I’ve had several, simply because I love playing video games but I don’t like playing just any games; I am pretty discriminating.
First, the Resident Evil franchise. I’ve been playing these games off and on for over 10 years (hey, Resident Evil 2 came out in 1998 after all!). I think I was particularly obsessed with RE 2, because I can remember memorizing the game dialog and copying large chunks of it in notes to my girlfriend in 9th grade. Miraculously, she and I didn’t break up over that. I am still somewhat obsessed with the series; I bought a Wii just to play Umbrella Chronicles.
I also fell for God of War pretty hard. I bought a used PS 2 just to play it because my newer version of the PS3 wasn’t backwards compatible. I was obsessed with beating the game on Titan difficulty, which I eventually did. It was a similar story for GOWII (overall, a bit easier than GoW 1, in my opinion).
I’ve logged over 200 hours in Oblivion and not even completed the main quest.
Finally, Bioshock. I played that for hours, until I thought I heard Big Daddies stomping around in my sleep.
baseball stars- we would spend days makingeach of our teams win hundreds of games 10-0 (mercy rule wins) against the “Lovely Ladies”, since they had the highest prestige and earned you the most money per win. We would do that until all of us had teams full of all top potential rookies with all their skills maxed out. Then play 3/4 a season, until invariably the cartridge’s memory would go bad one day and we would start all over again.
In the last 41 months I have played a total of 5,487 hours 17 minutes of Guild Wars, granted some of that was leaving my character logged on over night during special events…
I used to dream about strategies for Dune 2 (the first RTS) and Civs I-III.
Super Metroid. There was a point where I was playing through the entire game (on an emulator), getting a 100% completion run that was within 15-20min of the unassisted speedrun record EVERY DAY in sophmore year.
I’ve had other obsessions with gaming (EVE Online is my current one) but nothing quite that insane.
Warbirds, Nothing has come close to the continuous rush of online dogfighting in furballs, seeing all of the “spitdweebs” fall from the sky under the thunder of my FW190D’s cannons. I was a Gold country loyalist, defending the skies against the evil grapes, reds, and frogs. I would dream and replay every dogfighting moment in my head when not playing.
In its heyday before unlimited accounts, it was $2/hr, and I had many massive Visa bills. When they went cheap unlimited play, I logged even more time.
The only reason I quit was when the area ISP routing became too laggy and the game developed frustrating play as a result. With good ping, the game was amazing, with bad it rapidly became unplayable. I was even researching pings and connects in other cities to possibly change jobs and relocate, just to play
You had the best intentions in the world to work around the house, but first, a little Civ to celebrate temporary bachelorhood. An hour later, you almost had the Americans on their last leg, and you were just going to finish them off, then off to mowing the lawn. Any way, at around 4 PM you feel a little panic that the day’s got away from you, but you still have time to make the bed, wash the dishes, and come up with a lie about what you’ve been doing all day if you can just get one more tech level first.
Hey, I take MJinks’s post very seriously. I’m an alcoholic, and I used a lot of the same rationalizations to play games all day when I should have been working as I did when I was drinking. And I could stop any time I wanted.
Bard’s Tale III - first RPG I played. Commodore 64. I still have the graph pad I filled with maps and notes somewhere.
Final Fantasy VII - Another RPG that sucked me in. I was in college at the time, and managed to keep to keep it from becoming an addiction.
Starcraft - my first war RTS. I played so much Starcraft that when I hear the background music it makes my hands twitch.
I haven’t really had too many real obsessions since. I used to easily slip into the gamer’s trance (holy shit it’s 4 AM?) but not any more. It probably helps that the games I play now have definite breaks in play, like Left 4 Dead.
When I was a freshman in college, (fall 1996), Quake was pretty new, and all of us had high speed internet in the dorms for the first time in our lives. A group of us in my dorm discovered the wonders of multiplayer deathmatch, and would play practically every night. It became somewhat of an obsession. We wouldn’t shirk our studies, but we would stay up WAY too late after our work was done, leading to tired, distracted students. Eventually, many people just deleted the game off their computers so they wouldn’t be tempted.
I remember one weekend, I had been playing with three or four other players until around 1:30 AM, and then we stopped. I was poking around and found a new, and quite awesome, deathmatch map. At around 2:30, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and go to bed, when I saw one of my friends there too. I told him about the new map I found, and he kind of got this wry grin on his face. I just said “I’ll go start the server.” It was a bit nuts. Nothing since has taken hold of me like that did for a few months.
First two are no contest: Everquest, and World of Warcraft. For the third I’m gonna say Return to Castle Wolfenstein for its multiplayer, which I absolutely loved. The latest incarnation (Wolfenstein) was a sore disappointment in that regard.
Another recovered WoW player checking in. 200+ days played on one character over 3 years … so about 20% of my life for those years. It was a fun time, so no regrets. I lucked into meeting some serious raiders the month it all started, not even knowing what raiding was, and ended up carrying on with the same guild through to Sunwell. Then most of us burned out at the same time. I have never looked back at WoW or any RPG or MMO games since I quit. Fallout3 is as close to counting xp points as I’ve gotten in a year, and that barely counts. Any game where “grind” or “attendance” can be used to describe any part of it is just no longer for me.
I will completely vouch for that. No greater obsession in any possible hobby or job … there’s only so many hours in the day, after all. The few people I knew who went to Rank 14 would take a week off work, and only sleep a few hours a day for the whole time to get over the top. And sometimes that wasn’t even enough. Plus most of the time was just waiting for a match to start! We felt bad for the Alliance, who had no queue on our server, and couldn’t even rest for 15-45 min between fights, lest somebody out-earn them, or jump the honor-system queue the maniacs had arranged amongst themselves for who would be #1 that week. It was a pinnacle for Stress in video gaming. People who made it just *hated *the game by then.
I’ll vouch for guild leaders and officers too. It’s a shame you guys can’t use that on a resume in the real world, because managing a serious raiding guild is no joke at all.
When I was a kid, it was Missle Command at the arcade. I stole money from my parents to play it as much as I could. I even stole my Dad’s ancient silver-dollar collection and traded it in for quarters. There was a pinball machine called Gorgar that I really liked, too. I think it was the first talking pinball machine in the late 1970’s.
In college, it was definitely sports games on Sega and PS1. Madden, Coach K basketball, Triple Play Baseball, the EA March Madness games…god I had some marathon sessions with a good buddy of mine playing those and drinking myself silly until seven in the morning every day.
Now I have a penchant for PC games, but I just don’t have the free time to play any more now that I have a family and a mortgage. Current PC titles that I play most are Crysis/Crysis Warhead/Crysis Wars, COD 4 and Fallout 3.
But never was my addiction higher than when I was seven playing Missle Command. I used to dream about it. And now I don’t even really like it!
Not an obsession per se … I had surgery in early november and spent the next 3 months healing up, and mrAru was really nice and set my computer up next to the bed [this was in 95, and we had no internet at home at the time] so I played Eye of the Beholder, Black Crypt, and watched TV. i probably played the various games I had for 14-16 hours a day.
At one point in time, I could literally walk in and see where someone was standing in one of them, and do a complete walkthrough from that point. I think my personal fastest to play EoB was about 3 hours going full out and not trying to loot absolutely everything.
I still have both my amigas and all the games, I probably should resurrect one and load up the a500 HDD with a game and play =)
Further to this. I’m fickle. I decided to see what using the level cap ‘cheat’ would do. I heard that it would reset my character to neutral and do other things. Well it doesn’t seem to have had any effect on my character other than to allow me to keep on levelling up and gaining XP (in other words - All good, no bad)
I’m now at level 31 with only one of my S.P.E.C.I.A.L. skills lower than 10 (9- Intelligence. Ironic since Intelligence is what I put most into at the beginning, and it’s what I pride myself on in real life. But in FO3 it seems to have the least beneficial value)
ETA: If you choose to use this cheat. I must inform you that you’ll need to do it every time you load F03. What I did was load the game, load my savegame (habit) run the cheat. Re-load my game (F9). But I suspect you can run the cheat on the welcome screen before loading your game.
And also, be prepared to either: download the level cap mod which allows you to get past the perks screen if you have them all. Or, google “How to get past the perks screen” there’s a console command.
For two years, I did almost nothing else. My apartment was a wreck: cat’s litter box was filling up… I had a stack of empty pizza boxes on the floor near my desk… empty Chinese delivery cartons on my desk… fortunately, my friends staged a bit of an intervention. I got way too emotionally caught up in that game.
When I was at work, I spent most of my time cruising the FFXI forums and researching quests and items. I actually felt a sense of relief when I lost my job (for unrelated reasons) because it meant I had an excuse to play FFXI 20 hours a day.
That was over five years ago. I gradually tapered off my playing until January of this year, after which I haven’t played at all. Real life became more interesting than Vana’diel.
