Day 01 (June 23) - My first video game
My brother introduced me to video games so a lot of our early games were his, and I was intimidated by their apparent difficulty consequently. He had Shadowrun, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Doom in particular which would later become eternal favorites of mine. But it wasn't until I played Mega Man X2 for the SNES that I really began my life as a gamer. I was no doubt shaped and spoiled a bit by the game's hidden armor upgrades and unique blaster upgrades. To this day, equipment evolution plays a pretty big role in how well I react to a game.Day 02 (June 24) - My favorite character
Video games are not really a character medium. Like movies, they have a story to tell quickly and while they may have more time than a movie to do it, they also have to incorporate fun and fresh gameplay. A lot of that ends up being more important than character depth, although for the most part it doesn't hurt the medium. You kind of just accept that if you want growth and depth in your protagonists, you're probably going to have to read a book or watch a full season of a TV show. One character changed my mind a bit though, and he turned out to be one of my favorite characters, in one of the best gameplay experiences in my entire life.
Nathan Drake. His everyman shtick might be tired to some, but it was and is a breath of fresh air for me. I'm a bit tired of playing as a perfect badass or a perfect hero, it feels good to have a character say what you're thinking sometimes. And Drake certainly does that. He finds himself in awful situations, goes through a lot of pain and barely scrapes by, but he makes no secret of how taxing it is. Instead of grunting and putting up bravado or dignified poise like any other protagonist, Drake brings attention to how absurdly dangerous and difficult his tasks at hand actually are. More than that though, he's a good character. Where in most games I'd be skipping cutscenes, in Uncharted I was hanging on their every word. I even looked up the cutscenes on YouTube later and watched 1 & 2 like a long movie. Drake is a genuinely likable, relatable and well written character.
Day 03 (June 25) - An underrated game
A lot of gamers tend to regard the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as the best game ever. While I don't disagree that it is great, I see it as the first step to a more fleshed out Hyrule. The changes that it made to Zelda's setting and lore really made it feel like a more immersive fantasy environment. It didn't just feel like a re-imagining of a retelling of the same old Zelda, and I think that's why it resonates with a lot of people. Then came Majora's Mask, which wasn't so much a step forward in Hyrule's lore as it was a sidestep, a highly entertaining sidestep but not quite what drew me into Ocarina of Time. The game that followed was one of my favorite Gamecube titles and a truly under-appreciated game.
Wind Waker. A lot of people complained then and now that the art style was childish or lazy, which I think is kind of silly considering that Zelda has never been a mature title. I found the art style to be absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, gorgeous. It was just the change in tone that the game needed to have an edge over Ocarina of Time. Another Zelda title with an improved version of the same style just wouldn't have made the same impact on me, which is one of the reasons I didn't make it very far into Twilight Princess. It felt too much like the Zelda series was taking a small step backward by building another identical but alternate Hyrule, especially after Wind Waker succeeded so heartily in turning the franchise on its head.
More than the aesthetics though, I was captivated by the way it didn't just create an alternate Hyrule from scratch. The game creates a world in which the old Hyrule we know and love lies under the sea, and through the fantasy equivalent of evolution, many of the creatures have changed with the new world. I love that idea, because it gives the designers a chance to allude to the Hyrule we are familiar with while still building totally new lore. Still, aside from the detailed new setting, Wind Waker also had some of my favorite combat in any game of that generation, certainly of any Zelda game. While some of the bosses shared obvious mechanics with old bosses, they felt new and iconic regardless. Wind Waker is easily on par with Ocarina of Time, better in my opinion, and wildly underrated and unfairly criticized.
Day 04 (June 26) - My guilty pleasure game
I don't really get embarrassed about playing games that aren't cool. I've played (and enjoyed) The Sims 1-3, Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Harvest Moon, Rune Factory Frontier, MySims and I plan on checking out Viva Pinata. If you were to mention these games around a room full of guys who are playing Gears of War or Halo or something, they'd probably call you a giant flaming homosexual. But I really don't feel as defined by my love of certain games as I do by my love of certain movies and TV shows. There is one game however that I would define as a guilty pleasure, based mostly on the fanbase. In most games you don't have to ever meet other fans, so you don't take much notice as to how idiotic they are. In World of Warcraft, you get to know the fans, and is it ever embarrassing.
Even though Warcraft has exploded in popularity, it's becoming increasingly embarrassing to be associated with it. I've taken several 1-2 month breaks with intermittent backslides where I renewed my account for about a year now. Every time I come back though, the people seem to get dumber, more inept and more hormonally unstable. I really don't consider myself a hardcore gamer or an elitist gamer in any regard, but I swear to god, as the game gets simpler and more streamlined, the players somehow get worse. The players that do know what they're doing are often insufferable asshats with no patience for even the best novice player. It's quite possibly the worst, most embarrassing, dirty, pathetic fanbase I have ever had to listen to (neck and neck with Halo players, although most of them are capable of playing well).
If it's not obvious, I typically come back to Warcraft because I find the game to be pretty impressive. It's a massive world with 10 classes, 12 races, and 30 total player specializations. I love games that give me way too much to do. The biggest problem with Warcraft (save for its fanbase) is that it's kind of too massive. It can take a really long time to reach the level cap on one character and I end up making one of every class. After you've leveled 2 or 3 characters through 90% of the game, you start to treat the whole experience like a routine. Level here, switch at this level, do this again, never stop to read quest text, just check the map, etc. It gets to become a chore, a job even. After a while you forget whether you're having fun or you're just playing 40+ hours so that you can eventually have fun. And although if you were to ask me if I want to play it now I would adamantly and truthfully deny it, if someone cool told me they wanted to play it I'd probably renew my account in a heartbeat. It's an awful experience that I will take any excuse to jump back into.
Day 05 (June 27) - Game character I am most like or wish I was like
As I said in my bit about Nathan Drake, most video game characters are pretty one-dimensional. They're typically either perfect heroes or gruff anti-heroes, always badasses. I'm not a badass, I suppose I'd like to be a badass, but I don't usually feel too sympathetic toward perfect awesome mega heroes. I think I'll fiddle with the question a bit for the first time (and probably not the last) and answer both possible questions in one. My answer is a character that I both see (a modicum of) myself in and also wish I was more like.
Jeff "Joker" Moreau. Okay yeah, I'm reaching a bit. But it's hard, there are no characters with personalities as complex as a real person and as boring as mine. Anyway, Joker is your basic sarcastic jerk with a possible heart of gold. He mocks robots, rolls his eyes at badass aliens, and apparently enjoys watching hot women fight with psychic gravity powers. I'm not as much of an outright dick as him, but I tend to be an overly critical, sarcastic jerk in my ugly moments and witty in my best moments (I hope). Unlike me though, Joker has an exceptional amount of determination and confidence. Even though he was born with a literally crippling disability, he still followed his dreams of becoming a pilot, and basically blew everyone out of the water. He's worked hard to earn his place on board the Normandy, unlike many of the characters who just seem to will themselves to be awesome. So I'd say he's at least the most inspirational character in Mass Effect, and the only character I can think of that I'd like to be more like (aside from characters who have the magic ability to make all female characters fall in love with them for no foreseeable reason).
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