Tag: Skyrim

My Top Five Video Games

Everything I’ve been writing recently has been really heavy and emotional and I need to work on something a bit lighter. Somehow though I’ve managed to pick something that still leans into the dark, gothic, and dour. Alas, what can one do? No matter, it’s nice to not write about the complicated things. In no particular order these are what come to mind when I think of my top five favorite games ever. I’ll add a bit of justification, gushing, and some criticism where necessary.

  • Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

My fascination with SotN started watching my older cousins play through it at their home, and eventually I was allowed to borrow it and play for myself. It quickly became one of my favorites. No game before had combined all of it’s elements so smoothly for me. The music is nigh perfect, the UI is spectacular, SFX are spot on, and the graphics sell the whole gothic package with gameplay that rewards exploration and experimentation. It is truly a masterpiece in my eyes. I’ve probably completed it over a dozen times across multiple platforms, and is first on my list of things I wish I could experience for the first time again. It’s biggest downfalls are that it’s incomplete and can be way too easy without self-imposed restrictions.

  • Dark Souls

I once described this as 3-Dimensional Symphony of the Night, and I stand by that. While tonally there’s a huge difference, the gameplay expectations are actually pretty similar. Explore, fight, experiment, and improve. It has one of the most interesting game worlds I’ve visited and easily one of my favorite combat systems. While the music is understated and more ambient, nothing compares to hearing the Fire Link Shrine theme, or struggling through a difficult section and hearing the burst of flame from an ignited bonfire. Whether remastered or not very little compares to Dark Souls 1, not 2, 3, Elden Ring, Sekiro, or Bloodborne. I’d include Demon’s Souls but I haven’t played enough to comment.

  • Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords

While I could’ve put KotOR 1 on this list, the gameplay opportunities and writing make this a better replay for me. Character builds are a lot more loose allowing for some weird but satisfying approaches to breaking the game in your favor. Not to mention the characters’ and their writing is just some of the best, with nuances according to player choices. One could probably write a book on Kreia’s philosophy alone.

  • Vampire – the Masquerade: Bloodlines

No other game has made me feel like I was in a different world more than VtMB. From the music and ambience to all the different characters you interact with and the different places you can go. Not to mention that the first time I finished a play through of this I was in the LA area. It certainly has it’s weakpoints particularly it’s lack of polish and bugginess but when I want to live in a dreary rain-soaked slice of southern California replete with Vampires, Ghosts, and Werewolves only one thing satisfies.

  • The Elder Scroll V: Skyrim

I considered cutting my list to just four entries or putting something else here entirely like Fallout: New Vegas but Skyrim, despite it’s action-focused-not-as-much-of-an-RPG slant, does something no other game does. Like VtMB, Skyrim takes me to another world but unlike VtMB this one isn’t gloomy and gothic, but fantastical and fun. There’s a broad palette in Skyrim including gloom but the idea of living in a fantasy world of sword & sorcery has never been so fully realized as it has in Skyrim. Like all games it has it’s issues but what it does right, it does so more than anything else.

Growing Into Games – Part Three

Indiana University Sample Gates

The year I finished high school I went on to college at Indiana University. By chance I ran into half a dozen friends/acquaintances at one of the Welcome Week events held by the university. I started out in the dorms and one of my friends whom I hadn’t seen in a few years stayed in the same dorm just in a different part of the building. My first semester roommate was a fraternity pledge, so we didn’t see each other much and eventually he moved out to be replaced someone who’d recently come from China for University. He would ask me questions about life in America, Americanisms, etc… for hours every night. Not that I minded, the building to this day is still without any form of AC so most nights were too hot to find sleep.

I had brought my Xbox 360 with me to university and aside from my laptop would be my primary source of games throughout my time in university. My freshman year was 2011 and that September I walked to the nearest Best Buy to get a copy of the newly released Dark Souls. The trip took a little more than an hour, but it was worth it. With combat not too dissimilar to Monster Hunter, an open world gated by skill, knowledge, and locked doors it quickly became one of my favorite games. It felt like the 3D Castlevania Konami had been trying to create since Symphony of the Night re-wrote the series. Just as I had tackled MH with a friend, I kept up with a friend from my hometown of Indy to share notes on DS. Being so early in its release there wasn’t much information online yet either, so it took months until we started to see the game’s bigger picture. There was another pretty important day in 2011, a Pocky Day during a year ending in ’11. Truly a momentous occasion to be remembered forever. The small number of people who bothered to play Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim might remember it also came out on 11-11-2011. All joking aside I had played ESIII as a youth and then ESIV as a high schooler, so I was pretty excited for another sequel. Skyrim would be the only game I’ve attended a midnight opening for, though I was a good kid and waited ’til after class the next day to indulge. Truly a landmark year for gaming, dragons, and dragons in games.

Eventually I’d room with a good friend my sophomore year. He wasn’t much of a gamer but pretty quickly he chugged through Mass Effect two and then even beating the third before I could. Later Street Fighter X Tekken came out and we sunk hours into it. Despite the hate it gets, SFxT did have some fun concepts. Personally, we enjoyed running through the campaign with tag-in co-op and other co-op modes. Then later that year I got myself Borderlands 2 for my birthday. Funnily enough he and have birthdays a week apart so I’m sure we spent the week staying as high as possible and playing as much as possible. Borderlands 2 is in my mind one of the last great couch co-op games released for consoles, since then the industry has moved more to online exclusive co-op.

Starting my junior year of college, I’d be living in an apartment for the first time, and I’d have to find a job to pay for it. My friend had also left for family reasons, so I’d have to find new people to share expenses with. For the job I got work as an undergraduate Teacher’s Assistant for what was essentially CompSci-101. Given the large number of students I was one of a dozen or so UA (Undergrad Assts.) while there were several graduate TA’s to help the Professor. The job involved grading homework and tests, holding office hours, and running labs on Fridays. I enjoyed it, and though I was “teaching” people only a couple years younger than me it was a good experience. The pay was just enough for me to sub-lease a room off-campus. Living off of my labor was as difficult as it was liberating. I had regular income but expenses as well. At some point during this year I was invited to an old friend’s baby shower party in another city. He and I wrestled together in high school and I hadn’t talked to him much since. There we ended getting caught up trying to play through Dark Souls II, which had just released. Given my limited budget I had told myself to wait on purchasing it, but the taste of it lingered after I went back to my home in Bloomington. It must’ve been shortly after that the semester ended. With about a week left on the lease and no classes or work, I bought DSII. This time though I went digital and downloaded it. So, for the following week I stayed holed up alone in my apartment grinding through Dark Souls II. I remember it being rather glorious.

That year and apartment would be significant in another way since I would go on to date and then marry one of my roommates. We lived with each other for about two years until she graduated and moved west to California. That same year my friend had returned from helping his family in California, so he and I went on to share an apartment. Nearly all the furniture there was secondhand/free, our kitchen had little more than ramen and potatoes usually and we both just kept our mattresses on the floor. For us though it was a paradise. No annoying roommates, we could smoke as much as we wanted, music was always playing, there was decent affordable BBQ within walking distance, and people were always stopping by to chill. It was one long relaxed party with breaks for classes and work.

Later I had stopped caring much about my degree as much and focused more on making games both through my day job and as a hobby. After I worked as a teacher’s assistant for two years I was able to work for a professor developing various games. At the same time I had been attending a local campus game dev group and had worked on several projects through them. This became my focus, even taking a break from school to focus on game development more. Finally, I’d move out to California to try and break into the game industry while finishing my degree remotely. I was able to finish my degree but after a few months of sporadic contract employment and no long-term possibilities I gave up. As a backup plan, instead of trying to program games I could just become a mainstream software engineer. Despite having planned for game making as a career since I was a young boy, my ultimate choice was an intentional Plan B. I didn’t get to spend my career making games but that’s ok.