How did you discover BZ2?

[MrsGSH]

I am admittedly not a gamer and I only heard about BZ2 because it came up when I started dating GSH. I think that of the times I've mentioned that GSH still works on it to my friends, only 1 has been familiar with the game, actually BZ1.

So out of curiosity, I was wondering how y'all came across and decided to start playing BZ2?

[MrTwosheds]

Had played bz1, bought bz2 the day it appeared on the shop shelves. It actually took me quite a long time to fully realise what an outstanding piece of computer gaming "art" it really is.

[Ded10c]

Was introduced to it at... thirteen, I think, by a friend at school in 2004. He lent me his disk, but it wouldn't work. I found it second-hand (in a record shop, of all places) about six months later. Found BZ1 in a charity shop a few years later.

[GreenGuy]

Childhood game .

[Iron Maiden]

Childhood game .

Same.

[VSMIT]

Played BZ1, didn't know of the existence of BZ2 until probably 2002 or something like that. Didn't actually start playing it until 2004/2005.

[Axeminister]

I bought Battlezone II the week it came out. The name Battlezone was from a childhood game I used to play in the arcades back in 1980. So I bought Battlezone II to check it out. I played the single player missions for years before I finally got a good enough internet connection to play it online. Someone mentioned a mappack called G66 and the rest is history.
I played Battlezone II for about a year before I went ahead and picked up Battlezone 1. Battlezone II is the best game ever. The scrap management alone was a concept I never had before in a video game. As a contractor I'm always trying to find ways to save money and benefit from scrap. Playing the G66 mappacks/mods has been fun, managing the onslaughts of enemies with the decision making of spending the scrap on the right stuff to overcome.

[General BlackDragon]

I got BZ1 from a friend when we temporarily "traded" games to try them out, I got BZ1 and tomb Raider 3.

I fell in love with BZ1, and let him keep whichever game I gave him, i dont remmeber now. I used to always play through it in single player, long before I had internet when I was 12 or so.

After I was 14, in 2003, I was with my mom in an old book store, and on a top shelf, I saw BZ2 and got immediately excited.

[Nielk1]

I had BZ1 from my father's thrustmaster joystick. Game wasn't his speed. I got BZ2 after finding it in what was similar to an indoor flee market. The market wasn't kind to BZ2 so while still in its dawn of existence it was already making the rounds in bargain type situations. Had to get a new PC to be able to play it.

I had only ever played BZ1 in SP, and for the longest time I did the same with BZ2. My first community action was emailing Avatar to help him make a silo via an extractor ODF for BZC. Yes, Avatar was working on BZC way way way back then.

[bigbadbogie]

At the start of 2004 I had just recieved a brand new laptop for school.
The first thing I did was head down the street to see if I could get any games to play on it.

By a complete act of randomness I was browsing through the K-Mart games isle and stumbled across BZ1.
I did not expect much at the time but the picture of the player using a sniper rifle on the back of the case enticed me to spend the entire $5 and buy it due to my affinity for FPS games.

To say that moment changed my life forever is a massive understatement.

I found BZ2 after a great deal of searching in the cheapo bin at an Ebgames shop on the Gold Coast while I was on holiday later that year.

After obsessively playing the SP campaigns of both games for years, I came across some old BZ2 mods and gave them a shot. The rest is history.

7 years later I am still completely obsessed with both games. I will be forever.

[Feared_1]

My friend's dad downloaded it from some site back when I was like 10 or something. When his computer died a year later, I didn't know what the game was called and spent like 6 months looking for this "unknown game." I finally found Planet Battlezone and bought the game from Amazon.

It's thanks to this game that I'm pretty smart with computers and such (because of the people I met), and I'm pretty sure it inspired one of those people to be a visual effects animator or something.

It's become more than a game for some people, but not in a creepy way. It's inspired people's futures, which is pretty cool.

[Ded10c]

I owe a hell of a lot to this game too. Had I not played it's IA and SP for years, and had I not found and downloaded FE, I would not have started modding (I started writing what eventually became PF immediately after I finished FE). Back then, I knew far, far less about computers than the average user.

[MrsGSH]

It's thanks to this game that I'm pretty smart with computers and such (because of the people I met), and I'm pretty sure it inspired one of those people to be a visual effects animator or something.

It's become more than a game for some people, but not in a creepy way. It's inspired people's futures, which is pretty cool.

Yes, this is my observation too and I thought about starting a separate thread on it -- how did people get into patching and modding? That seems like a big jump. Back when I last played simple PC games in the mid-90s I could dig in and give myself infinite ammo or edit the text that showed up when I died, but what many of you do here is a whole different ball of wax.

How do you go from installing and playing a game out of the box to finding unofficial patches and modding and all that?

[Axeminister]

You have to search the net for forums like this one. I was lucky to find a patch for Forsaken, because it was such an old game. But because I searched it wasn't hard to find. Finding a patch for Outwars was harder but was eventually found. I became a tester after people noticed I was online everyday practically, fighting the forces of evil.

[Dianoga]

I remember seeing it reviewed on Electric Playground on TV around the time it came out. It looked really cool. I think I found a demo of it on one of those CDs you get with magazines and thought it was really fun. I ended up finding it at a store called Futureshop for $5 in the bargain bin years ago and I still have that CD today.