Welcome, one and all, to The Gamer's Pub! Have a seat and grab a drink. It's on the house! We've got beer, cocktails, liquor, soft drinks, anything your heart desires.

All settled? Good! Let's all get to know one another.

I'll open the conversation with a question, a question any gamer will be able to answer. We all answer the question, talk about the topic at hand, bounce off each other, and then I'll repeat the process with another question. Sounds pretty simple, right? Good! Let's drink and be merry.

What was your first video gaming experience?

I'll start this discussion topic. My first gaming experience took place when I was maybe six or seven years old. My dear parents bought me a Game Boy. Funnily enough, that console was released in 1989, the year of my birth. Packaged with the Game Boy were three games: Alleyway, Super Mario Land, and Wave Race. Now I can't remember which of those games I played first, but for the sake of argument let's say it was Super Mario Land.

Super Mario Land is the game I will always name as my favourite Mario game. Although there are many technically superior Mario games out there, some released even before the Game Boy release title, Mario Land will always have a special place in my heart for the precise reason that it was my very first game. It's one of the easier Mario titles out there, but that was perfect for a young and impressionable child. The music is among the best video game music I've heard, and sometimes I revisit the soundtrack on Youtube. The worlds are varied, and contain creatures you don't see in any other Mario game, my favourite being the Easter Island statues. Some had wings, others rolled on the ground. The whole game is a wonderful experience, especially the final level, where you pilot a ship and shoot everything in sight as the level scrolls from left to right. My fondness for Mario as a whole is not that strong, but like many others, the ultimate video game mascot was my introduction to this wonderful entertainment medium.

Your turn!

Growing up my parents didn't have any home consoles, so I mostly relied on PC games. One game that stands out is King's Quest VI Heir Today Gone Tomorrow. I used to watch my mum play it and it was like watching a Disney movie. The voice acting in the game was rich and a lot of the storylines were familiar since they drew inspiration from popular mythology.

I watched the Game Grumps Let's Play of it a few years ago and it holds up surprisingly well. The game isn't linear, so there's a few paths you can take with each play-through, which isn't bad for a game that came out in the early 90s.

That would have been about 1993-94, before my younger brother was born.

Other potential 'first games' - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (NES), Super Mario Bros/Duckhunt (NES), Goblins (PC) or Aladdin (Mega Drive). I feel like I played games before Aladdin, but that's one I can trace back to '94.

My earliest memory is NES. Mario/Duck Hunt, TMNT, Contra. It may not be my first games, but it's as far back as I can go in my head.

Pete's mention of PC games reminds me of some of my other very early gaming experiences. I don't think this predates the Game Boy, but I did spend a lot of my childhood playing the healthy selection of Microsoft Entertainent Pack games. Centipede, Asteroids, Pipe Dream, Missile Command, Rodent's Revenge. So many good arcade/puzzle games, but two stand out.

First, Battlezone. Yeah, it doesn't look like much, but first person tank shooting was badass, having to search for tanks and keep moving so that a tank out of your view doesn't blow you up.

Second, Chip's Challenge. This was not just a step above, but a whole 20 flights of stairs above, the other games. The likes of Centipede and Battlezone are tons of fun, but it's the same simple gameplay mechanic steadily made more and more difficult. Very repetitive. Chip's Challenge is a full-fledged puzzle game which dare I say offers a lot more content and challenge than a lot of the console games of the era. You run around a top-down 2D world solving puzzles to reach new areas. The goal of each level is to collect all the chips and reach the exit. There are Doom-style coloured keys for coloured doors, different boots to handle different floor hazards, monsters, and a ton of other stuff I'm forgetting about. There are 150 levels in total and the furthest I got was in the late 40s. It's tough as hell and ranks up there with some of the harder NES games in terms of difficult - but not in terms of wonky platforming or ridiculous enemy/bullet spam - pure puzzle-solving difficult.

Anyone have any memories of these games?

My Dad had an IBM JX in the late 1980s/early 90s, doing some research, this beast from 1984 had an Intel 8088 processor @ 4.77 MHz. Played a lot of games like Castle Adventure.

Around the same time, I have some fond memories of playing TMNT on my uncle's Amiga 500. After that, I got an Atari 2600 in the very early 1990s - I guess you could call it a 'mini' - it literally had 1000 built in games, or left like it. All the classics.

Then it was an original Gameboy, sometime in around 1992 maybe.

Good shout out on Chip's Challenge Emperor, I used to play the first few levels over and over again when I was younger. Did that creature on Lvl 8 faze you at all? I couldn't stand him when I was younger and would have to skip over that level. There was another stage where you have to collect tons of chips and there's a few of them chasing after you - I dropped the game then and there.

Oct 25, 2017 7:38:23 GMT NATH45 said:

My Dad had an IBM JX in the late 1980s/early 90s, doing some research, this beast from 1984 had an Intel 8088 processor @ 4.77 MHz. Played a lot of games like Castle Adventure.

Around the same time, I have some fond memories of playing TMNT on my uncle's Amiga 500. After that, I got an Atari 2600 in the very early 1990s - I guess you could call it a 'mini' - it literally had 1000 built in games, or left like it. All the classics.

Then it was an original Gameboy, sometime in around 1992 maybe.

I never grew up with a NES/SNES/Sega Genesis, but I've played them and I get what it's like to experience those kinda consoles. Just like playing my Playstation, except the controller has fewer buttons. The really early consoles - the Amigas and the Ataris - they must have been a different experience entirely, and something I will never fully appreciate.

However that does spark up a memory of dedicated handheld game machines. They were generally larger than a Game Boy, but couldn't take cartridges. Very pixelated - black squares on a light background. They only had one game encoded. Can't remember what any of them were called, but I recall one game where you control a dinosaur, running from left to right, jumping over stuff at high speeds. I think it was an autoscroller, but might be mistaken. Man, I wish my memory were better.

Oct 25, 2017 8:36:12 GMT Big Pete said:

Good shout out on Chip's Challenge Emperor, I used to play the first few levels over and over again when I was younger. Did that creature on Lvl 8 faze you at all? I couldn't stand him when I was younger and would have to skip over that level. There was another stage where you have to collect tons of chips and there's a few of them chasing after you - I dropped the game then and there.

I had to watch the video to refresh my memory. I don't seem to recall having any particular difficulty with them. They are surprisingly fast, but I don't remember dying to them that often. Just a few times until I learnt their movement style. Come to think of it, Chip's Challenge is a good example of teaching without teaching. The first monster level, you're surrounded by dirt. The monster cannot move on dirt tiles. When Chip moves, he clears dirt. Hence you quickly learn to walk around the perimeter so you can make progress while keeping a row of dirt between you and the monster. A lot of the early levels were designed in this style to introduce the player to the various mechanics without an explicit tutorial. There might also have been hint tiles which opened text boxes if I recall.

My first gaming experience was as cliche as they come, but at the same time, one that millions of people can relate to: Super Mario Bros on the NES.

When I was 5 my parents bought an NES for Christmas. It came with Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, as did many back then. It was a neat experience for all of us, even though I don't really remember it, but at the time this was a new experience for all 3 of us.

It was 1989 and my parents were 30 and 31, only ever seeing Atari in their lifetime (never owned one, though). Nobody they knew owned a computer and they had only got a colour TV just before I was born. Even though this was the late 80s, they were behind the times as far as technology goes (and still are to this day).

I unboxed it immediately and hooked it up without looking at the instructions, which blew their minds. They still talk about it. They couldn't believe that my tiny brain figured out to plug the power into the wall, unhook the coax cable and use that for the Nintendo. My dad was looking at the instructions and I was already playing Level 1-1.

I don't really remember that Christmas but I remember a few months later playing with my mom's brother. He was much younger than her so he was maybe 17 at the time, and he showed me how to beat the game (I could barely make it half way through the game at this time...I'm a slow learner when it comes to video games).

I had to watch the video to refresh my memory. I don't seem to recall having any particular difficulty with them. They are surprisingly fast, but I don't remember dying to them that often. Just a few times until I learnt their movement style. Come to think of it, Chip's Challenge is a good example of teaching without teaching. The first monster level, you're surrounded by dirt. The monster cannot move on dirt tiles. When Chip moves, he clears dirt. Hence you quickly learn to walk around the perimeter so you can make progress while keeping a row of dirt between you and the monster. A lot of the early levels were designed in this style to introduce the player to the various mechanics without an explicit tutorial. There might also have been hint tiles which opened text boxes if I recall.

Yeah, let's face facts here - I was scared of my own shadow so you can only imagine how terrifying a pixelated creature with giant lips were. Admittedly I grew a pair and got through level 8 no worries, but then level 12 knocked my ego down a peg.

Oct 25, 2017 18:03:58 GMT RT said:

My first gaming experience was as cliche as they come, but at the same time, one that millions of people can relate to: Super Mario Bros on the NES.

Believe it or not, I only played Super Mario Bros for the first time maybe three years ago. It popped up as a free game on my 3DS so I started playing. That game gets brutally hard in the later levels. Fortunately the 3DS had a save state feature so I massively abused that to finish the game. Although I must say I wasn't really enjoying it by the end, it's a pretty mediocre platformer (but great for its time, I'm sure).

Thanks for coming BigPete, Ness, RT, and nath, but it's still a bit quiet in here. I'm gonna go ahead and install some arcade machines. That ought to attract the game-loving public.



Call shinobimusashi Blindy G/B Raven System X-zero RagnarokMike Lony

Which brings me to my second conversation topic:

What are your favourite arcade games. Do you have any memorable arcade game experiences?

One of my favorite arcade experiences was discovering Galaxy Force II when I was little. This machine was fucking mean, it was roped off with velvet ropes and cost like $1.50 to play, the machine moved around a lot, it would spin all the way around and shake and all kind of shit. Honestly I was kind of scared of the thing. I faced my fears and climbed up onto that beast and it was one of the most amazing video game rides ever.



Pit Fighter and Final Fight were some of my favorite arcade games when I was little, then there was X-Men, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Terminator 2. Also old enough to remember the glory days of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat in arcades. Good times. 

First gaming experience I had was DKC, my parents also had an Atari. I played Smurfs and some War game that admittedly scared me for some reason.

Never been big into Arcades, played SFIV with moderate success with them though. Normally play the sniper games if they have any.

Simpsons Arcade most definitely, as well as the similar TMNT Arcade game. Those would be my top two.

At the bar my dad used to go to there was a great little bowling game I really enjoyed, one of the ones with the rolling ball to play.

Also really loved the light gun games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead 1 and 2.

I can't quite remember if Nintendo was my first gaming experience, it may have been the Atari that my grandma had for the grandkids, if it was the NES, obviously be Super Mario/Duck Hunt...if the Atari, I think either Kaboom or Burger Time. Probably Kaboom, as that would have been the easiest.

Simpsons and TMNT where big ones with me as well. When I went to Disney world as a child I use to pump those with about $10 a day.

MK was probably the first one I was kinda good at since it was pretty easy to pick up. And didn't require rotations like SF. I think there was an machine in the pizza place near some friends mother's shop. And MK2 was the first game where I could actually beat other random people in a fighting game.

I got into more fighting games usually playing them at X-cite. It was a Showbiz/Chucky Cheese birthday like place just more aimed at teens and had laser tag. Playing games like Killer Instant, Primal Rage, and etc. But soon Genesis and SNES start getting versions of these games which slowly killed off the arcade for me.

I occasionally played them in the mall near the food court or at Pizza Hut, but they seem to be on a decline.

In a nearly dead mall while in high school that still had an arcade the big thing with some people was MvC and MvC2. I had them on Dreamcast and played some friends in it but I couldn't hold a candle to the people at the arcade on them. So many chained juggles to death.

My favourite arcade game is easily Savage Quest. I guess you'd class it as a beat 'em up: you walk from left to right killing grunts and fighting bosses. But at the same time, it was radically different from the Simpsons and the TMNTs. You played it a booth with a seat with speakers all around you. You control a T-Rex with a joystick. Move the joystick to move the dinosaur. Spin it around to do a tail spin. Pull the trigger to bite. There were a couple of other moves: headbutting, dashing, and roaring. Nothing too complicated. The graphics were way ahead of anything else around at the time. You fought bosses using a full 3D environment. It's such a badass game. Plus it was easier than most other games (or maybe that's because I played it so much), so you got more bang for your buck. I got so good to the point where I could almost complete it on one credit, but didn't quite get there. The later levels are brutal, as you might expect. I did finish it a bunch of times though.

Never seen anything like Galaxy Force 2 before. Looks like a whole lotta fun.

Beat 'em ups are probably my favourite kind of arcade game in general. OK, fighting games are the most fun, but you get like two minutes of gameplay per credit. Plus it's only fun to play with friends - the computer wrecks you. Beat 'em ups can be played alone or with friends, and you can get a good amount of mileage out of both. My favourite is Golden Axe because of the fantasy theme, but Simpsons is fantastic as well.

I don't like the shoot 'em ups like Time Crisis and House of the Dead. They are too cheap for my liking. The times where an enemy just pops up right in front of you, requiring impossible reactions to shoot it without getting hit happen all too frequently. The only one I played regularly was Point Blank, which is a bunch of shooting minigames. For example shoot 30 targets in a minute without shooting any bombs.

Recently I played Pacman Battle Royale for the first time which is a pretty badass concept. I don't really like single player Pacman, but playing in competition is a lot of fun. I was quite good as it as well.

If you mean cabinets then:

Street Fighter II
Street Fighter III: Third Strike
Mortal Kombat II
Final Fight
Tekken 3
Soul Calibur
Marvel vs Capcom

Mostly fighters was my favorite thing to do in cabinets

Ahhh, the arcades, my home away from home. I can't believe how lucky some of you guys were. 25c a game? Where can I get a slice of that action? Not only do we have to deal with poisonous snakes, terrifying redbacks and bloodthirsty wallabies, but the arcade scene here was pretty expensive. If you wanted a game of anything, it was going to set you back a dollar. Not so bad in theory, but it usually limited your sessions to 2 or 3 games. Unless you booked some special arcade session where $25 covered a couple of hours, chances were you had to be fairly rich or mow a lot of yards if you wanted to 'git gud' at Mortal Kombat.

Is that a small violin I can hear in the background?

So there was only one arcade I can remember. In the Brisbane CBD there's the Meyer Centre, a fairly unimpressive five storey building which is beginning to resemble a ghost town the higher up you go. But back in it's hey day, the building was bitching. Not only was it filled with amazing stores you weren't likely to find around the South East, it had an arcade that was almost like a mini amusement park. Not only did it have all the latest machines like Killer Instict, Marvel Super Heroes and Tekken 2 but it had a god damn rollercoaster there. Unfortunately I only got to go there once but the experience left a profound impact on me and nothing else has come close to that arcade.

Okay so maybe that's an exageration. There's another famous arcade down the tourist capital of Australia, the Gold Coast. I'm talking about Grundies Arcade, now known as TimeZone smackdab in the middle of Cavil Av. which is like a wannabe Bourbon Street. Grundies was pretty massive, the place was the size of about two arcades, and still had enough room to comfortably fit a nice dodge em car section. My memory is really foggy of the place though, as a kid I usually stuck to the gimmicky games like arm wrestling and wacky gator.

By the by, if we were building a PW Arcade, Wacky Gator is being installed, I don't even care.

Speaking of, did you ever get anything decent with your tokens? I used to get strips of those things and usually they just ended up in the bin. The only time I'd ever buy anything is when they had pogs on sale. I used to be a mad pog collector back in the day - Looney Tunes, Chester Cheater, The Simpsons, Dragon Ball Z...all in pog form but the pick of the bunch were Mortal Kombat. Goro in Pog Form? You bet your life I was the coolest kid on the playground.

Otherwise arcades were usually a side attraction to going to the movies. That was apart of the deal. The folks would drag us to some crappy kids movie (Dudley Do Right...never again) under the proviso we could hit the arcade section afterwards. The best one was over near my grandparents place where it was an actual arcade. Nothing that will make any of you arcade dezians jealous, but it's the only place I remember having a Simpsons Arcade machine. Nowadays we have parties, meet ups or if you're into it Tinder to socialise. Back in the day, 4 player Simpsons was an easy way to make friends. A lot of tears were shed over that game, especially when you were making awesome progress and your parent would get bored and drag you off (or wouldn't support your ambitions to clear the game). I'm still upset I missed the opportunity to buy the game of XBLA when I had the chance. Someday, someday...

There was less drama at the local laser tag joint, Laser Force. From about 10-13, that was the birthday party destination and I got so acquainted with the arcade collection they had. Golden Axe, Point Blank, Marvel Super Heroes, Jackie Chan and a bunch of shoot em ups, 1995 well and truly lived in the halls of that fine establishment. If I was to go back, no doubt it'd still be alive.

I'm not really an arcade connoisour and it's definitely a gap I'd like to fix over the coming years. However if I was to pick one company that did it for me in my youth it was Namco. The brains behind Pac-Man came up with all the goods back in the day and I couldn't get enough of Tekken, Soul Calibur, Point Blank and Time Crisis. That right there was the making of any good arcade trip. I also want to give a shout out to SEGA for my favourite light gun game - Jurassic Park. We had about 5 machines at the local cinema, and Jurassic Park was the one game that was always occupied. Awesome game and again, if we were setting up an arcade, that's another one of my picks.

I could talk all day about the arcade machines. From favourite cabinet displays, pinball set-ups, DDR so on and so forth. Nothing hits my sweet spot more than mid-90s arcades.

The arcade machines are a hit! Now we've got a big crowd in the gamer's pub, let's get some multiplayer gaming going!

What are your favourite multiplayer games? What are the best experiences you've had playing video games with other people?

I tend to stay away from them these days, but my favourite multiplayer games are Team Fortress 2, Quake 3 Arena, the original Unreal Tournament, and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. Unfortunately my local multiplayer gaming experiences are limited, but Mario Party is a lot of fun, as is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Madden is the main thing I play competitively with my friends, if it's basketball 2K, but I'm not a huge fan of basketball, I really only like street mode, no more than 3 on 3.

Fighting game wise, love the Netherealms games, MK and Injustice, but my favorite is Dead or Alive...but fun and fluid without being overly complicated, easy to pick up, takes work to master.

Rocket League is a game that surprised me, I'm not a soccer fan, or playing games that are exclusively driving, but somehow combining them is amazingly addictive. I haven't played in some time because of how much I have to play, but when I do play, it's hard to put down.

Used to love the X-Men Legends games, along with the first Ultimate Alliance...but then Ravensoft went off to make the fantastic Wolverine game, and Ultimate Alliance 2 lost it, and the games died out, especially with Ravensoft being co-opted to purely Call of Duty. Just don't make 'em like they used to.

My favourite multiplayer games would be Team Fortress 2, Splatoon and Bomberman. I've spoken at length about TF2 and Splatoon, so I'll spare you the details, but Bomberman really was the first real multiplayer console game with the SNES multi-tap and the option of being able to play with 4 players. Saturn Bomberman came out with the option to play with 10 which just blows my mind.

Some of my favourite memories.

Okay, so the family just moved into a new house and I had the opportunity to break in the new games room with my mates. I invited along this one eccentric guy from class who was pretty friendly but we didn't know a lot about him. He brought over WWE Wrestlemania XIX for the Nintendo GameCube and challenged us to a Fatal Four-Way ladder match. One friend chose Booker T, the other was Goldust, I picked Rob Van Dam and he picked this CAW called Sean Michaels. This CAW was insanely over-powered, top stats, amazing move-set (including the Sky High Angle Slam as his finisher) and the design was ridiculous. He had Super Saiyan hair, Wolverine claws, giant blades protruding out of his arms, it was like every edgy's kid wet dream. Even the entrance itself was ridiculous, the pyro literally filled the entire screen like a bomb went off. Needless to say, he kicked all of our arses to start off with, but over time we started to gang up on him and lay him out with weapons. We then spammed all our finishers and tried our best to eliminate him aka John Cena Elimination Chamber '09 style. After a dozen finishing moves and a few cross words, he decided to rage quit and left his character at the top of the entrance ramp and went out to do something. We all carried on with the match and were having a real awesome match when we were all knocked out. All of a sudden, Sean Michaels comes down to ring-side, as we desperately try to end the match before he can win. One friend eats a superkick, I manage to toss him outside, go for some chairless Van Daminator move, he reverses and hits me with a superkick. Finally Booker T is on the ladder, he's in reach of the title, when Sean Michaels just warps up the ladder, knocks him down with a punch and grabs the title. The reaction was priceless, 'Sean Michaels' literally rolled over the back of the chair, flipped everyone off and we were all just gobsmacked. To this day, he still reminds me of the match.

We tried replicating the match, but the sequels didn't allow for that type of spectacle and you could never capture the same emotions of that one match.

Actually the Nintendo GameCube was a low-key great multiplayer system. TimeSplitters 2, WWE Wrestlemania XIX, Mario Power Tennis (we held a 16 man tournament around midnight during my 16th, Mario Party, Super Smash Bros Melee and even Tales of Symphonia. Half the fun of ToS was the battle system and coming up with all the cool Unison attacks. I always equate the N64 and later the 360 as the multiplayer systems, but I had some great moments on the Cube.

Awesome story, Pete. That's the most hilarious CAW ever :lol:

That reminds me of my own experiences with WWE games. Smackdown 2: Know Your Role was the wrestling game of choice at my shared university house. Mainly because it was the only one we owned, but a few of us had good memories playing the games as kids. One night we were messing about. First I was playing against my regular opponent. He just spammed running attacks and running grapples over and over so he was pretty easy to counter. Then he passed the controller to my other housemate, who had probably never played the game before. Needless to say, I was kicking his ass all over the ring. For some reason I had to leave the room for a moment. Piss break, phone call. I don't remember. I paused the game and walked off. A few minutes later, I returned. Someone had grabbed my controller and unpaused it, so my housemate was wailing on my idle character. He hadn't won the match yet, but he had the advantage. I rushed to my controller and battled on, but he was relentlessly hammering me with big moves and I couldn't get on offense. After one big move too many, he goes for the cover, I mash the buttons like crazy, but it's all over. One two three. Talk about a screwjob victory. He never played again, retiring with a 1-0 record against me.

I also have fond memories of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. My fondest memory is a one man trolljob. The game has a kick button which forces the opponent back a good distance. It also has friendly fire. There's a map where the defending team has to run down some stairs and on a narrow cliff path. What I would do is hide at the bottom of the stairs, just out of sight. As my teammates left the stairs and started on the path, I would kick them off the cliff before they knew what happened. If a group of people ran past I would just stand there, pretending to be idle. I went undetected for a while because they assumed it was an enemy. Eventually my teammates caught on. Some angrily yelled in the chat. Others did battle with me, and indeed I got forced off the cliff a few times. I was laughing my ass off the whole time.

I tend to stick with fighters as it's my only jam from multiplayer. Was never really into first person shooter and the ones I do I enjoy offline and story campaigns. Street Fighter, Dead or Alive, Tekken, Darkstalkers, Marvel vs Capcom, Guilty Gear, BlazBlue, Skull Girls and few more other japan-ish ones.

Not that I'm any good at any of them, ha.

I also have fond memories of Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. My fondest memory is a one man trolljob. The game has a kick button which forces the opponent back a good distance. It also has friendly fire. There's a map where the defending team has to run down some stairs and on a narrow cliff path. What I would do is hide at the bottom of the stairs, just out of sight. As my teammates left the stairs and started on the path, I would kick them off the cliff before they knew what happened. If a group of people ran past I would just stand there, pretending to be idle. I went undetected for a while because they assumed it was an enemy. Eventually my teammates caught on. Some angrily yelled in the chat. Others did battle with me, and indeed I got forced off the cliff a few times. I was laughing my ass off the whole time.

Hahaha, that would have been amazing.

I remember when Guitar Hero was all the rage, whenever a party was dying down, we'd bust the game out and just spend hours trying to top our scores. The one song that gives me PTSD to this day is Message In A Bottle. There was one party where this one friend was determined to get the top score so he sat in the one room for 6 hours trying to beat it. We'd pereodically check on him and everytime it would be like

Just A Cast-bleep-away
An is-bleep-land los-bleep-t at sea *bleep bleep*

He was the shits and after being unable to beat the top score, he was a broken man. Half the room was divided, one half was cheering him on while the other half was just giving him banter which was great because he took the bait and fired back.

I don't think he managed to beat it, my 11-year old brother was a rock god and owned half the top scores in that game.

Did you ever have a song that you couldn't quite beat? Did you ever try and beat Jordan or Through The Fire and the Flames?

Holy shit, how could I forget about Guitar Hero/Rock Band? A staple of my undergrad life. My skill level was pretty good. I could never beat Dragonforce on Expert, and I'm not sure I could even beat it on Hard. But at my peak I could finish all but the most difficult songs on Expert. My housemate was way better. He could finish Dragonforce on Expert, albeit not consistently. I actually played one of the Guitar Heros recently, for the first time in probably five years. I was god awful. Even moderately difficult songs on Expert completely wrecked me. I had to retreat to Medium for some songs. I was ashamed.

We used to jam on those games every Friday night before going out. We had all the instruments. Three guitars, so we could have a guitarist and a bassist. Microphone. Drums. Keyboard (for Rock Band 3). I only really liked playing guitar while my other two housemates were more jack of all trades. The problem is, one of them was a lot better at Guitar Hero than I, so when he wanted to play guitar, he got dibs. So I was relegated to bass a lot of the time, which is unfortunate because most of the songs are easier/less interesting on bass compared to the guitar.

We weren't especially committed to the cause until Rock Band 3 came out. We all made a pledge to buy one instrument each, £100 of our precious student earnings. One guy got the new drumkit. One got the keyboard. I ordered the guitar. The first two were good investments. The third, not so much. You see, the Rock Band 3 guitar was designed to emulate a real guitar. This wasn't a five button thing. It had like 50 buttons, each representing a position on the fret, and six plastic strings. Playing it was pretty much equivalent to playing a real guitar, and it was just as difficult. I tried to justify my monetary investment by laboriously going through the tutorials, but it was tedious as fuck. I don't play a game like Rock Band to learn guitar. I play it to pretend with a much easier simulation and have some fun. I kept at it for more hours than I should have, and eventually gave it up as a bad decision. RB3 guitar relegated to the space behind the television forever. It only got brought out one more time. A few years after these events, a guitarist moved in. A good guitarist. I told him about the RB3 guitar and he gave it a whirl. He chose the song Before I Forget by Slipknot, because he knew how to play it on real guitar. He played the RB3 guitar as he would a normal guitar, and without even looking at the notes on screen, he got 99%.

The best memory I have is completing the RB3 world tour. This was a marathon playlist of something like 75 songs, which takes a few hours if done in one sitting. We made an event out of it. We invited a whole bunch of friends over on a Saturday afternoon to drink beer, eat pizza, and play Rock Band. It was a blast. The core of the band (me and my two housemates) did the majority of the work, but our guests were allowed to play at their leisure. I don't even remember if we finished it. Certainly a lot of people had left before we got to the end. I'm going to go ahead and assume that we did. Good times.

It's getting a bit quiet in here. I'm going to pump up the difficulty level. Drink more and drink faster!

What are the hardest games you've played? What's the hardest game you've completed? Any particular harrowing experiences?

Original Ninja Gaiden, and I'm talking OG NES version, is probably the hardest game I've played, outright unfair at times with infinitely spawning enemies over precarious jumps where if you mistime a single thing you die, regardless of life. You had to beat a level start to finish, including the boss on one set of lives; thankfully once you beat a boss you could continue from the start of the next level, the one thing that kept it from being impossible. I still haven't beaten it, one of the late levels just got the better of me for so long, and I haven't been back in some time.

I sort of feel like there's this hall of fame for hard games. Games like Dark Souls, Silver Surfer, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, Ninja Gaiden etc. are all notoriously hard. I haven't played many of them because gaming is usually a source of relief, not frustration but there's been a few trying games out there.

I spoke about my escapades with Goldeneye back on PW.com. It took me around 14 hours to complete Control 00 Agent on Goldeneye. Namely because I suck at the game, but also it has one of my least favourite mechanics in video games - leaving the trickiest part right at the end of the level. Having to summon up the energy and patience to play through a long-ish level, just to get some bad enemy RNG is just a soul destroyer. Caverns was another example, where the first 10 minutes or so is piss easy, but then you've got two pretty tricky parts right at the end and if you stuff up, it's right back to the start.

Wrestlemania 2000 on the N64 is surprisingly challenging. Season made has a default difficulty that ramps right up as you go along in the game. It all comes to a head at the Royal Rumble where you've got to pull a Shawn Michaels and win from #1. Fail, and Vince McMahon bans you from main eventing Wrestlemania and you get the bad ending. Win, and you go to Wrestlemania to face Shawn Michaels and unlock the best character in the entire game. It took me 8 years, but one afternoon, I put Buckethead's Soothesayer on in the background, rolled my eyes back like Taker/Nagata and just went ham on the game. It's just behind defeating Ric Flair in Day of Reckoning when you're an OVW developmental guy as the toughest challenge I've faced in a wrestling game. I hear the Undertaker streak mode in one of the recent 2K games gives it a run for it's money.

One game that will always kick my arse is Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. The AI in that game is ridiculously broken and there comes a point where you've got to beat two opponents with one lifebar. I've never pulled it off, and I don't think I have the patience to even try.

I struggle to think of the hardest game I've given a real shot at playing. I don't have much of a tolerance for obscenely difficult games. I've tried Ninja Gaiden, most of the random NES platformers, Salt and Sanctuary, and given up in a couple of hours or less because it's no fun trying to do the same fiddly technical task or trial-and-error level dozens of times over, only to reach a harder section which requires twice as many attempts. Not my idea of fun.

God of War 2 overall wasn't that difficult, but it had its moments. I can recall a couple of sections that I had to repeat a lot of times. One involving escorting an old man while fighting hordes of enemies (who could attack the old man as well as yourself). Then there was the huge gauntlet on a winding staircase near the end of the game.

Perhaps the hardest game I beat is the original Super Mario Brothers. Although I didn't beat it properly. I played it on the 3DS which came with a rewind/save state feature. I used that liberally on the later levels.