a week.
Star Control II - Double whammy, because the adventure game was great, huge and time-consuming, and the head-to-head game was also great (and I ruled at it, thank you very much.)
Baldur’s Gate II - Biggest RPG I’ve ever played (and the best, probably, though Planescape: Torment was great).
But the All-Time most destructively time-consuming game in my life award goes to:
Ultima Online
I spent hours MINING in this god-forsaken game. MINING!!! CLICKING ON ROCKS!
SLOWLY!
There had to be some kind of hidden signal coming out of my monitor and lobotomizing me or something. I played the damn thing for two years!
Scupper, sounds like you had it bad. At least things died when I played for hours on end. 
One should never neglect eating ones wife at regular intervals.