> does anyone even remember Jet Set Willy

Of course And a PC version of Manic Miner is the most-played game on my machine at the moment.

What surprised me when I was reminded of it recently is the quality of some of the music on those early games - go to Wikipedia, find Rob Hubbard's entry, and follow the link to where you can download a zipped file of some of the music he wrote for games on the Spectrum, Amiga and C64. Tunes like those from Nemesis the Warlock and the second Hydrofool theme are, given the technology, quite brilliant. Wish I could stick 'en on my iPod!

I was really into computer games when I was a kid. At various times I had a Spectrum 48k (with the rubber keys ), a Commodore Plus4 (pretty much the same as the Commodore 64 I think...), an Atari ST and an Amiga A600. I loved them all and had loads of games that I'd play for hours. And on Saturdays a small group of us would go round to a mates house and play on his computer for hours! I was a huge fan of the Dizzy games and the Monkey Island games.

Nowadays I hardly ever play games. The only console I've ever owned is my N64, which I loved at the time but never play with it any more (apart from the occasional multi-player session on Goldeneye, MarioKart or Worms... ) Last year I bought myself a Gameboy Advance SP to take on holiday. To this day I've never recharged it and it still has power in the battery, that's how little I've used it!

So to sum up, games used to be cool, but Rock n' Roll is the new Rock n' Roll!

I've been playing videogames as long as i can remember.

My brothers had a Commodore64 one christmas and a NES another christmas, shared between the three of us (cue much infighting for use of it, and much smacking by annoyed parents ). Later on I had a Mega Drive, then a PlayStation, an N64, a Dreamcast, a PlayStation2, a GameCube and an Xbox.

Currently i've still got a Nintendo DS and a PlayStation Portable, and i've got a deposit on an Xbox 360.

You could say i've spent quite a bit of money on games consoles and games.

For many years, I only tinkered with console games. They tended to be christmas presents (until the PS2, i bought that and everything after that myself), and I didn't buy an amazing amount of games for them. Most of my gaming was done on the PC, and many of my fondest games memories are from PC games, such as Command & Conquer, Duke Nukem 3d, X-Wing Vs TIE Fighter and many others.

Recently, because maintaining a PC for top range gaming is so expensive, I play games exclusively on the consoles, and in recent games some of my favourites have been Devil May Cry, Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, Halo 2 among others.

Ooopsie thought I had posted on this one already

For me games were majorly important when I grew up. First used to play on the C64 when I was around 5 years old. I had the model with the 5 1/4 inch floppy drive, so no waiting until your tape was at the right spot . Also had the upgrade module for it which really speeded the whole thing up a lot! Also I had a few hundred floppy discs full with games.

After that it was a 386 (wasn't allowed on my dads XT & 286 when I had the C64) it had no soundcard yet but games like Raptor were extremely cool. At some point my dad bought a soundcard which was so cool, really enhanced the gaming experience, no more pc speaker bleeps. Plus you could play with the talking parrot and talk to a "doctor" who responded to your questions. All that still in ms-dos / windows 3.1(1) which was a pain in the backside for games. In the end I wrote a few startup discs with different settings for himem and mem386 etc in the config.sys and autoexec.bat as some games needed so much available memory in the first 640kb

This was also when I started to play with simple programming in quick basic. Had some fun with that When I finally got bumped up to a 486 games really started to become more than just the simple stuff we were used to from the C64. Eventually we got a p90 and used to play Duke Nukem 3d over an coax ipx/spx based network with some kids who lived in the area. Always was a pain to get that type of networks going. ISA cards that windows 95 recognized to have a certain DMA / IRQ setting but the card was hardwired to use different settings (but win95 said it was working fine). Not to mention if a terminator was broken or something similar Normally took a day to set up the network which only left part of the weekend to game. Had some good fun playing games like Duke Nukem.

Another favourite genre of mine are the Quests. Stuff like the Indiana Jones series, Space Quest, the day of the tentacle & sam and max were so cool! However as a little kid from the Netherlands, the English was a bit tricky but it's one way to pick up a language

Never used to have game consoles though, mainly because I had my courses for the PC games and my dad used to pay for all the cool pc hardware Have an xbox now though (since nov 2004)

(Edited by Chambler 19/09/2005 22:18)

i remember jet set willy!!
games were a massive part of growing up for me! i loved my commodore 64 and then my megadrive to death! all of the sonic games were amazing, and i still play them now (god bless the sonic mega collection for ps2!) i still have my megadrive (though its a bit knackered, hence sonic for the playstation) and i still play all my old games.
i bought a nintendo 64 last year because i never had my own as a child, i used to play on my cousins, but i love it! i've been playing zelda, mariokart, golden eye and perfect dark!
so right now i own, a commodore 64, a megadrive, an old classic gameboy, nintendo 64, playstation, ps2, a zelda themed gameboy advance....and i think thats it!
i have fond memories of bomberman on the snes, but not from as long ago as you might think! i spent last new years eve playing it til 8am new years day, completely off my face! but we had to finish it!!

I am really old-skool with my games playing. Kind of fell out of the games seat years ago. Haven't owned a modern console in years and have never been much interested in having a flashy gfx card or PC. I guess I just believe there are far more interesting things to spend money on. That said, I loved the 16-bit days, they were probably my favourite. For me the 8-bit era is nostalgic, but the 16-bit days were the hey-day of 2D graphics. I don't mind 3D per se, it's opened up a lot of possibilities, but 2D is just prettier and more stylized than 3D on the whole. Sonic is one of finest games ever, and I still own a mega drive and some carts including Sonic. I like RPGs and Strategy games, so of course I love the Shining Force games on the Mega drive.