My favorite five video games
I was watching the Day9 Daily, and he talked about his five favorite video games, and it was a question that made me, as a person who writes games for a living, think a lot. So here's my top five, with reasons. Feel free to comment with your own top five, with or without reasons, and/or repost. I'm curious to see what gets people's attention in gaming.
Also, this was a REALLY REALLY hard list for me to draw up because I like so many different kinds of games. Especially the ranking part. There's a lot of apples-to-oranges action.
1. Tetris. I had this for the mac. My brother and I would compete for high scores, one-upping each other each day. Eventually he had one really good run, which I wasn't able to top, and we stopped being rivalrous about it, but we kept playing. I would go to bed at night, and in my mind's eye, combine tetris pieces in various different ways. I played this game when I was 10. 2 decades later, I can still remember every single combo I figured out. And there were dozen of them.
2. Final Fantasy 2. This was the first console game I ever saw, and it made a huge impression on me, on my DMing and writing style, and on my approach to game creation. There was some ineffable quality to it that puts it a level above all other roleplaying games for me, including ones with meaningful choices like dragon age, or with prettier graphics like FF12. I made my own version in hypercard as one of my first real programming projects. The pawn of evil to redemption storyline is something I'd love to run in a tabletop some day. I have played this game all the way through 3 times. At 70 hours a pop. This is the only RPG that I have ever replayed (though I am strongly tempted to replay FF3 and/or chrono trigger, which are both almost as good).
3. Starcraft 2. All RTS's are basically the same, and I like the genre a lot, so I just picked the best one. It has a really powerful editor, good story, ridiculously high production values, and well-polished gameplay. I await the continuation of the story with baited breath that is only partially tied to the fact that I ran a tabletop in the starcraft universe and want to know what happens next.
4. Dark Castle. Ah, Dark Castle. My brother and I would play this game together-- he would do keyboard and I'd do mouse. We were pretty good. And then, when mom chased us off the computer so we wouldn't turn into couch potatoes? We went outside and pretended to play Dark Castle. I generally was the monsters. I think this led directly to my love of NPCing boffer LARPs. I drew hundreds of pages of levels, and this was the game that convinced me I that I wanted to write video games for a living. The only reason it's not higher is that it's freakin' hard. To this day I have not beaten the game on even normal difficulty. This was a mac game, but it was, as they say, Nintendo Hard. If I get a vacation where I can stay at home playing video games, I may well spend it mastering Dark Castle. If I can. Did I mention it was hard?
5. Warlords. My first turn-based strategy. This narrowly, narrowly edged out Heroes of Might and Magic 2 by virtue of: Requiring more complex strategy, having more sophisticated AI (it took me literally years to master it, despite the fact that the AI DOES NOT CHEAT. Did I mention I like difficult games?), and being published first. How much did I like Warlords? I learned how to hack resource fork hex data resources with resedit in order to modify this game, as the 1.0 version didn't have an editor. Yeah.
Honorable Mentions:
Diablo 2 Nezeramontias. Diablo 2 set the standard for action RPGs, but it wasn't very well balanced. Nezeramontias is a modification that balances it, and makes it a lot of fun. And really addictive.
Dark Forces (Marathon 2). I love games with editors, and I played a lot with the Dark Forces and Marathon editors. The games were about equivalently good to one another-- Dark Forces had better gameplay, while Marathon had a stabler editor (mac native and all that). FPS is a fun genre, but they're all the same, so I picked the ones I edited rather than some of the newer, spiffier looking ones. I drew lots of maps for these guys too. I used to go around the high school imagining the rooms as Dark Forces levels.
Arkanoid (Funkiball). Arkanoid's an arcade brick buster, also very hard (not as hard as Dark Castle) that I really liked, but I always felt it could be so much more. Then Funkitron hired me and I got to write my own brick buster. We had to ship after 9 months, and we didn't make a profit, and so Funkiball's not the smash hit that I wanted it to be. It could've been a lot more if we'd had the time, but it was still light-years better than all the rest. Google it and try it out! Writing the game myself is kind of like having an editor, right?
Ancient Art of War At Sea. This game ignited my love of the age of sail, which hasn't diminished since. I still play it on emulation.
Braid. This is not a game. It is a work of art that you can play. As such, it's not quite as approachable or as fun-dense as many games, but when I play this game, I go: "This is good." Like, immediately I can tell that it is leagues better than anything else in terms of workmanship. Unfortunately, because it's puzzle-based, you can only play it once. I recommend you do so, and savor it.
Adventure Construction Set. An old commodore 64 game with good music and my very first editor. From then on, all games had to have editors for me. The game itself wasn't very good, but the editor was awesome. My brother really liked this too. He wrote a copy of it for the mac for fun.
Lemmings. Addictive, addictive music, that I still listen to at work. The game was fun too.
Other Games I Liked a Lot But Not Enough To Make The List:
Simcity, SimAnt
Dragon Age
Pinball Construction Set
Zuma
Geometry Wars
Crystal Quest
Puzzle Quest
Deimos Rising
Castlevania Portrait of Ruin
Guild Wars (PvP only. The PvE campaigns were pretty lame.)
Also, this was a REALLY REALLY hard list for me to draw up because I like so many different kinds of games. Especially the ranking part. There's a lot of apples-to-oranges action.
1. Tetris. I had this for the mac. My brother and I would compete for high scores, one-upping each other each day. Eventually he had one really good run, which I wasn't able to top, and we stopped being rivalrous about it, but we kept playing. I would go to bed at night, and in my mind's eye, combine tetris pieces in various different ways. I played this game when I was 10. 2 decades later, I can still remember every single combo I figured out. And there were dozen of them.
2. Final Fantasy 2. This was the first console game I ever saw, and it made a huge impression on me, on my DMing and writing style, and on my approach to game creation. There was some ineffable quality to it that puts it a level above all other roleplaying games for me, including ones with meaningful choices like dragon age, or with prettier graphics like FF12. I made my own version in hypercard as one of my first real programming projects. The pawn of evil to redemption storyline is something I'd love to run in a tabletop some day. I have played this game all the way through 3 times. At 70 hours a pop. This is the only RPG that I have ever replayed (though I am strongly tempted to replay FF3 and/or chrono trigger, which are both almost as good).
3. Starcraft 2. All RTS's are basically the same, and I like the genre a lot, so I just picked the best one. It has a really powerful editor, good story, ridiculously high production values, and well-polished gameplay. I await the continuation of the story with baited breath that is only partially tied to the fact that I ran a tabletop in the starcraft universe and want to know what happens next.
4. Dark Castle. Ah, Dark Castle. My brother and I would play this game together-- he would do keyboard and I'd do mouse. We were pretty good. And then, when mom chased us off the computer so we wouldn't turn into couch potatoes? We went outside and pretended to play Dark Castle. I generally was the monsters. I think this led directly to my love of NPCing boffer LARPs. I drew hundreds of pages of levels, and this was the game that convinced me I that I wanted to write video games for a living. The only reason it's not higher is that it's freakin' hard. To this day I have not beaten the game on even normal difficulty. This was a mac game, but it was, as they say, Nintendo Hard. If I get a vacation where I can stay at home playing video games, I may well spend it mastering Dark Castle. If I can. Did I mention it was hard?
5. Warlords. My first turn-based strategy. This narrowly, narrowly edged out Heroes of Might and Magic 2 by virtue of: Requiring more complex strategy, having more sophisticated AI (it took me literally years to master it, despite the fact that the AI DOES NOT CHEAT. Did I mention I like difficult games?), and being published first. How much did I like Warlords? I learned how to hack resource fork hex data resources with resedit in order to modify this game, as the 1.0 version didn't have an editor. Yeah.
Honorable Mentions:
Diablo 2 Nezeramontias. Diablo 2 set the standard for action RPGs, but it wasn't very well balanced. Nezeramontias is a modification that balances it, and makes it a lot of fun. And really addictive.
Dark Forces (Marathon 2). I love games with editors, and I played a lot with the Dark Forces and Marathon editors. The games were about equivalently good to one another-- Dark Forces had better gameplay, while Marathon had a stabler editor (mac native and all that). FPS is a fun genre, but they're all the same, so I picked the ones I edited rather than some of the newer, spiffier looking ones. I drew lots of maps for these guys too. I used to go around the high school imagining the rooms as Dark Forces levels.
Arkanoid (Funkiball). Arkanoid's an arcade brick buster, also very hard (not as hard as Dark Castle) that I really liked, but I always felt it could be so much more. Then Funkitron hired me and I got to write my own brick buster. We had to ship after 9 months, and we didn't make a profit, and so Funkiball's not the smash hit that I wanted it to be. It could've been a lot more if we'd had the time, but it was still light-years better than all the rest. Google it and try it out! Writing the game myself is kind of like having an editor, right?
Ancient Art of War At Sea. This game ignited my love of the age of sail, which hasn't diminished since. I still play it on emulation.
Braid. This is not a game. It is a work of art that you can play. As such, it's not quite as approachable or as fun-dense as many games, but when I play this game, I go: "This is good." Like, immediately I can tell that it is leagues better than anything else in terms of workmanship. Unfortunately, because it's puzzle-based, you can only play it once. I recommend you do so, and savor it.
Adventure Construction Set. An old commodore 64 game with good music and my very first editor. From then on, all games had to have editors for me. The game itself wasn't very good, but the editor was awesome. My brother really liked this too. He wrote a copy of it for the mac for fun.
Lemmings. Addictive, addictive music, that I still listen to at work. The game was fun too.
Other Games I Liked a Lot But Not Enough To Make The List:
Simcity, SimAnt
Dragon Age
Pinball Construction Set
Zuma
Geometry Wars
Crystal Quest
Puzzle Quest
Deimos Rising
Castlevania Portrait of Ruin
Guild Wars (PvP only. The PvE campaigns were pretty lame.)