Favorite Video Games, Part 1

During the month of February, the editors over at IGN presented write ups on their favorite games. A gamer as long as I can remember, it got me thinking about my favorite games and how I'd never really quantified/categorized them in that manner. In high school, we were tasked to write about a collection of ours and I wrote about (and was mildly ridiculed for) my video game collection. But even that was more focused on what my collection of video games said about me as a person. For example, I argued that video games were, in part, responsible for my intelligence and problem solving skills as I grew up playing more on strategy games or role-playing games than first-person shooters. It has been nice to see these thoughts validated in the years since through numerous studies about the positive effects video games have on a variety of faculties.

Anyway, I've decided to tackle this on a system by system basis (and I didn't realize how many I've actually had/played until compiling this list). Below you'll find the games that stood out to me in on each system I've owned. It was hard to classify the two and a half decades of PC gaming into one chunk so I've divided it up into three: the Early Years (featuring the old school Floppy Disks), the Middle Years (CD/DVD-ROMs), and the Modern Years (Steam).



If I had to boil everything down to my favorite system, it would probably be the Playstation 3. Of the systems I've played, it has the largest library of games I could go back to time and time again (plus I could go back and purchase many of my favorite PS1 or PS2 games on the Playstation Network if I wanted to).

If I looked at what game I have spent the most money on over the years, it's probably Final Fantasy IV (American II) as I have SIX different copies of the game across the following platforms:

• SNES (Final Fantasy II)
• Playstation (Final Fantasy Chronicles)
• Game Boy Advance (Final Fantasy IV Advance)
• Nintendo DS (Final Fantasy IV)
• Wii (Final Fantasy IV: The After Years)
• Playstation Portable (Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection)

I am just a huge sucker for that game apparently.

However, if I had to pick my ONE all-time favorite game, I'd probably settle on one of its many successors: Final Fantasy VI (American III) on the Super Nintendo (or the Playstation or Gameboy Advance; this is another one I purchase on pretty much anything I can). I love the colorful cast of characters. Kefka is probably my favorite Final Fantasy villain. Aria Di Mezzo Carattere (the Opera Theme) is probably my all-time favorite piece of video game music. And I utterly love the audacity of a game in which, halfway through the story, the villain succeeds in destroying the world, forcing you regather your party in the World of Ruin for the second half of the game.

Anyway, check out my thoughts on many other games/systems below. The systems are listed in chronological order of when they were released (with computer games and mobile thrown in there based on when I remember them starting to fall in my timeline). The games within each are listed in no particular order.

Because there a lot of systems/games in my repertoire, I'm going to make this a multi-part post.  Part 1 will cover PC - the Early Years, Atari 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Part 2 will pick up with the Game Boy and move on from there for a few systems.

Kicking things off with my earliest memories, in the days before even dial-up internet connections. Back when I had to remember things like "dir" to pull up the DOS directory of what files were on the computer. The days when floppy disks were actually floppy and not the hard disk younger generations only know as the Save icon.  These were my favorite games of "The Early Years of PC."

• Math/Reader Rabbit - Definitely painting myself with the nerd brush here when the first games I'm listing were educational games. But it's a testament to my parents, who recognized early on this potential of video games. Learning reading and math with the help of an animated rabbit beat flash cards, no question.
• Wheel of Fortune - I couldn't tell you how many games I played trying to win one of the five end-game prizes. When I finally won that car, I ran screaming around the house!
• Monopoly - There was no arguing over who got to be the car in the DOS version of this game; everyone was basically just different colored dots on the board. On the plus side, playing the computer game version of this meant two things: 1. people (*cough*me*cough*) couldn't flip the board when they (I) got mad and 2. the computer was the Banker so nobody (me again) cheated and embezzled money.
• Oregon Trail - An all-time classic. My family never actually owned it but I looked forward to every computer class where I'd try and get me and my friends all the way to Oregon without anyone dying of dysentery (whatever that was six-year-old me would say)

Humblebrag Alert: This guy probably played
a small part in my 800 Math SAT score

If I knew then, what an avid gamer I'd end up becoming, I definitely would have convinced my parents not to sell our Atari 2600 for a pittance in a yard sale. It's especially weird because later in life, they became such hoarders, adding on entire rooms to the house just for storage.

• Pitfall! - Truth be told, this is the only game I really remember playing on the old Atari. But damn if those pixelated alligators didn't haunt my dreams.

I definitely don't remember any rainbows.
But hey, I was like 4 or 5.

Many of my earliest memories of my family involve us sitting around our giant Game Room television and playing our family Nintendo Entertainment System (my dad, sister, and I would take turns playing while my mom would watch). We probably didn't get one until 1989 or 1990, but both the NES and I are products of 1985, so I have always felt a connection to Nintendo and this system began my 20 years and counting relationship with the company. Save the Virtual Boy and (as of this post) the Wii U, I think I've owned every major Nintendo console or handheld. Not included below but an honorable mention: the Game Genie. Yes, it was cheating but how else were we supposed to get through Battletoads or the seaweed level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?! Game designers used to be way bigger dicks to kids and the Game Genie was sometimes the only lifeline. Plus you only got 3 codes so you couldn't cheat that much. (And I actually did beat both of those games without the Game Genie but they were still fucking hard as hell).

• Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt - anyone who has been playing video games as long as I have and doesn't have Super Mario Bros. on their list is a dirty liar. It would be a very different industry if we'd never gotten this plumber with a genocidal hatred of turtles and the inability to run too far left. And fuck whoever on Duck Hunt said "let's have the dog taunt you, but you can't shoot him."
• Super Mario Bros. 2 - while there are a lot of people who rag on this game, I enjoyed it. In part, because I didn't find out until years later that it wasn't a Mario game at the onset and just got re-skinned because he'd gotten so popular over here in the States. But I remember thinking how cool it was that each of the four characters handled so differently (though there really wasn't any beating Princess Toadstool's floating jumps). It's a shame so many characters from this entry have been forgotten by the franchise, never to return. But at least it gave us Birdo, a creature whose very existence is a lot creepier when seen through the eyes of an adult, instead of the child I was when the game came out.
• Super Mario Bros. 3 - one of my favorite Mario games, which makes sense given that the whole construct of the game is that of a play. But there's also the fact that my sister and I would play this together during our sibling rivalry years and I would use my advanced knowledge (i.e. Nintendo Power magazine) to get all the Warp Whistles and get through the game waaaaaay before her.
• Tetris - I still can't play this game for too long without losing the ability to sleep because the bricks will just continue to fall in my mind's eye. But sometimes, it's just worth it.
• Mega Man II - I'm pretty I still have Mega Man through Mega Man VI (but my Nintendo is in a box buried in my closet and I didn't feel like digging for it just for this post) but number 2 stands out to me (though I don't think I appreciated the anachronism of a robot like Wood Man until Wood Bender on Futurama 15 years later).
• Dragon Warrior IV - this was my first foray into the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games. I remember I lent my copy of Final Fantasy II on Super Nintendo to my friend Nick for his copy of this game in the 5th grade. Then he moved away over the summer and we never traded back (maybe that's why I've bought so many more copies of it over the years; regret over losing the original). Anyway: loved this game and its story structure of playing a different story/set of characters in each chapter until they all come together in the final chapter. The monotony of the merchant Taloon was oddly my favorite. I would work in his shop way longer than I needed to just to save up enough money so I could buy the rare Sword of Malice that someone would pawn off to his shop.
• A Boy and His Blob - I didn't actually own this game growing up. But my grandmother who lived in Michigan did (yep, my grandmother on my dad's side loved video games, which is pretty freakin' awesome if you ask me). Both my parent's have a lot of family in Michigan so when we were younger, we took a lot of family trips back there. And when we stayed at my grandma's house we always got to play her Nintendo and this is one of the games I remember best from those trips. Giving the blob different flavored jelly beans to get him to shapeshift and solve the puzzles was a blast. It was a hard game too so there was a huge sense of accomplishment when we figured something out. We'd all play together (one person playing, everyone else making suggestions) but I don't remember if we ever actually beat it. 
• Spot: The Video Game - this is definitely a dumb one but like A Boy and His Blob gives me fond memories of my grandmother's house. Shortly after graduating high school, my dad and I went to Michigan for a few days to help my grandmother pack up her upstairs library. She'd gotten up there in years. Her vision was mostly going and she couldn't really walk up and down the narrow, spiral staircase that connected the three levels of her home (library upstairs, bedroom/kitchen/living room on the main floor, game room/guest rooms downstairs). On that trip, she gave me her old Nintendo, so I packed that and the games up into that aforementioned box that now resides in my closet. Among the games in her collection was Spot: The Video Game, a really cheesy multi-player puzzle game starring Spot, the red dot in the 7-Up logo (who, like many ad campaigns of the 80s/90s, wore sunglasses and had a cool attitude). But I love this game because it brings back great memories of playing across three generations with my grandmother, father, and sister.

Thank you internet, for allowing me to
find weird, nostalgic gems like this.

And with that, I'm going to take a break. The next installment will start up with the Game Boy but I honestly have no idea how much I'll put into that post. I've got the list of all the games more or less selected, but I'm finding I've got a lot more to say about each selection than I anticipated.

Do you have any favorite games/memories from any of these systems you want to share? Let me know in the comments.