I was playing online Trivia Pursuit tonight (rock and roll or what?) and realised just how much I took for granted the fact I was playing against three other people from around the world. Made me think back to the days when online multiplayer was new, fresh and exciting. I think my first proper foray was Unreal Tournament back around 1999. It was thrilling and heart pounding stuff just to know you were up against real people. I remember thinking at the time that online was the bees baws and the only plausible future for gaming. Now I'm much happier playing solo. Anything fast paced and competitive just stresses me out.
What's your earliest memory of online multiplayer?
Probably Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield Vietnam, 15 years ago or so. Ah, the heady days of the internet. It was all spawn camping and lag etc. If someone wasn't moving you didn't shoot them as they were probably typing.
Think mine was Unreal Tournament on the Dreamcast via dial-up. Hell of a faff as it was the U.S. version of the game which meant you had to input all sorts of internet gobbldigook to get it to work. It was genuinely mind blowing getting your head round playing against people from all over the world.
Then the phone bill arrived. That was even more mind blowing.
Quake III on Dreamcast. I'd read lots of things about the lag but I thought it played fine. I got to the point where I could almost hold my own against the M&K players. Voice chat annoys me. Even talking on the phone annoys me, so I liked the quick keyboard commenting mid match.
I think, probably, a very laggy CounterStrike which was no fun, and got switched off after a few minutes.
First real memories are co-op Gears of War 2 and Crackdown with Muse, which was followed fairly shortly thereafter by FNF. Pretty decent introduction, all told.
Delta Force: Black Hawk Down on PC - IIRCit was only the demo, so I played the single map endlessly on the Stonehill server and got to know the regulars. Many, many hours of fun, no menu down, don't think I ever bought the game - so in that respect the demo was both a unmitigated success and a miserable failure.
Agreed. Quake III and Halo 2 are the highlights of my online mp career. If Rocket League had been released on the Oldbox I'm pretty sure that would be up there too.
Really peering back into the mists of time here, but my first was Duke Nukem 3D. Played against a mate just down the road. Thought it was hilarious. I suppose that must have been 1996.
Mario Kart was very good. Also enjoyed Boom Street, Tetris Party and Dr. Mario. Had my arse handed to me more often than not but had some victories.
Had my virtual arse handed to me playing The Conduit, Tatsunoko v Capcom and the Mario Strikers game - that was a one off experience not to be repeated.
But not knowing the people I was playing against took the edge off it - could have been bots for all I knew.
However online doesn't really appeal to me as most of the modern genres such as FPS, GTA etc. don't interest me.
Had great craic in work with office LAN gaming though. Bit of Quake 2 and a LOAD of Worms Armageddon. We were largely same room though. But given the right set of circumstances I could probably get into to but I don't have the dedication to get good enough or to turn up regularly.
But - for games like Tetris and Dr. Mario - if there was a good matching service I'd probably be more into it as it's a great way to improve.
Unreal Tournament/Quake 3. Got quite good at it, but my proper love was, and always will be CoD4, which is why I don't bother anymore, nothing will match it.
Counterstrike, Total Annihilation or team fortress. I can't remember which I played first but I loved them all. Counterstrike is probably the one that really convinced me that online was for me though.
There was a ww2 air combat game I played on a BT subscription gaming service that I vaguely remember. I think that might have been before the others.
I think mine was CoD MW on 360 with badgers. I didn't really play online much until then.
I still remember my first match, played with Musechick and Jimmy The Lips.
Not everything is The Best or Shit. Theres many levels between that, lets just enjoy stuff.
GTAV. Goober came along in a helicopter and was trying to signal to me to get in. But I was still doing the tutorial so I ignored him and carried on. Soz.
Did manage to play some properly with various badgers after that, and continued even playing with randoms for a while.
Other than that, I've only really played Souls games in co-op.
HL2 deathmatch but exclusively on the Killbox map which was a big cube with very low gravity and large household objects littering the floor. Distinct memory of bouncing around flinging bathroom sinks at people to the sound of the William Tell overture.
Operation Flashpoint in 2002. Offline, it was Crammond's Grand Prix over a LAN in '96.
My connections to others haven't improved since 2003 when I upgraded to ADSL, because traffic's increasing all the time and saturating our networks. There are only so many pipes around the world. I've gone from 0.5Mb's 60Kbps to 70Mb's 8Mbps, but my pings are only slightly lower on average.
Warcraft II with Kali around '97. I had to buy a proper license to play more than 10 minutes.
The game got old after a while so I spent a lot of time just chatting to random people.
I always wanted to try Ultima Online, as I'm sure many of us did, but it came out in our penny-per-minute days. That's why I didn't get online until 2002, when BT offered a £5.99 evenings-and-weekend option. Else 1p per minute peak hours, but I avoided those.