What advances in gaming blew your mind the most?

Ardent

Been gaming for decades now, although out of the loop lately with young kids and all that. Some standout moments for me in my gaming career -

Fifa International Soccer, Desert Strike and Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Megadrive. What a great console that was!

Street Fighter II arcade game. So many hours and 10p pieces lost to this game.

Doom on the PC. The first game to officially blow my mind. Then I bought a SoundBlaster card and it blew my mind all over again!

The first Call Of Duty Modern Warfare. This was a huge leap in gaming - gaming perfection in every sense.

Showing my age with some of those games above but I think the key theme is this - you can't create a great game with technology alone, you need a great idea or story to go with it.

dreamers75

Mario 64, spent 1st 2 or 3 hours running in a circle.

Retr0gamer

Ardent wrote: »

Showing my age with some of those games above

You really aren't but you're making me and a few others I imagine feel old saying that... I remember the Megadrive being next gen.

keane2097

Jaysus I forgot about Desert Strike!

Beefy78

Jesus, I thought NOTHING would ever beat Desert Strike the first time I played it.

The_Valeyard

keane2097 wrote: »

Jaysus I forgot about Desert Strike!

Anybody else play desert strike with cheat 'infinite ammo' and just go around the whole map, blowing up every single building.

Also loved Jungle, Urban and Soviet Strike.

Captain Chaos

Soviet Strike was my first Strike game. I got it as my first game for the PS1, the game came out just before Christmas of that year. Good times, never saw FMV sequences before in a game and it was my first open style game, didn't realise there was a mission structure to the game and kept failing as I never resqueued Nick in time from the firing squad. Figured it out after a few hours of just blowing stuff up.

Quick Post...
Unreal Tournament - Headshot!!!
Gravity Gun - Half Life 2

Venom

Doom was a real WTF moment back in the day.

A fighter sim on the Comadore Amiga where the view zoomed in from high orbit into the plane's cockpit totally blew my mind the first time I saw it :eek:

Retr0gamer

That was probably Starglider 2, made by the guys that made Starfox later on. It was basically No Mans Sky but in 1988. You had a massive Galaxy to fly around and any planet you could fly through the atmosphere to reach the surface with no loading times.

CiDeRmAn

Retr0gamer wrote: »

That was probably Starglider 2, made by the guys that made Starfox later on. It was basically No Mans Sky but in 1988. You had a massive Galaxy to fly around and any planet you could fly through the atmosphere to reach the surface with no loading times.

I preferred Mercenary and it's sequels on the various computers of the 80's, full roaming on the ground, steal a spaceship fly to a space station, dock and more adventures, brilliant.

Star Lord

Nothing has ever blown my mind quite like going from a CGA computer to a VGA one! Those Test Drive 3 loading screens were beautiful! (the game itself, not so much...)

Venom

Retr0gamer wrote: »

You really aren't but you're making me and a few others I imagine feel old saying that... I remember the Megadrive being next gen.

Dude I remember the Spectrum 128k being the hot new thing

Venom

Retr0gamer wrote: »

That was probably Starglider 2, made by the guys that made Starfox later on. It was basically No Mans Sky but in 1988. You had a massive Galaxy to fly around and any planet you could fly through the atmosphere to reach the surface with no loading times.

Deffo not Starglider 2 but some F16 type plane sim. It and Shadow of the Beast (for the music) made the Amiga an easy buy

Praetorian

Wolfenstein 1992 - seeing it first on my uncles £2000 pound 486 with VGA screen! I thought it was astonishing, and so life like I had a 286 with EGA screen at the time.

Doom 1993 - obviously

Xwing & Tiefigher 1993 and 1994 - spacey brilliance

Warcraft 2 1995 - RTS intro!

Quake 1996 - naturally. The real 3dness of it all!

Unreal 1998 - beautiful

Half Life 1998 - extraordinary

Starcraft 1998 - rts perfection!

Homeworld 1999 - near perfection

Super meat boy 2010 - pure playability

Occulus rift
About 3 weeks ago I had my first occulus experience. The game was Iracing. Not even a brilliant game, or a genre I have much interest in. So I sat down and strapped myself into a racing seat with force feedback, an awesome steering wheel and pedals. Put the occulus on...and WOW! VR here we go!

CiDeRmAn

Venom wrote: »

Dude I remember the Spectrum 128k being the hot new thing

I remember Atari Pong being high tech and desirable, at least to us 5 year olds!

I own one now and it's still cool!

Un Croissant

I looked through the thread to see if I could relate to anything. I couldn't really pick off the top of my head.

But... Modern Warfare 1 came out and I couldn't believe there were battles with allies running all around you, with names and everything. I actually cared when guys got shot running up a hill. I had never seen anything like it.

Also... the jump from ps1 to ps2 I remember thinking "it doesn't get better than this" when I played The Bouncer

laurenhiggins

Sonic the hedgehog blew my mind because over time they turned a great title into a complete pile of garbage by basically changing it completely..... And of corse 3D graphics blew my mind at the time

ZiabR

What about Counter Strike 1.3 - 1.6?

Retr0gamer

logik wrote: »

What about Counter Strike 1.3 - 1.6?

Great games but they looked terrible on release and there was no technical leap there considering they were piggybacking off Half Life's network code.

ZiabR

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Great games but they looked terrible on release and there was no technical leap there considering they were piggybacking off Half Life's network code.

Good point, cant argue with you there. I did have some serious fun with them though and the LAN parties we great craic.

Evac101

Praetorian wrote: »

Wolfenstein 1992

Doom 1993 - obviously

Warcraft 2 1995 - RTS intro!

Quake 1996 - naturally. The real 3dness of it all!

Half Life 1998 - extraordinary

Starcraft 1998 - rts perfection!

Homeworld 1999 - near perfection

^ these +

Dune the RTS 1992 - was my introduction to them and found it amazing.

MUDs - many and varied and, imo, in some cases still represents a level of story telling which many modern games lack.

Zork - a repudiation to my point regarding MUDs and one of the first games I 'heard' sound being used in inventive ways and proper voice acting

Ultima(s)

Wing Commander - brilliant gaming.

BeerWolf

My first online gaming experience, Diablo.

Fast paced PROPER 3D shooter Quake, from all the previous "3D" with 2D sprites games before it. ( Still got fond memories of the days of Quake 2, being played online... old Capture the Flag, over dial-up. )

Both in the same year!

K.O.Kiki

Deus Ex.

So great, it's still only game my non-gaming friend finished before I did.

BizzyC

Half Life - overall gameplay
Diablo 2 - amazing cinematics (even had a separate disc just for cinematics)
Morrowind - first game with a big open world I played
Far Cry - amazing graphics, set up expectations for all games to come

CiDeRmAn

Yeah,
Half Life was simply amazing.
Story telling via videogames, and a first person shooter at that.
The point when you went from ducking and diving from alien freaks of nature to being assaulted by the troops you expected were there to save you.
Brilliant.

YouSavedMyLife

Real music being played in Wipeout, wowowowowoowwhoaaaa

YouSavedMyLife

YouSavedMyLife wrote: »

Real music being played in Wipeout, wowowowowoowwhoaaaa

Didn't a then-famous DJ provide the majority of the soundtrack as well? I believe NiN created the theme for Quake, but I could be wrong.

kunst nugget

Deleted User wrote: »

Didn't a then-famous DJ provide the majority of the soundtrack as well? I believe NiN created the theme for Quake, but I could be wrong.

Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital were all on the soundtrack but it was a guy calling himself CoLD SToRAGE that did most of it. T'was a great post rave game. Tried playing it recently and it looked absolutely muck.

CiDeRmAn

kunst nugget wrote: »

Leftfield, The Chemical Brothers and Orbital were all on the soundtrack but it was a guy calling himself CoLD SToRAGE that did most of it. T'was a great post rave game. Tried playing it recently and it looked absolutely muck.

I have the soundtrack somewhere.
FSoL were on the sequel with We Have Explosive, purr brilliant.
Photek as well, and a instrumental version of Firestarter.

Another mind blower was the opening cinema of Gran Turismo, with a Chemicals remix of Everything Must Go by the Manics as soundtrack.
It took me 10 years to find a CD of that remix!
And now I have it.
I'm happy.
Possibly easily pleased....