System Shock 2 - The only game to have truly scared me. This was one of the first games that I played when I switched to PC gaming since my HP Pavillion at the time couldn’t play a lot of the newer games. The rest was history
Deus Ex - This game still informs much of my world view
Thief 1 and 2 - While SS2 scared me in absolute terms, Thief gave me a sense of dread and isolation coupled with amazing stealth mechanics
Skyrim - My gateway to RPGs
GTA 4 - SA was my introduction to the series and, while I enjoyed very much, 4 was just blew me away.
Planescape: Torment - The most beautifully crafted RPG ever
Fallout 2 - I’ll be honest: I only played and beat the first two Fallouts just this year but, man, do I wish I played them sooner. FO2 in particular change my relationship with the series.
Undertale. That was the game that really changed my life. I never did complete the bad ending route because that game is my comfort game, and it made me want to be friends with the world. I was kind of a jerk in middle school and highschool, but Undertale, which I played in my Junior year made me feel so guilty about who I was being. I think it also saved me from going down the rightwing extremist pipeline because of how much it touched me. I thank Undertale for making my life better.
Super Mario World (SNES) - my first video game and the reason I eventually wanted to learn about computers
Final Fantasy VIII - my parents accidentally bought this for me instead of VII that I asked for. It was not a good impact, it was during formative years of my life and I looked up to the broody/loner main character and tried to emulate him, but in real life that just made me act an asshole and be lonely
World of Warcraft - this was probably an addiction and took too much of my college life. Haven’t played an MMO since I quit. Still reminisce about it.
SimCity 4 - forced me to think about systems, which I think indirectly shaped my career path
Kerbal Space Program - made orbital mechanics intuitive and made me interested in all things space
i remember wow was addiction to people in my HS, in the mid 2000s, im glad idnt play it. also it costs money so i never had interest. STARCRAFT/red alert CNC was pretty much got me more interested in space related topics(i did not pursue the field, because i wasnt really good with physics/high level math courses)
Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?
The answer is you’re a meat robot! We’re all just chemical gradients that learned to think.
A lot of people find this really existentially problematic but I think it’s fascinating. It’s even more fascinating that the meat doesn’t like thinking about it’s meathood, and developed bits of brain meat specifically to think about souls & gods instead of reality.
Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.
In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.
Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.
There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?
Half-Life 2. It brought me into PC gaming, as well as introducing me to Garry’s Mod, a relatively simple sandbox tool for creativity, complete with a wide array of assets to use.
I also really appreciate its moody world design that doesn’t often explain things directly to you.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze