the most fun you had in video games

[Danny Dowling]

that one time (or those times) you were playing a game and just couldn't stop enjoying it. it brought a smile to your face, it engaged you. maybe it had a story that was fun, maybe the gameplay was so good you didn't feel the need to a heavy story presence. or maybe it was times with your mates partying up and getting sick banter on.

here's is where we reminisce, and share those great experiences. here's a few i can think of:

Need For Speed Underground 2 on PS2 (someone should really Kickstarter an NFSU3 btw), learning all the songs, driving a sick whip and generally just feeling like a badass at 12 years old (yes, it's been 10 years).

Champion's of Norath on the PS2 with Dragonforce playing on the ol' CD player. an embarrassing one, but it was glorious.

me and my mate smashing Gauntlet Dark Legacy getting 999 on all stats and battering everything. 25 hours straight we played it, no jokes.

True Combat: Elite on PC while listening to In Flames. Don't know why, but I loved it.

deciding to just walk around get lost in Final Fantasy III (DS). sometimes you stray too far and nearly get completely annihilated by monsters far beyond your level. it was great immersion though.

the first time i played my PS3, Motorstorm and Resistance were mindblowing for me!

the first time playing my PS2. collecing Precursor Orbs in Jak and Daxter was golden.

 

[tippy2k2]

Saints Row: The series (excluding #1 when it was just a GTA clone)

Like...all of it. Everything about Saints Row IV is awesome and you should go play it. I would recommend playing SR2 and 3 as well. In fact, just all of Saints Row. Go pick up Saints Row 2, 3, and 4 and then you can thank me later. You're welcome.

I also greatly enjoy playing sport games on the internet for their are waaaaay too many little kids with big mouths and zero skill. Crushing their tiny little spirits is the most sadistic yet fun thing ever. If someone doesn't smack talk or if they're being respectful I'll take my foot off the gas and stop crushing them but absolutely curb stomping someone who's just running their mouth is probably the best thing about sport games.

 

[sanquin]

An obvious one: WoW. In the beginning, I couldn't stop playing. I had a ton of fun, and loved the world and bits of lore i picked up.

Mass Effect 1: Best game I've played on the xbox360. I finished the game in 2 days, and started a second play through right away.

Golden Sun 1: For it's time, it was one of the best rpg's you could get on the GBA imo.

Pokemon Blue: Ah yes, another obvious one. I didn't think much of pokemon at first. Then I decided to give the game a try, and got hooked. Heck I still play it every now and then. The concept is exactly the same in all games, but I can't argue with a design that just...works.

 

[Danny Dowling]

yeah i picked up at Pokemon Yellow. dived back in to the video games with Black 2 and got Y. dunno why but i just don't enjoy them like i did yellow. things are just different now i suppose, there are so many things to paly now and so many ways to play i doubt we could ever get another game like the first series of Pokemon games. at the time it was the only handheld anyone really had and it was the best game on it. nowadays it's DS, 3DS, Vita, iOS, Android... yeah miss those Pokemon days.

I remember wanting Golden sun on GBA when it came out, i remember the advert on the TV and jsut being like "woooow, yeahhhh" buuuut I never got it lol. I think it's one of the games Nintendo gave us for making up for the 3DS price drop though, need an excuse to charge that little bastard again.

I remember Advanced Wars 2 as well on GBA. Me and a friend had it and we were hooked, travelling to Taekwondo training long distance killing 2-3 hours playing each other and against the CPU strategising and that... damn, wish the AW2 map mode where you choose your own CO and the opponent CO could be released. that with online play or something? dammmmmnnnn, that'd be some MLG shit right here. Amazingly good game.

 

[Sanderpower]

I have to say WoW as well. I played it when I was in middle school and I instantly loved that game. I would spend days playing it.

 

[Clearwaters]

In saints row 2 me and my cousin spent hours sniping the wings off planes and watching them crash.

Saints Row 2 co-op was seriously just some of them best fun I've ever had. The 3rd and 4th game just aren't as fun. They were too self aware and it feels like those games were missing something.

 

[Danny Dowling]

yeah me and a mate spent hours playing the rag doll car game, when you glitch a massive score it was hype as hell

 

[Willzors]

I used to play team buddies on ps1, the multiplayer was fun while being extremely simple. I found it funny as well since the game looked like it was for kids but had a lot of swearing.

 

[thejboy88]

Shadow of the Colossus. PS2. While fun isn't really the best word for it, it's easily the most engrossed I've ever been in a game, and I enjoyed playing it probably more than any other video games so far.

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

Hands down, the first time I played Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero / Rock Band is one of the few games that I'll consistently have fun with, and I hope to see it make a comeback one day.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I recently got Dishonored and since I had the weekend off, I spent most of it getting through the game as a passifict. Somehow I got Clean Hands without Shadow or Ghost but after playthrough number 2. Now I'm on playthrough number 3, going through the game as a psychopathic, knife-wielding, maniac. After two playthroughs made up of slowly, methodically, sneaking around, it's incredibly cathartic to just say "screw it" and murder people with their own bullets, walls of light, etc.

The first time I played Burnout was a ton of fun...especially when I did the thing everyone else probably did which was to say to myself, "is Crash Mode really what I think it...OH MY GOD, YES!" I need to rebuy those games...

The first 4 hours of my time with Brutal Legend was me driving around the huge opening area, listening to metal and driving off of ramps. It almost made up for the gameplay presented later on.

Konami beat-em-ups have always been fun. Whether you're in the arcade or playing a home version, there's just something special about games like X-Men, TMNT, etc...even though they're all virtually the same game with different skins but it's like with CoD or, the Arkham games: the gameplay is fun so why try and fix what isn't broken?

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Pretty much all the good N64 games.

Unreal Tournament for many MANY hours of modding fun.

Halo 3 for many hours spent around the TV with my friends in glorious Slayer/Infection/Forge/Theater/etc. We'd bring that nonsense to school parties and everything... *sigh* I miss those days.

Too many others to mention as well but those are the games that most stand out in my mind.

 

[Kyrian007]

Has to be the best multiplayer shooter of all time. N64 "Perfect Dark." Not kidding, with my pals team deathmatching against sims... we easily wore out a couple dozen n64 controllers. I bought a dozen thumbstick "modules" and got good at switching them out of controllers when one finally got unusable. My profile savegame has over 100,000 kills (and an accuracy just under 90%.)

Otherwise... various EA NHL games. Some friends and I played all the way to to the 2007 season on NHL 2001. Full seasons and playoffs. And it gets pretty glitchy after 4 - 5 seasons.

You know, I had a lot of fun playing splitscreen Borderlands with my crew as well. Which was odd, I thought the game sucked. Well, until I played Borderlands 2... which was so bad that I wound up thinking 1 wasn't so bad after all. But now that my friends and I all play on PC, and Borderlands mp shut down... we all bought 2 while it was on sale this weekend. Bought a game I hated, just because with beer and friends it's fun.

And you know what? It's much better on PC. I was shocked by how much better it looked and handled than the ps3 version. Always before it was just fun hanging with my pals, even if the game meant shooting the same bandit, robot, or yeti over and over and over and over and over... but I actually caught myself getting into it yesterday. Guess I'm giving it another shot.

 

[MHR]

Trolling in Wurm Online, an indie MMO. I'll not get into the lengthy details, but during the lowest player population hours of the early A.M. I got the idea to dig a large strategically placed hole out in the woods on the outskirts of a player village. This was against the rules and designed for noobs and suckers to fall in and break their legs. When people found it, it worked better than I thought it would. People complained about this mystery pit so bitterly that it gathered quite a crowd. Many people huddled over the edge to examine it closely, and paid the price for their curiosity as they too would fall it. What made matters worse is that I had somehow unknowingly dug the hole in such a bugged way that people didn't always seem to land at the very bottom and instead kept bouncing around and often dying. Since in this game you drop all your possessions upon death, people would respawn and attempt to climb down to get their items and simply broke their legs again. This caused such a problem that a GM had to come in and repair the situation manually by using commands to fill the hole quickly.

Edit: Perhaps I haven't been clear. The big bad hole wasn't some kind of super weapon or exploit people were helpless against. Anyone with dirt or a shovel was capable of filling the hole or digging those people out of it. The people trapped in the hole could have also waited a couple of minutes to heal before they could climb up efficiently instead of being impatient, getting up only part of the way, and falling back down injuring themselves again. All those people decided instead to either gawk and lol or go back down it to get their stuff back, and surprise, get stuck down there the same way they did before. It was really laziness and inattention that caused them enough frustration to get a GM involved. You're free to disagree, but it really was quite funny.

I had never seen anything funnier. That night again, with the gleeful help of my mates, we covertly dug another large hole in the exact same spot. The next day, events repeated themselves and the admin was called in again, and shouted in all caps "I JUST FILLED THIS HOLE!"

Best trolling evar, never got caught, most epic time.

Other times in WoW Burning Crusade days I just went around as a warlock (for cheap easy 1v1 dueling) ganking ganking ganking players all day on a PvP server. I was one of the more persistent kind. I'd kill you while you're doing a quest or something, then fly away, do something else like kill a couple mobs in a low-traffic location or some other players, then come back and check if you were still there when you had already forgotten me and I'd do it again. People would eventually get tired of this kind of crap and get guildie help and such and I'd just lay even lower and come back when they gave up the search and do it again. This wasn't hard and was nothing special, but the key to causing this particular kind of trolling is persistence. Over a long time I made a bit of a sour name for myself with some enemy guilds. You know you've won when you get entire raids, 20+ summoned in by guild warlocks to just camp your corpse on multiple occasions. It was also hilarious to have the arena netherdrake that was faster than every single other flying mount at the time to outrun all of them.

Note though that I generally didn't gank people that were grey in level compared to me. It was always green or higher with occasional exceptions if they were in one of the guilds that loved to hate me. I like to think I'm a better class of troll. Any idiot can gank a grey, camp a corpse, build a fire and teabag. Do something unique.

Yes, my best times were of trolling. That's not to imply that I haven't had loads of fun doing normal non-sadistic things, it's just the most fun I've had.

Edit: Recently playing TF2 I played heavy and my buddy played medic and killed a bunch of people. That's normal, douchebags do that all the time, but instead I used the Natascha weapon. Everyone agrees it's a horribly useless weapon with poor damage coupled with slower firing speed, but it's very annoying at the same time because it slows people down a bit, so some people will rage about this weapon when in actuality it sucks and they have better odds of dealing with it than regular weapons. I slapped a killstreak tracker on that baby and renamed it "Skilltascha" and went around trying as hard as I could to kill people with it. I managed to reach a 72 killstreak with it in one life before dying. The enemy could see my progress tick up slowly the entire time because of the killstreak kit. Caused a bit of rage, and my buddy and I had a good time of laughing about that.

 

[Shinsei-J]

Need For Speed Underground 2 on PS2 (someone should really Kickstarter an NFSU3 btw), learning all the songs, driving a sick whip and generally just feeling like a badass at 12 years old (yes, it's been 10 years).

Has to be high up there for me too.
I just have memories of one summer holidays (Christmas time in Australia) where my older brother and I got this and didn't stop playing it. Him being older and an ass at the time I only got to play maybe once every five races so he was much better at it than me but one time near the end he was having trouble beating a single race and he had been on it for hours. During this time I had asked to play a couple of times, left then comeback asked some more and then he finally gave in handed the controller to me and told me I can't beat it anyway.
Beat. It. First. Try.
He was in shock. Where I'd usually expect him to be angry for doing better than him he was overjoyed and impressed.
One of my favorite moments from gaming in my childhood and it's now a precious memory to both of us.

Other "most fun" games include but are not limited too:

Pokemon at any iteration. Blue and Gold I similarly played with my brother having the opposite version. Ruby I played with my old best friend at the time. Pearl I found common ground with my current best friend. Heart Gold I raced my brother in and hung out with my best friend. Black 1 and White 2 was the same and for X and Y my best friend and I marathoner it while watching anime.
All of these times have just overjoyed me and solidified Pokemon as one of my favorite game series ever.

Klonoa: Door to the Phantomile is just one of my favorite games and causes so much joy at every turn that I replay it at least once a year.

Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Minecraft, Fire Emblem, Mario, Golden Sun, Bravely Default, Braid, Bastion.
Any of these I could cite as examples of that pure joy and not wanting to put them down too but I'll cut it off here as the shortlist.

 

[Danny Dowling]

Trolling in Wurm Online, an indie MMO. I'll not get into the lengthy details, but during the lowest player population hours of the early A.M. I got the idea to dig a large strategically placed hole out in the woods on the outskirts of a player village. This was against the rules and designed for noobs and suckers to fall in and break their legs. When people found it, it worked very well. People complained about this mystery pit so bitterly that it gathered quite a crowd. Many people huddled over the edge to examine it closely, and paid the price for their curiosity as they too would fall it. What made matters worse is that I had somehow unknowingly dug the hole in such a bugged way that people didn't always seem to land at the very bottom and instead kept bouncing around and often dying. Since in this game you drop all your possessions upon death, people would respawn and attempt to climb down to get their items and simply broke their legs again. This caused such a problem that a GM had to come in and repair the situation manually by using commands to fill the hole quickly.

I had never seen anything funnier. That night again, with the gleeful help of my mates, we covertly dug another large hole in the exact same spot. The next day, events repeated themselves and the admin was called in again, and shouted in all caps "I JUST FILLED THIS HOLE!"

Best trolling evar, never got caught, most epic time.

Other times in WoW Burning Crusade days I just went around as a warlock (for cheap easy 1v1 dueling) ganking ganking ganking players all day on a PvP server. I was one of the more persistent kind. I'd kill you while you're doing a quest or something, then fly away, do something else like kill a couple mobs in a low-traffic location or some other players, then come back and check if you were still there when you had already forgotten me and I'd do it again. People would eventually get tired of this kind of crap and get guildie help and such and I'd just lay even lower and come back when they gave up the search and do it again. This wasn't hard and was nothing special, but the key to causing this particular kind of trolling is persistence. Over a long time I made a bit of a sour name for myself. I got a few guilds to loathe me. You know you've won when you get entire raids, 20+ summoned in by guild warlocks to just camp your corpse on multiple occasions. It was also hilarious to have the arena netherdrake that was faster than every single other flying mount at the time to outrun all of them.

Note though that I generally didn't gank people that were grey in level compared to me. It was always green or higher with occasional exceptions if they were in one of the guilds that loved to hate me. I like to think I'm a better class of troll. Any idiot can gank a grey, camp a corpse, build a fire and teabag. Do something unique.

Yes, my best times were of trolling. That's not to imply that I haven't had loads of fun doing normal non-sadistic things, it's just the most fun I've had.

i don't condone any of this in any way. actually i think this is pretty bad and i'd probably not mention it too often if i was you.

 

[wooty]

Probably the first time I played Valkyria Chronicles.

Seemed really fresh to have a JRPG that kept all the elements of that genre, but mixed in with turn based strategy, third person gameplay, a squad you could give a shit about, lots of characterization and an ever increasing (and often punishing) difficulty curve. Plus those water colour effect graphics are still gorgeous to this very day.

 

[PBMcNair]

Easily Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Played it end to end in about 8 hours, grinning from ear to ear the whole time.

 

[Story]

Pretty much every time I played with someone else.
Playing Spyro the Dragon all day with my mother, trading Pokemon with people in school, playing Shadow of the Colossus with my friend and his family, playing my first MMO with my best friend, playing any of the Super Smash Bros with friends and family, doing a round of You Dont Know Jack with my grandfather, playing Mario Kart 8 with my siblings, and that one time I played WoW for a Gamification class. All of those experiences still stand out in my mind.

Otherwise, playing through Okami for the first time was also very satisfying. As was dicking around in Elder Scrolls Oblivion (I could not stop laughing all day).

 

[Casual Shinji]

Probably Little Big Planet, though it ultimately didn't last.

First time it appeared on screen and I was interacting with it I was hit with an immense feeling of childlike glee and wonder. It was like being a kid again, surrounded by your toys and knowing no better than that it would last forever.