People often call me a nerd for liking video games so much. There’s also frequently that whole argument that my playing games is a waste of time and that I should devote myself to other wholesome activities.

I  disagree. I believe that games are part of the human experience. Just ask one of my English professors, who actually had a course on human beings and the influence/necessity of play, which is really what games are. I think they’re great as a form of escapism, which is what I’m really about.

And there are many that have been not only entertainment, but also as influence on the way my brain thinks and solves puzzles. I’ve been introduced to great music, and have been encouraged to imagine many things beyond what I might have been able to do alone. Or even though a book! Who says video games are a waste of time? Hah.

Anyway, I got the idea for this post from a friend who plays a lot of games and who had to write a paper about all the games he’s ever played, including make-believe games and physical games (four square, anyone?). I’ve left those out, because I was more interested in the video games part of it. So below is a fairly comprehensive list of all the video games I can remember playing along with some brief descriptions/commentary, starting from the earliest ones. I hope you enjoy it!

• Centipede - Atari. I remember watching the pixellated yellow circle peck away at the green centipede who was inevitably coming for you through the field of mushrooms.  I remember laboriously manipulating the simple joystick and never getting much farther than five or six levels in. Past those points, the mushroom field would change colors, and I always wanted to see what was next, but was rarely ever able to see them unless my dad took over playing for me.
• Dig Dug - Atari. I don’t remember much except that there were little places underground and sometimes they filled with water.
• Donkey Kong – Atari. I sucked at this game, big time. Stupid Donkey Kong and his flying barrels.
• Frogger - Atari. Even though I know it was out for the Commodore 64 (right?), we played this on Atari. I sucked at this. My frog always got squashed in traffic.
• Space Invaders – Atari. A great game, and I could get pretty far, but not when the invaders started scrolling so fast it was hard to keep up with.
• Pac Man – Atari. More than a few controllers were broken over this game and all the ghosts. And the Pac Man theme song is so classic.
• Asteroids - Atari. No real memories of this game except that I wasn’t good at it.
• Wishbringer - Atari. The very first text-based RPG made by Infocom was Wishbringer. I never finished this one. I loved it, and had most of the first part memorized and all its moves. I was always caught by the tramping boots or eaten by a grue. I never used all the wishes, and I always rescued the seahorse.  My Dad showed me how to play this one and then I was captivated. It was like reading a book, but interactive! And yes, I realize that this game was classified as an “easy” puzzle game. Maybe I’m just not that smart.
• Zork I: The Great Underground Empire - Atari. Zork was the other obsession of mine when I was very young. I would put the large floppy disk into the drive and wait for one side to boot, then flip it over and wait for the other side to load, and then spend hours in front of the bright blue screen–blue with white text–trying to navigate the maze inside Zork, trying to gather all the baubles and put them in that damned trophy case before getting killed by either the thief or the grues in the dark.  I never finished this game, not being the best problem solver ever, and I remember loving this game until my younger brothers got a hold of the Atari’s keyboard and drew all over the keys. After that, since I didn’t know home row, I quit playing.
• Super Mario Bros. – Nintendo (NES). Who doesn’t have memories of this one? My friends could play through it extremely fast, but I always died or fell into a hole.
• The Legend of Zelda - NES. I never played this one, just always watched my friend play. I’d sleep over at her house and ask if we could play this game. She’d take the controller from me. After my five minutes of playing I would already have died twice, and so she would take over and we’d get through a bunch of the game.
• Ghostbusters - NES. I remember moving the Slimer to the game we wanted in the menu but never getting far. Not too many memories of this game, except Slimer.
• Duck Hunt – NES. Who doesn’t remember this one, as well? I could shoot the ducks but not the clay plates. And sometimes when I got really upset, I’d hold the gu
• Paperboy - NES. I guess we got this game a) because it was used, and b) because my parents wanted us to play non-violent video games. Instead of getting actual paper routes where we could potentially bust out people’s windows if we threw papers hard enough, we played the game instead.
• Skate or Die 2 - NES. Mostly what I remember is the creative theme song: Skate or die! Skate or die! Skate or die, d-d-d-d-die... Sometimes if you skated and flipped in the right way, landing on the ramp itself, you could decapitate yourself. Fun times.
• Double Dragon - NES. I don’t remember this except that it was multiplayer and it was a fighting game that involved lots of punching.
• Rad Racer – NES. I don’t like racing games.
• Tiny Toon Adventures - NES. I also don’t remember this one. I do remember liking Tiny Toons on TV.
• Spy vs. Spy – Nintendo Gameboy. Oh, those devious Spies. I think in this game you could be the black or the white spy. I only ever got to the end level once, mostly because I wasn’t sure if you could save the game and resume. I wasted a lot of time playing this in the car.
• Dr. Mario – Nintendo Gameboy. Another game that my cousin had and let us borrow. Like Tetris, except with pills!
• Tetris - Nintendo Gameboy. Duh. A classic.
• Myst - Mac/PC. Myst was awesome because it had great graphics and really hard puzzles. It was eerie and quiet and I just liked walking around pressing on things in the world. It wasn’t like all those other 8-bit crappy games with the pixelly main character. The environment looked somewhat real.
• Mario Teaches Typing - Mac. Yes, I learned Home Row best from Mario. Cousin and I frequently competed on this game. I got to play it because we’d go to my aunt’s house at Christmas or Thanksgiving and take turns on the ancient Mac. Oh Mario, what didn’t I learn from you?
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter - Mac. I really sucked at this game.
• Socket - Sega Genesis. I never played this much. My cousin had it and never, ever let me play it unless it was absolutely necessary (a bathroom break, maybe. Or in our case, the lack of a bathroom break and the subsequent trouble we got into…).
• Doom - PC. Oh, Doom. The very start of my love for first-person shooters. Even though I don’t fall in love with all of them, there’s something very satisfying about shooting and killing things. I used to play this game in the dark and would freak myself out late at night.
• Descent - PC. This came along with Doom in the Windows 95 game pack. My dad broke our joystick playing this game, and I remember that he would play it late at night after we’d gone to bed, because I would get up and sit at my air vent, which was right over the computer room in the basement, and listen to the sounds of spaceships shooting one another followed by muddled cursing and sometimes even slamming as he inevitably broke another controller.
• Warcraft I – PC. Not as fun as the next one. I didn’t spend much time on this one, because the graphics weren’t as nice as Warcraft II.
• Warcraft II - PC. Man, did my brothers and I play the hell out of this game. We never went online though because our internet back then was either nonexistent or still with AOL dial-up, so games would have been spotty. How fun was it to double click on all of the creatures until they got annoyed with you? Until the sheep exploded? It was awesome. Mostly, we made our own ridiculous maps and played through them after beating the campaigns.
• Cyberia - PC. I don’t remember a lot about this game except that it was one of the first RPGs that I remember my dad also playing. But we got stuck somewhere because the puzzles were too hard for us, and then we quit playing. I do remember the save points not being very obvious, and so the frustration with the game was that you’d get pretty far without seeing a save point, die at the last second, and have to redo a bunch of stuff over and over again.
• Duke Nukem – PC. I’m not sure you can fathom my love for Duke Nukem, which surpassed that of even Doom. The first FPS game I played over and over and over again, and the first one that I downloaded extra content for. I loved everything about this–the levels, the bad guys, the guns, the strippers. Yes, I did know the cheat for throwing money at the strippers (and yes, most times I shot them too). Oh Duke Nukem… why did you disappear from my life?
• Theme Park - PC. We never got Sim City for some unknown reason, so really I only remember this game as the first Sim-type game we ever had. I enjoyed making rollercoasters, but when you had the option to test the coaster in “3d,” our computer would lock up because it was too much for the graphics to handle. Oh well. I was never good at designing a theme park that everyone liked, and more often than not my customers would be throwing up or dissatisfied, just like in real life now.
• The Sims - PC. When my dad got a laptop, we were impressed that it could run this game. How cool was it? You got to design a house and a family to live in it. They had to get jobs and earn money and everything! This game was really hard until I learned the cheat for money, and then it just became about which of us could plan the most elaborate house with the coolest things.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time - Nintendo 64. My best friends had this game, and over the course of several months they let us take turns playing this. Great music, great graphics (at the time), and great puzzles. Everything you could want in a game. We loved throwing the chickens and collecting the heart pieces and collecting the jars of stuff. Link is awesome. The best part was spending time with the people who had this game though, because we all had this one endlessly amusing thing in common.
• 1080 - N64. The same friends had this game as well, and when we were trapped at their house during the long, endless summer while our parents were at work, we’d play this in between watching Hook and Apollo 13. This game was okay. I”m not very good at games like this one, which was a snowboarding game where you had to do tricks and stuff. Meh.
• Final Fantasy VII - Playstation. We finally got a Playstation and had Final Fantasy VII. I remember I spent most nights and all weekend playing this game, trying to breed the golden chocobo. Dad used to yell at us for throwing things around the basement in frustration when we had to reset the stupid Playstation so many times. And anyone remember Cloud crossdressing? This game defined my youth and my love for most RPGs. Good music and a great story. And a piece of trivia: my favorite character is Vincent Valentine (yes, even over Cid).
• Parasite Eve – Playstation. This was the next RPG I got, and while I enjoyed this game, I’m certain my brothers didn’t care. Maybe because the protagonist was female. I don’t know. But I enjoyed this one’s story and walking around New York City, through Central Park, etc. Decent monsters. A really hard boss fight at the end. Good graphics, for Playstation. Wish I could find the final boss music for this though…
• Spyro the Dragon – Playstation. This was just a feel-good game about a collecting crystals or whatever. You’re a cute little dragon named Spyro. After a certain point, my brothers and I got stuck, so we didn’t play it anymore.
• Tekken – Playstation. For some reason, we got Tekken even though I don’t really like fighting games. I never played it that much, but they did.
• Final Fantasy VIII - Playstation. I thought the next installment in the Final Fantasy series would be good, but the story was so bad that I couldn’t continue after the first disc. Also, I never got the hang of the card games, and ultimately quit playing.
• Final Fantasy IX – Playstation. IX was better than VIII, but I quit playing after disc 2 because of school interfering. Honestly, I don’t remember much of this game.
• Grand Theft Auto 3 – ???. I don’t remember who introduced me to this or on what platform I played this, but GTA3 was the best thing ever. We played with friends and it was just utter hilarity to watch people jacking and destroying cars. It made me uber violent in real traffic though, and I remember many aggressive dreams soon after playing this.
• Morrowind – PC. A boyfriend showed me this game and then I spent hours playing it on his laptop. That was until I got my own laptop, around the time I graduated from high school. After that, I played this game endlessly, wrote stories about it, lived it, breathed it. It was so easy to get lost in and fun. Great music, good story.
• Star Wars: Battlefront – XBox?. I spent a huge amount of time playing this with friends in school, and often while others were drinking around us. I’d hike up the hill to their apartment and let myself in and sometimes even play alone, in effort to get better. No matter how hard I practiced being a sniper, though, they were always better. But I still had fun. This marked the rise of the game handle, LilMagic.
• Oblivion - PC. I got this a little while after it came out, mostly because my laptop was breaking. I customized my desktop so I was sure it could play this game, and I remember spending hours even in my dorm room playing this with the lights off and the sound turned up. This game was even more immersive than its predecessor. It had a better story and a fun physics engine, and the programmers had fixed a lot of the annoying things in Morrowind (like the lack of fast travel across the map). It was bigger and better and more beautiful. This is a top contender for where I’d want to spend my life, if I had to choose a video game to be trapped in. Just sayin’.
• The Sims 2 – PC. Of course I played this. Luckily, all Sims games are easy to get into and out of again once you realize how much of a drain on your life they are. I never seem to miss these games like I do games with actual stories.
• The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth/Rise of the Witch King - PC. How many long nights did friends and I play this game? Really, this game was all about the bonding experience with my friends. I was always dwarves because they were unstoppable in large numbers. I never played the single-player campaign either, but some nights I can say that I miss this game. It wouldn’t be the same without the guys, though.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – PC. I just like playing the Harry Potter games because I like walking around the castle
• Neverwinter Nights – PC. A BioWare studio game. A friend got this for me and we played together for a while. I never really got into the story because of how infrequently we played, and I  guess I would have felt like I was betraying him if I’d gone on and played the single player campaign. Oh well. After a while we stopped playing, and I haven’t really missed this game. Maybe because we were probably only about 20% done.
• Bioshock – PC. I watched my cousin play through this entire game while we were unemployed, and felt like this was one I could handle. There were puzzles that weren’t too complicated, but mostly it was a FPS and didn’t feel like it. I enjoy the switching and how pretty it is. Really, I only became interested because this was the first game I heard of that could use both cores of my PC. And since it creeps me out, I haven’t finished it because I make myself play in the daytime, when I won’t be so scared. Will not finish before Bioshock 2, but at least that’ll give me the opportunity to fully enjoy it.
• Fallout 3 – PC. Ah. A long-awaited game from Bethesda. I fell in love with this game from the first moment I started. People may have problems with the (lack of) story for this latest Fallout installment, but I don’t mind, since I never played the first two. Can’t miss what you never had, right? And how could I not love a game that is a) set after an apocalypse, and b) set in my home town? And even though Bethesda may hold your hand through the beginning parts of their RPGs, at least you don’t feel as overwhelmed. You feel like your character is really yours, and that the story is shaped by your own decisions. It is truly immersive and freeform, with lots to explore and unexpected happenings around every corner. Sometimes I loved this game (still do, actually) more than my own life. And I love all the different things you can do, from collecting pristine, old books, to gathering Lincoln artifacts, to the bobbleheads. And my own odd obsessions, like my teddy bear and buffout collection. I will probably keep playing this game for a while, even though other games may come out. Why? Because I love it and I don’t want to remove myself from the world it sets up. Not yet.
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Mass Effect – PC. Another BioWare studio game. Never got into this because it was too much all at once, and I got stuck in the beginning. Didn’t like the navigation (which was more limited than Fallout 3, which I had just finished playing). I hear this one is worth the getting used to though, so I’ll give it another shot sometime.
• The Sims 3 – Got this one as a gift. My biggest accomplishment as far as this game goes is that I created a household of my friends and they all live together. Last I checked though, because I began to play through another character profile, a bunch of the guy sims had moved out and bought their own houses elsewhere in the neighborhood. Those crazy kids.
• Dragon Age: Origins – PC. The third BioWare game I’ve played. This one I’m starting to get into, although I still feel overwhelmed (even 20 hours into the game) by all the lore and everything. While I don’t feel this one is as immersive as some of my other favorites, it’s becoming more fun the more comfortable I get. It’s not for the faint of heart, however; one may feel overtaken by having to learn the UI, by being thrown into this insanely huge universe, and by having to micromanage a team of up to four at a time during crazy battles. So far it’s been fun, and I’ll probably keep playing this to the end.

And that, I think, has been the total experience of my computer/console gaming experience. Not as vast as everyone thinks. And I’m definitely leaning towards RPGs as time goes on. I could care less for FPS games like Halo and that kind of thing, and I’m DEFINITELY not made for strategy games (Dragon Age is pushing the limit here…). I’ve never been interested in racing games, either, or arcade-style fighting games, or co-op games like Team Fortress or anything. Maybe you could say I don’t play well with others.

Just give me a good game where I can create a character and become completely immersed. Let me lose myself for a while whenever I play, and forget about my life.

(***May I also say that perhaps playing lots of these survival/apocalyptic/RPG games has taught me valuable skills about surviving in a desolate world? No?)

Categories : Fallout 3, games, lists, memories