9 Games That Shaped Me, In Some Way
A thing has been going around on Mastodon (and probably other social media) where people make this grid of games that shaped them. This kind of thing isn’t super interesting or revealing to me unless I understand something of why or how the “shaping” happened, so here’s a post with my 9 games and a little explanation of each one. I reserve the right to retcon any of these at any time without warning or notice.
Super Mario World
I was in late elementary or early middle school when my parents finally got us a video game console, a Super Nintendo, after years of my brother and me clamoring unsuccessfully for a NES, and so while I’d been able to play other Mario games at the houses of friends and relatives, Super Mario World was the first one I had the chance to really burrow into. It didn’t have anything quite as cool as the Tanooki Suit or Hammer Bros. Suit from SMB3, but there was still an awful lot of fun stuff to discover in it. Fun, colorful, lots of exciting environments. My love for side-scrollers didn’t start with SMW but this game probably cemented it.
Final Fantasy II
My parents gave my brother and me Final Fantasy II (now known as Final Fantasy IV) with our Super Nintendo, and we started it up, watched the opening cutscene for about three minutes, and then went back to Super Mario World. When we came back to Final Fantasy II later, out of desperation or with slightly longer attention spans or both, we got totally sucked in. Characters? A real plot? Feelings and betrayals and tragedy? This game did things I didn’t know video games could do. And nearly every bit of music from it is still permanently seared into my brain.
Final Fantasy III
Now known, of course, as Final Fantasy VI. Yes, this one shaped me too. If Final Fantasy II was the “I didn’t know video games could do this” one, III was “I didn’t know you could get away with raising the stakes this much.” The first and maybe only video game I’ve ever played with an opera scene. The only one where the apocalypse literally happens in the middle of it… and then the huge cast of characters has to go around picking up the pieces. Tremendously affecting, for a teenager. So many bits of story will stay with me forever, and through it all, the music was even better than its predecessor.
Nuclear Throne
One of the hardest games I ever got pretty good at. I don’t know what exactly it was about Nuclear Throne that grabbed a hold of me so ferociously. It feels really good to play, is one thing. “Crunchy” is the word that comes to mind. Crunchy pixels, crunchy sounds, crunchy controls. Tough as nails but well-balanced: the RNG can feel cruel, but never insurmountably unfair. There is so much to discover and the skill ceiling is in the stratosphere. I’ve since played a lot of action roguelikes but sometimes I think they’ve all just been attempts to recapture the thrill of Nuclear Throne.
Angband
My first roguelike and the start of a lifelong love of them. Taught me the dubious pleasures of save scumming and RNG manipulation. Oh, and kiting. Expanded my understanding of what a game could look like and gave me a nascent pre-understanding awareness of the meaning of open source code through its many, many variant offshoots (a distressing number of which I tried playing at least once). Later, an object lesson in the value of a strong and principled game design vision: see the next entry.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
A contrast to the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink overwhelm of Angband, Nethack and ADOM, and the terminus of my enthusiasm for strict Berlin interpretation roguelikes. So many things kept drawing me into DCSS. Its strategic and tactical gameplay is incredibly rigorous and unforgiving, with little margin for player error. The sophisticated autotravel and other affordances mean there’s next to no time wasted on just navigating the dungeon or finding items you couldn’t carry around with you. Then I discovered that these attributes are part of a thoughtful and intentional philosophy. I learned about the servers that enabled games to be logged and rewatchable, found the IRC chatroom for the game and hung out watching other people play the game way better than me, and ended up with an entry in the helper bot’s knowledge base. I played in a couple tournaments and contributed a silly little patch to a very early version of the game, my very first open source contribution ever. On the server I played on most I ended up with a respectable win rate of almost 2% across 13 versions of the game. Then at some point my interest tapered off due to lack of time or just overexposure. But it’s safe to say that for a long time this game was extremely important to me.
Disco Elysium
I probably haven’t played enough games to make grandiose claims like
this, but: best-written video game of all time? And with voice acting to
match? Dark and grim but not grimdark, balanced by also frequently being
one of the funniest video games of all time, and one that holds
up to serious literary scrutiny to boot. One of two games that I can say
any of this about (the other being Kentucky Route Zero, which
mostly didn’t leave as strong an impression on meDespite KRZ being the more impressionistic
game. Ha ha.
), and likewise one of two games I’d recommend like I’d
recommend a book.
Blaseball
Fantasy sports as horror story as “video game” as community. I wrote a whole thing about what this game meant to me.
Hollow Knight: Silksong
I don’t know if this one will stick, but Silksong felt like
it overturned my understanding of difficulty in games. It’s a very
challenging game and I actually took a multi-month break smack in the
middle of it, after reaching a new area and feeling exasperated rather
than invigorated by it. I honestly didn’t think I would come back. But I
did, after a quick detour through a Hollow Knight replay,Incidentally, this was as part of an Archipelago during a one-week virtual
Blaseball team reunion.
and with a more liberal use of walkthroughs and guides I
was able to finish it. Despite that I personally found it very
frustrating at times, I would defend Silksong’s difficulty as a
legitimate artistic choice to present a hostile and unforgiving world
uncompromisingly. It required a kind of perseverance from me that I
haven’t experienced in a game in quite a while, and it rewarded that
perseverance both through the intrinsic feeling of accomplishment and by
rewarding me with consistently beautiful and interesting new places to
explore.