What was your first foray into the community?

Started by Shaboba, November 21, 2017, 08:14:16 PM

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Shaboba

If you'll all indulge me, I'm in a memory-lane sort of mood... and I was just curious to ask everyone, when you were first getting into :ff: and/or :ffvstr: , what do you remember being the very first site(s) you went to for skins/meshes/etc... custom content of any kind? For some of you it may have been a while, for others it may have been fairly recent. Anyway, I feel like since the community has been here a while it may be interesting to see how everyone's experiences differ :D

I remember for me personally, the first sites I really got into were the Skindex, and I think Gryphon's site; I visited FXForce a lot too. Electric Freedom, Tortuga's site, and NPI were all favorites of mine as well. I think all of them are gone now, but it's nice to have those memories of the olden days :P

Cyber Burn

I think that for me, the Sites I visited most were:

Alex's Freedom Fortress
Gryphon's Site
NPI

And of course,

Freedom Reborn


Deaths Jester

#2
Well, I guess we got to go back to the olden days for me and the ORIGINAL Freedom Force Center that was set up right after Freedom Force first came out.  Back then it was just seeing what you could do with the meshes and skins - everything was new back then and the skinners and meshers were just seeing what was possible.  Was an early member of that collection...so yeah, old school...and yes...you youngsters talking about the OLDEN days with EF, NPI, and such...FFC pre-dated them.... :P
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

Podmark

Why must you make me feel old...
First sites were Skindex and the original Freedome Force Center, and the old My Freedom Force forum. I'm not sure if Electric Freedom had even launched when I started.
Get my skins at:
HeroForce
my Google page

detourne_me

I was just a lurker around that time, just downloading skins from all over, KennX's old site, Gryphon's,  I remember Grenadier used to have his own site, too.  Then when FFUnderground launched, that was a great one!

daglob

My situation was peculiar. I don't remember if it was a Champions discussion group or what where I learned about the game, but I downloaded the demo and had a ball. So I ordered the game. When it came in, it wouldn't run. However, between the time I ordered the game and it came in, I went exploring. The first place I remember finding was Madd Rabbit's links page. I was on dial up and had a 50 mb limit to what I could download a month (remember that the dial up and the modem downloaded reeeeeeaaaaaaaalllll ssslllloooowww). So, I could download stuff I really, really, really wanted. Alex's place, Gryphon, Zedd's site, FXForce, Freedom Flat, Starlock, Gni, Emerald Dawn, Firestorm, Glitch Girl...  I went through the Yahoo groups...

Then I didn't come back until 2007, and a patch to Windows let me finally play the game.

Deaths Jester

I know what you mean Pod, this made me feel so bloody ancient...and I had forgotten the old forum! And you are right, EF hadn't launched yet. If memory serves me right, the idea for EF grew from the My Freedom Force forums.

What is really amazing me is how many folks mention sites I was a part of as their first/fav ones: FFU, EF, NPI, FFC...just to mention the few I've seen. Damn...I was everywhere yet was always a bit of the outsider in the community back then. Weird...and I still feel like the ancient bag of bones from the age of dinos.
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

Reepicheep

#7
I have no idea what it was called, but there was a family of sites that hosted models and skins for games like The Sims, maybe NWN... Freedom Force was among them. Y'know, the moddable games of the late 90's to 00's. I remember the Sims one was called Sims Resource, but I can't remember what the Freedom Force one was named.

There was a skin on that website called Lunar Dragon. It was an original character that used the Male_Cape model... I have no idea what became of it, because I never saw it since. But it was the skin I used for my first custom FF character. I can only vaguely remember what it looked like. Maybe it was green.

I think I went to the My Freedom Force forums a bit late and it broke within a week of me arriving. And I was at that age where the world centred around me, so I thought it was my fault somehow. I've been holding that in for about fifteen years now. Wow, it's good to get that off my chest.

Edit: Also, I totally lied about my age when I registered. I'm in a confessing kinda mood.

daglob

Quote from: Reepicheep on November 22, 2017, 08:29:57 PM
I have no idea what it was called, but there was a family of sites that hosted models and skins for games like The Sims, maybe NWN... Freedom Force was among them. Y'know, the moddable games of the late 90's to 00's. I remember the Sims one was called Sims Resource, but I can't remember what the Freedom Force one was named.

There was a skin on that website called Lunar Dragon. It was an original character that used the Male_Cape model... I have no idea what became of it, because I never saw it since. But it was the skin I used for my first custom FF character. I can only vaguely remember what it looked like. Maybe it was green.

I think I went to the My Freedom Force forums a bit late and it broke within a week of me arriving. And I was at that age where the world centred around me, so I thought it was my fault somehow. I've been holding that in for about fifteen years now. Wow, it's good to get that off my chest.

Comic Skin Network, maybe?  http://web.archive.org/web/20060830043927/http://www.comicskins.com:80/skindex/ff/DC/dc_ff_skins_c.htm   

From this archive you can access Freedom Force Skins. Unreal Torment, and Sims skins. I don't see a place of original characters, though...

Reepicheep

#9
Nah, I remember it being a lot more pro designed than that, and it wasn't exclusively for comic book characters.

It's entirely possible my memory is crossing a lot of wires, though. Those neurons are pretty dusty at this point.

I could totally be thinking of FFCenter.

Deaths Jester

I think you are thinking about FFC, Reep.  If memory serves me right, we did have some SIMs and other game skins on a few different places..

Though you could be thinking of Skindex too..they added some SIMS skins later on to their stuff...
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

Reepicheep

I remember the Skindex pretty clearly. I think it was FFC I'm thinking of. I spent a long time exploring that site, mostly spent waiting for the pages to load.

Deaths Jester

Yep, that's FFC then.  There were always a pic for each skin and there were usually nine per page so it took forever for the page to load back then.  What's funny though is there were sometimes just two or three pages of skins done by one skinner because they were all uploaded at the same time...I know there were a few sections of pages like that on FFC that I did that too.
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

daglob

Yeah, I found he archive of that, too. Lots of DJ's stuff. No sign of Lunar Dragon, but not all pages are there, and I've never been able to download anything from it.

Deaths Jester

It's probably one of the earlier skins and there's a high possibility it never got archived. I know of at least half a dozen or more of my very first skins on FFC whose pages were def not archive (AOA Unus and AOA Infinites I know aren't on the wayback plus others).
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

Cyber Burn

Quote from: Deaths Jester on November 23, 2017, 06:03:46 AM
It's probably one of the earlier skins and there's a high possibility it never got archived. I know of at least half a dozen or more of my very first skins on FFC whose pages were def not archive (AOA Unus and AOA Infinites I know aren't on the wayback plus others).

But I'm pretty sure that I still have them.   :D

deanjo2000

I think my first sites were the skindex and alex's Site. It was around 13 years ago now but blew my mind when I found this game :thumbup: it was in a gaming mag, not sure which though.
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/da3a3y1ac4uqp/FreedoForce

"sorry she couldn`t wait" superman to wonderman jla/avengers.

Deaths Jester

PC Gamer hyped FF a lot back then cause one of their writers was a huge comic fan who LOVED FF. He often mentioned the custom content and mods the community was doing at the time.
Avatar picture originally a Brom painting entitled Marionette.

John Jr.

I discovered the game searching for reference for some Legionnnaires customs I was working for another game. I was impressed with the diversity of characters and how it already had all of my favorites. I started to get skins and meshes on Alex's Freedom Fortress and Tommyboy's site.

crimsonquill

#19
Let's see.. *puts on thinking cap*..

I first became aware of  :ff: when an article popped up in PC Gamer and loved the old school look of the game. I was an addict of X-Com: UFO Defense at the time.. so seeing a game environment that gave superheroes some love beyond being tied to some major movie/TV/comic promotion was very intriguing to me. As soon as I saw the game itself appear in stores it was in my cart and playing on my PC late into the night.

Now I stumbled upon Freedom Force's own FF Center by pure accident looking for game clues and that opened the door into Modding very quickly. It wasn't very hard to imagine that this game could become a huge sandbox for other comic book worlds once you got pass the initial game storyline and started to look for replay expansion.

Then along came  :ffvstr: which was preordered way in advance thanks to PC Gaming once again and discovering how handy Amazon could be. :)  I plowed through the initial game in just a weekend and already was looking forward to the Modding tools. Of course this is when I first found Freedom Reborn and the community which I remain a proud member of to this very day.

- CQ
"He said let there be light... CLICK! It was a lightbulb. And It was good."