Ah! FFXI was a man’s MMORPG! It took forever to do anything, but it was fun, dammit! When friends expressed shock at my playtime, they’d assume I always stayed logged on to bazaar outside of Jeuno. I’d smile and nod… 
Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic Adventure 1 was great, I got all the emblems, but it wasn’t too much of a feat. 100% completion in most games isn’t too crazy when there’s no bullshit (see: JRPGs and obtuse triggers), even in Zelda while it may be time consuming it’s not too difficult usually. In Sonic Adventure 2 this required playing each level with each character with 5 different subgoals ad nauseum until you were damn near perfect. The treasure hunting missions were especially brutal since the 3 locations were randomized and getting from some locations to others was pretty time consuming and could ravage your score if the level was generated “wrong” or you weren’t as familiar with that shard’s location/method of access as the others.
It also required getting a crazy Chao (preferably the Chaos variety since it would never die so you could beef up its stats forever without worrying about its happiness) for all the races and fights, which in itself is maddening albeit not too difficult when you’re farming A-ranks.
The only game that I’ve ever played through the night was Final Fantasy III for the SNES. That one was a real time killer between '94 and '97; if my friend and I weren’t playing it, we were talking about it somehow.
Baseball Stars for the NES was mentioned upthread. Another friend and I spent a good chunk of the summers of '90 and '91 absolutely glued to the TV playing that one.
SaGa Frontier for the PS…I had odd playing habits with that one. It seemed I was either playing that game all the time, or I wasn’t playing it at all, with no curve in between. I’ve had it since 1998, and I still don’t know if I really like it or not.
Oh boy. Heh, was EverQuest an obsession…
It started out innocently enough… I played only an hour or two a day when I first got it, and only after I finished homework (I was in high school at the time). Then I got more and more involved and I’d skip homework to play, telling myself I’d do the work at school. Then I started reading quest walkthroughs and class powerlists in school instead of homework. Then I started staying up really late playing the game. And once I was caught, I learned to pretend-sleep for half an hour while my parents went to bed, then I’d get up, turn off all the lights and start playing again.
Eventually, some other crap happened in my life and I ended up getting kicked out of school.
It was a dream come true.
I ended up staying at home for a while. Which translated, more precisely, into staying in my room with all the curtains drawn and the doors locked. I literally played EverQuest every single waking hour of my life. I’d wake up, play while eating breakfast (that somebody bought for me every day), play through lunch (which somebody also bought for me), then take a nap as a break. Then I’d log back on, this time as a Guide (a volunteer customer service rep) and answer petitions (customer service requests) for a few hours. Then I’d eat dinner while playing some more. Then I’d go to bed for real and literally dream in Norrath every single night.
During this time period, I had a minifridge full of sodas, constantly resupplied, and I’d just eat, drink, and play all day long. I would shower maybe once every three weeks, and usually only during patch downtimes. I literally did not venture out of my room for something close to a year, and during that whole time I did not see a minute of sunlight. I was ghostly white and morbidly obese.
My parents eventually got sick of that and kicked me out of the house and made me to go to California for college. I just took their money, dropped out of all my classes, bought myself a new computer and stayed in my apartment playing more EQ. Nobody would bring me food now, so instead I resorted to online grocery delivery from Safeway and Albertson’s. I ate TV dinners 24x7 and I remembered hating having to spend the 30 seconds unwrapping and microwaving them because that took away from my precious game time.
I even toured the SoE/Verant offices once and I remember being awed by their giant server stats screen and all the GMs sitting around, well, GMing. I truly found Mecca, I thought. It was orgasmic. And don’t get me started about the EQ FanFaire…
All in all, I logged more than 2000+ hours over a year or two (and that’s just on my main)… and never even got beyond level 24 – something that normally took people no more than a month of casual play. Just spent a LOT of time socializing and exploring.
Eventually I met a girl in EQ too. It didn’t work out, and EQ was never quite the same after that.
So I moved onto EQ2 
:eek:
Daaaaaaaaamn. See, I knew I wasn’t that bad.
And the most shocking part is you never got past level 24!!! Hundreds of days played, life ruined, family fractured, health destroyed, time and money wasted, college dropped-out-of, and you never got past level 24?!! Once I got the hang of the game, I could get to level 25 in about 2 days - 2 real days, not 2 days played. And I was not a powergamer or levelling whore by any means.
Yeah, heh. It was pretty sad. But to be fair to EQ, I think it was more of a symptom than a cause. I was an depressed geek outcast loser at school and part of a cultural divide at home. The only place I could be myself was over the Internet, where people didn’t pre-judge me.
So I took to gaming in a big way. I was bored of offline RPGs that would only last 20-50 hours and was actively looking for an effective escape. My regular BBS had a few great door games, but it got boring playing with the same 5-10 people over and over. IRC was a diversion, but not addictive enough to hold my interest. I sought out MMOs. UO was a letdown in its simplistic initial incarnation, and Meridian 59 was unavailable. EQ just happened to be the right (wrong) thing at the right time.
The level 24 thing was funny, sure, but it didn’t bother me. In fact, I kinda wore it as a badge of honor: By level 24, I’d seen more than most of the players I knew, including my level 50 friends. I knew the geography of all the zones except the planes (which I couldn’t get into) and had assisted numerous wizards on their level 50 spell quests, numerous paladins with their Holy Avenger quests, etc., and memorized the stats of every item in the game (which wasn’t hard back before the expansions came out). Being a druid, I could more than take care of myself and a few companions; I couldn’t kill much, but survival was a simple matter. I’d been on dragon raids and had ventured deep into dangerous dungeons thanks to Superior Camouflage and Harmony. I was a certainly a powergamer, but one who preferred socialization and exploration to the leveling treadmill. I spent most of my time standing at the dock in Oasis buffing people for fun and leading people from one end of the world to the other – tourism on foot was big in the early days of the game, before teleports were widely available and horses were but a distant dream. Eventually I started Guiding too, though I was technically underage, and that further reinforced my dependence on the game for worthwhile human contact.
EQ gave me the only real friends I had at the time, and for that I’m thankful. I was a lot closer to people in game than I’d been with anyone in real life – ever. Between my guild, random friends, and even customers I met while Guiding, EQ probably saved my sanity and perhaps my life. It was the one thing I had to look forward to when all else was empty. Perhaps EQ could be seen as enabling from one perspective, but I seriously doubt I was in any state to do anything else at the time.
All in all, that was a pathetic stage of my life, sure, but also perhaps a necessary one. EQ served as a transition from absolute introversion to more open socialization. It taught me that people weren’t always bad and that socializing could be fun, and it provided a safe and comfortable environment where people judged you based on what you did and what you said, not what kind of shoes you were wearing or whether your hairstyle was fashionable.
Hey, even the Army is exploring surrogate/transitional virtual worlds nowadays: Second Life for returning veterans
Anyway. If nothing else, at least EQ was cheaper and safer than drugs 
Believe me, I totally understand[stood] the appeal of the game. I was just ruffling your hair a little bit about the level 24 thing. And actually I knew a guy who played as much as you for the first year or so of the game and only made it to about level 24 himself. A few other friends played for years and only made it into the 40s. I played on and off for 4 years and never made it past level 54 myself. But then there were people who played casually for 3 or 4 months and made it to level 60. I think it took a special kind of OCD (beyond what the rest of us had :p) to make it to the top levels of that game.
And, yeah, killing foot travel with easy spells and then horses and then the Plane of Knowledge really hurt the social aspect of the game, didn’t it?
Indeed I was one of those rare actual believers of The Vision, I suppose, that infamous “make the game as hardcore and difficult as possible” philosophy of Smedley’s. All the MMORPGs that came after EQ were dumbed down for the masses. What’s this fast-travel nonsense? Whaddya mean you can rest back to full health in less than four hours?!! You have MAPS?! In my day we drew on our own on a_puma00’s skin!
I hated The Vision until they started straying from it, and then I thought, wait, that wasn’t so bad after all. The last time I returned to the game and they had the bazaar and the Plane of Knowledge, I felt like the spirit of the game was dead.