What's the most obsessed you ever were with a video game

The Game Room
1

I’ll give you my top 3.

Third place is Final Fantasy X. In the first half of this decade I was primarily a PC gamer, so I missed out on a lot of the console classics of that era. In fact I didn’t even buy a Playstation 2 until 2006. I remember always wanting to play FFX (I saw it at a friend’s house and it looked awesome), so that was the first game I bought. It immediately captivated me. I was in college at the time, and for a period of a couple weeks all I did was play FFX or go to class and wish I was playing FFX. It was the first game in a long time that I got so into, and it sort of reminded me of being a kid, when more games had that effect on me.

Second place is Diablo II. As I mentioned, I spent a lot of time playing PC games, and most of that time was spent playing D2. I was a huge fan of the first Diablo, and I remember obsessively reading diabloii.net, all the latest reports and rumors of what would be in the game, the characters, skills, enemies, and a lot of stuff that ended up not being in the game at all (anyone remember the “guild hall” rumors? That would have been cool…). I remember going to buy it when it came out and trying to decide which class I would play first (Necro, FYI). It didn’t let me down, and I played it, all the time at first, then on and off for the next 4 years or so. I was never a super-serious player that got characters up to 90+ levels (I think my highest was 70-something), but I had a ton of fun. I remember fondly the glory days when SOJs were king and WW Barbs could right-click on the far side of the screen and cut a killing path through absolutely everything…

And the #1 game that consumed me completely is Earthbound for the Super Nintendo. A few things come to mind…

(please keep in mind that I was in elementary school when this game came out)

[ul]
[li] I used to get up early, like at 5 AM, on school days (probably on weekends too), totally excited that I was going to be playing Earthbound. I didn’t want my parents to know I was up so early, so I turned the volume way down and sat really close to the TV. This is the only time in my entire life I’ve been happy to get up at 5 AM.[/li][li] Between the time when I rented the game and when I bought it, I wanted more than anything to save enough money to buy the game, or even better to have my parents buy it for me. During this period I went to a chess tournament or something like that. While I was there, I noticed a couple of kids sitting on a bench, reading the Earthbound strategy guide. From this one sighting, I somehow convinced myself that my parents had bought the game for me and had brought it to the tournament without telling me (for some reason). Then they had loaned the strategy guide to these kids who I had never seen before. So this meant that I now had my very own copy of Earthbound! …man, I was desperate to own that game.[/li][li] The best one of all: at some point I took the theme song to America’s Funniest Home Videos (why that song, I have no idea) and re-wrote the lyrics to be about Earthbound. Hey, I was just a kid![/li][/ul]

Anyway I was completely obsessed with Earthbound, and to this day no game makes me nostalgic like that one.
OK, your turn!

2

RPGs like Morrowind and Oblivion are bad for my health, no exaggeration.

I will play them for hours straight. No food, no bathroom, no rest.

The lack of food will bring on a headache but that won’t stop me. Eventually the hunger and headache go away because I’m still playing and don’t pay attention to anything else.

Then when I do finally stop, both the hunger and headache come back fiftyfold. I just about fall over dead when I get out of my chair after completing my session.

And boy will the above fuck up my sleep schedule while I’m at it.

3

Did you ever go to an effort to seriously research the game? Back when there was a group of us Dopers playing it, I managed to figure out the patterns behind most of the randomly-generated dungeons, and had a character dedicated to nothing but exploring the others so I could figure out their patterns, too. When we played in public games, we had everyone convinced that we were using Maphack, when it was all just our own brainpower.

We also did things like PvP “duels” to watch precisely how much damage we did to each other under what conditions, to verify how the damage formulas worked, and came up with what I think was the highest damage output possible in the game (something like 40,000 damage per hit average, at a rate of one hit every 5/24 of a second… Unfortunately she was a glass cannon).

4

The original Bard’s Tale. I spent so many 24-hour cycles playing that game, obsessively keeping track of xp and trying to map dungeons without going crazy. There’d be nights when I’d stay up all night playing BT and then go to school the next day (in high school, not college). I was crazy-stupid for that game.

5

I spent most of my sophomore year of college absolutely obsessed with Team Fortress Classic. Must have logged 300+ hours over the course of a school year, and I became scarily good at conc jumping and rocket jumping; I must have spent at least 50 of those hours in the air. :wink:

6

I used to play WoW ~30 hours a week. I played for about 3 years and my play time varied along that time, but I never really dropped below ~15 hours a week.

7

For me, there’s a few. First was Chrono Trigger, where I got every character’s level to * (kinda like 99+1) and then all their stats to * as well. It took more play-throughs than I care to remember, but I still have the awesome save on the cartridge. Next was Final Fantasy Tactics with a 300ish hour save with too much done to mention.

Final Fantasy X: International has sucked up maybe 400hrs, but I think I’ve beaten all the dark aeons and arena monsters. I don’t have a PS2 to play it anymore, though, so I can’t check. :stuck_out_tongue: Also on PS2 is Romance of the Three Kingdoms X. No idea on how many hours, but I still play it all the time.

Finally, and not very surprising, is the Civilization series. Mostly Civ3, since it was all my old laptop could take, but 4 is gaining on it with the new one. I fondly remember lying on a girlfriend’s bed, slaughtering Romans in Civ3, while she watched talk shows. That was probably the most fun we had together… :smiley:

8

Lightweights.

Diablo II makes its way into second place - when I heard they had released the 1.10 patch, I skipped all college classes for the day to go home to play it.

But (unsurprisingly) World of Warcraft is number one by a large margin. I was in an “elite” guild. After months of grinding Molten Core and Blackwing’s Lair I was finally nominated for an officer’s position. I accepted, and loved it. Organized and lead all healers. From then on - it was work a real job eight hours a day, work a Warcraft job five hours afterwords. Except on weekends, when it was work the Warcraft job ten hours a day, minimum.

I don’t want to shit on Warcraft - I really did love being a “hardcore” guild officer. I stayed through our completion of BWL (back when that meant something) up through half of Naxx (back when that meant something. First Naxx). Like I said, it was easily a second job. I have a lot of good memories from it.

Just before the Burning Crusade expansion, I just completely burned out. I told my guild - I can’t do this, I’ve stalled out my life - and I quit.

I still play WoW from time to time, but always as an extremely casual player. Haven’t been in a proper guild since. I do miss my old WoW guild; but most players have dispersed - either into real life, like I have, or into other, more “hardcore” guilds

9

Fallout.

I played Fallout 1 & 2 quite a lot, and somehow gravitated back to them several times over the space of a couple of years.

The obsession comes with Fallout 3. I bought an XBOX 360 just to play Fallout 3.

10

It’s been a long time since I’ve really been what you might call obsessed about a game. I mean, playing long stretches of time, doing “one more turn” throughout the night, that’s still pretty common for me, I guess. But when I shut down the game, that’s it - I don’t spend the rest of the day wishing I was back playing, or playing it in my head, you know ? Those days are past, for some reason.

I remember, back in middle school, being absolutely nuts about Day of the Tentacle. The weird thing is, I didn’t have it - in fact, I didn’t even have a gaming rig back then. But one of my friends had it, and I watched him play the beginning for an afternoon at his place, and I was hooked. For weeks, we “played” it at school - that is to say, he’d tell me what he tried to do, what items he’d found, what happened when he tried this on that, and I’d suggest things he’d overlooked. I finished the game by proxy :smiley: (and he would never have gotten the “paint mummy red” thing without me, either !)

Then there was The Longest Journey. Hooked me pretty bad, too. The storytelling was nicely done, and I really got sucked into the setting. Sadly, I tried replaying it again a few years ago, and it didn’t work as well the second time around.

But the real obsession that almost ended me was Dark Age of Camelot. First MMORPG I’d ever played - and oh how I played it. I’d spend every evening on it. Then I’d sleep a few hours, get back on it at 5AM, went to work dead tired (and spent as much time as I could get away with on the forums), then grab some fast food on the way home and back to it. Crazy stuff.

11

Top 3:

Final Fantasy VII - my first RPG. I was annoyed when I got it as a Christmas present because I’d asked for something else and had no idea what was going on when I started playing. A day later I was hooked. I played it constantly, I’d stay up all night playing then have to go to school in the morning. Come home, have a nap for a few hours then play again. Even after I’d finished it I replayed it over and over again. Still play it through once every few years.

Harvest Moon (PS version) - this one just came at a bad time for me. I was suffering a severe bout of depression in my penultimate year of high school and couldn’t face school or much of a social life. I’d pretend to go to school, come home when my mam left for work and play Harvest Moon all day and into the night. Every day. For over 6 months. It’s a fun game, but looking back it seems bizarre that it had me so obsessed for so long.

Morrowind - still play it to this day. Broke my laptop because I kept playing Morrowind in bed until the laptop eventually overheated and went up in smoke. This coincided with another fairly bad period of depression when I was in uni, so I guess me + depression + video games is a bad combo! It still hooks me in to this day. It’s just so BIG.

12

I think the most obsessed I’ve ever been with any games is the Ultima series. I’ve still got my cloth maps but most of the gimcracks they tossed in the box are lost…

13

What else did they include besides cloth maps?

14

Romance of the 3 Kingdoms
WOW
Bards Tale and Morrowind
Original Mario

15

Civ II in highschool. I played it in our basement and just above the screen is a window. I looked up once and remember saying to myself, ‘when did the leaves fall?’.

16

Like many others, Diablo II and WoW. I still fire up D2 now and then, get a Skellie Necro up to the 80’s, and get bored. But I was a complete D2 addict for a solid 3 years. Same with WoW - From Launch, I was heavily into it for 2 years or so, and have gone back and restarted 2 or 3 times.

Civ 3. Lots of “just one more turn before bed” nights, that seemed to stretch into 10 more turns.

Joe

17

Back when Super Nintendo came out I was visiting family and my little brother had it. Intorduced me to Super Mario world or something. There was a Yoshii and castles and a flying cape and Star worlds and all sorts of other stuff. Played it for about 2 days and then went back to college.

Well, the game had wormed itself into me so much I went out and bought a SNES just to play that damn Mario game. And not only did I want to beat it, but explore every world and “get” every bonus and what have you. Now I’m not into figuring it all out myself, I just wanted to make my way through everything. So I bought a couple of step-by-step books and for the next several months it was all Mario all the time. But I did it! I nailed that sucker. Mario was my bitch.

I guess I got it out of my system b/c I haven’t really played another video game since.

18

Civ II was my first and greatest game obsession. My husband and I played that game in shifts. I sometimes fell asleep while waiting for the computer’s turn to end. I’ve never regained quite that level of game obsession.

Diablo II. I still play it sometimes. I went without food in order to buy it and again when LOD came out.

I’m with you on Earthbound. What a bizarre, amazing game. I’d love to play it again.

Morrowind would be next, mostly for the thieving action, and finally King’s Quest.

Honorable mention goes to Commander Keen.

19

Oh, to follow up on my previous post, after the Mario thing I also gave the same treatment to The Legend of Zelda, a Link to the Past. After that one I looked around for other similar games, but the two I tried (Final Fantasy something or other and some other game I can’t recall the name of [Mana?]) left me cold and I never got back into video games after that.

20

The Civ series was always a time-suck for me.

KOTOR was a big one too. I have played that through at least 20 times, I’d say.

The most recent one for me was Mass Effect. I unlocked all 1000 achievement points on that thing.