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Message: [QUOTE="Gorse, post: 2606, member: 73"] I was very fortunate with online multiplayer games growing up. I didn't have any online-enabled home consoles until the PS4, and I only had access to Mac computers, but I still managed to have a ton of great multiplayer experiences through nothing more than a laptop and a prayer. Here's what took up a good chunk of my adolescence: [B][IMG align="left" width="211px" size="258x387"]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5f/Tf2_standalonebox.jpg[/IMG]Team Fortress 2 [/B]is my favourite multiplayer game and favourite PC game full-stop. I jumped on the bandwagon as soon as it went F2P in 2011, and from the moment I first played a round of 2fort, I was in love. Immediately, I got all my friends to get with it, and very soon, it was our primary online hangout throughout a good portion of late-grade and high school. We were all [I]deep [/I]into the game – we formed a competitive clan, spent time with the in-game economy, had our own "regular" server, trolled the hell out of fellow players (hey, we were 14!), and came up with a variety of unfunny injokes. Beyond the people I knew IRL, I also made a lot of Steam friends through public servers, and spent a ton of time on YouTube reviewing strategy videos and watching parodies made in GMod. ([URL='https://youtu.be/NF1i07RyPa0?si=pvJWGjgJ4xQej4GE']STBlackST[/URL]'s were the best, but I was also partial to [URL='https://youtu.be/NfqdtC6CPYg?si=yuqE5S74i3ACTBab']this[/URL] and [URL='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Libic29tjbs']this[/URL].) I knew the lines to every Meet the Team video by heart. I bought other games just for custom hats and weapon skins. (Both Poker Night games were worth it.) The culture surrounding TF2 in the early-to-mid-2010s was just [I]excellent[/I], in so many different ways. Like a lot of people, I stopped playing regularly when they brought in custom matchmaking to compete with Overwatch (bad idea, Valve), but I'll always cherish the laughs this dumb war-themed hat simulator brought me and my chums when we were young. Here's my single best video game memory: "Meet the Pyro" came out at noon on our last day of grade school. The teachers let us do whatever we wanted that day, so me and about 10 other kids were huddled around a computer, desperate to the see the video as soon as it came out. Unfortunately, YouTube was blocked, so we were searching feverishly across loads of sketchy video-mirroring sites, praying to get even a trace of it. Finally, we found one site that had the whole thing available to watch, and we all lost our fucking minds at how funny it was. We must have watched that two-minute promo at least ten times over, and spent the rest of the day laughing about it. Then, summer started, and I never saw a lot of those guys again. ? [IMG align="left" size="300x190"]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/OMGPOP_logo.png[/IMG] Does anyone remember [B]OMGPOP [/B](or, if you're really cool, [B]iminlikewithyou[/B])? It was a "social gaming" website that came about in the late 2000s – think the Facebook gaming era. The site hosted a wide selection of mini-games in various genres – Bomberman clones, Scrabble clones, clubhouse games like darts and pool... whatever you wanted. Playing the games would grant you coins that unlocked custom skins, characters, and power-ups, and there were various chatrooms that you could meet people in. The coolest feature, though, was that you could copy/paste a link to a game on other websites, and whoever clicked it would join instantly. As such, I spent a [I]ton [/I]of time playing these games with my friends on a forum I was a regular at, and we all had a lot of fun together. An older girl that I was insanely in love with liked the pool game, so I played it with her for hours, eventually unlocking every customizable available for it. (Hey, I was 13!) OMGPOP is where that popular old iOS game[B] Draw Something[/B] came from – it was on this site first, and we had lots of fun with it. By 2013 or so, the site had been bought by Zynga, who abruptly shuttered it and laid off all its employees. I'd quite enjoy it if an idea like this came back, some day. (And Marina, if you're still out there, I'm available! ;)) [IMG align="right" width="184px" size="528x704"]https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/the_kingdom_of_loathing.jpg[/IMG] Finally, before either of the previous games, I was also very active in a browser-based MMORPG called [B]The Kingdom of Loathing[/B]. This was a fully online, multiplayer adventure game illustrated with hand-drawn stick-figure graphics – a common internet art style in those days. You interacted with the game world by navigating through various web pages, and could do all the stuff you'd do in something like WoW – fight monsters, go on quests, play mini-games, build a little base, craft items, and work your way through the storyline. It must seem very primitive by modern standards, but browser MMOs weren't uncommon back then, and I'm pretty sure KoL was considered the market leader. The best thing about KoL, though – by far – was the game's humour. It was a [I]comedy[/I] MMO, and everything, from item descriptions to battle messages to quest outlines, had a snarky, tongue-in-cheek sense of playfulness. I adored with this game's tone – the sense of smart, multi-layered wit was exactly what I wanted in my adolescence, and I'd spend hours upon hours reading pretty much every piece of text the game would allow me to. Like Knighthart in this thread's OP, this game heavily influenced the person I'd become as I grew up (online and off), and I'm grateful for it. If you ever wondered why I always type in full sentences, it's because of KoL – [B]to speak to other players in-game, you had to pass a spelling/grammar/punctuation test with a perfect score. [/B]If I were king of the world, that would be mandatory for everyone. As with TF2, I was also heavily involved in the culture surrounding this game – the community had loads of in-jokes to enjoy, and the developers themselves created some very funny, entertaining side-projects, like a full internet radio station and a general discussion podcast hosted by the game's creators. KoL was popular before the smartphone age, and it never really had a huge player base, so everyone was pretty close, and it wasn't hard to meet community figures directly. (One of whom gave me a personal invitation to his exclusive clan. ::winnie) For a few years, I was a somewhat common face in the game's chatroom, which gave me my first exposure to talking with other people online. An adventurer was me, indeed! These games weren't the only multiplayer experiences I had online – I also had an internet-enabled DS, 3DS, and PSP – but they [I]were [/I]the ones that shaped me, and gave me the most fun I've had with video games yet. [/QUOTE]

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