back in your video game peak ....if they had it, what video game could you have went “pro” on?

Atari: Decathlon and Kaboom

Wii: Wii golf

Obviously none - dominate my neighborhood, yeah that has All-Pro written all over it.

I think I was really good at Atari Asteroids.  And Tetris.  But the world record holders for tetris are insane.

I doubt the gamers are all that different from actual athletes with respect to rare skills and the thousands of hours of practice.

FIFA '06

Tiger Woods '01

FIFA, but never actually be pro. I was just the best of my group of friends. Only lost 1x (we did best of 5, so I lost actual games) to an in person opponent during my junior and senior years of college.

posted by justincredible

Tiger Woods '01

'04 was my jam too. Penguin Falls!

I was ranked in the world top 500 in FIFA at one time. I had over 500 wins. I played wayyyy too much.

posted by Automatik

'04 was my jam too. Penguin Falls!

 

I was ranked in the world top 500 in FIFA at one time. I had over 500 wins. I played wayyyy too much.

If you had stuck with it, you could have been making bank right now.

I was just good, never elite. The gap between the two is significant. 

I played in a 40 man tournament in 2009 and got 8th. It was a mix of casual players, good players (like me) and fucking badasses. I got knocked out by a badass and it wasn't even close. Absolutey destroyed.

Back in the day, I was pretty darn good at Kaboom, too, Ironman. 

Back in the day, it would have been the arcade game "Track and Field" by Konami.  I went through a few quarters and wore out my thumbs on that one.  Had just about mastered the final event.

Never played home video games much by myself, with the exception of Super Mario World (NES) when my first son was an infant.  Within a few years he was clocking the old man on Super Mario Kart, and later on Madden football and NASCAR.  

wasn't S&L's brother a serious gamer? I can't remember his screen name, but I thought I remembered him talking about it...could be wrong?

Need more love for rpg's

Legend of Zelda: LttP

posted by gut

Obviously none - dominate my neighborhood, yeah that has All-Pro written all over it.

I think I was really good at Atari Asteroids.  And Tetris.  But the world record holders for tetris are insane.

 

I doubt the gamers are all that different from actual athletes with respect to rare skills and the thousands of hours of practice.

This. Take Trials Rising, which came out early this year (kind of a cross between motorcycle stunt racing and a platformer, where you complete courses as quickly as possible without faults). I've been a fan of the series since Evolution came out on the 360. Going off the global leaderboards, I'm about in the top 11% (haven't played in a couple weeks, so don't know if that's changed, so we'll go with that). The difference between top 11% and top 1% is probably the same as the difference between that marginal major league baseball player who can get up to the big leagues...as a stopgap back-up who spends his career bouncing back and forth between there and AAA...and a first-ballot Hall of Famer whom even non-fans of the game can recognize.

I'm a guy who's completed all the courses up through the Hard level, but can't even finish an Extreme (well, I did survive getting through one in Evolution, but I usually hit a brick wall about at the first stunt) and never will unlock the Ninja level ones. And my main "skill" is persistence, to where I might have some of the shittiest results on some of those Hards, but at least I made it through them, which is more than you can say about a lot of people. Top 1% guys? They have, at minimum, Platinum medals on everything and have the YouTube videos I find myself looking at after 100 faults on the same part of a Hard course just so I can see how the fuck someone was able to actually do it. Where I see how effortlessly they make it look and hate myself just a little bit more when it takes another 75 faults to pull it off.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm very good. However, the gap between very good and truly great is way larger than the gap between very good and shitty.

I will give myself credit on the A2600's Journey Escape, though. A shitty game where you take each member of Journey through a crowd of people you have to avoid in order to reach their limo. It's a really easy game when you get the hang of it and I did get the score up to where the game freezes because the A2600 didn't have the mental capacity to roll scores over. I mean, I'd guess a lot of people have done or could do that, but YOU CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME!!!!

Atari26- Pitfall

Nintendo- SNK Baseball Stars

posted by CenterBHSFan

Need more love for rpg's

 

Legend of Zelda: LttP

I remember on the NES' Adventure of Link, you had a second quest after beating the game, where you started with all your experience, health, strength and magic, while the game's difficulty remained the same. I made a habit of speed-running that thing on a regular basis and could get through it in usually 3 hours, with 2:20 being my best. Or was it 4 hours, with 3:20 being my best? Either way, that was always fun.

Atari: Xevious and Donkey Kong

Gamecube: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Xbox: Madden NFL 2004

Geometry Wars for xbox live. At one point I was in the top 50 of their arcade leaderboard 

 Nintendo:   Leisure Suit Larry and LoLo