I was in a Halo clan once. Before that, I grew up playing JRPGS and Street Fighter. I was that kid in the arcade that would spend all day at the mall with just one dollar while the others would wait their turn to challenge me. As long as I can remember, games were a central part of my life from the days of the Atari 2600. Today, I find myself somewhat jaded, but I still purchase at least one game a month... for research purposes if not anything else. I play games that have a unique aspect to them or games that lots of people are talking about. One of the most memorable games I played recently was Breakdown... it was a horrible experience, but beating the game became a personal mission. My most recent game purchase has been "Metal Arms: Glitch in the System" for Xbox, and before that, I purchased Metroid Prime Pinball for the DS.

My two favorite games are Soul Calibur III and Radiant Silvergun.

Am I a gamer?

YES
I
AM

Are you kidding? I hate games. Jack Thompson is my hero!

Absolute favorite: Warcraft 3: TFT

Beyond that, I don't think I can make a list. There are too many must-mention games that it would go on forever.

I have a pair of Pac-Man boxers, though, if that tells you anything.

Am I a gamer? Of course! I know very few game programmers who aren't. In fact, of all the game programmers I know, I can only think of one who isn't a hardcore gamer. You have to love games to be willing to work harder, longer hours, and for less pay.

I'm the same way, DragonSeeker. I've been making up games since kindergarten (mostly little RPG's) and by the time I got into college (for electronics, no less), I decided that I needed to know how video games really worked. I started studying C from The Absolute Beginner's Guide to C. Once I devoured that, I tore into Andre LaMothe's Teach Yourself Game Programming in 21 Days. I devoured that book too and made my very first real program; a simple little game called Farmer Bill's Almond Farm. It was interesting going from little 50-100 line Hello World's to a 5500 line video game. Ever since then, I've been hooked and have made it my life goal to be a game programmer.

Oh, and here's Farmer Bill's Almond Farm if you're curious:
bleachkitty.com/downloads/opa.zip

There are some truly horrible things about it, like the level logic being one big switch. There are also some things I'm really proud of, like writing the whole sound system in Assembly! (For you youths out there, DOS was a total nightmare to write sound code for. There was no fancy DirectSound interface, you had to interface with the drivers yourself. I said screw all that and just wrote Assembly code to access the PC speaker, which worked well enough despite being ghetto.)

(edit)
Oh yeah, favorite games. Well, I'd have to say that right now it's Ratrace. Seriously though, my favorite games change pretty often. A reporter at GDC asked me to name my top 5 favorite games. I chose The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Ultima 7, Thief, and The Sims. These are the games I constantly go back to over and over and over. They never die or stop being fun.

-Rez

I'm working through Guitar Hero II on expert!

And, back in the day when my Xbox actually worked - my favorite games were PGR2, Halo 2, and I played lots of SSX too.

I booted up a copy of Age of Empires III - and remembered that I'm not really into RTS's!

I think I'm looking forward to Wii games as soon as I get off my butt and go get one - and of course some XBOX360 stuff too - ditto on the hardware.

System Shock! And System Shock 2 was ok, too. Bioforge, the Ultima games, the Warcraft games (and now I'm a World of Warcraft addict), Tron 2.0, The Elder Scrolls games, the Unreal games, Thief et al, Cybermage, the Wing Commander games (including Privateer, but Privateer 2 was disappointing), Freelancer, Rome: Total War, Battle Zone, Command and Conquer et al, Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2, Knights of the Old Republic 1 &2, Tribes 1 & 2, Mechwarrior 2, 3, 4, Falcon 3.0 & 4.0, Operation Flashpoint, Descent et al, Black & White, Tomb Raider, "Block Out" (not really sure what this is actually called - 3D Tetris-like game from an overhead view). Tutankamen, Asteroids, Star Castle, Tron, Discs of Tron, The Starfleet Simulator, Outrun, Tempest, Star Wars (again, uncertain - vector graphics, fight TIE Fighters then shoot turrets on the Death Star then run the trench, wash-rinse-repeat). Um, memory fails me. This is most certainly not a complete list.

We "hacked" Akalabeth because we didn't like starving to death. The game started with 10 food and you ate 1 food with each step - resulting in rapid death. It was in Applesoft BASIC so it was an easy fix.

Apple Trek was pretty cool - Star Trek in text mode! You could explore several star sectors and kill Klingons, resupply at star bases, etc....

But I'm not a "hard-core" gamer in my own opinion because I spend less than $2,000 a year on upgrades and I don't have a separate storage area for my various controllers.

Oh man, how could I forget about System Shock! Mech Warrior 3 and Falcon 4.0 were games I used to support back at Microprose. Good stuff!

-Rez

Thank you. I've waited until now to join this thread out of concern for being mocked for my choices (because of my age and taste) but once I see Apple Trek named I now feel safe

My list is Gears of War, Lost Planet, the Pac Man games. Zelda. Pit fighter, Warlords, Circus Atari, Donkey Kong, Intelivision Baseball, football, B17 Bomber

gb

Oh, man - forgot Heavy Gear 1&2! Those were fun - I liked the "little mechs" after playing with my Kodiac in Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries.... "Prozac, dude!"

Wizards of Wor was good.