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Maplestory Lets go back to 10 years ago. Little Paero is 8 years old and likes runescape, but wants something a bit more 'gamey' than it. I had heard about World of Warcraft and Guild Wars 1, and decided to look up stuff on them. I was going around the internet and I stumbled upon a site called GameOgre which at the time was essentially a directory for every MMO ever (even the really fucking tiny ones). I looked at WoW and saw that you needed a subscription to play. I asked my dad if I could get it, and he told me to fuck off because he wasnt going to pay £10 a month for me to install Viruses on the family PC. Looked at Guild Wars as well, saw you had to pay and didn't even bother asking about it. I looked at other games (including Everquest, Everquest 2 etc etc) and finally found the page for Maplestory. I saw it was free and because I was a fucking badass I signed up and installed it without asking my dad. I started the game up, logged in, and created my first character (called Tokyo359, because I was a weeb) on the Khaini server. I had no fucking clue what I was doing, but I found it fun. I got to attack stuff, see numbers, and level up. I made it off of Maple Island (the beginner Island) on the boat and got to Lith Harbor and hearing this soundtrack. It was fucking crazy, I walked up to the NPC there that told you about Job Advancements (which at that time were only Warrior, Thief and Archer which you advanced to at level 10, or a Wizard that you advanced to at level 8). I thought the NPC looked fucking baller as hell (he was some barbarian looking guy) so I chose to be a Warrior. I went to Perion (the warrior town) and leveled up on the Stump monsters around there until I hit level 10, at which point I went into the Town Leaders room and went to job advance. But before I did I noticed one thing. In every town/class leaders room there was an NPC that was an exact replica of whatever player was the highest level on that class. Now in the Warrior room was a character called Tiger. The earliest screenshot of his character I can find is this one from 2007. That wasn't how he looked when i first saw him, but I was fucking blown away. At the time he was about level 120, which in the old days of Maplestory meant you were a maximum no life (as a rule of thumb leveling from level 1-30 took roughly a month) and was the highest leveled player in the entire game. His name was known by literally everyone who played Maplestory around 2005-2008. But in early 2008 (February from what WayBackMachine is showing) his character, alongside the character of Suuushi (who he was good friends with) disappeared from the leaderboards. To this very day, nobody know what happened. Some people suspect that he got banned for hacking, other people say that Tiger was a group of people account sharing to get the highest leveled character in the game, other people say that a rival guild on his server (Scania) managed to hack his account and delete his character, and some people say he just got bored and deleted it himself. So far nobody has ever gotten the full story of what happened to Tiger, and it's something that myself, and so many other old Maplestory players really want to find out, but I doubt we ever will. (I even got the oppertunity to ask a player called Dray86, who was a big Maplestory Machinima creator, what happened to Tiger, as he made some videos with him, but even he doesn't know) Alright so yeah. I saw Tiger and that fucking hooked me, I was definitely a Warrior. I advanced and just went back to levelling in the hopes I could some day be like him (Or FangBlade, or Paladin, who were other high levelled Warrior players). Some things I remember was a higher leveled player (I think he was around level 45 when I was level 18) buying me a brand new set of armor and weapons because I was so poor. I remember this one time I took a teleport to an area called Mushroom Shrine because it sounded cool, there was only me and one other player there. She was around level 20 and had not 1, but 2 of the 'Snowboard' weapons. Everyone wanted one. She had a level 10 variation (called the Sky Snowboard) and a level 24 one (called a Silver Snowboard). I began talking to her and we leveled together. After a few days she actually gave me both of her snowboards. I dont know what happened, but I dont have the level 10 one anymore, but I still have the level 24 one and keep it on my character just because (even though I dont play him anymore) Here's a photo: Not long after my computer broke, and I pretty much didn't get to play Maplestory again until about 2009. I never made it that far on that character, I got to about level 25 I believe, and never got to level 30 to advance to the Spearman class so I could be like Tiger. A few years later I became friends with a guy at my school called Jamie (still one of my best mates to this day). We had really similar taste in games. We both loved Korean MMOs (because we were kids) and ended up playing Flyff, Tales of Pirates, Gunz: The Duel, and Exteel together. I showed him Maplestory and we played that a fair bit. From then until now I kept going back to it every now and again, on both the American and European servers. Playing loads of different classes but never really sticking around. Around Summer last year I went pretty hard on the European servers and progressed further than I ever had before (this time playing the 'Zero' class). Most recently (as in, right now) I'm back on the American servers, as they've released a server called 'Reboot' where all Monsters hit 4x as hard, have 4x the health, and give 4x the XP. But more importantly they disabled trading, so people botting are only ruining the game for themselves, and the removed all the items from the cash shop that made the game Pay2Win. It's really revitalized the game, and some many people from the old days have come back and are loving it. This is how popular it is. Each server is divided into 20 'Channels' so certain maps dont get crowded. The 2nd most popular server 'Scania' currently has this many people playing: Reboot, has this many: So yeah, its popular. Anyway that's the end of that. I love Maplestory, it's fucking great, its the defining game of my childhood and I still play it to this day. I could talk about it for hours and hours because despite all of its problems (and trust me, around 2010-2014 there were a LOT of fucking problems) I love it more than any game I've ever played, and I'll continue to play it as long as the servers are up, and probably on Private Servers after they close. Here are my favorite pieces of the OST, from the Cygnus Knights storyline which was a story that lasted 2-3 years, and in ways still continues to this day. Edit: I just realised I didn't elaborate on why I like the actual gameplay. So if you don't know, Maplestory is Very grindy. You grind to level up. To get gear. To get money. Its perfect for me because I've always loved that gameplay style. You pick a class, you level, unlock new skills, keep levelling, increase your damage etc etc. All the classes (there's about 35-40 of them) play really crisply, and the vast majority are very balanced, so you play what you like (although some classes can be objectively better if you're one of the very few people who can make it to the damage cap). Its fun. Every class has similarities but they all work slightly differently, and Nexon re-balance, re-book send sometimes completely overhaul classes to bring them up to par.

thank you for helping me self-insert as the little girl. On-topic: Heroes of Might & Magic III Wide variety of factions that all play differently. Fully-fleshed out magic system with different schools of magic being available and each of them catering to a different playstyle. Long and interesting campaign with neat little cutscenes that were pretty decent for their time. Literally hundreds of scenario missions to play with tons of different objectives and game rules that make each one a unique experience. Random seed maps. Very expansive map editor which is also simple to use, making community map-making simple and fun. Online multiplayer that to this day is still active. 100% God-tier OST. All in all Heroes of Might & Magic III is a complete package and provides probably over one thousand hours of gameplay that doesn't really get stale because of the hundreds of unique scenarios (plus the campaign) that manages to switch it up a good amount. Necropolis best castle.

I didn't mind the prologue. It wasn't as good as Fallout 3's, IMO, but directly seeing life before the war for what I believe is the first time was very interesting. It also was fairly short, and served as a solid tutorial.

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I drew Andre from Floraverse with the TF2 Rocket Launcher.