17 replies to this topic

[Brazo Izquierdo de Muerte]

thought id take some time and see how every one discovered MW.


it was 1995 i was 12 at the time. mom and step dad made the mistake of going to best buy to get a bunch of office supplys and computer things. i was walking around the store looking at all the cool computers and the new windows OS when i came across a computer running a video with giant robots. like the goofy kid i was i went running to the nearest sales rep and ask him about it. he came over to look and said "oh yeah thats mech warrior 2." then he asked me a question that would set me down this path of mechs and houses and glorified war. " do you wanna play the game while you wait for your parents?" i still dont know how long i was there but it was not long enough. i asked my folks for the game but they said "no computers are for work not games" little did they know.

in the time between then and 1999 when mech warrior 3 came out i managed to play every mech game i could get my hands on. (even the ones for sega and snes) i even got a hold of my own computer and played both of the Heavy Gear games when those came out. (they were AWESOME).then mech 3 came out and i snatched it up and lost my self for about a week in the game. i dont know what happend in that week, familly could have come and gone world could have ended i would not have noticed.

then in 2000 MW 4 dropped. not my favorite of the series but its MW did i really care ? noooo hell no. it was a new mech game. now in this time i had met maybe a few other ppl that even knew what MW was. i think like maybe 5 or 6 . every one else was to busy playing N64 then ps2 or xbox.

then all was quiet for awhile. no new mech games except for the add on to MW4 which was ok but it was not really new. not to mention i still did not know that many ppl that even knew about MW ( i live in a small city and most were playing warcraft and starcraft and unreal tornament.

then a buddy of mine told me about a game with mechs that was on xbox. no way i said. Mechs dont come on consoles mech come on pc. but it was mechs so i had to look right? what i found was mech assault 2. man i thought this is really arcady and mechs dont blow up like that, and theres no way to customize your mech. but then i noticed that the game plays on line. i had just gotten my own place and online gameing over the xbox was still new to me. but i thought on line (thats with ppl right)? so i jumped on line. and it was FULL of people. lots of MW fans who loved the series as much as i did. ( where the hell were you people hiding) so then the easy arcady style of MA did not matter any more . here were tons of ppl to play with and to gripe about how we all wanna mod and customize our mechs just like the true MW games. but after a time it seamed like we were at the end of MW. ( oh i did try steel battalion which cost me 200 for the controler and the game) if you want to play Steel battalion and you never have i do have some advice for you. Dont.

So in the mean time xbox 360 came out . and guess what came with it a new game with what alot of us were hoping for was MA3 or a new mech game but they named it funny. they called it Chrome hounds. im going to rant here so grab a sammich and a beer but.........(HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GAME? HAVE THE DEVS THAT MADE IT PLAYED IT? this blows on a level that makes the brain hurt just thinking about it. here is the choices you have for the "hounds" in the game .

1.crappy armored hound with big *** gun and some speed.
2 slightly less crappy armored hound but still crappy amored, hound with more big *** guns. less speed.
3 fair armored hound with MORE big *** guns and maybe missiles and less speed.
4 HUGELY armored hound with EVEN MORE big *** guns and missiles and almost no speed.
5 command hound with no armor and almost no weapons but it has speed.

so lets recap thats gun gun gun gun gun gun and no gun. not to mention that you have to capture some thing called a combas to control an area. ( i know what a compas is but a combas ?) also never mind the fact that you better hope you dont die at all beacuse if you do you will use up your game time just WALKING back to where the battle is.



so i did what any one would do when looking for a new big robot game . i went to armored core. now AC is ok and i do like it but mw it aint, but if you have never played it alow me to very gently sum it up for you. take every thing you know and love about MW and thats your first mark. now run to the polar oposite of that. now go about 15 feet past that. i give you Amored Core.

then after that bout of insanity salvation reached my ears. MW 5 was coming. then that got changed to MWO.

the only thing i can say to this is WHAT THE HELL TOOK YOU SO LONG?

Edited by Alisyn Chaynes, 17 May 2012 - 07:27 PM.

[KursedVixen]

I'm not sure when it was but i first played mech commander years after whatching battltech it wasn't untill many years later i got the connection that battletech and mechwarrior were the same thing.

[Voridan Atreides]

I started playing MW3 when I was like 8 and it was one of my favorite games. I remember watching my older brother play MW2 when I was really young and that is how I got into it. I would play MW3 all the time with my friend and my younger brother. We had a Bushwacker vs. Cauldron Born rivalry (I liked Cauldron Born and my friend and brother liked Bushwacker). I have not played it in some time but I'm really looking forward to this game. Mechwarrior will always be one of my favorite games.

[fail0045]

i started around 5 and found mw4 vengance and started playing it and knew right away i would love it. i still play it about once a year. ww got me started on video games.

[Pheonixwolf]

my father has always been a big kid, playing D&D well into his forties and having picked up Battletech when it was still in year one, had to of been around 1993/4 when i was 10 when i started to enjoy reading and he hands me 3 books. "Here read these, you might like'em." -The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy-, from there i was hooked, eventually he gave me his nearly complete collection of the Original books. (yes including the ones with Calmacho's Calbreros).Hopefully i can get him to join this game once it gets going.

P.S. he once claimed to be part of the gaming group that was the inspiration for the Kellhounds, The tough bald black guy (lolz)

[Jaroth Corbett]

1st Somerset Strikers cartoon is what got me going. i could never forget seeing the graphics change from the usual cartoon style to the CGI that is commonplace today. Blew my mind as a child.

Edited by Jaroth Winson, 17 May 2012 - 05:45 PM.

[Flyingotter]

1994, I was 12 and picked up the Citytech second edition boxed set just because I liked the miniatures. (and because it was at a used bookstore who had three copies and was selling them for six bucks each!). My best friend and I were hooked on the TT game from then on, the rest is nerd history...

[Atlai]

I was three years old when i walked in to our PC room and just started up some stupid math game that i thought was cool when i looked over at my dad who playing on his computer and i saw him playing MW3(i should tell you ive always liked big robots/machines,)now i had no idea what he was playing at the time but i came over and asked him what he was doing and he said mechwarrior and im like whats that and he said just watch, so i did, he piloted his mech(a daishi i would learn) across a desert, then all this fire came out of nowhere and completely destroyed him, after he fell over i remember telling him "why dont you just get up?"and he told me he died and i said oh. then he did something that would start a love for a series like no other...he handed me the joystick(that i still have today)and asked me if i wanted to play...I would go on to beat the campaign when i was 4, then replay it till i could take on any enemy in any mech with any weapon all when i was five man i love that game thanks for the nostalgia

[Skycat]

From perusing the posts in this thread I am probably the oldest gamer here. I go back to the paperback book days. I have the entire collection from Sword and Dagger through the last book before FASA decided to "reboot" the series and skip a few hundred years of storyline.

I played MechWarror when it first came out on the PC. Then MechWarrior 2 and then MechWarrior 2 Mecenaries. The computers back then you could afford were flat out overwhelmed by the processor demands of those games. The first MechCommander was a challenge. I wrote a walkthrough for a gaming site on all the missions for that one (site long gone now). Hope this online effort captures some of the fun of those early efforts.

-Skycat

Edited by Skycat, 17 May 2012 - 06:39 PM.

[Redshift2k5]

Played ye olde DOS Mechwarrior, as well as watching the TV show. didn't get into the more later Windows games because at the time I was horrible at video games and I stuck to point and clicks while my brothers played shooters. Now I play a lot more action games, and I've been trying to get up to speed on modern mechwarrior games by playing MWLL Different theme than MWO, but the control scheme is strikingly similar (given what they've said so far of the controls)

[Yuba Frank]

It was a long time ago, maybe 16-17 years, when we got our first computer and I found you could play games...then I found Mechwarrior 2, got a Sidewinder Pro with it I think, and that was that. Never played TT game...I had a job and worked for a living so I didn't have time to play around with that. Soon after I found there were books, TROs, etc...and bought and read them so could understand what was going on. Just liked the story and the fact that I could get away for a little while, climb into a mech, and blast the crap out of things. I still think it is the best "universe"...but they took that path into Dark Age and lost me. Glad to see this reboot going on, wish it was back in 3025 though so we could play longer before the clans show up. I haven't played mechwarrior for a few years now so I'm sure to be a bit rusty.

[Toothman]

Guess I'm the new oldest person in this thread :-) I was at GenCon, when it was still in Milwaukee and I saw the BattleTech table top box. I said "I have to have that" and still had $25 in my pocket so I grabbed it. Been a fan since. Have almost all the books, played almost all the video games, am very impatient waiting on MWO to drop.

[MystykOne]

well skycat....im as old as you possibly and possibly older! LOL i read scifi compulsivly at high speeds so of course over the years i read and loved the battletech books. i saw people playing the board game but it didnt look like it was a game for me. back in the 90's i got my first computer, a 386 that i immediatly found i had a talent for computer hardware on. i upgraded its butt up to a real fast 486 as fast as i could(in thoser days you could buy chip 'helpers' that bolted on to yer older chips so u didnt hafta buy a new motherboard LOL) and filled it with ram as well(4m chunks of 30pin ram that cost as much as gold) i had found a kool thing called BBS's(was b4 the internet came out here in canada) and downloaded a game called mettletech earthseige. it took days to download the 13 disk set of the program plus the 3 disk set of sound effects. finally i had it all down and WOW did it ever kick butt. i dont have to tell anyone here aboot the rush you get when u first pilot your first mech. WOW! i immediatly went back to the BBS and found metaltech earthseige battledrome wich was my first online experience with fighting in mechs. WOW to the next level! HOLY CRAP was it fun!!!! never forget the line graffix of the missiles arching up to blow apart my apponent! gawd i loved that game. unfortunately i couldnt find any other of the metaltech games as time went on but a freind told me about mechwarrior. so i got mw2 and gave it a try. WOW addicted INSTANTLY!! i loved it even with the klunky controls(ME had better controls initially) then MW3 came out and suprise suprise ME2 came out as well. well ME2 was totally a disapointment....they had way overthought the game and even though the graffix kicked *** everything else sucked in comparison to MW3. so MW became my full out addiction. i really got into the online gaming part and started to play with a bunch of clan guys and eventually joined the clan WOLF N EXILE. at aboot that time MW4 was first coming out. the way it worked was kinda funny but suddenly i found myself leading a powerful bunch of people as KHAN of the clan. gawd we had good times. i even loved the flamewars and political bullshit that made the game even more real to me. clan WOLF N EXILE gradually went crossgame and we played a couple other games together as well and then we joined one of the mechwarrior leagues and really got serious aboot it. we kikked the drunken warriors new buttholes and our best warrior WX_STROKER is still legendary as someone who can kick your butt in seconds flat. he was scary! LOL and he was my actual real life brother as well. i had got both my brothers into the clan(over 200 members by then) and they got their wives involved as well. so i got mine involved....and ill be damned some of the other members wives got into it to and BOOM we had a womans cadre that kikked severe butt! we had women joining us just because of that! was a real blast. then my son got old enough to play and he loved it as well. aaaah the times we had. good fond memories.....*sigh* unfortunately i found my health starting to go for some unknown reason and i couldnt really play no more so i retired and left the clan to my XO(my other brother WX_Bohunter) and just came online from time to time when i could. my health deteriated further and further with noone knowing what really was the matter till one day i had an attack that left me paralysed from the neck down completely. it took me 5 years to get so i have good control over my upper body but im still very weak in the legs. turns out i had a weird type of M.S. that at least is now semicontrolable since now they know what is happening. my son came to me a couple weeks ago with a copy of pcgamer and showed me the article on MWO....I NEARLY CRAPPED MASLF!!!! i so cannot wait for this to come out!! i tried playing the xbox versions and such but they left me kinda cold.....was like MW for dummies and i really didnt like it. im am so excited about this game. my wife and both my kids are pretty happy as well. as a matter of fact my brothers and their families as well as a bunch of our old WX buddies are all just waiting with baited breath!! PLEASE DONT DISSAPOINT US DEVELOPERS!!! we need our addictions addressed!! LOL
thanx
Mystyk

Edited by MystykOne, 18 May 2012 - 08:10 AM.

[Xaks]

Roughly 1987 or so. A good buddy of mine was in the National Guard. This game called 'Battletech' was big among the guardsmen, and one weekend I happened by his place while he was doing some testing and scenario planning.

I was a vet of D&D and various other tabletop games, so he asked if I wanted to pilot against him for some 'simulated' battles of a new loadout he was testing.

No farking idea what the hell I was getting myself into, I said "Sure. What're my options here?"

He gives me a 10-minutes quickie on combat and parks me in a stock Battlemaster on a standard map against him in a modified Marauder.

All the sudden it was two days later, we were up to our eyeballs in paperwork, source books, record sheets, and empty beer cans.

I went into full-bore addiction from right there until....around 1997 or so.

[Xaks]

Toothman, on 18 May 2012 - 06:25 AM, said:

Guess I'm the new oldest person in this thread :-) I was at GenCon, when it was still in Milwaukee and I saw the BattleTech table top box. I said "I have to have that" and still had $25 in my pocket so I grabbed it. Been a fan since. Have almost all the books, played almost all the video games, am very impatient waiting on MWO to drop.

You might have me beat by a few years, but if so it ain't by much.

I made up for it though: A second-cousin of mine owned and operated the biggest gaming shop in central Wisconsin through most of that time, and I got first dibs on pretty much everything. I worked a LOT of part time side jobs in those days to pay for my Battletech addiction!

Ahhh, those were the days...

[ice trey]

It's long. Very long.

• Battletech Saturday Morning Cartoon - 1994 - Could never remember the name, but was blown away by the 3D animation and the theme song stuck in my head. Thought any minute not spent in 3D was a waste of air-time. I was eight years old.
  
• Mechwarrior 2 Demo - late 1995 - Installed by my father on his computer to sate my never-ending cravings for computer games (and his being too cheap to buy me a nintendo or full version games). Became obsessed with it. Played it over and over.
  
• Mechwarrior 2 Full Version - 1995- The first full-verson game I ever owned, given to me for christmas. Played it over, and over, and over again. When not playing, I read the rulebook over and over until it was ragged.
  
• Mechwarrior 2 Ghost Bears' Legacy 1996 - Played it even more than Mechwarrior 2, due to MW2 having incompatabilities with Windows 98. Only ever got to try the Trial of Bloodright once. Still can't figure out how to fight those trials.
  
• Powerhits Battletech: Contained Battletech late 1996 - Crescent Hawks Inception, Crescent Hawks Revenge, Mechwarrior 1. While the last two titles haven't really caught my attention all that much, I absolutely love Crescent Hawks inception, and it's being so old makes it surprisingly compatible with just about every OS I can find.
  
• Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries - 1997: Still by far my favorite of the Mechwarrior series if only for the attention to atmosphere and extremely gritty ambiance and fluff. Glitches abound and pushing DOS to it's limits made it lag like crazy.
  
• Battletech CCG -1997 on: I found out about it while looking for Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries cheat codes on dial-up internet. Had my parents take me out downtown to buy a starter deck and two boosters. I would go on to keep collecting these cards even after they went out of print, but I'd barely played five games and never found anyone who played on their own accord - I had to recruit new players or give them starter boxes as birthday gifts (Yes, I was a self-serving little fart)
  
• Battletech Technical Readouts - 1997 on: Bought my first TRO (3055 Revised) at the same time as the Battletech CCG. Bought 3055 because I felt I "Already Knew" all the mechs from 3025 and later thanks to Mechwarrior 2 and the Powerhits Battletech manuals.
  
• Battletech Miniatures - 1997 on: My very first miniature was a Warhawk/Masakari, borne from love for it from Mechwarrior 2. I was frustrated that they were so tiny (I was used to painting model airplanes) and this would be my first exposure to hearing about the tabletop game being explained. I would later find the tabletop game, but my parents refused to buy it for me - A boardgame with a 75 Canadian Dollar price tag at this time seemed ludicrous, especially to my layman parents who expected it to collect dust.
  
• MechCommander - 1998 - Bought it a bit late. I couldn't appreciate the game right away due to it then being a ram hog that made my father's 300mhz CPU chug. Would gain much more appreciation later in life - namely when it didn't make my computer cry tears of blood.
  
• Mechwarrior 3 -1999- Found out about it first through the internet, Bought a Computer Gaming World magazine just because of a MW3 article posted therein. Bought it, played through it, but never have been able to play it start-to-finish more than once.
  
• Mechwarrior 3 Pirates Moon Late 1999? - Started playing it, but found it frustratingly hard and gave up. Haven't been able to play it since the first time I installed it years ago, due to my father losing my Mechwarrior 3 disk.
  
• Mechwarrior 4 - 2001 - To say that I was excited for this title would have been an understatement. I still remember being in the 9th grade, looking at spoiler screenshots on the promo web-site. I was disappointed at how watered-down it felt when I was finally able to try it, and how poor the actors were (I would later actually come to appreciate the actors - it's the only Mechwarrior game that really tried to come close to having characters to grow with). I Collapsed and bought Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries over the internet in 2006 when I heard that an online community were making new 'mechs and a work-around for incorporating them into the single-player game was possible, but same said 'mechs were not available to be used in Mechwarrior 4 Vengeance. I begrudgingly bought MW4 Mercs. It's a fun game, but besides it's bolstered roster, it was less compelling than it's predecessor.
  
• Battletech Tabletop / Mechwarrior 2nd Edition - RPG 2005 and onwards- After years of no mechwarrior video games with nothing slated to come out in the future, and having learned my lesson from the eastern blackout of 2003, I thought about buying into Battletech tabletop. I found a PDF file of the quick start rules, and was able to convince a friend at my lunch table in Highschool to try playing it. It was a hit with him, and I offered to buy further into it with Mechwarrior 2nd edition P&P RPG. After a few sessions of the RPG, and because I'd collected a few Battletech books and miniatures over the years, and now finally had my own source of income from a part time job, I decided to buy the core rules. I went over to the local game store and picked up the Master Rules. I would go on to GM a tabletop roleplaying group for about two summers in my parents' basement between semesters of university.
  
• Battletech in an LGS / Total Warfare - Fall 2006 and onwards: My first exposure to someone who had more experiece than I did at Battletech came in the fall of 2006, when a local demo-team agent who I'd never known existed ran a game of Battletech at a scale and complexity level unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was suddenly forced to take the newly printed rulebook and memorize it in a single week, learning all the post-Succession-wars technologies from scratch. Needless to say, it was a huge flop, and I had my Word of Blake force soundly defeated (2 left of 12) while the Davion force I played against suffered only one crippled Commando. Still, I'd had so much fun that I decided to build my first army.
  
• First Army Completed - 2007: My first legitimate army, my 1st Genyosha force, was bought and paid for before the print version of TechManual hit the shelves, and therefore, before I realized how badly C3 networks are punished at the Company level. Still, I never really would end up playing anything bigger than lance-on-lance, so it all worked out in the end.

[Walter Soebchak]

When I was in elementary school, me and my big brother, pooled our allowance to buy the third edition boxed set. It was after the first release, but before the second, so lets say 1993. I was 10 years old and my brother was 14 when we started fumbling through learning the rules. Before too long both his friends and mine were investing more and more allowance money into expansions, technical readouts, figures(plastic and pewter) and paperback novels.

The biggest evolution in our table top adventures came when both me and my friend Tony bought the mercenaries supplement, and began meticulously building our mercenary units. Together with a couple friends, who happily offered to play the opposing forces, we began to build our units. We were only in middle school by this time, and our setups weren't too sophisticated, in fact I used to haul my miniatures(of which I had a battalion) around in an old coffee can. My maps and record sheets came along in a trapper keeper. We kept playing on and off through high school, games becoming less and less frequent. In 2002, I left home for boot camp, and many of my friends went on to college. By the time Tony and I returned home our battletech collections were long gone, mine lost to an indiscriminate spring cleaning session. Since then, mechwarrior and mechcommander games have filled the void.

Of all the various games spawned by the franchise after I started playing in the mid 90's, the only ones I missed were the original mechwarrior and the first mechassault on xbox. Recently, in anticipation of MWO, I reinstalled MW: Mercs and MWLL, and dusted off my old saitek two-piece. I hope that my skills are back up to par by the time the beta launches!

I can't tell you for the life of my what my unit's name was, or what figures I had exactly, but countless hours were spent shuffling them across various maps with my brother, and some of our closest friends. Most of us are still friends today, and are actually planning a MWO reunion, with myself, my brother and two of our close friends comprising the command element for a merc unit. The battletech and mechwarrior franchises meant a lot to us growing up, and still mean a lot to us today.

From an old school tabletopper, to the developers who are working to bring us this game, thanks. To those new to the universe, welcome, and I hope you enjoy MWO as much as we've enjoyed the iterations of the past.

[990Dreams]

I was 4, and I saw my dad on Mechcommander 2. I asked to play, and he let me. Ever since I have loved mechs. Then I lost all the game disks, and then MTX and MC2 open source came out. Then came MW:O