BBC B
– Elite
– Castle Quest

Early 90s PC
– Midwinter
– Xenon 2

SNES
– Mario Kart
– Super Mario

N64
– Marko Kart 64
– Golden Eye (this is easily the top one!)
– Perfect Dark

Wii
– Mario Kart
– Quantum of Solace (online)

Resident Evil 0,1,2,3,4, Code Veronica
Metroid Prime
Metroid Prime Echoes
Splinter Cell
Metal Gear Solid
Driver
F-Zero GX
Rogue Leader

Elite on C64
Rogue & Nethack on various *nix boxes
Doom, Doom II on linux
Quake, Quake II on linux

Quake II co-op kept us sane during the long boring nights on Y2K duty, waiting for the phone to ring.

Ooh where to start….

Champ Manager
Half Life and Half Life 2
Counterstrike in all its guises (used to be clanned that played in a couple of leagues)
Civ
Sim City
Lineage2
Age Of Conan
Dawn Of War series (and now wasting loads of time on DoW2)
X3 Reunion and then X3 Terran Conflict
RF Online
Planetside (my favourite MMO of all time, shame it got let down by a lack of support from SOE)
Everquest2

I’m also a games tester in my spare time, I get the opportunity through contacts to take part in a lot of alpha/closed beta testing every so often.

MtbCol how do you get into the games testing stuff?

By far the most time spent was on Unreal Tournament. Used to play it online every spare minute, and sometimes in not spare minutes for 18 months.

Used to have NG stats enabled, and used to rise to around 83 in the world each quarter(reset every 3 months). Wouldn’t say it was wasted, because I loved it.

FORZA2 ont he 360 was my achillies heal in my last year of uni.

Nurenberg(sp?) Ring, the 80’s porche LeMans car (hugmongous turbo, humongous downforce). If you so let go the throttle or lost your nerve and braked to early it would just go straight on at the corner! Had to keep the turbo spinning and the speed up otherwise nothign worked!

Counterstrike

CIV, and this one:

Never really got into computer games either…

MtbCol how do you get into the games testing stuff?

I started off by signing up to a few gaming company newsletters alongside being a Fileplanet member. Fileplanet often do closed beta invites for certain games.
Once you get involved, if you’re prepared to test properly, and that’s actually trying to break the game code/ report errors/ replaying the same stuff over and over again, rather than just playtesting the game to see if its good enough to buy, then you can build up a better relationship with certain developers and usually get first option on similar games coming out from them.
Another way in is to be in some form of gaming community, every so often these “clans”, if they’re well respected and of high enough profile, usually get asked to do testing too.

Here’s a few I’ve had the opportunity to test:
Lineage2
Planetside
RF Online
Age Of Conan
Joint Operations – Typhoon Rising and the expansion Escalation
Counterstrike Source
Warhammer Online
Tabula Rasa
X3 Terran Conflict

and I’m in a couple of games that are still under the radar so to speak, both of them are covered by an NDA so I’m unable to discuss them.

NDA? Well that’s a non disclosure agreement which blocks you from posting anything about gameplay/screenshote/level design etc about a game during testing.

A good place to start isBeta Watcher

World of Warcraft in recent years has probably taken up more hours than I would care to admit. Got proper addicted while recovering from an Operation which had me housebound for about 3 months (and then no physical activity for another 3 months) just after its release.

Other than that in the last 10 years or so SOCOM, SOCOM2, COD4 have been the biggest offenders. Mainly in the winter though, and when the wife has been heavily preggers, as she’d be asleep by about 6pm everyday.

Through school\colleage there have been tons, NOtable mentions include Elite\Frontier\SWOS on the BBC\Amiga, Mario\Zelda on the SNES, Goldeneye\Mario on the N64, F29 Retaliator\Doom networked at colleage, Champ Manager while working for the MoD (had far too much time on my hands).

I’ve spent an obscene amount of time playing Peggle. The other 2 major games that have robbed chunks of life from me are city of heroes/villains and UT.

wonder who misssed the raft of glitches in COD WaW when it first came out? it was a bit of a mess.

hours and hours and hours – deadly

Manic Miner
New Zealand Story
Wizball
Zilch
FantasticContraption.com
Civilisation takes the biscuit, though. Weeks have been lost.

Ooh so many to choose from
C64
Apache gunship
elite

Megadrive
Sonic
Ecco
flashback

Then the PS1 major drain on my time
FF7 and 8
Gran turismo 1 and 2
silent hill
Resident evil 1-3
Metal gear
command and conqeur
Abes odysee and exodus

PC
Morrowind
Oblivion
halo
halflife
quake 3
elite 2

Thousands and thousands of hours, quite a bit of it lost sleep.

Doom
Unreal Tournament
Solitaire
Colin Mcrae Rally on PC and PS2
Grand Tourismo 2 and onwards
Tomd Raider PC and PS2
Ratchet and Clank
Now anything that my daughters have on their Wii

Great thread.

Commander Keen
Wolfenstein 3D
Alone in the Dark
Sam and Max
Tetris
Super Mario World (SNES)
Cool Boarders & Gran Tourismo (PS1)

I kind of stopped playing after that, i’d love a PS3 though.

Secret of Monkey Island

Doom

Kula World

Call of Duty 4

Elite – on BBC+Amstrad
Mario Kart – on various Nintendo devices
Puzzle Pirates – online Java game with a Linux (and other OS?) client

Have not played Eve Online or WoW on purpose.

Doom Series
Quake 1 & 2
Halflife 1 + 2 & Episodes
GP3 & GP4
Colin McRae Rally
Richard Burns Rally
Rally Trophy
Grand Prix Legends
GT Legends
Unreal II

I forgot about Lemmings and FantasticContraption.com

Love them.

Final Fantasy VII probably swallowed most of my time. I lost a good 8 months playing that from start to completion and it’s still my favourite game of all time.

Civ is just crap.. Honestly you people!

Secret of Monkey Island – love that game

I wouldn’t say it was wasted time, it’s a fun activity just like cycling.

The ones that I have spent a lot of time on were…

orbitor
jet set willy
original Civilization
populous 1 and 2
original settlers

nowadays I rarely get that much time but I did get quite involved in GTA4 and I’m currently rekindling my attention to combat flight sims.