Post #130877
September 03, 2018, 09:15:34 PM
I have a few.
There was this one game I played when I was about 8 years old, called Captain Claw. We didn't have money for a new PC, so my mother bought over this old pentium one from her work, and it could only play games that were a good five years old at that time, and I could forget about 3D acceleration, as it did not have a dedicated GPU. It didn't even have a CD ROM and had like a 1 GB hard drive. So my favorite game at the time was this pirate game about a cat who wanted to find the key to the Amulet of Nine Lives (which happened to do exactly as the name Implied). It was this weird 2D platformer and I remember it punishing my young self if I made a mistake.
That PC of mine also had a SEGA Genesis emulator, on which Shining Force, Phantasy Star IV and Streets of Rage 2 were some of my fondest gaming memories.
Years later, when I managed to wow my parents with my grades at 13, I convinced them to buy me a PS2, and on this, SSX On Tour, Destroy All Humans and the original Killzone were some of my favourites. Tomb Raider Legend as well, but more because it became something of a Christmas tradition to rent that game every year from the 25th to the new year.
In 2010, I managed to save up enough money to buy myself a PS3, and immediately fell in love with Dragon Age Origins, Heavy Rain and God of War 3. This was when my depression really started to set in, and I felt this overwhelming sense of existential dread, making God of War 3 fit my mood perfectly. I was going through some issues with my entire family at that point, but particularly my dad, so Kratos' entire quest in that game was appealing. I also adored Assassin's Creed 2, but more because of the period it took place in and its surreal aesthetic. It was super detailed for its time, but it had this dream-like quality that reminded me of an oil-painting. I can spend hours just running around Monterrigioni, Venice and Forli even now. It was helped on by a phenomenal soundtrack by Jesper Kyd.
EDIT: Actually, the first time I experienced an Elder Scrolls game can get added to that list. I had never played one before Morrowind, and when my parents were in the worst part of their divorce proceedings, my sister and I played it obsessively to try and take our minds off it. In her case, it led to severely slipping grades, as she was going through quite a severe depression herself. Our teachers knew what was going on at home, so her Afrikaans teacher (who also happened to have been my own Afrikaans teacher and my register teacher for a good portion of my life) called me one day to tell me my sister was failing a lot of her subjects. She asked me to intervene, and intervene I did. The game was actually installed on my sister's PC, so that afternoon when we got home, I marched up to her room, gave her a severe shit-out about her slipping grades, and told her I was confiscating her PC until she could show me her grades were improving again. I told her I'd let her play over the weekends as long as she did well in school and showed me all her homework. I didn't want to take it away from her completely, because reality sucked balls at that point in our lives, so she needed some way to escape. She was furious at the time, but she now fondly remembers it as the one action that led to her getting into university and getting her degree in education. No jokes: Morrowind nearly ruined her life and saved it at the same time.