Pokemon, only if by "good" we mean "knew most of the minor/undocumented things and could tell them to my elementary school mates"...
...of course, that's because my parents got a PC, dialup, and ADSL when I was respectively 6, 7, and 9 😁 and cared to learn English on my own!

Can't really claim much more - even today, 20 years later, I'm certainly familiar with more things including a lot of games I played back then (between PS1 and arcade), good at modern Tetris with the bells and whistles but still wouldn't call myself above average...

PC games? Eh, I only really played 3D Pinball and WinBrick 2000, found it far more interesting to screw around with PowerPoint animations and whatever was on the monthly magazine shovelware CDs 😀
Summer 2007 was our Super Mario World modding season, that's for sure!

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-11-10, 17:22:

I have a problem with getting "too good" at games.

Urban Assault:
don't ask, I can't even begin to explain. Go watch my twitch highlights, they contain successful runs of every mission.

That one Microsoft's FPS/RTS combo? How do they compare to Battlezone and Uprising?

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-11-10, 17:22:

Quake:
Somehow more boring than Doom, Nightmare difficulty completely breaks the AI, Shamblers become borderline useless if you have somewhere to dart into view and out of view constantly.

I tend to suck at Quake, except with Navy SEAL mod. You know, with real-world firearms and appropriate damage ratings. With that, grunts and enforcers become the deadliest enemies because they can easily kill you with a shot or two, but I like it that way.

At one time I was a competitve QuakeWorld and later Counter-Strike player.

DracoNihil wrote on 2022-11-12, 18:47:

gerry wrote on 2022-11-11, 10:24:

I became pretty good at UT99 single player - which translated poorly into online play!

Unreal Engine 1 has very shoddy networking code that somehow got worse in UT99. I have much better luck in deathmatch in Unreal 1 over UT99.

i always found that online players (the better ones) had so memorised places, angles and patterns that they would win over a given game, like a good poker player who has a great feel for probability will win over the long run

that and in the early days a fair amount of online play was still via dial up 😀

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2022-11-15, 08:49:

That one Microsoft's FPS/RTS combo? How do they compare to Battlezone and Uprising?

I have no idea how to even give a solid comparison considering things like this happen.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote on 2022-11-15, 08:49:

I tend to suck at Quake, except with Navy SEAL mod. You know, with real-world firearms and appropriate damage ratings. With that, grunts and enforcers become the deadliest enemies because they can easily kill you with a shot or two, but I like it that way.

Just be quick and aim for the head with your (I forgot what the pistol was in that mod, a SOCOM or a USP?) handgun, really simple! A shame that mod didn't go very far before Counter-Strike ended up happening for Half-Life.

gerry wrote on 2022-11-15, 09:41:

i always found that online players (the better ones) had so memorised places, angles and patterns that they would win over a given game, like a good poker player who has a great feel for probability will win over the long run

that and in the early days a fair amount of online play was still via dial up 😀

Yes, rote memorization of the maps can help but you still have to tackle the fact the netcode is awful and you have to even aim so far ahead of people even when using hitscan weapons. It's dumb, I only really play it with people that explicitly want to play UT99 with me, either here on the forums or anybody I meet on Twitch itself.

As it was the only game I played, I became a decent (but not excellent) online virtual pilot playing Il2 1946. But I never joined a squad, and this finally made me give it up; time after time, squad players on the opposing side would use team tactics against me, and squad players on my side would ignore me and make no effort to help me. The idea that real pilots in WW-2 would have done nothing to assist another fighter pilot on their side because he wasn't in their unit is risible, and it brought home to me that these guys I was playing with just treated it as a game, divorced from historical context. So I gave up playing it online in 2007, and haven't played it again since.

I've gone from being terrible to merely being not so good at playing Halo CE, the only FPS I've ever played. I aspire to make it to adequate.

StarCraft/broodwar but only because I played the hell out of it for years. Never against another human mind you, just running through the campaigns.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-11-15, 13:48:

As it was the only game I played, I became a decent (but not excellent) online virtual pilot playing Il2 1946. But I never joined a squad, and this finally made me give it up; time after time, squad players on the opposing side would use team tactics against me, and squad players on my side would ignore me and make no effort to help me. The idea that real pilots in WW-2 would have done nothing to assist another fighter pilot on their side because he wasn't in their unit is risible, and it brought home to me that these guys I was playing with just treated it as a game, divorced from historical context. So I gave up playing it online in 2007, and haven't played it again since.

That wouldn't be totally historically inaccurate if you were playing as Japan. The Japanese aviation doctrine is often described as being more individualistic, with this supposedly in concordance with the samurai spirit. I remember hearing that one of their pilots credited football as being one reason the American pilots were better at teamwork. Of course, in your case, you probably just had lousy teammates.

gca wrote on 2022-11-15, 13:54:

StarCraft/broodwar but only because I played the hell out of it for years. Never against another human mind you, just running through the campaigns.

Sorry, but that does not count - if you do not play against human.

Disruptor wrote on 2022-11-15, 18:30:

gca wrote on 2022-11-15, 13:54:

StarCraft/broodwar but only because I played the hell out of it for years. Never against another human mind you, just running through the campaigns.

Sorry, but that does not count - if you do not play against human.

there's some truth there - online players often overwhelm the best single player experienced players, but the reverse is unlikely

nevertheless i would count being really good at single player to still be really good! it just doesnt extend to online. many games have no online so it cant really be the final arbiter of 'good'

gerry wrote on 2022-11-18, 09:43:

Disruptor wrote on 2022-11-15, 18:30:

gca wrote on 2022-11-15, 13:54:

StarCraft/broodwar but only because I played the hell out of it for years. Never against another human mind you, just running through the campaigns.

Sorry, but that does not count - if you do not play against human.

there's some truth there - online players often overwhelm the best single player experienced players, but the reverse is unlikely

nevertheless i would count being really good at single player to still be really good! it just doesnt extend to online. many games have no online so it cant really be the final arbiter of 'good'

Using multiplayer to compare someone good at singleplayer with someone good at multiplayer would be like putting a long distance runner in a sprint and saying the sprinters are better runners. You're judging someone by a different set of rules. I wouldn't say that multiplayer gamers are better than singleplayer gamers unless the multiplayer gamers would also do better in singleplayer.

Ensign Nemo wrote on 2022-11-18, 10:27:

gerry wrote on 2022-11-18, 09:43:

Disruptor wrote on 2022-11-15, 18:30:

Sorry, but that does not count - if you do not play against human.

there's some truth there - online players often overwhelm the best single player experienced players, but the reverse is unlikely

nevertheless i would count being really good at single player to still be really good! it just doesnt extend to online. many games have no online so it cant really be the final arbiter of 'good'

Using multiplayer to compare someone good at singleplayer with someone good at multiplayer would be like putting a long distance runner in a sprint and saying the sprinters are better runners. You're judging someone by a different set of rules. I wouldn't say that multiplayer gamers are better than singleplayer gamers unless the multiplayer gamers would also do better in singleplayer.

indeed, but in context of either fps or rts ive never known a player good at online who isnt also very able to beat the single player game, often rather easily

gerry wrote on 2022-11-18, 12:02:

indeed, but in context of either fps or rts ive never known a player good at online who isnt also very able to beat the single player game, often rather easily

I think we're going on a bit of a tangent. I don't doubt that most players good at multiplayer are also very good at single player, but the original context was does being good at singleplayer count as being really good at a game? Some people think that it doesn't because if you put someone who has only mastered singleplayer against someone who has mastered multiplayer, the single player person will usually get destroyed. My point is that you shouldn't use a multiplayer game to descredit the singleplayer person. If singleplayer doesn't count then you would have to show that multiplayer gamers are also better at singleplayer.

Pinball. I've even crafted entire pinball playlists carefully optimized to help me power through 1hr+ games and rack up insane new high scores.

But I suck at Doom. The game itself even agrees:

I don't know if my CRT is getting weak or I just happen to be a Doom Numbskull, but it took me forever to find a certain door hidden in one of Level 28's many shadowy corridors. I was just wandering around the dark in circles--kind of like that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, except with demon guts all over the place.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-11-20, 19:31:

Pinball. I've even crafted entire pinball playlists carefully optimized to help me power through 1hr+ games and rack up insane new high scores.

But I suck at Doom. The game itself even agrees:
IMG_0029.jpg

100% kills and 98% items? That hardly sucks! My average score is lower than that.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-11-20, 19:31:

I don't know if my CRT is getting weak or I just happen to be a Doom Numbskull, but it took me forever to find a certain door hidden in one of Level 28's many shadowy corridors. I was just wandering around the dark in circles--kind of like that scene in This Is Spinal Tap, except with demon guts all over the place.

To be fair secret doors in Doom are PITA to find.

Standard Def Steve wrote on 2022-11-20, 19:31:

But I suck at Doom. The game itself even agrees:

Time always SUCKS. And also you'd be a "freak" for playing Hexen too long!

I wouldn't worry about par times in the Doom Engine games, during my livestreams it's taken me a long time to figure out what I've missed because the pickup models in Doomreal are uncharacteristically tiny, and it's not intuitive what counts as a "item" or not on that stupid tally.