I was a little more overlevelled than you, but far less well equipped, and he totally didn’t last minutes. Poor fellow didn’t stand a chance.
Still less disappointing than Yu Yevon…
Eventually I’ll get The Orange Box. I have a hard enough time mashing MLB 2K8 past Halo and Call of Duty.
Neverwinter Nights 1. Man, when I first heard of Bio’s attempt at bringing PnP D&D to PC games I was hooked. I was a regular on the NWN boards since there was still an Interplay. For years we talked about NWN, discussed all the possibilities (starting new campaigns with friends who have moved away, no longer played PnP, etc) and excitedly gossiped over every little nugget of information we got, both about the game itself and the new D&d 3.0 rules.
The game finally shipped and it didn’t disappoint. Sure, after years of self-built hype it couldn’t possibly live up to my imaginings, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great game, and a lot of the plans I had did eventually come to fruition.
The original Age of Empires. My computer was too crap at the time to play it (an old 486 with 8mb RAM), but I’d seen my friends dad playing it and it looked amazing (it was a great game).
I also got an XBox 360 solely to play COD4.
I’m a cheap bastard, I don’t buy hardly any games until the price comes down to $20 or less. But I have bought a few games they day they came out:
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2. Loved the previous NFS games. This one was a bit of a downgrade in several ways, but still had nice graphics and fun gameplay.
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. GTA III and GTA Vice City were tons of fun, and all the new stuff in San Andreas made it a must buy. I still haven’t gotten appreciably far in the story line, I tend to waste time driving around and exploring.
Hm…most anticipated game ehe? Well, I guess it’s a toss up between my current anticipation for WAR to release and the anticipation for the Total War games from Rome onward (including my frantic search for any information concerning the upcoming Empires game). I was highly anticipating Sins of a Solar Empire to before it shipped and was actually sitting there on their web site hitting refresh for hours waiting for it to be available to download (about a day before it was available in stores).
-XT
Alpha Centauri
I had been (and am) a huge fan of Civ II. SMAC came out in Spring of '99 I believe. I bought it and left it sitting, unopened, on my desk until that final glorious day of spring quarter when it loaded seamlessly onto my desktop and I was introduced to the wonders of Planet, the wretched deceitfulness of Chairman Yang, the advantages of monoliths, and the cataclysmic results of digging too many boreholes. What a game!!
Shufflepuck Cafe for the PC
I had the chance to play it on the Apple at a computer store. I was lost for hours in the air hockey goodness. When I heard it was coming out for the pc, I had to have it. I loved the gameplay. I loved the character animations. I loved everything about it. I still play it occasionally.
I have two:
Final Fantasy X - Bought a PlayStation 2 just so I could play this game.
Half-Life 2 - I was a huge fan of Half-Life.
SimCity 3000.
Oh, but Spore is my next one 
I’ve been gaming for a while, and thought I was pretty jaded, but after I had played GTA: Vice City and GTA III (in that order), and got my carjack on, I was sitting around one day and saw the commercial for GTA: San Andreas. At that moment - with the opening riff from “Welcome to the Jungle” playing over some baaadaass gameplay footage - the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I knew I had to have that game. Hell, My wife told me I had to have that game.
I got a PS3 just so I could play GTA IV (although the blu-ray player and other kickass games don’t hurt) - I got it about two weeks before RockStar announced the game was pushed back to spring.
And oddly, now that I’ve seen some of the trailers (ok, all of the trailers, in HD, 5 times each), I don’t have that same sense of “shitohshitohshit I have to have that game!!!”
I mean, I’ll be preordering it soon, and once I get it you won’t be able to pry me away from the sixaxis for several days, but I get the feeling it’s not going to have that same je ne sais quoi as San Andreas. Plus, no airplanes - WTF?
Same here, so I have the 1.0 version you can patch for Hot Coffee- yeah pixellated porn! (Actually, I never bothered with Hot Coffee but it’s nice to know that I can)
I hope you’ve at least opened the game up to the point where you can get to Venturas… because if not you’re missing out on a lot. And if you can stomach all the messing around you have to do to get the airstrip property in Venturas it makes getting around a lot easier.
Plus blowing things up is a lot easier with the Harrier (or Apache)
I bought an Xbox 360 before Madden came out. I didn’t NEED to have it for that (especially after I got the game), but I did have to have it for Halo 3, which I won in an online tournament.
I had to have an Xbox 360 before Madden, Halo, or GTA. I’m relatively psyched about GTA. I also have interest in Bully as well, but it may just be bad timing for that game to be released in my world (as is virtually every other game. I get constantly chided for playing only two games in another messageboard I frequent.)
I only made it to the point where you’re relocated to the country and you get a job driving trucks. Which I thought was a truly inspired point in game storytelling. Nothing too fancy, very believable.
Something happened to my saved game so I had to start over, I think I lost it in a system upgrade IIRC.
That’s just when things get really good (although there’s a lot of tedious long-distance driving after that part).
That’s when you meet Catalina, who’s one of the most amusing characters in any video game, and you meet the guy that sounds (voiced by?) like Cheech right after that, and he’s hilarious too.
Having been inspired by this thread I downloaded the game from Steam the other day. I got to that part last night after ~6 hours of real-time play (not in a particular hurry, but didn’t do much of the gang wars/girlfriend stuff).
Mass Effect. sigh. I was bouncing up and down when we left the store with it. First time I’d really been interested in a game in years.
I thought it was going to be fun and great and awesome and a far better version of games I was addicted to as a kid. (Like Space Quest. Through the rosy glasses of time, I conveniently forgot about the eventual tedium and weak endings those games had contained.)
Well. It was fun. It was worth the price, I think, especially for the entertainment value it brought three people. The story started out nice. I got thoroughly addicted. Then…blah. Tedium. Interface problems. A typical good track/bad track that was less sophisticated than Black and White. Great voice acting, but characters I didn’t give a crap about, except one or two that I wanted to shove out the airlock for being annoying. I quit playing for a month, then watched my husband finish it with his character and called it good.
I still loved the combat interface, and the writers went into some serious detail setting the scene of the universe. Sigh. If only we’d gotten to explore it instead of read about it, and if only the AI hadn’t been dumber than shit. Such great potential that wasn’t quite fully realized.
Infocom’s Sorcerer (sequel to Enchanter).
Later I went to work for the shopping mall software store so I never again waited for computer games. A big shout-out to anyone from Tulsa who remembers Home Software at The Woodland Hills Mall!