Times you took your love for gaming too far

CaspianX

For those that don't know me, my name is Jake McNeill. I'm a freelance writer for 1Up, and occasionally I'll start a thread in these boards because, honestly, I tend to find you guys to be possibly the best source for opinions and experiences in the gamer community.

My latest assignment is an article about the more obsessive, compulsive, excessive, and just plain ridiculous side of gamers. Understand that I have no desire to create some kind of freakshow, but rather something more along the lines of "times even we have to admit we took things too far."

I've done a lot of these things myself - my game collection has gotten somewhere into the thousands (half of which I've never taken out of the shrinkwrap), I've taken days off from work just to play Oblivion ("Uh, yeah, I'm... uh... really sick... *cough*"). One time, I took a pencil and pad of paper and actually mapped out the whole ridiculous trade system of Secret of Evermore - that wasn't even a very good game!

So my question to you guys is what experiences along those lines you may have had. Times when your enthusiasm outweighed your judgement, or caused problems elsewhere in your lives. As per usual, I'll PM anyone whose comments I'd like to use in the article to ask for permission before plastering an embarassing story up on the website.

Thanks again in advance to everyone who participates.

TehSpectre

CaspianX wrote:

One time, I took a pencil and pad of paper and actually mapped out the whole ridiculous trade system of Secret of Evermore - that wasn't even a very good game!

=(

Secret of Evermore is in my top 5 SNES games. Meanie.

JJ

Secret of Evermore was all kinds of mediocre.

Maybe you should have played more than 5 SNES games.

Edit: on topic, I haven't really done anything crazy like buy some collectors item for a shitload of money. I think the most I spent or I should say my dad spent was 70 dollars on Mischief Makers on the N64. I almost regretted getting it for the hell he gave me about it.

Dee Kae

TehSpectre wrote:

CaspianX wrote:

One time, I took a pencil and pad of paper and actually mapped out the whole ridiculous trade system of Secret of Evermore - that wasn't even a very good game!

=(

Secret of Evermore is in my top 5 SNES games. Meanie.

Ever try mapping that one forest in britishland? I tried, as a wee lad.

I felt confused, yet determined.

That is a good game. ;-;

cj iwakura

TehSpectre wrote:

CaspianX wrote:

One time, I took a pencil and pad of paper and actually mapped out the whole ridiculous trade system of Secret of Evermore - that wasn't even a very good game!

=(

Secret of Evermore is in my top 5 SNES games. Meanie.

I wouldn't go that far, but I also liked it. :P

I have to keep my love for gaming within reason, so I haven't done anything really outlandish.

I don't even camp out... the last time I did that was for Parasite Eve, and I was only an hour early.

I remember buying Space Channel 5 Special Edition for $30 just because I was so anxious to get it, even though I could've easily gone down the street and gotten it for $15.

milehigh

When I took a Wavebird, and threw it, as hard as I could, into a wall my Mom was upset, I told her I threw a dog toy into the wall when playing with our dog. I knew better. My friend caught a lucky blue shell in Mario Kart, and it took all I had not to throw my fist into his face. That was when I realized I cared too much about the outcome of a game, nonetheless the Wavebird was fine.

Also when I spent 8 hours online for Everquest (this was when dialup was prevalent) and had to beg my family not to use the phone all day.

Edit: Also camping for at least 18 hours for a console in sub 20 degree weather....Yeah, the 360 was good, and I my Wii...but that shit was intolerable if I hadn't had my flask of Skyy and a lot of crazy ass friends present.

Edit #2: The fact that I've had a few drinks tonight and am seriously considering purchasing another 360 (the first one died after warranty) and a G15 gaming keyboard through Newegg's Preferred Program despite already being under heavy debt.

SniperGuy

I stayed up for hours upon hours playing world of warcraft. Then I set an alarm to wake myself up early so I could play on a saturday.

I wanted to do blackwing lair!

bruin

For certain releases I become irrational, and it occasionaly has (minor) negative effects on the rest of my life.

Before Halo 2 came out I went a little bit insane. In the last week or so I started to nap during the day to pass the time faster, and I started to worry about things like injuring my hands/eyes/ears. Then in the first couple days of release I played the game more than I did anything else. I played through the campaign I think three times, and played many, many hours of multiplayer. Unhealthy I know, but I'll likely end up doing the same thing for Halo 3.

Two other ones that stand out are Oblivion and Twilight Princess. I played each of them for a good 3-5 hours per day until I was done with them. The first break I had from school with Oblivion I would play pretty much all day, then go out at night and usually think about the game unless I was preoccupied with something else.

Dee Kae

milehigh wrote:

When I took a Wavebird, and threw it, as hard as I could, into a wall my Mom was upset, I told her I threw a dog toy into the wall when playing with our dog. I knew better. My friend caught a lucky blue shell in Mario Kart, and it took all I had not to throw my fist into his face. That was when I realized I cared too much about the outcome of a game, nonetheless the Wavebird was fine.

Also when I spent 8 hours online for Everquest (this was when dialup was prevalent) and had to beg my family not to use the phone all day.

Those years..... Those years....

Dail up.... I'll never forget those years.

Akilae729

My friend and i made these elaborate charts to determine what units were the most efficient to build in StarCraft, so for example, a dragoon was best all around protons for the cost in materials and time to build. Then we also charted out what units to avoid, and all sorts of other parameters.

I also remember getting up 2 hours early before school in middle school, so around 5:30, so i could play Diablo II bNet for a few hours

EDIT: My dail up had a really bad habit of disconnecting during SC matches, I learned to read the little lights on the modem, and i could tell when it was coming. I would be on the phone with my friend who was playin with me and i would be like oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, god damnit!

We actually put a little piece of paper over it that said Lagwagon. Then we realized there was a band named that. Then we realized that band was not happenin

delphinus

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

Variable

Diablo II

I almost failed my sophomore year. at the "mid-tri" - essentially the time when we got are mid semester grades (called trimesters cause we had only three) I had 3 F's and 2 D's. It was such an easy year, too. But I never went to bed before 3 o clock and had to wake up at 6 so I was basically sleeping through school.

The time that I was awake was spent writing down builds for characters I wanted to play, every skill point and every item I had to hunt for before stating to build them.

It was hell. My step dad put in a sensor so if my computer wasn't off a light in their bedroom would be on. I figured out how to disable it and would do so every night around 9"30... and then game until my eyes wouldn't stay open anymore.

One night a friend stayed over and woke me up telling me I had been saying "throwing mastery" in my sleep.

That's as much as I've ever been into a game.

Just Like That

I'm not sure this really qualifies as obsessive gaming (more like excessive slacking), but in my senior year of high school me and my friends installed WoW on the school's network so we could play, in the tiniest size window possible, during a business technology class. It was the only classroom in the school with computers fast enough to run it (every other class had these godawful generic computers that ran at about 400mhz). It was in a shared folder so you could access it from any computer in the room.

Now, at first, it was great. Only a few people knew about it, and the ones that did were smart enough to keep it pretty well concealed, i.e. they knew what alt-tab was and weren't stupid enough to run it fullscreen. I even managed to get a few levels on my hunter just from playing during school. Sadly, 'twas not a secret that was easily kept. The inevitable happened and some idiot got caught playing in the middle of class.

And it was bad. Apparently there was some computer locked away in some building downtown that was keeping track of everything we did, with dates and times of executables that were ran, and when they were terminated, and what computer was being used etc. They knew exactly when we started playing and when we stopped... which coincidentally happened to be right around the times the class started and ended. They printed all of this information out, and the result was about as thick as a good sized novel. The printout for my computer was especially long.

We all thought we were fucked, big time. Thankfully (miraculously?) our teacher was really nice about it and only made us admit responsibility and delete all the files (I found out that someone had also installed Counterstrike, which I'm sure didn't help). It could have turned out a whole lot worse, too. When I tell people this story they usually mention how we would have been expelled if we were at a different school. So thats my story of gaming excess.

Edit: That was only the stuff we got caught for It was actually worse than that. You know those crappy 400mhz computers I mentioned? We put games on those too. And it was tough, because the computers all had security programs called FORTRES and Deep Freeze on them. FORTRES never allowed you to click on anything except the programs on the desktop and only ran certain executables, and Deep Freeze reset all changes to the hard drive upon restart. In spite of all this, we managed to play Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake on them (can't provide the details). We played them in our AutoCAD class every day, and when we had substitute teachers we had networked class deathmatches :twisted: We were such bad students. Such very bad students.

kedinik

I was wondering whether the attacker or defender had the advantage in Risk. During 6th grade math class I wrote up a chart listing every possible combination of defensive dice on the left, every possible combination of offensive dice on the top, and totalled the number of Defender Wins, Attacker Wins, and Tie outcomes.

Monaro

delphinus wrote:

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

That's...

That's awesome.

yalborap

kedinik wrote:

I was wondering whether the attacker or defender had the advantage in Risk. During 6th grade math class I wrote up a chart listing every possible combination of defensive dice on the left, every possible combination of offensive dice on the top, and totalled the number of Defender Wins, Attacker Wins, and Tie outcomes.

So....What did your results show?

ZackSchilling

delphinus wrote:

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

That had to have taken 5 hours or so each way. Holy shit. Were you in cross country? You have to have been. No other sane person would even consider running that distance.

halkun

I took 8 years out of my life to reverse engineer Final Fantasy 7 and then started a project to re-implement the game on new platforms. I think that counts for something.


On a realted note...

About three years ago, I sold my Playstation Final Fantasy 1-10 collection. Of course there was no PSX release of 3, and so Crono trigger filled that gap.

Recently, when FF3 was released, I dropped $150 and re-purchahed Final Fantasy 1-5 for my DS. I will be getting 6 before the week is out.

I have yet to play any of them.

I also was able to score a PSX copy of FF8 and FF9 online. (I currently own two copies of FF7, and in fact, when I sold my collection above, it was a 3rd copy of FF7 that went in that package.)

Using Sony's Popstation and my custom PSP firmware, this means that when FF6 is released, I will have the ability to play Final Fantasy 1 through 9 anywhere I want. (FF1-6 on the DS, FF7-9 on the PSP)

Kazhiim

yalborap wrote:

So....What did your results show?

He was, is, and would always be a virgin, no matter the dice roll.

Houk

dammit, i know there's stories. but i cant think of anything. the only thing that comes to mind are the uncountable times me and my friends would stay up all night in high school, from friday all through saturday on our gaming sessions. mario kart, goldeneye, smash bros, diablo, team fortress classic, whatever. i'd usually have one system on my tv upstairs, one in the living room downstairs, and a couple computers hooked up. i lived wiht my grandparents, who slept really weird hours. they were always up and down, so they didn't really care. if it was a gaming weekend, my gramma would stock us up on mt. dew (cant drink the shit now), pizza rolls, pringles, all that shit.

goddamn i miss those days.

Legacy

Tobasco wrote:

Edit: That was only the stuff we got caught for It was actually worse than that. You know those crappy 400mhz computers I mentioned? We put games on those too. And it was tough, because the computers all had security programs called FORTRES and Deep Freeze on them. FORTRES never allowed you to click on anything except the programs on the desktop and only ran certain executables, and Deep Freeze reset all changes to the hard drive upon restart. In spite of all this, we managed to play Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake on them (can't provide the details). We played them in our AutoCAD class every day, and when we had substitute teachers we had networked class deathmatches :twisted: We were such bad students. Such very bad students.

Bah. FORTRES was easy to get around. Boot in safe mode and change the folder's name. Then reboot. Change it back and restart at the end of class.

chaossoldier

I remember when I first got pulled into Final Fantasy XI. It was during the summer thankfully but it was the first time I ever started gaming into the wee hours of the morning and afternoon.

I'd say recently, I did what I thought I'd never do and camped out for a video game system. The Wii to be specific. My first and hopefully last time ever doing that.

littwentythree

I probably played Asheron's Call to at least 5 am five days a week for the first year or two that I owned it.

kedinik

delphinus wrote:

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

You don't happen to be a marathon runner, do you?

Just Like That

Legacy wrote:

Bah. FORTRES was easy to get around. Boot in safe mode and change the folder's name. Then reboot. Change it back and restart at the end of class.

They disabled the ability to boot to safe mode. That was the first thing I tried. Using a boot disk was also a no-go because it was disabled in the bios setup. Which was passworded.

Edit: and just so we have all the bases covered, you couldn't select the "restart in DOS" option at shutdown either

kedinik

yalborap wrote:

kedinik wrote:

I was wondering whether the attacker or defender had the advantage in Risk. During 6th grade math class I wrote up a chart listing every possible combination of defensive dice on the left, every possible combination of offensive dice on the top, and totalled the number of Defender Wins, Attacker Wins, and Tie outcomes.

So....What did your results show?

The defenders win about 3% more often.

jedijz

Tobasco wrote:

I'm not sure this really qualifies as obsessive gaming (more like excessive slacking), but in my senior year of high school me and my friends installed WoW on the school's network so we could play, in the tiniest size window possible, during a business technology class. It was the only classroom in the school with computers fast enough to run it (every other class had these godawful generic computers that ran at about 400mhz). It was in a shared folder so you could access it from any computer in the room.

Now, at first, it was great. Only a few people knew about it, and the ones that did were smart enough to keep it pretty well concealed, i.e. they knew what alt-tab was and weren't stupid enough to run it fullscreen. I even managed to get a few levels on my hunter just from playing during school. Sadly, 'twas not a secret that was easily kept. The inevitable happened and some idiot got caught playing in the middle of class.

And it was bad. Apparently there was some computer locked away in some building downtown that was keeping track of everything we did, with dates and times of executables that were ran, and when they were terminated, and what computer was being used etc. They knew exactly when we started playing and when we stopped... which coincidentally happened to be right around the times the class started and ended. They printed all of this information out, and the result was about as thick as a good sized novel. The printout for my computer was especially long.

We all thought we were fucked, big time. Thankfully (miraculously?) our teacher was really nice about it and only made us admit responsibility and delete all the files (I found out that someone had also installed Counterstrike, which I'm sure didn't help). It could have turned out a whole lot worse, too. When I tell people this story they usually mention how we would have been expelled if we were at a different school. So thats my story of gaming excess.

Edit: That was only the stuff we got caught for It was actually worse than that. You know those crappy 400mhz computers I mentioned? We put games on those too. And it was tough, because the computers all had security programs called FORTRES and Deep Freeze on them. FORTRES never allowed you to click on anything except the programs on the desktop and only ran certain executables, and Deep Freeze reset all changes to the hard drive upon restart. In spite of all this, we managed to play Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake on them (can't provide the details). We played them in our AutoCAD class every day, and when we had substitute teachers we had networked class deathmatches :twisted: We were such bad students. Such very bad students.

At my school I found out how to disable Deep Freeze. I don't remember specifically what it was but it involved a certain keyboard combination that you had to press before the computer boots up. Before that I would usually keep game demos in a shared network folder and sneak in some lan gaming.

I also played Runescape at school when I had nothing better to do. I know better now.

kedinik

Kazhiim wrote:

yalborap wrote:

So....What did your results show?

He was, is, and would always be a virgin, no matter the dice roll.

That's not what your mom said last night. But then again, it's hard to speak at all when your mouth is full.

SilverWind

Well, a friend of mine and I did go through and log all of Case 5 of the first Phoenix Wright. 105 thousand words, roughly, and I think around 65000 of it was done by me.

I... know that case a little too well.

Whenever I really like a game, I tend to take it a liiiittle too far.

anti-everything

On my first WoW character, I took a 3 day weekend to grind out the last 2 levels to level 40 to get my mount. It wasn't constant, all awake playing, but it was a lot. And I finally got it right around my usual sleep time Sunday night.

Bionic Monkey

The week before the Wii came out, my wife said I was acting like a junkie in need of a fix. She works at Adult Parole and Probation, so it's not like she was being facetious either. The night before the launch, I was so damn anxious, I couldn't sleep.

But to be fair, I'm an enormous Zelda fanboy, so this was not only a console launch, but a Zelda launch at the same time. I think I was justified.

Speaking of which, I also have a triforce tattoo. That probably constitutes going too far. In the same vein, I also have almost every copy of Zelda available. The exclusions are the CDi games, and the gold cart of OoT (I have the grey cart with red blood), and the grey cart with the changes. I'm debating whether to grab a copy of the Player's Choice of Wind Waker. I have an order for the $155 Fierce Diety Link statue coming out soon, and fully intend to purchase every statue in the line, even though they're all going to be around that price range.

Brodo Faggins

kedinik wrote:

delphinus wrote:

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

You don't happen to be a marathon runner, do you?

He'd have to be. A regular marathon is 26 miles. Jesus Christ.

Taramoor

I have four binders full of graph paper.

On that graph paper? Complete Maps for every Infocom text adventure ever released.

Regarding general purpose insanity, I occasionally get cravings to play certain games. These cravings had me hook up my NES so I could play through Dragon Warrior I on a whim.

I have all the major systems released (sans PS3) within easy access and setup. I have a Zapper (the gray one) and a copy of Gumshoe primed and ready to go just in case. Also, I think my copy of Super Mario RPG is fused into the Super NES.

Otaking

I lost a wonderful girlfriend of a year plus relationship over Magic The Gathering. I was over at her house one night and I had just met some other players in the area and learned they had Beta Mana Birds and Dual-Lands for the trading to complete my full beta deck. (If you remember the early days of Magic, full Beta decks were teh sex at one point because Alpha was banned from tournaments for a while due to the rounded corners not matching standard cards)

So I sort of vanished that evening into another round of playing and trading "Just for an hour and I'll be right back" while she was making dinner.

I returned about four plus hours later when the haze of the card obsession cleared from by brain to a bowl of cold soup and a nice greeting card she had picked out for me (we hadn't seen each other in a while) stamped into the middle of the floor with a dirty footprint on it. Needless to say that was the last date

I think it worked out for the best though as I have an amazing wife now, at the time I was too young for family responsibilities (Just started college etc.) and my ex-girlfriend had a daughter. I still felt like I fucked up royally for several years though. I dropped in on my ex-girlfriend at random about five years later and found that she had married and had like four more kids so probably the best for both of us.

And hell it was BETA MANA BIRDS after all!!!

****BETA MANA BIRDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Luckily my wife is a very understanding woman and even games with me quite a bit, but also I think sometimes you need to go through something like that to teach you what is really important (well if you are dense like me) as I would never put games ahead of her.

Edit: Also, they were MINT.

delphinus

Brodo Faggins wrote:

kedinik wrote:

delphinus wrote:

when i was 15, there was a marvel vs. capcom 2 tourney in the next city.

i had no ride, and theres no bus stop near me

i ran 30 miles from surrey BC to burnaby BC to place 5th in the tournament

You don't happen to be a marathon runner, do you?

He'd have to be. A regular marathon is 26 miles. Jesus Christ.

no im your average 5'2 130 lbs gamer

halkun

I carried a 20 pound 15 inch color composite moniter 12 miles to a friends house so we could play Wasteland in color on his Apple II.

I heared Weird Al Yankovic's UHF Tape for the first time that day.

Eyes5

I fanart and fanfiction.

I once spent 40$ on a first edition Blastoise during the height of the Pokemon craze. It was worth it!

I'm also incapable of maintaining a relationship if my boyfriend isn't at least as obsessive about Nintendo as I am, and it's pretty hard to find someone of that caliber in the real world. Sacrificed two relationships that way.

Nocturne

Otaking wrote:

I lost a wonderful girlfriend of a year plus relationship over Magic The Gathering. I was over at her house one night and I had just met some other players in the area and learned they had Beta Mana Birds and Dual-Lands for the trading to complete my full beta deck. (If you remember the early days of Magic, full Beta decks were teh sex at one point because Alpha was banned from tournaments for a while due to the rounded corners not matching standard cards)

So I sort of vanished that evening into another round of playing and trading "Just for an hour and I'll be right back" while she was making dinner.

I returned about four plus hours later when the haze of the card obsession cleared from by brain to a bowl of cold soup and a nice greeting card she had picked out for me (we hadn't seen each other in a while) stamped into the middle of the floor with a dirty footprint on it. Needless to say that was the last date

I think it worked out for the best though as I have an amazing wife now, at the time I was too young for family responsibilities (Just started college etc.) and my ex-girlfriend had a daughter. I still felt like I fucked up royally for several years though. I dropped in on my ex-girlfriend at random about five years later and found that she had married and had like four more kids so probably the best for both of us.

And hell it was BETA MANA BIRDS after all!!!

****BETA MANA BIRDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Luckily my wife is a very understanding woman and even games with me quite a bit, but also I think sometimes you need to go through something like that to teach you what is really important (well if you are dense like me) as I would never put games ahead of her.

Edit: Also, they were MINT.

"Cause I'm as freeeeeeeee as a mana bird now,
And this bird you can tap to add one mana of any color to your mana pool"

Sorry, I had to.

And in your defense, in the height of my magic playing days I would have done the same thing.

WotanAnubis

My biggest failing, I think, is that whenever I get a new game (that I actually like) I can't resist staying up until somewhere around 4 at night/in the morning even though I know that's going to mean two or three days of massive headaches.

Mr_Grinch

During my obsessive PC Gaming period (probably around '96) I'd been following the development of Ripper for some time, I must have watched the trailer over and over again.

An FMV game, that actually LOOKED good, had Christopher Walken in, -that- Blue Oyster Cult song AND lots of gore and swearing?

I had to have it.

I was 14 at the time though, I didn't have a job and I got no pocket money.

The school organised a charity run, I put tons of effort in to getting sponsors, I never normally would have bothered. I managed to raise about £40.

That money never got donated to charity.

I'm so going to hell.
(but at least I had the game on release date and completed it within a few days. That finale, for me, at the time, was superb: "The scene is set, the rolls are cast, for the next game...of Ripper" -cue Don't Fear the Reaper-)

DarkSymphony

In everquest, in my guild <Inner Circle> we were the top guild of Xegony. One time when Luclin was the new expansion (well, newest anyway) we cleared all the important parts of the ssra temple in 1 night and then went and did Vex Thal afterwards since it was about to repop. Well, we cleared SSRA, Vex Thal and then some weird glitch happened and while still being in game and not getting disconnected, everything repopped AGAIN in SSRA and Vex Thal. sooooo needless to say we cleared them all AGAIN. both zones. Then, since we had already been up more than 28 hours at that point we decided to clear Velious (non-TOV, non-plane) *Kael, Skyshrine, etc.*, finished up a bunch of twink character epics (warrior, bard, 1 cleric and the necro epic). by that time we were creeping up towards 48 hours and seriously I don't remember what happened after that. I know for a fact my face nailed the keyboard and I just passed out. I do remember having to get my corpse summoned and first finding out where it was I died after all of that happened.

That, is the craziest shit I ever did.