Z and Cinder have gone on holidays and left us with a few topics to keep us entertained and instead of posting I just sort of…didn’t!! But…here we go – I am doing the first one!!
I am also still deciding if I am allowed to continue Intpipmo given I only did one post….lol I failed on that front I think :p But hey…tis my blog I can back date and pretend they were done in November right? RIGHT??!!?
Back to this topic though. The first game I ever got hooked on was Ragnarok – I have mentioned it previously I am sure.
It was an RPG game in the 90’s my brother and I played non-stop on the one computer we had. I would sit and watch him play so I knew how to when it was my turn. It was about this time I started reading about magic and wizards (Thanks Magician by Feist) and so began my love of RPG – but I had no idea what that meant as a genre until much later.
I was without a computer or gaming for a few years and the next game I was hooked on was Pharaoh (thanks Sierra games) and thus began my love and adoration of City building games.
To say obsessed would be an understatement, if anyone remembers the pain of this game and building some of the huge pyramids you will understand leaving the game running overnight in the hopes that your entire city wasn’t a burnt husk when you returned. My enjoyment of city building still exists today and I have played a fair chunk of them but none of them had the same enjoyment for me as this one game (which I have on my pc now and sometimes pull out for an hour two).
I love city building because it is a puzzle and needs to be done well for it to work, the AI in older games was very unforgiving and if you stuffed it up you knew….they made sure you knew. I also really enjoyed the games with historical significance – who doesn’t want to build a pyramid and be a pharaoh? I loved Zeus as well as the mythological aspects in the games were enjoyable. I would love that is Aztec/Mayan based with the same style as Pharaoh or even a Pacific Islander one with you needing to see up small colonies on islands with different but similar cultures. <Swoon>
Then I found out about MMO’s. Guild Wars was my first.
It was amazing to me that I could be a magic hurling character in a world like the books I was an avid reader of. It made the worlds in my imagination real for me; I could see and interact with them. That was until WoW came along in the form of a birthday present by a great friend. I have tried a few MMO’s since and the only other one that was really engaging initially was Star Wars but WoW kept pulling me back for the graphic style, the lore, the story, the people and the dragons.
MMO’s are my favourite because of the team you play with. You get to work together, have a laugh with other people who want to be shapeshifting fire hurling agents of good (or chaos…looking at you SP’s and Locks) and you get to have dragons as pets and ride them. What else can you possibly need? I love that other people enjoy high fantasy (…maybe not as much as me…in fact maybe they don’t even think of it like that?) and it sends me back to my days reading books like Lord of the Rings and the Belgariad…I can pretend I am a character in those novels and feel part of something bigger.