What’s the first video game you ever played? I’m not entirely sure. I recall watching my brothers play games on their Sega Megadrive. They played Street Fighter 2, and Bare Knuckle, and Fifa 95, and some Formula 1 racing games. I also remember Midnight Resistance, a Contra clone with really good music.
With Street Fighter 2, I played all the common characters – Ryu, Ken, Guile, Bison, Dee Jay, Vega, Chun Li, Dhalsim, Blanka, E. Honda. My eldest brother would play sometimes. He particularly liked Fire Shark, the vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up. We don’t talk anymore. He has kids now.
I’m remembering now that there was a sort of tank commander type game that I used to play with my neighbour when he came over.
Used to play GTA and Midtown Madness at a cousin’s house. And some boat racing game. At another cousin’s, once we played some road rash type racing game.
I remember, during the school holidays, I’d go to the arcade at Tampines with my friend Gordon. We’d go early, before it opened. We would meet at the McDonald’s at Tampines Interchange. There was a Star Wars Episode 1 themed racing game by the entrance, which I never played because I had never gotten into star wars as a kid. I did play Crazy Taxi. There was a 3D Bare Knuckle-type game, called Dynamite Cop. I spent many dollars playing that one. I was always impressed by the people who were really good at Time Crisis, or DDR.
DOS – Blackjack. Ski Free. Chip’s challenge. Prince of Persia 2. Tomb Raider 2. It’s funny how there were all these games that I enjoyed despite getting stuck. Fifa 98 and 2000. Final Fight 3. Metal Slug series – Metal Slug 1, 2, X. Friends would come over to my place to play. I’m still pretty good at those.
Counterstrike and Dota were too really popular games that I played with friends in order to socialize, but I never particularly got good at them. I played Half-Life up to some point and got stuck and gave up. I played a demo of Opposing Force, and was always curious to try the actual game. I played Simcity 2000 (not sure how it ended up on my computer) and went on to excitedly ask my mother to buy me Simcity 3000 for my birthday.
Left4Dead led to hours of fun with friends when it came out. We also played some funny “pirate ship” mod of Warcraft 3.
I never got into Halo or Call of Duty. I liked Duke Nukem 3D – it had so much personality. And Quake 2, which had a pretty neat style. I liked the idea of Hexen (Heretic?) but I sucked at it.
- Games
- Prince of Persia. This was one of the first games I ever played. I read up quite a bit about it – Jordan Mechner, his thoughts about story, Karateka, how he drew the character animation by filming everything in real life and then drawing it frame by frame.
- Wolfenstein 3D – I still remember the protagonist’s square face, how it would get beaten up as he lost life, and how he’d grin when he gets the biggest gun. I remember all the Nazi bling bling you can pick up. [1]
- Duke Nukem 3D – This game was so cool – though the later stages seemed hard AF to navigate.
- Bare Knuckle – I played 1 and 3.
- Metal Slug.
- Red Alert – the first RTS game I ever played. I thought the music was really great. I thought the Tesla coils were really cool. My strategy was to defend the base with several Tesla coils, some troops and heavy tanks, just keep advancing up the tech tree and then build 8 Airfields and MIGs – which can then take out just about any building when you send them all together at once. Very fragile, but I always enjoyed the building up part more than the micro-managing combat part.
- Digimon Cards – I collected these when I was between 7 and 10 years old. I was late to the game – I didn’t really bother until I found a rare-ish card on the road somewhere. After that I started buying and trading them with friends (I think). I’d buy them from the mamak shop next to school, where you could buy a packet of 3 cards for $1.50.
- Mortal Kombat 3 – this was the first Mortal Kombat game I played. It was pretty difficult. I was young and afraid of all the fatalities. I remember the final bosses were really cheap and hard to beat. I started doing better after learning some of the combos.
- Terranigma
- Final Fantasy and other playstation fun
- Fighting games- GGX2, Street Fighter 3S- arcades, w/ JS, sticking to 1 character
- Tomb Raider 2
- Zelda
- Zork
- Final Fantasy 6
- Final Fantasy 7
- Dragon Age – I have a funny story about this one, how I played the nicest possible role at first, but then had the game hang on me in a way that I couldn’t get out of, so had to start a new game and then dicked around through the start – only to have it influence the end result.
- Mass Effect 2 – funny story about this one too.
- inFamous
- Uncharted 2
- Starcraft
- Simcity 2k, 3k
- Half Life
- Grand Theft Auto
- Heroes 3
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Feels:
[–]Blackzach9 2445 points
VIDEO GAMES: Best games I’ve ever played are:
- Terranigma- Incredibly epic bildungsroman (journey of a hero) that gets you to grapple with a lot of big questions.
- Final Fantasy VI. Amazing characters. Depressing to contrast this with FF13.
- Final Fantasy VII. The one and only.
- Mass Effect Series.
- Dragon Age: Origins.
- GAMIFICATION: http://gamification.org/wiki/Gaming_can_make_a_better_world
- Habit RPG
- Jane McGonigal
- SCVNGR
- Games People Play
- Finite and Infinite Games
- Game Theory
✱
2024sep2 In my previous (substack) post I soft-launched what feels like a compelling new format for me, which i’ll tentatively call “the trenchcoat essay”, where rather than struggle to write something that’s about 2400+ words exploring a single idea, I sketch out about 5-7 ideas in quick succession. I realize there’s a bunch of precedent for this. A lot of novelists start out writing short stories. I was watching Sesame Street with my son, and it occurred to me that the show is a series of sketches, as opposed to say, something like Breaking Bad which is a much more difficult undertaking, which runs a coherent narrative thread across 5 seasons. I have been straining and contorting myself for two years trying to write my Breaking Bad, and I have to concede that I’m probably not ready to do it, and I should instead be writing my Sesame Street. I don’t regret the struggle; I have lots of notes and sketches that will surely come in useful to me as I go. But here we are.
For today’s trenchcoat essay, I’m going to talk about video games. A challenge I’ve had with my substack in general is figuring out how much to explain things. If I were writing this post on a video game forum, there’s a lot that I wouldn’t bother explaining, since I’d simply trust that the readers would already have the context they need. It’s harder with my substack1 because I know some of my favorite readers are non-gamers, and I want to invite them into my “gaming world”. At the same time, I trust that my readers are smart, and that if they really want to understand something, they can just look it up.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write “a video game memoir”. I’ve had many different iterations of this project over the years. I’ve gotten precious about it, wanting to write some really profound collection of memoirs that are somehow not just about the video games I’ve played, but about Life, The Universe, and Everything. (This is a recurring motif in many of my writing projects.) Eventually, the frustration of not having published anything begins to outweigh my frustration with the work’s insufficiency, and I get driven to do something like this: I’ll just list out maybe about 7 games and freestyle my thoughts about them. I’m always tempted to start at the beginning, so this time I’ll try working backwards.
— 1. The Witcher 3 (2015) —
The Witcher 3 is a popular and beloved game that’s based on a collection of stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, an economist-by-training who has been described as “the Polish Tolkien”. There’s since also been a Netflix series starring Henry Cavill as The Witcher, which has reached a large mainstream audience but isn’t quite as critically-acclaimed as the game. I watched it myself and found it kinda goofy and enjoyable, but I wouldn’t particularly recommend it unless maybe you were really into Game of Thrones and were curious to spend more time in a somewhat-similar universe. (There was actually a Polish TV series too in 2002, before the first game in 2007, but nobody outside of Poland or maybe hardcore Witcher fans really know or care about it.) You don’t need to play the earlier games or read the books to have a good time with The Witcher 3. I think I bring up TW3 particularly because I’ve found it’s story-world so compelling.
RDR2?
I’m tempted to write about Red Dead Redemption 2, another excellent game “like” The Witcher 3 in that you play a protagonist in third person, riding your horse around, helping people and fighting bad guys.
— 3. Hades (2020) —
I had seen some buzz around Hades and I finally got into it when it was recommended by patio11, a twitter friend that I respect and admire.
— 4. Borderlands 2 —
I can’t precisely remember why I got into Borderlands 2, but I remember it being the first game that I played multiplayer co-op with