You pick the game giveaway!! Part II

[jormungand]

Many thanks for the give away.
Im just interested in RotTR thanks and luck for everyone.

My story... lol Im cuban so in Cuba we didn't have internet. Me and my friends used to go to a place where we could pay 50 cents for hour playing Nintendo , snes and the story of consoles +++ blah blabla.
One day one of those friends took me to his house , his father had a computer and he was playing Dukenukem 3d .... my expression was like oh damnnnnn !!! can i try ??? the sensation of playing with a mouse and a keyboard was unique. Then i spent
like a few years more playing on those consoles . My cousin came with a laptop and showed me Return to Castle Wolfenstein..... Since was my cousin laptop i had the chance to play everyday and beat the game till the end. Another few years passed and then i went to university... my need of a computer became relevant to my mom and she decided to help to buy one. my frist pc was a pentium 3 dont know wth WAS BUT THAT WAS WHEN I MET HALF LIFE!!!!!!!!!!
Being in university was great for my introduction into pc gaming a lot of people were already playing on pc for long time. but like i was a guy who was born in the skirts of Havana city never had the chance to be in touch with pc.
Well, since that i started playing Warcraft 3 and frozen throne , damn those were good times . My dad brought me one day some parts.( my question was:... is better than what i have????? the answer from him was : WTF do i know... but let me call a friend of mine that can put you all this together... then i started watching what he did and making questions i realized that i could upgrade my pc using parts. that was my first AMD pc with an ati radeon agp 9600.
From that point i started buying my own stuff reading a lot from forums that a friend that had access to internet gave me saved webpages. From that point i started selling my PS1, PS2 and putting all that money in pc parts and games . then i came to US and .... i finally tasted the multiplayer online after so many years playing alone campaign games or a few ones in lanparties.

 

[SomeOne99h]

Hmmm ....

I can't really remember when but I think 20 years ago or more, my brother had an Acer Pentium III 300Mhz(?) with Windows 98. He put it in our room when he came from the US. I only watched him playing Driver, and it would stutter when the car ran full speed but he and our brothers didn't care about the stutters. Then my brother flee to US again to continue his college there. When he came back again, I started using it. I downloaded many shareware games including Swarm Assault. It was an RTS game about bugs going into war Red Alert style. Then I kept buying the PC magazine that comes every month just to get the demos and sharewares because the internet was so slow (dial-up), I can't just download anything from the net without frustration. I found a game in one of CDs made by 3D, the first helicopter army men game. I can't remember its exact name. The game however required 64 MB of RAM or was it graphics card's RAM? anyway, The PC didn't have that much or RAM/vRAM so I gave up. I also remember that I tried to get the latest drivers for the graphics card ATI RAGE 16 MB (or was it 8 or 4 MB?) because I wanted desperately increase performance and added DirectX 8 support and because there is no real market in my country to actually buy a new video card.

Many years passed .... in 2006, I decided to buy a laptop with a good graphics card. An Asus laptop with Nvidia 7700 Go (Yes it is 7700, it is not a typo). I then got Battlefield 1942 and Company of Heroes, Those games ARE so much fun that I keep playing them till TODAY especially Company of Heroes. Those games worth the money pretty well, 8 years and still going. Hey rtwjunkie, I know you play Company of Heroes with Blitz mod, and so do I

Thank you [URL='https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/members/whitenoise.66742/']WhiteNoise [/URL]

I vote for Skyrim Special Edition

 

[WhiteNoise]

It's pretty cool to read about how you guys discovered PC gaming. I didn't get into PC gaming until I was around 26-27 years old and that is only because of my best friend who had a PC. I was always so jealous. I'd hang out at his house and we would take turns playing PC games and it was loads of fun. We are both much older now, both married and have kids. He lives in San Diego and I live closer to LA now but you know what we still do? Twice a year (spring and fall) he drives up to my house on a Friday night and stays until sunday. We call it the game weekend and all we do is drink beer, eat junk and play video games with hardly any sleep. We still act like a couple of kids. Great fun!

 

[Random Murderer]

Entering for TrackMania Turbo

Spoiler

Oh my gosh, where to start?
I guess I should start by saying that before I could walk, my father had turned me into a gamer. We had an Atari 2600 and an NES, some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor in the living room next to my dad, each of us with an NES controller in hand, playing Mario. I was hooked on video games immediately, so it wasn't odd for me the first time I noticed an old PC(even for the time) at my grandparents' place just a year or so later and had my grandfather explain what it was and show me how to turn it on and play some games. It was by no means easy for someone who had just learned to read to crank out DOS commands and get games running, but I remember being absolutely astounded that the "controller" was so large and had so many buttons, and that I could use it to tell the PC to do different things, and that even though the graphics were nowhere near the NES I had become accustomed to, somehow the games felt more engaging and immersive. I wish I could remember the name of the 5.25" floppy that they had, it had a ton of games on it and some of them were really unique and interesting. Keep in mind the PC I'm referring to is an IBM 5150, so monochrome black and green screen, extremely basic sound, keyboard with no mouse, dot matrix printer, and all ASCII graphics. I remember learning what Othello was and playing a lot of that, first on that old IBM then on a real board with my grandfather. I also remember there was a minesweeper-esque game in which you had a large grid that represented a plot of land you owned and you had to choose where to drill for oil, then see through that operation until you either struck oil or failed miserably and had to choose a new location to drill, provided you hadn't run out of funds. I perused these many games for about a year until my parents decided to buy a PC for our household. Enter my first PC: an Intel 486 machine running Windows 3.11 for Work Groups. Not even a month after getting this PC, a friend gave me the Shareware version of DOOM along with a lesser-known game built on the DOOM engine called Operation: Body Count, and I've been an avid PC gamer ever since.
It's worth noting that I still own the 5150 from this story. It still functions, and I still have a few hundred floppies for it. Even if it stopped functioning, I would keep that PC, it simply means too much to me for me to willingly give it up. In a way, that IBM 5150 is responsible for my love of PCs today, and is probably my single most favorite piece of tech I have ever owned.

Thank you @WhiteNoise for the giveaway and the opportunity for all of us to come together and share our PC origin stories.

 

[AsRock]

Well from a early age been a fiddlier, remember my mother Betamax which i had to take apart just to see how it worked. Atari Sinclair took'em all apart and remember not being to happy to find very little in the Atari 2600 lol.

Anyways my brother being about 10 good ol mother and dad got him a 386 which was running win 3.1 and being the type of person i am a long with my brother thought it be awesome to mess with it, some part of messing with it got the OS all screwed up and of course it was me, they just knew me only to well and being the eldest well it was defaulted as my fault.

As my parents did not get it from a shop and just some body who put them together we did not have the floppy with the system. So i was tasked as seen at it was my fault too find the way to fix it. Took a few days i got a version ( COUGH ) of Win3.1 from a friend of a friend who used to deal in HiFi.

Ever since then been using them ever since, although it would of happened sooner or later as i was, well still in to simulators and the PC was the way to go and on top of that it came with options to fiddle ..

Only one really want is Just Cause 3, been waiting for a heavy price drop on it.

And Thank You for the opportunity..

 

[LightningJR]

Great giveaway! I am in for Rocket League.

The furthest back I remember playing games on a PC would be on an old 286 (I think) I played Family Feud and Wheel of Fortune on that beast. I remember it went straight to dos and I used DOSSHELL to open any programs. At the time I thought it was DOSS-HELL because I was an idiot young kid and had no clue. I have no idea where that PC came from but my best guess would be from an uncle. I learned a lot from that PC, I messed around in DOSSHELL for hours trying to open random files and navigating poorly the directories. It had a 5.25" floppy drive too but I don't think I ever got anything running from the floppies I had, I think it was just super slow and I didn't have any idea how to copy the files to the PC.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Stardew Valley -- Would like to take it with me for a routine visit to Mayo Clinic in less than two weeks. Gonna be up all night for a 6:45am appointment so would be nice to have something new to play on an old laptop.


I can't really point to a specific game that was the starting point. I jumped between Windows and the console of the time (NES, SNES, PlayStation) quite a lot without giving it much thought. I remember Duke Nukem, Sim Ant, Sim Isle, A-Train, and many other titles that consumed a lot of my time. So instead, I'd rather focus on the moment that turned me from a "whatever works" sort of gamer to the "PC gaming master race" sort of gamer.

It was during the winter of 2001 and I got Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed for PlayStation through the PepsiStuff promotion and played the crap out of it. I loved the game, especially how it had open world multiplayer which was huge for the time...and even years later. Fast forward a year or two later and my sister bought a new Compaq Presario that came with an EA bundle including SimCity 3000 Unlimited and the Windows version of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed. I installed it on my own Compaq Presario at the time and my mind was utterly and completely blown. The graphics were miles ahead, the gameplay was less repetitive, the test drive campaign was epic, and the soundtrack was unforgettable. Except multiplayer (which I never really cared for) all facets of the Windows version were superior to that of the PlayStation version. Ever since then, my spending on consoles has plummeted while spending on computers skyrocketed.

The ironic twist is that both of these games, in their own right, are still the high bar for racing games for me. They had soul where a lot of the newer games (2005 Most Wanted aside) really lack it.

 

[ZakkWylde]

Farcry 4 Gold!

My story begins with my family being given a intel 286 running dos/windows 3.1. My father was attending college and was given a less than legit cd filled with software much of which was games. I played hours and hours of wolfenstein 3d, doom, one must fall, hocus pocus, aces over europe, and many more. I was only about 5 and had a hard time with dos so my father set up a menu that would launch games with a keypress (press 1 for wolf3d etc). From there I played red alert, warcraft and on and on. Upgraded to a pentium 3 and ten years later a q6600. It was a tough few years not meeting minimum specs haha.

 

[yotano211]

Many thanks for the give away.
Im just interested in RotTR thanks and luck for everyone.

My story... lol Im cuban so in Cuba we didn't have internet. Me and my friends used to go to a place where we could pay 50 cents for hour playing Nintendo , snes and the story of consoles +++ blah blabla.
One day one of those friends took me to his house , his father had a computer and he was playing Dukenukem 3d .... my expression was like oh damnnnnn !!! can i try ??? the sensation of playing with a mouse and a keyboard was unique. Then i spent
like a few years more playing on those consoles . My cousin came with a laptop and showed me Return to Castle Wolfenstein..... Since was my cousin laptop i had the chance to play everyday and beat the game till the end. Another few years passed and then i went to university... my need of a computer became relevant to my mom and she decided to help to buy one. my frist pc was a pentium 3 dont know wth WAS BUT THAT WAS WHEN I MET HALF LIFE!!!!!!!!!!
Being in university was great for my introduction into pc gaming a lot of people were already playing on pc for long time. but like i was a guy who was born in the skirts of Havana city never had the chance to be in touch with pc.
Well, since that i started playing Warcraft 3 and frozen throne , damn those were good times . My dad brought me one day some parts.( my question was:... is better than what i have????? the answer from him was : WTF do i know... but let me call a friend of mine that can put you all this together... then i started watching what he did and making questions i realized that i could upgrade my pc using parts. that was my first AMD pc with an ati radeon agp 9600.
From that point i started buying my own stuff reading a lot from forums that a friend that had access to internet gave me saved webpages. From that point i started selling my PS1, PS2 and putting all that money in pc parts and games . then i came to US and .... i finally tasted the multiplayer online after so many years playing alone campaign games or a few ones in lanparties.

Cuba FTW!!

I left Cuba when I was 5.

 

[Capitan Harlock]

Well all started in 1995 on windows 95 but was not my pc ,playing Road Rush , before i played only on copycat consoles .
In 2002 i got my first very own pc but didn't played a lot of games because i had a ps1 for years but i day i discovered what let me encounter my playmates , VIETCONG .
I have a Ps2 too and played that a lot but no online play for me because the internet adaptor was very pricey at the time.
After Vietcong i got into Half life and other games from Valve and into mods with Bid for Power a mod for Quake 3 arena and so on thanks to my friends and in the years pc as become my main platform .

My pick if can be what i want mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 or Deus Ex Mankind Divided choose for me please i have so many games i want XD.

 

[Mussels]

Lets go with overwatch.

Dad had a computer repair business, back in the 386/486/pentium 1 era. Because systems back then would outright freeze, or CRT monitors would burn in he'd leave them running doing defrags or OS installs and get me to let him know when the screen changed, or when something stopped working.

Pretty much learned to read and write for games in DOS - the motivation was pretty high for correct spelling and 'punctuation' when it was the difference between a game running or not.

I think how he setup his systems back then slightly influenced mine, 20 odd years later. I uh, may still find it fun to watch defrag programs do their thing (ultimatedefrag is pretty, yo)

 

[Flogger23m]

I want Dishonored 2.

In the 90s the first PC game that hooked me was a flight simulator, I believe it was called "Discovery Wings". It was not a big title, probably not very good for the time either. It certainly is not remembered very well whereas Flight Simulator, Falcon and Flanker defined the era. But I really enjoyed it as I did not know any better. The next game I got hooked onto was Incoming, which came with a ATI "All In Wonder" card. I saw the box lying somewhere in the garage a few months back. Then I shifted to the N64, but came back to PC gaming with Jane's USAF. Picked up a PS2 and gamed with both of them, although by 2007 I was more or less a PC exclusive player. And I have been since, only replaying old PS2 games and recently my 3DS. But the majority of my gaming is spent on my PC. There are many excellent games on consoles, but most of those or similar come to PC. However, the PC has the best exclusives. The things mainstream gaming media/CEOs seem to be oblivious about. Flight sims, RTS, ArmA, modding and more. I am glad for Jane's USAF putting me back on track as a PC gamer. Many great experiences I had were simply not on consoles.

Thanks a lot for the OP for holding an excellent giveaway.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Thanks for the giveaway.

I would love Deus Ex Mankind Divided or The Division, but was waiting for some sale....

The Story? hmm....

was in 1995 if I remember correctly, in High-school; on the programing class we were on the lab where the 4x86 PCs were, and I remember somebody bringed on floppy disks Doom 2, Terminal Velocity and specially Syndicate. I remember begging the guy to borrow the disks so I can also play home, but I was too late, the teacher found them and confiscate them, lol.
Remember that was such a big disappointment I almost cried, lol. The guy with the floppies also cried like a baby.
Point is, after that day I've became a gaming freak, making dozens of friends and trading floppies and later gaming CDs and so on...

good times.

 

[Toothless]

You can post a list of games but then if you win I will just randomly pick one. If there is one on the top of your must have list then just post that.

 

[DarkOCean]

Deus Ex Mankind Divided or Dishonored 2

I started playing PC games idk back in 2004 in high school, Gta vice city

 

[Ahhzz]

Seeing the comments about Shareware make me remember the boxes of 3 1/2" disks at the McKays' locally ... prowling thru, looking for something special heheh

 

[Tallencor]

Lets go with overwatch.

Dad had a computer repair business, back in the 386/486/pentium 1 era. Because systems back then would outright freeze, or CRT monitors would burn in he'd leave them running doing defrags or OS installs and get me to let him know when the screen changed, or when something stopped working.

Pretty much learned to read and write for games in DOS - the motivation was pretty high for correct spelling and 'punctuation' when it was the difference between a game running or not.

I think how he setup his systems back then slightly influenced mine, 20 odd years later. I uh, may still find it fun to watch defrag programs do their thing (ultimatedefrag is pretty, yo)View attachment 81236 View attachment 81237

That last pic is epic. Made my morning.

 

[droopyRO]

My folks got the money to buy me a PC in the summer of '99, upon delivery and installing the thing i understood that if you hit the delete key your PC will malfunction(i had zero knowledge back then of hardware and software) so i unplugged the keyboard and pulled out the Del keys from it. My first full PC game was Jane`s Fleet Command and it kept asking for the CD after installing it, i didn't knew it was a pirated version that would't work without the crack. So after more than a day of trying to run the game i went to get my money back, only then i was "instructed" that there are original and pirated games and what to do with the latter to make it run
Thank you for the giveaway.

 

[Crap Daddy]

Great giveaway and many thanks. As they say a picture tells a thousand stories so I will leave this here:

Other unforgettable moments: Medal of Honor Allied Assault multiplayer, Far Cry and the beautiful islands and jungle in Crysis. I was in my late 30s and early 40s back then, still young though.

Dishonored 2 would be nice.

 

[WhiteNoise]

It was during the winter of 2001 and I got Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed

I lost myself to that game on the PC. Still one of my favorite PC racing games.

 

[Vario]

Farcry 4 Gold!

My story begins with my family being given a intel 286 running dos/windows 3.1. My father was attending college and was given a less than legit cd filled with software much of which was games. I played hours and hours of wolfenstein 3d, doom, one must fall, hocus pocus, aces over europe, and many more. I was only about 5 and had a hard time with dos so my father set up a menu that would launch games with a keypress (press 1 for wolf3d etc). From there I played red alert, warcraft and on and on. Upgraded to a pentium 3 and ten years later a q6600. It was a tough few years not meeting minimum specs haha.

My dad did the same thing in DOS but the menu required me to complete math problems in order to play games.

 

[stinger608]

First, I want to take this opportunity to give a huge thank you to @WhiteNoise for an amazing giveaway!!!!


I would like to have The Elder Scrolls® Online: Gold Edition if I win.

Spoiler: The Story

The year was 1993 and my best friend in the world, rest his soul, had just purchased a Packard-Bell 486 DX50 system with 4 megs of ram. The original Doom was just being released. He purchased Doom for his system as I sat idly by watching him play this insanely scary game! I was hooked right then and knew I had to have a PC.
I had previously had an old 286 system that I did early coding on but nothing "modern" for gaming! A short time went by and I managed to pick up a very similar Packard-Bell system from a rent-to-own local store. I grabbed Doom and if my memory serves me right, Quake had just released or was about to.
I later sold that Packard-Bell and got a "hot rod" system...........Yep, another Packard-Bell with an ultra fast Pentium MX133!!!!!!!!!!!!! That system I ended up saving up the bucks to install a Diamond Moster 3Dfx 12 meg card so I was able to play Quake II as it had just been released.
My best pal ended up getting a Diamond Moster 3Dfx 8 meg card to join me in playing some Quake II multiplayer!

My god, what an awesome period in my adult life! We later both ended up with some Socket A AMD systems that I built for both of us and started attending LAN parties when Unreal Tournament was the hot game!

Wow, I honestly miss them days dearly!

 

[newconroer]

Osiris : New Dawn


The commies...

Spoiler

When I lay down on the psychiatrists couch, and think back... it all started with Christmas '91.
Freddie Mercury had passed, Kuwait was being bombed, Mike Tyson was arrested, Jeffrey Dahmer was finally caught, Linux was released, and if not mistaken, the world was introduced to web browsers.

Of course, most of that I had no idea about at the time. What I did know, was that after opening Christmas presents, I returned to my room, happy for the most part though a little disappointed. Santa had not brought me a Nintendo. As I sat on my bed I noticed a wrapped gift on my desk. Having flashbacks of the wrapped rifle hidden in the corner scene in A Christmas Story from the year before, I jumped for joy thinking it was a Nintendo. I opened it up to find this :

A Texas Instruments TI99-/4A.

I was uncertain what it was...really the important thing I took from that moment was that it definitely did not resemble a Nintendo!
My father explained what it was and in time I came to love it, playing such classics as Barrage, TI-Tennis, Carfax Abby, Pitfall and many others.

I never did get a Nintendo, and maybe it was in spite of that, my interest in video gaming with PC master race would grow. I was introduced by a friend to BUILD engine and similar style games in the mid 90s.
Classics such Seventh Corridor, Doom, Duke3d, Redneck Rampage, Hexen, Heretic,NAM etc were awesome.

By that time we had three computers in a the study, one acting as a gateway machine and the others the internal devices.
We had them setup to play LAN, often my father and I doing coop missions in NAM. One afternoon a friend came over and was watching us play. He was nudging me that we should find away to get my dad to leave so we could play Total Annihilation. We were excited that we had built our own tank unit with lasers on their freaking heads(we didn't know at the time that phrase would later become popular...).

Eventually dad had to go drop some kids off at the pool. He was having a lot of 'Carnation' instant breakfast drinks for some reason, and they made you have to go to the toilet often. So we pranked him by installing a backdoor cow trojan on his machine.
After he returned, we kept closing his NAM game window with ALT-F4 every few minutes. At one point he got quite upset and shouted "God damned fu**ing commies!"

As he went down the stairs his voice trailed in the distance...

"Sons bitches"
"..commies hacking civilian systems"
"..can't even blow up some fu**ing [unintelligible]"
"..some pinky commies interfering..."

The loud banging from the kitchen must have been the cupboards as he scrounged around trying to find another Carnation drink packet - like an addict needing a fix.


It was after that point we knew there was a sure fire way to get ourselves more computer time together and go have large FPS and RTS matches over dial up with our friends down the street.
He never did make the observation that it only happened when he was playing.

About seven months later, he decided the commies had won and was going to get another computer entirely. We thought that was great, we could then sometimes have three people doing LAN at the house. Sadly while he was at FRY's buying the computer, he got coaxed into picking up (the last in stock) three Voodoo graphics cards because they were cheap. When we went to install them, we realized they were AGP and not PCI. Well, as you can imagine this was all the commies fault too and there we were surrounded be pieces of the computers strewn about, with little knowledge and how to put them back together.

In the end we had to sell everything piece meal, and buy all new computers : with Pentium IIIs, Banshee AGP, Seagate Cheetahs, 21" CRT monitors, Creative sound cards, Thrustmaster wheel/pedals, and FLCS style joystick/thruster. Last but not least, we were early cable internet adopters in our neighborhood.
I went onto play many online Duke3d ranked matches, hosted whole summers' worth of Rainbow Six full sixteen man games and large custom Total Annihilation maps. We spent so much time inside it's a wonder we even knew how to talk to girls when school started up again each fall.

My father has all the equipment stored away in a little 90s computer museum, including the TI99/4A and all it's accessories - which I believe is worth a lot now.
The storage shop is like Mr. Robot but without all the schizophrenia and violence.

 

[WhiteNoise]

@newconroer That was great! That actually sounds like my Dad lol

 

[Luke Whitton]

Edit: Im not too late after all!

If i were to win i would like Call of Duty Infinite Warfare

From a very young age I've loved technology, taking things apart to see how they work and probably not remembering how to put it back together. We always had a family computer to send emails, chat, watch YouTube and stuff. I always use to use it but never to game on, that would always be done on the xbox!! Till more recently I met up with @CAPSLOCKSTUCK who showed me that it's wasn't hard to make one for the same money. So that's what we did! I couldn't be happier.. that the xbox was out of my life. Gaming on a computer is just so much better for so many reasons, and it's a computer!!

Thanks for the giveaway