The Gaming Experiences of a Gen-Z Kid

Hello, whoever’s reading. I’m the Wayward Pooch, son of Fantasy Football Writer and High-Stakes FFPC Player Lance Turbes Senior. That makes me Junior.

I’ve been playing video games since I first figured out how to hold a Nintendo 64 controller at around age 2. Of course, I didn’t really know how to control anything at the time; my parents let me use the controller more to build self-confidence than truly “play,” as all I would really end up doing consisted of walking off cliffs or face-first into walls. However, when I first set eyes on titles like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, my mind soared, and new ideas bloomed and made themselves home. The sounds of Nintendo are truly a marvel, even today, and somehow, they still keep finding new ones that’ll probably be classics in 10 years’ time, just the same. I’ll never forget the dramatic mystery and chest-shimmering that accompanied Link’s discovery of the Kokiri Sword, or the opening notes of the Bob-Omb Battlefield theme, which play shortly after jumping through its respective painting in Peach’s castle.

When I snuck a few peeks at the Lord of the Rings movies of the early 2000’s, I was eventually allowed to see them through. Though too little to retain any meaning in the words the actors spoke, the world itself was more than enough to intrigue me, and Gollum/Smeagol both scared me and made me want to see more. Peter Jackson’s masterful rendition of Tolkien’s Middle Earth holds up strong, even today, as one of the best trilogies in cinema, ever, and the originals in my eyes are still better than the CGI-heavy Hobbit trilogy that came years after (even though those were still good movies in their own right). My parents bought the main three Lord of the Rings games for the PlayStation 2, and even though they’re not nearly as technically advanced as the titles that come out today, I still had great fun with all of them, and they kept the world of Middle Earth alive to me for many years after.

The PlayStation 2 era was weird, looking back on it, but in some ways, it was a better time for games. In the early 2000’s, the industry was already getting into the big-budget (multimillion-dollar) territory, but because there weren’t a million examples of what a AAA (blockbuster) game was supposed to be, I felt like developers, then, were willing to take more chances to get public reception. I mean, Kingdom Hearts, for example, had a truly bizarre idea behind it, if you really think about it. Disney characters, crossing between universes, united to fight shadow creatures seeking hearts? And somehow, this “Sora” kid fits in somewhere. I mean, if it hadn’t been done then, I don’t know if today’s publishers would be willing to bank on it working now. They sure did a great job on the execution, though, despite development tools not being nearly as easy to use as they are, today.

Smash Bros. 64 was a regular choice of ours in the early days

My brother and I are really close in age, so it was common that we’d be hanging out together. Back then, there were tons of split-screen and local co-op titles to choose from (where did split-screen go?), and even primarily single-player games tended to include a small multi-player mode to spend time in. We didn’t have many racing games to choose from, but between Mario Kart 64, Gran Turismo 4, and MX vs ATV: Unleashed, plenty of races were had. Super Smash Bros was also a household favorite, and we played the heck out of that one, but never managed to unlock a single bonus character aside from Jigglypuff. Being a couple years older, I would win more than he would in most games, but in losing, he was an extremely fast learner (faster than me, certainly), and eventually, it wasn’t long before the scales tipped in his favor across the board.

The best wild west game to ever grace the PlayStation 2: Red Dead Revolver. It’s a revenge tale of a boy whose father was murdered by a corrupt US Army General. Red, pictured above, takes up his father’s scorching-hot scorpion revolver from the flames of his still burning home, and shoots off the Generals arm with one clean blow, permanently scarring his own hand for life in the process, and setting in motion his journey to kill the man who gave the order to torch his home. Classic.

Red Dead Revolver was a big game for me. I loved the entirety of the spaghetti-western atmosphere Rockstar delivered. Everything from the music, to the character models, to the dialogue and story writing was top shelf for the era, even if it was corny at times. I was too little to care about the nitty-gritty then; I was there to appreciate the ride and immerse myself in a different time period. It took me a long time, but Red Dead Revolver was one of the first games I actually completed. When I was browsing through Metacritic in an attempt to gather up some noteworthy entries I remembered from the period, I was surprised this one scored so low (71). I mean, it’s not the worst score, but if a game gets remastered for consoles two generations later because there’s legit demand for said remaster a decade later, then it was probably deserving of something outside the yellow “so-so” zone. It was a good game; most people I know that have played it remember it in a glowingly positive light.

Champions of Norrath’s first location pitted you with the task of besting goblin raiders, while catapults launched balls of fire, raining from above. This is one of few titles that to this day cannot be emulated correctly on PC. Because of this, there is basically no way to play it now, unless you still own a fully-functional PS2 and can find a used copy of the game, or you don’t mind slogging through it with massive frame-drops everywhere on PCSX2.

RPG’s were a beast that I didn’t come around to until Champions of Norrath: Realms of Everquest, a hack-and-slash top-down experience with some of the best fantasy music in the genre. It’s a shame Snowblind Studios went under, and the IP is currently split between so many parties that I’ll never see another Champions game grace my collection in the future. It sucks that this subset of RPG as a whole quietly disappeared across the board, really; the only titles that were similar as far as I could see were the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance entries before it, the X-Men: Legends games that came a few years after, along with Marvel Ultimate Alliance in the PS3’s launch year. And you can’t even buy Ultimate Alliance on PC anymore because it was pulled from Steam not too long ago. Times change fast.

At the beginning of God of War (PS2), a serpent tries to take down you and your ship; I could never get past this beast, and ultimately dropped the game as a kid. Later in life, I did manage to get back to it for one last run that I saw to its end. The second God of War game, I thought, had a better story with a longer lasting impression on me, and the Blades of Athena’s combo-list was way more fun than both the Blades of Chaos (GoW 1) and the Blades of Exile (GoW 3).

At our house, we had God of War in our collection, but that, along with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas / Vice City, were off limits due to the mature content they contained that was no-doubt too much for a 5-year-old to lay eyes on. That didn’t stop me from sneaking in a few sessions of God of War when the off-limits tag started to gather some dust a year down the line, though I never even came close to completing its opening chapter, as I wasn’t smart enough yet. It’s also straight-up hard, even compared to many newer titles now.

Whenever I find a Dig-Dug cabinet in real life, I take it over for a while and try to set the high score. This game had a few cool tricks you could pull off if you tunneled efficiently and set up traps for your enemies. There were also small glitches, like frame-canceling your attack animation, that allowed you to beat your enemies head-on as quickly as possible. After a certain number of points were scored, you would gain extra lives so the fun could keep on going.

My dad made sure to supply the classics, too; Namco Museum introduced me to Dig-Dug, my favorite arcade game next to the original Gauntlet, which I found amongst the other titles that Midway Arcade Treasures had to offer. My brother and I had plenty of friendly competitions in many of the cabinets contained within those two, along with the sequel Midway Arcade Treasures 2 and the Capcom Classics Collection. I enjoyed losing in Ghosts and Goblins, never able to beat the first level, and loved the destructive action that Rampage supplied. The animations in Rampage were full of character, from the covering of King-Kong’s eyes when he knows he’s going to fall, to the side-step shimmy off screen when you lose.

Shadow of the Colossus’s PS4 remake was very faithful to the PS2 original’s sense of scale and overall atmosphere. Thank you Bluepoint games for letting me re-experience what I felt as my little first-grader self.

Speaking of giant beasts, Shadow of the Colossus on PS2 was another game I remember vividly. We played it after it had already received a “greatest-hits” commendation, and deservedly so; the atmosphere of the Forbidden Lands captured the solace and eerie nature you’d get from reading stories of crossing sacred burial grounds, and for its time, the graphics and physics were really something to behold. It was one of the first games I’ve tried that captured story via lore and world-building over clear-cut narrative. It’s no wonder Team Ico have been commended for pushing games as an art form since its debut; they really their nailed camera work and scene scaling.

Mace: The Dark Age was our favorite fighting game of the time. The level of fidelity was slightly better than Mortal Kombat 4, which, for the first time since its retail debut in 1998, is finally available again on PC. Thanks, GOG.

Just because we had a PS2, though, didn’t mean my brother and I stopped playing the N64. Mace: The Dark Age was our fighting game of choice for many years; people look back on it like it sucked, but I still think it’s much better than some of the stuff that gets spewed out of the indie scene these days. Every character in Mace was fun to use, even though the balance in that game was a wreck by today’s standards. We could never get past the second to last fight in the arcade mode, even with the unlimited retries that we had. When our dad made it a point to reach Asmodius, the final boss, we were in awe just laying eyes on him. He didn’t win, but it was still a thing to witness; there was no YouTube back then, so secret levels and finishing moves were always exciting. The internet has taken much of that magic away, but it was bound to happen eventually. At least with the power of the internet, I discovered recently that Mace was actually developed in part by Midway, the developer of Mortal Kombat, which has morphed into NetherRealm Studios in recent years and continues to develop Mortal Kombat entries almost every other year.

The original DS was a great handheld system

The Nintendo 64 was also not our only console from Nintendo by then, either. For my 5th birthday, my dad took me to Best Buy as a surprise when it was getting late. I remember walking out with an original thick, blue DS, New Super Mario Bros (DS), and Lego Star Wars (GBA). I wanted to play it when we got home, but it was time for bed, so my mom showed me how to charge it up, which was my first time being allowed to use in-wall power outlets. I remember the little orange LED, peeking out the bottom right corner of the folded screens, indicating the charge was going well. When I woke up the next morning, I was both confused and delighted when I realized that my parents swapped out the New Super Mario Bros cartridge with one for Super Mario 64: DS, yet another early game for the collection. I would still play the legacy copy half the time on the original console, and actually beat it there first, with the help of my mom, a few years later.

Ocarina of Time’s opening shot featured adult Link riding into the sunrise, to one of the most classic scores in all gaming history. This game is the reason the vast majority of ocarina (the instrument) players in real life decided to learn the instrument in the first place.

Ocarina of Time was another beast, one I would not complete until well over a decade later when it released on the 3DS. We never owned Majora’s Mask, but that’s cool, because to me it’s another great game to look forward to, rather than a missed opportunity. You’d be surprised how many old games still hold up against some of the uninspired cash-grabs of today, even with their generally dated graphics and awkward control schemes.

Before we each had a system to ourselves, we would share the blue DS with each other to play minigames and the like in our own time. When my brother eventually got the newer white Nintendo DS Lite a year later, for his 4th birthday, we used DS “Download-Play,” a common feature of DS games in that era, to compete against each other in local multiplayer using only a single copy of any given game. We never got bored of our plentiful options, and were very lucky to even have that many choices.

Later on, I vaguely remember enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, but my memory of the time is hazy at best. I can only recall it taking a very long time to complete, and that I solved most puzzles through accidental trial and error, as I could not read very well, yet.

I remember all of the above with fondness, but there was one game that was really the holy grail of my childhood, the one game to rule them all…

That game was Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.

The first chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty involved making your way to the bottom levels of an under-cover US military tanker ship, which was in the process of being raided by a Russian private military company. Great level design that I will probably enjoy, again, sometime.

That game, I’ll tell you, opened up so many avenues in my mind as to what was possible in all aspects of life. It’s a masterpiece. I thought I was just looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but I ran through it again last year, and it’s just as good today as it was, then. The graphics didn’t really age too poorly, either, surprisingly enough. I thought it would look really bad after, what, 19 years?! I think it’s held up pretty well in the visuals department, mostly thanks to their use of simplified polygons, high-quality mesh work, and smart use of textures. The sound effects are still classic, the voice acting is just as good as I remember, and the story is still a roller-coaster not many understand or have bothered to make sense of.

Snake (Left) and Raiden (Right) were the two main protagonists of the story. Snake is Metal Gear’s man, and yet Kojima swapped who you were playing as at a very early point in the game, following Snake’s tanker mission gone-haywire. It was a controversial moment for many fans.

Kojima was seriously ahead of his time, and I mean that sincerely. From the innovative gameplay, to the dramatic high-budget cutscenes, to the sneaky and controversial protagonist swap after the first chapter… the whole experience knew what it wanted to be, and executed without second-guessing itself. Going through it for the, well, I’m guessing 20th time, I still noticed more and more small details that made me go, “Damn, this was released in 2001?” I feel like it took at least 3 or 4 years for competing teams of developers to get to that level of simulation, and nobody but the best in the recent history of games has come up with a story to rival it. Many people say it’s overrated, its story is too convoluted, and that Kojima is an “egomaniac” that can’t make a “real” game, but those same people probably go home to play 8 hour stretches of Fortnite, so I don’t mind their trash-talk. I know what I like, and I like Kojima’s work. A lot. Nobody I knew at school even knew what Metal Gear was, so it’s not like I was told “he’s good, just rate all his stuff highly and you’ll be the popular kid.” If anything, amongst my peer group, his work was very niche and unpopular.

The “Grim Ripper” of Guitar Hero was the final unlockable character in the game. I mean, look at him; it’s worth it!

Guitar Hero, on the other hand, was super popular amongst my friends at school. I could never play any difficulty past normal, but that didn’t stop me from having my fun with it. I remember being so happy to finally unlock the “Grim Ripper” as a playable character in the original. The ending to the second one, however, was my favorite segment of them all, when you finally get to play Free Bird on-stage at Stonehenge, of all places, UFO’s fly overhead. Awesome.

SpongeBob’s neighborhood in Battle for Bikini Bottom

In other news, Battle for Bikini Bottom was basically a SpongeBob-themed Super Mario 64 with lots of comedic flavor, and my brother and I adored that game, sinking in many hours each. There were times where we literally went full Beavis and Butthead and couldn’t stop laughing at the dumbest of little things, and sometimes, they weren’t even jokes that the developers intentionally programmed; often, it was our own misinterpretation of what they were saying that was funny. Good times!

There was another funny memory I had that concerned my inability to read without error until age 7. Metal Gear taught me many words I still use today, surprisingly enough, and at the time, I knew how to count and what numbers meant, but it took me a while to get to the point where I wasn’t just skipping in-game descriptions and text, instead learning to actually read them. The turning point came when I accidentally inserted a copy of Silent Hill 2 (yes, that Silent Hill) in my PS2, instead of Metal Gear Solid 2.

The games we owned were unboxed and inserted into those black faux-leather disc-binders that could hold dozens of DVDs. In this case, the mature games were all next to each other. Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 2 both had a “2” in the name, green cover art, and lay side-by-side on the same page. I wasn’t paying enough attention to the designs of the artwork or length of the words when I took it out, and when I started to realize that the game was not the same, I didn’t understand why, but I was so intrigued that new stuff was happening, I kept on going.

“Hey bro-bro, look at this! Everything’s different!”

“COOL! Why’s there fog everywhere? I can’t see anything.”

“I dunno! It’s cool though, right?!”

He walked away shortly after, as nothing was going on. Again, I was still really bad at games (I still am, which is partly why I continue to flock toward single-player entries), so after about 10 minutes of walking around in the fog, going nowhere, he lost interest in watching.

The garbage can monster, Silent Hill 2’s first enemy

Eventually, however, after dealing with the intentionally unwieldy tank controls of that era’s horror games, I reached the cutscene when that thing comes out of the garbage can and limps straight towards you, and when I was handed back control over my character, I froze like a Bambi. Right before it touched me, I slowly depressed my finger into the power-off button of my bubble-screened TV, held the green power button on the console until I heard the fans stop spinning, closed the cabinet shutters that encased the TV screen, and silently walked away. I think my parents were quietly watching as it happened, knowing I’d probably scare the heck out of myself, and it was probably the right move, considering I wasn’t supposed to be playing anything on that page anyways. They’ve mentioned that story a few times to me, wondering if I’d forgotten it. Yeah, like I wouldn’t remember that!

The character selection in Marvel Ultimate Alliance was really something

I also wouldn’t forget the time my dad unboxed the PS3 right before our eyes on Christmas day, 2007. Inside was a copy of Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which my brother and I would play for hours on-end together, and a copy of Madden ’07, which, sadly, we’d never touch. I don’t know why, but it took us until high school to start appreciating football; before then, we didn’t understand the rules, nor recognize any players.

Concept art for TESIV: Oblivion’s Imperial City, the epicenter of Cyrodiil.

It wasn’t long before The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion found its way into our collection, and boy is it likely that game is our most played title to date. The soundtrack, orchestrated by Jeremy Soule, is legendary, and for its time (even today, I would argue), the game world was huge, detailed, and sucked you in. Going back to it last year made me realize how silly the character models looked, but everything else was just as I remembered. I still feel Oblivion was better designed than Skyrim was, but both have a place in our hearts that cannot be chiseled away, no matter how many Witcher 3’s come out. The main and side stories were all interesting in their own right, and it was our first open world game to take place in the first-person perspective.

We were no strangers to first person games, but frankly, we agreed third person games were better because you could see your character’s armor. We were armor junkies. We wanted the biggest, baddest heavy armor we could put on, no matter what game we played. Accruing pieces of armor was our sole motivator to progress through about 70% of our collection. We hated open helmets, and sought after anything in the neighborhood of appearing Sauron-like (we thought he looked super cool). There was really no reason for this other than the fact that we liked armor. A lot. We thought it was cool, and it made us feel cool. The fact that Oblivion was first person and we enjoyed it stirred us into exploring other genres, and put action-RPGs on our radars.

Wii Sports’ Bowling Alley

Around the same time, Nintendo debuted the original Wii, the first and seemingly last good game console to tout physical motion-controls as a means of interaction in its games. Wii Sports, and its sequel, Wii Sports: Resort, have become classics of the mid 2000’s. Even today, we have our Wii hooked up, ready for bowling and hoops on a whim. Even excluding the true motion-control games, the Wii featured Mario Galaxy, which has overtaken Super Mario 64 in my record books as the superior title. Both have a place in my mind, earned by being great in their own ways. I’ve never played the sequel, Mario Galaxy 2, but judging by its high review grades at the time that rivaled the original’s, I’m willing to bet it was just as good, and also deserves a place on my “to-finish” list. Mario Kart Wii was another great non-motion game for the console (provided you had a nunchuck-controller handy), introducing new staples such as the Blue Koopa Shell, which would become a standard in future Mario Kart games.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 had a great cover system and team-play overall. Lots of fun. I wasn’t a huge Siege fan, as I was very disappointed when I heard it would not feature a campaign, and be strictly multiplayer oriented, with its Terrorist Hunt mode requiring constant connection to the internet.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was another classic that we spent much time with in this period. Its terrorist hunt mode became a routine activity for us, and one of our highest-played co-op modes in any game to date. We never finished the story mode because it was so fun to clear out maps together and unlock new armor and other equipment. We’d get so good as memorizing where the AI was going to be that we’d split up at the start of games, get in position, then open fire and retreat to a vantage point so we knew the enemy could only come at us from one side. My dad, who didn’t really play any games on PS3, made an exception for Rainbow Six; he would actually go online with people he knew on occasion, running terrorist hunts with them because the gameplay loop felt so rewarding. Between that and Assassin’s Creed (the original), Prince of Persia: Sands of Time on PS2, and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, Ubisoft became a developer and publisher that we started to trust if we were looking for consistently good games.

When Rock Band came around, it was a big deal to finally have a drummer. We all sucked with the drums, even though in theory they sound like something simple to wield. I remember when we’d visit relatives, whenever the party got to a big enough size at some places, the adults would be like, “Let’s get our ROCK BAND ON!” The music would get cranked up insanely loud, and everybody would rage. Somehow, whenever night approached, my brother would always manage to fall asleep, laying down on the couch right beside the blaring speakers and base; he would pass out no matter how hard he tried to stay awake.

One of the first few missions of Modern Warfare 2 involved sneaking through enemy lines in the snow; Modern Warfare 2 had some of the best missions in any Call of Duty, ever.

We were never really Call of Duty kids; I played Big Red One on PS2, along with a little Call of Duty 3 soon after we had our PS3, and as much as I liked Modern Warfare 1 (CoD 4), I never could get into it due to my lack of higher-level (adult) English comprehension. By the time Modern Warfare 2 came out, though, I was a different person, and something about the way that game carried itself excited me. Little did I know that I was playing one of the most expensive video games developed of all time; Infinity Ward’s then lead staff members, who would go on in later years to found Respawn Entertainment, nailed everything. The guns felt great. The movement was smooth and responsive. The story, for once, had substance and a lasting impression when all was said and done. To top it off, I discovered years later they had the legendary Hans Zimmer orchestrate the soundtrack; no wonder it was so good!

Following my time with Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Modern Warfare 2 was the second shooter with which I participated in online multiplayer, a big deal for me at the time. My company consisted solely of my older cousin, who would attempt crazy exploits with me, like climbing to a borderline out-of-map area in the map “Highrise” for sniping people, to using respawn-flares in the far corner of other maps to farm me for kills, with the goal of launching a nuke obtained via “kill-streak” to end the game, instantly, for everybody. I loved when back then, nobody whined about balance in multiplayer games, and crazy stuff like this made it through development. Yeah, it was totally unfair, but it sure was fun while it lasted. When I wasn’t playing online, my brother and I would run the cooperative spec-ops missions together until we became angry at each other for “sucking too much,” and then we’d 1v1 each other on a tiny map named “Rust.” This is by far my most favorite map in any Call of Duty, to date.

Yoji Shinkawa’s character art for Metal Gear Solid 4. From left to right, the characters depicted are Meryl, Snake, and Raiden. Shinkawa’s style has something about it that captures the character’s essence, even though he doesn’t always quite nail their appearance one to one.

When the price dropped on Metal Gear Solid 4, my dad surprised us with it when he came home from work. My brother and I were more excited than we normally were on Christmas when we saw the title propped upright next to the console. My dad didn’t say a word, waiting patiently for us to realize it was there, as we passed by it multiple times. We’d been stupidly replaying the free demo for it on the PlayStation Store for nearly a year by then, oo-ing and ah-ing over every minor detail.

“His suit camos-out like an octopus!”

“Why is Snake old?”

“Otacon’s in this one, too!”

Looking back, I miss the demo’s loading screens, which portrayed Snake smoking a cigarette slowly, with the warning in the background stating “Smoking is a harmful to your health; Don’t copy Snake,” or something along those lines. The retail copy stripped that feature, instead opting to place logos for the bosses based on whatever chapter you were in. Both were cool touches, regardless, and it wasn’t a huge deal, but it was just something I remembered.

Demon’s Souls was one of the first games to feature in a YouTube video that I’ve ever seen.

We never played Metal Gear Solid 3, even though at the time, I vaguely remember my dad at one point showing it to us in one of the first YouTube videos we’ve ever watched, which contained highlights from the best of gaming in the 2000’s. There was even a segment featuring Demon’s Souls, back when it had just come out, and nobody recognized FromSoftware unless they were a fan of King’s Field. To this day, I’ve never played Demon’s Souls, but that’s another one for the list, eh?

Metal Gear Solid 4, at the time, blew out everything else getting released in terms of graphics. My brother liked it a lot more than I did, and finished it multiple times after I was done. He enjoyed how much it eased the pedal off of shoehorning you into only progressing via stealth, as was prominent in the second game; he wasn’t a very patient person at the time, and found he could easily breeze through areas insanely fast if he decided to mow down all his enemies with the heaviest weapons he could find. I never even considered this, and took my time with tiny weapons, like the silenced 1911. Neither of us could appreciate non-lethal means of engagement at the time, mostly because we didn’t like it when enemies woke up to bite our butts later, right when we weren’t ready for them. These days, I choose non-lethal means of engagement whenever it’s an option. Hell, even in Dishonored, I completed a “Clean Hands” playthrough, even when murder and assassination were highlighted all over the place.

Concept art for the original Dishonored

We were in awe of Metal Gear Solid 4’s cutscenes, but both of us had a tendency to skip ones with large dialogue segments. At this point in my life, I could understand a lot of what the characters were saying, but more complex engagements went over my head and his. We thought Drebin’s monkey was the real MVP, and chuckled whenever it got its hands on stuff it wasn’t meant to be using.

At the time, I didn’t know anything about Metal Gear Solid 1, so the entirety of the return to Shadow Moses sequence didn’t have any sentimental value, as it was intended to. It didn’t make it bad, but replaying it this year made me realize just how many details I glossed over as a kid. It makes me want to find some way to play Metal Gear Solid 1, because it would probably clear up many confusions I had at the time, and even today, when story beats were featured. In many ways, Metal Gear Solid 4 was and wasn’t a stand-alone title; if you enjoyed the gameplay, which we both did, it wasn’t a big deal that the story made no sense to us, but now that I’m older, I realize how much I missed out on, and have a greater appreciation for the game than I did in the past, oddly enough.

Artwork depicting the path to Whiterun, Skyrim’s central city. Compared to Oblivion, which took on a bright fantasy style, Skyrim was cold, generally sunless, and relayed this very different mood with its soundtrack (also composed by Soule), foreboding and mysterious.

Christmas, 2011: a close friend of my dad’s gifts me and my brother a copy of Skyrim for PS3. This is definitely in my top 10 for Christmas gifts received. That game was awesome, and on PC, it’s still awesome, as is evident by the thousands of people still playing it over 8 years later. People thought The Witcher 3 would kill off Skyrim’s popularity, but Witcher 3 didn’t (and in my eyes, still doesn’t) have the mods to back it up, despite being a much better game in the vanilla state. I thought it was cool to see Skyrim maintain popularity and recognition through all this time. I mean, it’s had to compete with so many titles in the same genre at this point, and it still holds up, quirks and all. If Oblivion was as easy to mod as Skyrim currently is, I don’t know if Skyrim would still be as popular as it currently is. Regardless, my brother and I spent months each exploring this northbound region of Tamriel, and even without the DLC expansions Dawnguard and Dragonborne, there was enough content for us that even today, my brother still finds new stuff in the vanilla game that he’s never seen before. I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece, because when you go back to it years later, you can’t help but notice all of its major flaws, but the modding community has remained ever so dedicated to it that, with the tweaks of your choosing, it has become one through reputation and community dedication, alone.

Uncharted 2 immediately places you, Nathan Drake, hanging off the bottom of a train cart, ready to fall off a mountain, right from the start of the game. Talk about drama!

Though Uncharted 2 released a few years prior, we never heard of it until about this point, and my dad got it on sale when we were shopping at Best Buy. That was when I first heard of Naughty Dog, and forever became a loyal fan of theirs. The game had an Indiana Jones vibe about it, and even though the story was very cliché at times, it was very enjoyable, coherent, and comedic nonetheless. I never played the multiplayer for it, but my friends told me it was good fun while it was still around. I recall one buddy of mine a couple years later told me to check out The Last of Us, another game from naughty dog, but I was extremely terrified of zombies as a concept, and could not bring myself to play anything that contained zombies in any way, shape, or form. I would get goose-bumps just thinking about how they could spread so quickly and take over the world to gorge on the living. Really, my imagination was the culprit here, as between mushroom-headed Clickers, the flower-mouthed stuff in Resident Evil 5, and whatever you call those things in Silent Hill, I had enough monsters to think about.

Tasked with rounding up all his old gang-buddies for The Law, with the hopes that he and his family will be left alone, John Marston’s past eventually catches up to him.

Not being a Grand Theft Auto kid, with the only other Rockstar games I had played at the time being Bully and Red Dead Revolver, finally getting a chance to play a true open world Rockstar game was amazing when Red Dead Redemption rolled around. It had everything I liked about Red Dead Revolver, with a more serious tone on the Wild West, and tons of content to play through. From the side missions to the characters and scenery, the whole world was a pleasure to experience. That ending took me by surprise, and was definitely one of the finest moments in gaming history: The Law always wins.

In 2012, we got to play Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, whose story I thought was slightly worse than Uncharted 2, but definitely still enjoyable. The gameplay, on the other hand, fared much better than the second’s, with basically everything being improved upon and polished further. It also included a split-screen co-op horde mode, along with a miniature (and extremely difficult) cooperative story mode, separate from the main game, that we could never complete. Not that we wouldn’t try our hearts out!

Far Cry 3’s main villain, Vaas (depicted above with the mohawk), made for an excellent, if cliche, insane antagonist. He was so crazy, you almost liked him. His character was definitely the highlight of what would otherwise be a generic, semi-lackluster story without him.

On Christmas Day of 2013, Santa brought Far Cry 3 and Black Ops 2 to us in our stockings (this was the last Christmas where we believed he was real; good times). I took a liking to the open-world formula Ubisoft was started to refine, and had a blast with Far Cry 3’s vehicles, cliché storytelling, and fun arsenal of weapons. But as good as it was, Black Ops 2 would consume my brother and I for the next few years, surprisingly enough. It was our first split-screen title that let us go online together with buddies from school, and I remember all the times I partied up during breaks to compete in it. Having never played a Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare 2, the newly refined progression and loadout systems were fun to climb the ranks of. The score-streak system at the time took the place of the kill-streak system, which allowed me to actually unlock a few boosts for once by simply playing the objective instead of headhunting all the time. The campaign mode was pretty cool, but was nothing close to Modern Warfare 2’s level of storytelling, even with the multiple-endings gimmick that was touted as “revolutionary,” only to get scrapped in future releases.

The world of Black Ops II: Zombies was chock-full of smoke, fire, and of course, the undead. Fog engulfed everything outside of the main few locations, which a robot bus driver would take you through if you could keep up.

Even with all this cool stuff, though, the real highlight of Black Ops 2 was its zombie mode. The “Tranzit” map was really something. I thought it was genius to have crafting, buyable weapons, and a bus that took you from location to location in an effort to “keep on moving” all in the same mode. The inclusion of indirect storytelling, which you could miss if you didn’t bother to explore the most dangerous areas, like the cornfield after the farm area (which your bus wouldn’t stop at; you’d have to jump off the ride in the thick fog to face denizens that would leap at your face and murder you if you weren’t smart with your route), was a nice touch that made the experience unique enough to come back to years later. This game mode made me stop fearing zombies everywhere else in my life. Thanks, Treyarch; you really delivered one of the most complete multiplayer packages I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying.

For my birthday that year, I got Assassin’s Creed III, a game many people hated due to weird game mechanics (and in some places, cutscene-overload). I didn’t hate it at all; I liked it quite a bit, and saw it through to its end. The only other Assassin’s Creed game we had at the time, besides the first one, was Revelations, which I also had fun with, despite it being a very different experience from 3. I despised the ship-fighting sections, though, which was why I passed on Black Flag, the Assassin’s Creed everybody loved, not that they were the worst thing I’ve come into contact with. Those moments just didn’t click with me, and I felt they were too drawn out to be fun. I’m in the minority here, of course, but just because I had this opinion didn’t mean I hated the game. The native American to western culture shift I thought was respectful and cool to experience, and the tomahawk/hidden blade combo was fun to mess around with. I thought I would love to use the guns a lot, but was surprised at how many swords and other close-quarter weapons there were, and I ended up abusing the “counter attack” mechanic in my favor throughout the whole game; I thought the animations for those were too satisfying to pass on, even if they were over the top and terribly unrealistic.

Assassin’s Creed’s signature has always been in its “Leap of Faith” mechanic, which, though extremely unrealistic, was always eye candy for onlookers.

Unfortunately, Assassin’s Creed III eventually required an update in order to continue being played on our old launch-day PS3, and a power surge from a crappy outlet in our house permanently bricked the system when it was in the process of installing it. It was the last nail in the coffin for a console that went through two surgeries to solve the infamous Yellow Light of Death error, resulting from lack of sufficient thermal paste on the CPU. This was the end of an era, as for my 14th birthday, my dad told me: “we’re going to build a gaming PC, together.”

For about three years before then, I had been using a Windows XP desktop PC that struggled to run Internet Explorer without freezing too much. Even still, I didn’t really know how to use any computers at the time; my “finest” moments in the tech world before that were when I discovered how to draw (horribly) with a mouse on school Macintoshes. It was a big deal to have a modern PC in the house; my dad actually continued to use his own slightly higher-level Windows XP PC for many years after the new tower was assembled, refusing to upgrade until his hard drive began its swift death following 13 years of continued operation. He never got bored of 2003’s Command and Conquer: Zero Hour, and still plays it regularly, even today.

Command and Conquer Generals and Zero Hour were the last Real Time Strategy games to feature modern military units. The genre seems to have died out, unless you like space-themed games, which my dad never did.

Building a PC helped me understand what they were made of, what each part did, what things held data or needed power… I told my friends that they should follow me to the PC gaming world, but only about less than half of them did. I remember the Xbox One vs PS4 arguments that would surface on the schoolyard, eventually leading to shout-offs then brief shoving and yelling.

“PlayStation has better games!”

“No, Halo and Gears of War smoke whatever you guys got!”

“Hey guys, you know PC’s an option, t-“

“SHUT UP, you!”

It was fun. I’m childishly happy that this is still a thing, today. Go, tribalism! :-)

The Orange Box is still a good deal if you like first-person games. Half Life 2 and Portal have some of the best levels ever designed, and to this day, hold up great for being released back in 2004 and 2007, respectively. I never played much Team Fortress 2, but there’s still well over 60,000 players still rocking it as I write this.

Unfortunately, I would proceed to miss out on some of gaming’s finest exclusives of the generation, including, but not limited to, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us Remastered, and Bloodborne. Instead, I was introduced to Steam, Valve’s digital storefront and network, where I found The Orange Box, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, the Skyrim modding scene, Left 4 Dead 2, Borderlands 2, and The Witcher 2, among others. Steam sales allowed me to own and try out exponentially more games than I could afford (with my tiny wallet of holiday money) if I were to purchase them on consoles. Before I was a Steam user, though, I was actually an Origin user, as my first real PC game would oddly enough turn out to be a retail copy of Battlefield 4. I loved being able to experience the graphics on high settings and just stare off into the distance of its enormous maps. This was my first and last Battlefield game, and I enjoyed the ride while it lasted (though I would intermittently return to it for the next few years).

Dark Souls is best known for its dramatic, extremely difficult boss fights. The entirety of its world remains well known and highly renowned today, and not without reason. If you haven’t tried it yet, you probably should. Just… Prepare to Die, of course.

Around this time was when another buddy of mine, also a PC gamer, introduced me to Dark Souls: Prepare to Die edition. I snagged it on sale for $5 (back when you could still buy it on Steam; thanks Namco…), and ran that one into the ground with love. After installing Durante’s fix, the game worked and played great. The mouse and keyboard controls sucked, though, but I figured out how to get my DualShock 3 working on PC via a Chinese program named MotionInJoy, which I swear installed viruses when I wasn’t paying attention. It worked, sure, though it also served as my introduction to the existence of malware. I can’t confirm if it was the program itself, or the sketchy websites I had to visit to download it, that caused my PC’s decent into madness; however, if I’m being fair, it was probably the latter.

For the next few years, I would be introduced to the world of viruses. Frequently. I was an extremely gullible kid, thinking I could get X and Y for free if I just “clicked here!” I reinstalled Windows 7 at least 6 times, losing years of data in the process each time a nuke was the only solution. The data loss included things like a 4-years-in-the-making Minecraft server, operated by myself, which had tons of structures built over time, by hand, with many friends (at least 10 different people) through both middle school and high school.

As simple as Minecraft’s graphics are, they really make you appreciate your worlds.

I recall its giant statues of our characters, interconnected homes, and the town we made together for people to see when they entered the server. There was a huge tree-house base, which was my home, that overlooked the entirety of the conquered game region. I remember my first Skype call being a Minecraft group chat with three of my buddies, as we began to make what we could of the world I managed to host. I learned a lot about how routers worked, what ports were, and how web hosting functioned in the process.

Whoever makes trojans and other software whose sole purpose is to steal and destroy (maliciously) will definitely make God’s job easy; they’re going to Hell, without question. No mercy. I’m lucky I never stored family photos or other irreplaceable things aside from school documents on my computer. I can only empathize with people who have lost such memories to assholes with no lives, as I have with this server. At least they can’t take my memories away.

Later that year, my brother and I learned that Dark Souls II existed, and we jumped on that boat without hesitation. My brother, not having played or seen the first one, was intrigued by all aspects of it, from the grim storytelling and environments, to the plethora of armor and weapons, whose sheer quality and quantity would stand to outclass FromSoftware’s next three titles in the coming years. Seriously though, why would they get worse? We didn’t know we had it good, then, until we realized, now.

To the people who say Dark Souls II was an uninspired cash grab, I say take a good long look at Majula, then tell me it sucks to my face. This was one of many areas with a gorgeous view and interesting characters to listen to.

Many complain that Dark Souls II was stupid-unfair, that it was rigged to ruin you, and its environments were uninspired and generic. I completely disagree with all of the above, except for maybe the first point. Indeed, the launch edition of Dark Souls II, which is commonly referred to as the “DX9 Edition,” as it ran on DirectX 9, did have poor enemy placement and an ending that left you wanting more. It wasn’t long after, however, that they re-released the game on PC in the form of a complete “Scholar of the First Sin” edition, which ran with improved visuals on DirectX 11, redid enemy placements everywhere, altered the ending of the story, added new bosses, and included all of the DLC released for the DX9 edition. With all of these adjustments, the game went from “kind of worse than the first game” to easily better than the first game in our eyes.

The Sunken City was one of the best optional locations I’ve explored in any game.

The new locations added much needed depth to the lore, and the changes to the endgame rewarded players for fuller exploration of its optional locations. The new weapons and armor were welcome additions, and in my opinion, not having played the DLC in the original release, the expansions surprisingly featured better environments than the base game, great side stories, and more interesting level design. Normally, DLC doesn’t change a game too much, but in this case, it took everything that the game did right, and improved upon it to make the experience that much more complete. Hats off to FromSoftware’s management at the time: they didn’t even have the original game director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, at the helm during creation. Maybe that’s why we liked it more? I’m not saying he’s bad, because I adored both the first game in the trilogy and Bloodborne, but I feel he’s lost something along the way to where he is now. Sekiro’s not a bad game, but it’s definitely no Souls of mine.

Unturned’s simple graphics did enough to give you a general sense of where you were in its maps. Some servers would have tons of people and home-grown mods, and you’d start to see helicopter gunships and tanks take over entire regions of maps. It would get increasingly hectic (and laggy) as more people joined in on the fun.

Survival games started to become a big thing around 2015. Unturned, an indie game developed by a single Canadian kid named Nelson Sexton, was the first of our survival games played as a group (it helped that it was one of the first free to play games we came across on Steam). That game’s still rolling strong! Good on you, Nelson, for the constant updates and comedic value you provide it with, even today. Seriously, its underrated just because it looks like Roblox, and the content it provides is well worth a try if you can gather up some buddies for a weekend and don’t mind the trouble.

H1Z1 was starting to gain popularity that same year. By June, we all had a copy of it on hand, and we played the crap out of its survival mode for at least a couple years. It was not a great game in any respect; it was plagued by glitches and lack of good anti-cheat measures, forever. It rarely received updates, and when it did, barely anything would change, and new problems would arise. Basic features like rain, which functioned fine on release, would be removed for the game for months at a time. Daybreak Games are, in my book, not a good developer; they were the first of many to cash in on what would spur into the Battle Royale craze of the next few years. I didn’t like the Battle Royale mode one bit, but my friends loved it so much that I had no choice but to jump on board every so often.

I look back on my time with H1Z1 as a fun era, though that didn’t mean the game a very good one. My friends and I were never around for the DayZ craze back when it was an ARMA II mod, so H1Z1 was basically our DayZ.

My positive memories of the game came from before the Battle Royale mode existed, when everybody was still on the survival servers. People would take it so seriously that they’d recruit players from different time zones so they could have 24/7 base security. Large groups would take over public servers by storm, with the only other force to compete being, of course, Chinese hackers, whose favorite English line was “China Numba One!” They’d relay it to you over voice chat following your inevitable death by aim-bot from the flying men. It was classic, and became such a common occurrence that eventually, other Americans would start saying it, too, snickering their butts off all the same.

The garbage that calls itself ARK: Survival Evolved was also on our radar, but it ran so shamefully horribly at launch that nobody, not even me with my relatively mid to high-end PC, could muster even a mere 20 frames per second, with everything on the lowest settings, so it was basically a mass auto-refund for us all. We would eventually purchase it again a year later, when it was slightly better, but I never enjoyed my time with that one, sadly. I know many people like it and still play it to this day, and I won’t judge them harshly, as it does have a few things right going for it.

People didn’t appreciate Ground Zeroes being as ridiculously short as it was, but for $5, I had my fill of entertainment with it. In some ways, I wish the true release of MGSV had cutscenes and dialogue as frequently as this “demo” did.

That same month, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a paid tech-demo for what would eventually become The Phantom Pain, found its way into my library, and even though the experience was intended to be one short-lived, I replayed it over and over and over to the point of 100% completion over the course of 9 hours, for what was intended to be a 40 minute experience. I liked it a lot, and eagerly awaited the full release later that year.

When The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released, I was the happiest dude on Earth. It was like Game of Thrones and Skyrim had a baby a hundred years into the future. My PC could barely run it at 24ish fps on medium settings, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. I have only good things to say about The Witcher, and played that one to completion over the next few months.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt has some of the best monster design since Dark Souls, in my opinion. Its open world and vast amount of decision making within it lead you to three possible endings and tons of side stories that were all interesting in and of themselves.

When Metal Gear Solid V released in full later that year, I was treated to yet another amazing experience by Kojima, though as much as I loved what would be the final entry to the series, I could not help but feel the second half of the story was rushed, which was unusual coming from an auteur such as he. Around this time, it was clear tensions between Kojima and Konami were peaking, and I can only wonder what could have been. Alas, the gameplay and engine looked and performed beyond my expectations, and I had a great time with that one. It is by far my most played Metal Gear entry, and the amount of content that’s there is nothing to scoff at, even if it’s not the game it could have been, given more development time.

Dying Light’s expansion pack took you through the countryside of Harran, whose setting was very different from the slums and city-scapes of its urban locations. In many ways, I missed the amount of stuff you could climb in the zombie infested ghettos, but the open fields and new vehicles were fun, also, just in their own style.

In Christmas of 2015, I grabbed Dying Light on sale, Techland’s zombie-parkour playground that released at the beginning of the year. Never having played a Dead Island or Mirror’s edge game, first person climbing and zombie slaying was a new experience for me, and one I enjoyed immensely. Though the story was lackluster, the gameplay that was there made up for it ten-fold, and I would return to Harran for years after, thanks to Techland’s commitment to intermittent smaller updates and community events, along with their later expansion pack The Following, which featured buggies and a whole new region and story to progress through, not to mention new ways to battle the undead, which also cropped up in new flavors. The base game and DLC were excellent, and anyone who likes open world shooters should give it a try if they haven’t, yet; the sequel coming out later this year looks to have improved on everything its predecessor fell short of.

Fortnite, Fortnite, Fortnite… what else can I say about it that hasn’t already been said?

This was when I consider “The Drought” to have begun. Being spoiled from 2015’s excellence, the next few years were Battle Royale, Battle Royale, and more Battle Royale. Following the release of H1Z1’s new mode, then PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fortnite’s pivot to Battle Royale, so many players of older niche multiplayer titles that I enjoyed flocked away, and the popularity of the big three killed off not only the player-bases of existing titles, but the thought of single-player development in-whole for the bigger publishers in the industry.

Everything had to have skins, loot boxes, and a king of the hill mode to be considered “profitable,” to the point where Activision removed campaign mode from Call of Duty (until the recent reboot of Modern Warfare), and EA publicly denounced single-player games as a dying breed, one they would no longer dabble with following Visceral Studio’s 2017 closure (until of course Star Wars: Fallen Jedi development was taken up by none other than Respawn Entertainment, themselves, a little while down the line).

I don’t hate Rainbow Six Siege, but every time I try to get back into it, I realize just how much I miss the old Rainbow Six, and end up putting it down for a while.

Ubisoft stopped developing Assassin’s Creed games for a while, following a disastrous last few releases, and it felt like they were going all-in on games as a service when The Division, Rainbow Six: Siege, and For Honor came into the picture, with their last front-running single player entry being Far Cry 4 in 2014. It’s not like they stopped making single-player games, but I didn’t like Watch Dogs 1 or 2 all that much, and Far Cry Primal was caught in a fiasco where people started to realize the map was laid out exactly the same as in 4 (but I disagree with that take, as it was a pretty good spinoff when I tried it a few years later in 2019, and the content within was not even close to being “exactly the same” as Far Cry 4, even if it was repetitively following their tried-and-true formula). The last couple Ghost Recon games from them were also very repetitive (and boring), and with how things were going, I passed on Far Cry 5 and Assassin’s Creed Origins based on Ubisoft’s new reputation, alone, even though after eventually getting around to them both this year, that turned out to be poor judgement on my part. For the time, though, that’s how it went for me.

Though I did not play it on release, the DOOM reboot is definitely a great game to try if you’ve got a knack for the old-school shoot-em-up style.

The only single player games that I cared about in 2016 were the DOOM remake, which for a 12-hour experience with little replay value (my opinion, of course), I couldn’t justify dropping $60 on at launch (after playing it through in 2019, though, man was I wrong). Dark Souls III also came out that year, but unlike the previous two entries, Dark Souls III was just not fun for me; I felt FromSoftware tried too hard to compromise between the new style they developed with Bloodborne, and what they knew Souls fans liked. There was borderline too much fan service for me, and the overload of online integration made me dread every attempt to complete it. I eventually just put it on the shelf to gather dust; in my eyes, it just didn’t have the character that the original and its sequel carried themselves with.

No amount of marketing could erase the reputation Bethesda raised for themselves with Fallout 76. I hope they can return to glory before The Elder Scrolls VI comes around.

Dishonored 2 was another game on my list of ones to check out that year, but thanks to Bethesda’s greedy new management (which would soon lead to their recent downfall and what would become the disastrous Fallout 76 and a pivot to mobile games), Denuvo Anti-Tamper absolutely destroyed the performance of the PC port at launch, enough to make me pass on it, regardless of the glowing reviews. Having played it a few years after Arkane Studio had time to patch it up and remove Denuvo, I am still of the opinion that the first was more fun to me, and its story, despite being simpler, was better, managing to create an almost Half-Life like level of atmosphere. Again, these opinions are my own, and I’m not knocking the quality of these games, but at the time, the cost-to-fun proposition (for me) just wasn’t there, and so I did not enjoy 2016’s AAA offerings.

The opening cinematic to Hyper Light Drifter was extremely cryptic, and I could not piece together what was going on until I did the dirty work and analyzed every nook and cranny in its world, well past the 8-hour completion mark.

Instead, 2016 was when I discovered the indie scene, where I came upon a little game called Hyper Light Drifter, developed by Heart Machine. I fell in love with its environments, aesthetics, and overall design. There was no dialogue, not even text (aside from the main menu), and yet through its visuals, it managed to instill within me empathy for its doomed protagonist and crumbling world. Couple this with some of the crispiest top-down 2D combat controls, and I had a blast. To put my enjoyment of it into perspective, it’s an 8-hour experience, and yet I’ve spent over 65 hours with it to date. It is one of few games I’ve finished to 100% completion, grueling over every little detail it had to offer. I even purchased its art book because the color choice and character design were so well thought out.

Better run, dumb-dumb: Papa Baker’s gunna getcha!

In 2017, I was met with the same dilemma as 2016, only this time, there were ZERO new AAA games that I was interested in after Resident Evil 7, which released in January. That was the first “real” AAA game I had a taste of for nearly a year and a half, and I enjoyed it so much when I bought it in April that I ran through it about 3 times, trying to obtain every collectable within it that I could lay my hands on. There was also the XCOM 2 expansion, War of the Chosen, that released later that year, but I’m not really a strategy-game guy, and when I was met with laggy (and I mean bad) performance at its launch in 2015, I refunded it before the 2-hour mark. Couple that with mission timers, which were absent from its prequel, Enemy Unknown, and I really didn’t like it too much. I get why they included them (they were trying to combat abuse of the conservative “overwatch” mechanic), but I’m not good enough to deal with all that crap at once when permadeath is just around the corner of a single unfortunate dice-roll. When mods started coming in, I began to warm up to it, and repurchased it on sale in Christmas of 2017, and that held me off for a while, somewhat salvaging an otherwise uneventful year of single-player titles.

The fact that Rain World was a four person project still baffles me. VideoCult poured their souls into this one, and managed to capture the often fleeting remnants of their dreams.

For me, though, the unsung hero of 2017 was, in fact, Rain World, a niche indie title released by the 4-person squad at VideoCult. It had been years since I felt the melancholy of an open world, as I had in Shadow of the Colossus as a kid. Truly, in that 2D pixel-art world of over 1000 rooms, it felt as though I was making a pilgrimage across an environment that I had no place wandering about. The near total lack of instructions or other characters, the presence of danger everywhere, and the unique control scheme and art style was amazing. There are no games like Rain World; at least, there weren’t in 2017.

Rain World’s aesthetic pushes 2D procedural animation to its limits. Every creature was pliable, and scenes where never scripted, so everything felt like it had a mind of its own.

This was another game that, despite taking an average 26 hours to complete, I’ve spent over 50 on, still discovering new things in it today that I hadn’t noticed before. It’s also the first title I’ve bothered to create a mod for (not a very good one, though; nothing complete enough to publish, but definitely fun enough to personally mess around with). I spent most of 2018 with Rain World, then Hollow Knight by Team Cherry, and at the end of the year, Capybara’s BELOW, the latter following in the footsteps of Rain World’s vibe in its own way. I enjoyed each, caveats and all.

The Last of Us is without a doubt in my top 10 all-time games list. Neil Druckman’s storytelling was outstanding, and he managed to create the most believable parent-child relationship in a game, second only to God of War in 2018 (even still, I would argue those two titles are really close).

I played no new AAA PC games in 2018 or 2019. Resident Evil 2 is one that I’m looking forward to trying out when the price goes down some, but overall, 2019 would be another disappointing year for me, if all I had was PC gaming. Thankfully, in Christmas of 2017, my brother and I were thrilled to receive a PS4 slim from none other than our loving parents. For once, we could go back and experience all the exclusives we missed out on in years prior. I finally got to enjoy The Last of Us, which has become one of my favorite games of all time. Revisiting Shadow of the Colossus in HD was also a thing of beauty, and I’m glad it was remade with insane respect to the original and extreme attention to detail; it was very clearly not a remaster, but a faithful recreation from the ground up, and it showed. Then there was Horizon: Zero Dawn, which I had some fun with, and the legendary God of War reboot, which also sits in my top 10 of games ever made, right beside Death Stranding, which I’ve just recently finished, and plan to review, soon.

Death Stranding is another masterpiece by Kojima in my book. I enjoyed it as much as I did Metal Gear Solid 2 as a kid. It really felt like the best of Metal Gear Solid 4 and 5 came together in this one, even though combat and stealth in this game were not at all the focus of its gameplay.

Seriously, if I stuck to PC forever, I would have missed out on some of the finest games ever made. As great as PC gaming is, that greatness stems from the assumption that everything works perfectly all the time, and heck, that’s never been the case for me. Ever. Between poorly tested updates from Windows 10 locking up my system (to the point of it fully-crashing to a freeze, black screen, or restart at random, until I needed to uninstall TWO official updates that clearly went untested by Microsoft), down to unneeded updates from Bethesda breaking my meticulously taken-care-of Skyrim install of over 120 mods for the fifth time, the whole platform was starting to wear on me. If every single publisher goes the route of trying to make their own storefront to control a greater fraction of their income, we’re eventually going to have a hundred launchers to open our games! I’m not against first-party launchers per-se, but turning my computer into a bazaar is not something I’m interested in, either. :P

GOG Galaxy 2 has alleviated some of the growing pains in the industry, but at the end of the day, Galaxy is another launcher. It’s like a band-aid for the greater wound. If I could trust each of these companies (and trust is something most companies have already shown to be not worthy of), I wouldn’t mind having 20 launchers and accounts to get on with my business. But man, some of these companies need to provide better account security options before I’ll sign on board (2FA should generally be mandatory now, in my eyes).

I like Valve, but don’t appreciate their random bouts of radio silence, whenever more serious issues bubble up in the industry that they’d rather not address. And I also don’t like EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda’s historically, infamously prone-to-failure DRM measures. CD Projekt Red & Blue seem to be the anti-DRM good guys now, but who knows if they’ll still be the “good guys” in 10 years’ time?

Valve’s lead man, Gabe Newell, isn’t the best person in the world, but I sure feel miles more comfortable trusting him than I do Tim Sweeny of Epic Games or Randy Pitchford of Gearbox.

Loyalty to a company is stupid, I agree, but at least Valve have put their money where their mouth is in terms of supporting open source software and Linux. I mean, when I look back on the last decade of PC gaming, never once can I remember Valve intentionally hurting their customers. They were basically a monopoly, and still provided legitimate services and new features that nobody else dared to bother with. News outlets today say, “oh, they were not innovating enough.” Really? Where were basic features like achievements and friends lists/universal game invites before Steam? Xbox has had both in place since 2005. All these competing publishers and fanboys are jumping on a bandwagon of hate so they can get a bigger slice of the pie by providing subpar services, themselves.

Recently, the Epic Games store’s lineup has been better than Steam’s offerings, thanks to their quality over quantity model and slow expansion. I hope they can continue to improve and become an even better store-front with time; just do it with superior features, not with bribes.

The Epic Games Store is getting much better now, but why did they put out a skeleton of a store when they had another store to model themselves after? Valve, as far as I know, didn’t have someone else to model their services after, unless you count the brick and mortar companies that came before them. Steam sucked when it debuted. Really bad. But we’re not living in that time period, anymore, so if you’re going to release a competing store, and you actually have something that’s developed enough to model after, why would you cut corners as a multi-BILLION-dollar company? Even Itch.io was more feature complete.

Before Epic games, I don’t remember there being PAID exclusives on PC. Valve never bribed people to release only on Steam, but many publishers and indie developers chose to release on Steam, exclusively, because it was convenient, and because Steam granted smaller developers the exposure that they needed to get their name out there. Never once were they like, “oh, you can’t post your own game to your own site; you must use our services!” Many people put their games on every store, something that used to be common.

They even let developers and publishers attach in their own home-grown launchers (like uPlay and Rockstar Club, among others) to their Steam releases; it’s not like they were an anti-competition monopoly. And yes, I’m aware the Epic Store does the same thing when it comes to Ubisoft titles, but what about for smaller developers? At the very least, Epic Games’ upfront offers secure indie developers with a baseline safety-net budget in what’s otherwise a harsh and unpredictable market, in addition to providing a fairer revenue split, but it all just seems like virtue signaling to gain market share. At the end of the day, I’m going to have extra programs running in the background of my PC, phoning home and collecting whatever data I said they were allowed to take from me when I glossed over their EULAs.

I live in America. Capitalism and businesses in general should operate as they need to, within the realm of law. I’m not advocating for any legal changes to the way things work now, because more rules generally make things worse, not better. People shop where they please, and whoever gives the people the superior product will be the winner. I’m just disappointed that publishers seem to be greedier than ever, now, and generally, I don’t have a choice of where I want to buy specific games from anymore. But I can choose not to buy their product if I deem it too invasive (or their copy protection going too far), and that sends a response just the same.

I know I’m in the super-minority, and that’s fine. My opinion is my own, as wrong as some may feel it is. Valve is one of few companies to earn my trust through continued consistency and quality across the board. But even still, they’ll never be my first choice when buying games, because I want to own my games, not merely own a license to play them.

“At the end of the day, Steam, itself, is another form of DRM, and DRM sucks; pirates are going to pirate no matter what challenges you put before them, and when their work is done, all DRM ends up being good for is annoying or locking out paying customers from accessing what they purchased in the first place.”

— The Wayward Pooch

When I started working, I saved up enough money that I decided it was time to invest in a Nintendo Switch, which, after record sales numbers, started to earn a reputation as a legitimate console, instead of as a gimmick like the WiiU was generally perceived. For me, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, alone, was worth the price of admission, especially now that a sequel has been confirmed already for the Switch. Not to mention it feels good to be playing Smash Bros and Mario Kart, again, for the first time in years, just as I had as a little kid. Funny how things eventually come full circle, one way or another.

Nintendo still nails their art. Above, Link is depicted ready to battle a golden Lynel from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, a fantastic entry in the series.

The Battle Royale genre is here to stay, though its entries, now, may turn out to be fleeting moments of gaming history in a few years’ time. I’m not a huge fan of games as a service, but I don’t see that model going away, either, as is evidenced by the number of people who have become Fortnite and Destiny regulars. Indie developers are in a better place, now, than they were when I was little, thanks to storefronts like Epic Games, GOG, and Itch.io pushing for better revenue splits and ease of distribution.

Not all that has arrived in recent years has been negative, as I might have made things seem earlier; I’m just another disgruntled dude frustrated with seeing an industry I love change so fast. If everything is moving to VR and streaming services, and retail copies of titles are to be a thing of the past, then I guess at that rate, I’m going to be the old man who tunes into the radio while the neighbors watch TV.

Is that so bad?

Then again, it’s unknown what the future holds, or even what the silent majority will do. For all I know, I’m not alone; maybe the market today is hungry for a taste of the old ways. Maybe most people still value availability of hard-copies, single-player titles, and offline, DRM-Free support.

Maybe I need to get involved! ;-)

The world is always changing. Things don’t stay the same forever: everybody knows that! I believe a mix of the old and new is the right way forward.

We’ll see!