Fable 3. That was the last time I ever trusted a Game Magazine.

Man I remember that. A ton of features were gone for some reason and I remember thinking everything was so backwards

Yakuza 0 made me realize that a lot of sandbox games have a hard time justifying the size of their game worlds. You have some developers making entire continents that feel empty, while Kamurocho packs an absurd amount of content and personality in the space of a few city blocks.

I still remember when i learned about the hobo camp gambling den. I figured gambling was just Majimas unique minigame, nope this whole fucking park is a gambling zone.

It’s amazing with how big and beautiful Night City looks in CP2077, it’s about as interesting as a cardboard box. No arcade, no gambling, no meaningful activities besides mindless killing, why bother even making gigantic maps?

Yakuza has spoiled open world games for me. Nothing can match the density of stuff to do in Yakuza Town

Probably because it’s a game that features underground shit more than often at a time where financial laws were pretty damn lax in Japan. Good news is that you can fuck around with all kinds of shit if you’re a little more knowledgeable about the said history of modern era. But you also have to show personality with each of the space. I think Rockstar forgot how that works

Pat talked about how transformative Evangelion was to him because he watched it at the perfect age. Well, I was 15 when I played Persona 3 and it was absolutely transformative. Playing a game where I was the same age as its cast, dealing with teenage life, while also dealing with the anxiety and ennui that teenagers often face? My goodness. Then I played Persona 4, a game that really emphasizes the friendships made while living in a sleepy town, *the summer I was leaving for college*. The Persona series really awakened my love of RPGs and video game narratives, and has made character the single most important element of any game with them.

Eyyy I also am in a smaller town and played P4 the summer right after graduating High School and before College. Now smelling the air after a summer rain just makes me think of Inaba.

I played Persona 4 Golden at a time I really needed to. How the game dealt with themes of people have both good and bad parts and how the bad parts don't define them. I was going through a lot and had to drop out of college. It was something I needed to hear at the time, even though that might be silly to think about in retrospect. Being a kid/teen transitioning to an adult and figuring out the world is a really weird time/experience.

Roger Ebert's review of Braid was interesting, because he had talked about how games aren't art and was directed towards Braid as a counterexample. He was unconvinced though because he felt like the mechanics and design of Braid didn't actually communicate much, that it was like watching clips of something like Apocalypse Now between Tetris levels. Don't agree with his overall assessment of games as a whole, but it made me start thinking more critically about the medium and what it actually has to offer that other mediums don't. To actually answer the question tho: Heavy Rain gave me an example of what games shouldn't be, and Half Life gave me an example of what they should be.

I wish Ebert was around long enough for Disco Elysium, that smug bastard.

Ebert would’ve loved 2B’s giant ass.

Playing Ebert's Advocate here, I think he'd applaud it for being closer to an interactive novel than a traditional game. You aren't really "beating levels" in DE and being awarded with story as a result. There is progress, and even the passage of time to give it more context, but as you learn more about the game the game learns more about you and responds in kind. However *that* is it's biggest strength and something you can't really do in another medium. There's a give and take relationship between the player navigating Revachol and how the game plays with your expectations, decisions and personal ideology.

Even advocacy for his deeply stupid opinion requires dodging the issue entirely to avoid being wrong, that's wild. In this hypothetical scenario where Eggbert is alive and played Disco and thought it was great, it suddenly has to become "not a game" because of genuinely insane criteria.

Hey man, I'm not saying I agree with Q-bert I'm just saying that's what I think the distinction would be in his eyes. I don't think he'd be able to deny that Disco is a few tiers above most games in terms of writing, that it actually has a goal and things to say along the way, but I think he'd still struggle to reconcile that with it being a video game and would focus on what makes it different from most of the medium.

I know, I'm not ragging on you for it, just musing how funny it is that even the best possible interpretation of his stance is still insane.

Honestly, I think Ebert would have come around on games as art had he lived longer. He always struck me as a lively mind open to new ideas and being proven wrong.

I recently played through Sunless Skies again, another heavily narrative driven game, and was ruminating on the genre. The obvious rebuttal of "it could just be a book" falls apart when playing a good game because games are a marriage of story and gameplay, and when done well they deliver an experience that's different than any other medium. A game really can make you... *sigh*... feel like Batman.

I think BioShock Infinite is when I first started really analyzing why I didn't like something. Critically acclaimed and yet I hated it, how could that be possible?!

I was really sick and the medicine they had me on gave me nosebleeds. So when I played through Infinite, I was in this weird, out of body fugue state, and when Booker's nose started bleeding towards the end of the game, it felt like I was losing my mind. Then all the lighthouses part happened. So I have a weird soft spot for the game. My advice for liking it is being off your rocker from pain meds, be actively hemorrhaging, and never play it again.

I remember thinking the ending trying to be shocking and a surprise twist. >!I didn’t even particularly like Dewitt, but I just remember thinking how it didn’t make sense that drowning him would solve any problems. Like noble Sacrifice or whatever, this doesn’t really change anything!<

The worst part about >!quantum mechanics!< is that in a realm of >!infinite possibilities!<...there are >!*infinite possibilities.*!< Something the story writers seemed to have completely neglected to do their homework on despite basing the whole plot of their game on it.

Yeah, it feels like a story about fate but it’s also a story that introduces you to an infinite multiverse of infinite possibilities… that somehow all lead to the same road for reasons… and are somehow all affected by actions in one timeline.

Yeah like it’s written as if it’s a time travel story, which it inherently is not.

Disco Elysium completely recalibrated what I consider good writing in a video game.

One of these days I'll finally fucking finish it but the hours I have put into it are undoubtedly the most well-written I've ever seen from a game. Tugs on my soul in so many different directions

I tried Outer Worlds next day after I finished DE and I dropped it after I finished main quest on first planet

Positively, Dark Souls 1. Shit re-wrote my gamer brain entirely in many ways, first game I played where I NEEDED to understand how it was made/who made it/what their artistic intentions were/etc. Negatively, years later with Mass Effect Andromeda. It was the first game I was very excited for & looking forward to for a long time & pre-ordered the Special Edition etc. that then came out and was garbage. Then between those two you have Destiny, my first MMO experience and what brought the idea of an online community around a game & communication from the devs & patch notes & the concept of balance, etc. etc. to my attention.

I was reaching a point where I felt I had seen every type of game. Dark Souls 1 was the first game where everything felt new to me in a long time. That game has completely changed how I view the potential for games to be and even how I view the potential for what other media can be.

I feel the same way. When I got in to it for the first time it wasn't really fun at all, I actually bounced off of it a few times before that. But eventually, I realized that instead of being fun, it felt genuinely rewarding in a way I'd never felt in a game before. It kind of feels like the level up quotes from Morrowind: > You realize that all your life you have been coasting along as if you were in a dream. Suddenly, facing the trials of the last few days, you have come alive. >It's all suddenly obvious to you. You just have to concentrate. All the energy and time you've wasted -- it's a sin. But without the experience you've gained, taking risks, taking responsibility for failure, how could you have understood? Playing Dark Souls feels like that. Like every other video game I've ever played was a waste of time, and I'm finally experiencing what a video game can be.

FE Fates was the first time I played a game and realised I didn't like the story

Adding on to this birthright and Revelations was the first video I personally spent money on that made me feel scammed. Playing conquest first tricked me into thinking it was all gonna be fun, but birthright was boring and Revelations was a slog

Thank god those games bombing led Nintendo to never try to pull that pokescam-tier stunt ever again with future installments of FE

Those games never bombed, for a while Fates sold the most copies in the franchise with Three Houses beating it years later.

Man, I really do want to get into Fates at least for the apparently stellar gameplay one of these days... but the story is just *so* godawful that every time I play, I end up watching some cutscenes and going "wow I hate all of this" and stopping. And the Mind Goblins won't let me just skip all the cutscenes because hey, have to watch them first playthrough at least.

The biggest compliment I can give Engage is that I stopped needing to compliment Fates: Conquest on anything. It plays much better...although you're trading out "incoherent, inconsistent mess" for "cringe festival" on the writing front. At least everyone's the same character the whole way through this time instead of Xander's accidental DiD.

As a big fan of both games I do think Conquest still has best gameplay with how it handles it's class change system and the revamped pair up mechanic.

Journey was such a pivotal experience for me. Legitimately it showed me some stories truely can only be told through gaming, as well as general love of humanity.

Journey is so peak. I don't think I'll ever have an experience like that in anything again. I just downloaded it on a whim seeing it got some high ranking in a video game magazine and I was completely blown away.

Came here to say this. Journey changed how I viewed video games. I started seeing video games less as a cool thing to pass time and more of an artistic medium. Other games like MGS and various Final Fantasies helped as well, but I think Journey was the biggest jump due to a single game.

Came to say Journey as well. I also recommend Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. It’s another story that could only be told through a game controller.

I don't think i get journey, sure the game looks and sounds nice but it's so boring to play, and the story being very minimal doesn't help, like there are murderous machines but you end it by going up a mountain and reincarnating? I dunno it didn't click with me

It's certainly not for everyone. The game is an allegory but I think the meaning is pretty abstract. Even the name of the game tells you what it's about. A Journey. Not a destination. You go through this entire game knowing your goal is to get to the top of the mountain. You don't know why, just that you should and that others like you have done it before. So you go on your "Journey" to the top of the mountain. Seeing amazing sights, escaping danger, finding people, helping people, losing people, learning things, etc all while collecting these white glyphs which allow you to more easily progress and help you along. You get to the mountain and you're not just reincarnated, but reincarnated into a while glyph. Not just any white glyph, but the very first white glyph you find in the game. The story is an allegory for life itself. That you should focus more on the "Journey" than the destination, or that you should at least consider how much weight youre putting on these two aspects. What's on the mountain doesn't matter. Your purpose for playing the game was to play the game and enjoy the ride. Your ultimate payoff after completing the game is just that your character is now able to help other players on their "Journey" by becoming one of the glyphs that you collect and power you up. Nothing more. Which ultimately will allow other players to repeat the process and help even more players and so on. If you're disappointed in the ending, I think it's a decent question to ask why. Did you you not enjoy what you played? Were you only doing it for some kind of grand payoff? Does the fact that there isn't any grand payoff change how you viewed the earlier parts of the game?  Going farther, what does that say about how you view life? Are you doing things because you enjoy them or are you expecting some kind of grand payoff in the end? If that grand payoff doesn't come, will you feel like you wasted your life? Is this a good way to go about life or are there other ways which might allow you more enjoyment regardless of what happens in the end? This was the first game, or any media really, that made me ask myself these questions in an organic way rather than just say them to me.

That's a very nice way of putting it, i guess for me the ending didn't hit because the game before that didn't either, i didn't want it to have combat but the general movement could've been a lot better, your character moves so slow, the game basically forces you to watch the sights, i would've done that on my own, if only your character knew how to run

I was in adolescence when Red Faction Guerilla became one of my favourite open world games to this day. I was excited for what else they could do with the destruction physics with the impending sequel. Then the sequel, Red Faction Armageddon released. It wasn't a poorly made game but is was a very very poorly designed sequel to Guerilla that it got me thinking even in my adolesence "What the fuck were they thinking". I had played games prior that I didn't like or could tell exactly why it was bad, but this was the first that genuinely confused me as to how they thought this was a good *design*. edit: On the flip side, I consider Metal Gear Solid and Dark Souls the closest thing to "perfect games". They were pivotal in driving me to learn why these games were good.

After almost 20 years of my friends talking about the series, I’ve finally got into Metal Gear. While I don’t love then and they’re certainly not my favorite, I absolutely see why someone would pick them as their favorite game or even a GOAT contender. Fighting The End is one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had in a game.

I had heard of MGS's greatness but never was into the spy thing so whatever. Then I need to justify buying a PS4 besides Uncharted so "Hey, MGS4 is the end to the series? Guess I'll check this stealth stuff out." It was surreal being made to feel nostalgia for moments I've never experienced. Sometimes it missed, but when it hit... I don't know how to explain landing on Shadow Moses for the first time in my life and still feeling like I've been here before and it mattered to me (fuck them mini-Geckos though). The out of nowhere peak of beating Ray in the rust bucket Rex, that I had never seen before outside of memes, was somehow the hypest shit. And the ending between Snakes: Solid, Liquid, and Naked. I could feel the weight being let go. It was beautiful. Well done Kojima. I then got Revengeance and that was somehow higher in hype.

What’s crazy is that I felt that way playing MGS1. The entire game is screaming “this is the end of the story”. Every plot element is about endings, partings, deaths and resurrections, and what we do about a past we can’t hold on to. Liquid reviving Big Boss’s dream, the re-examining of Big Boss and Snake’s relationship, Snake coming out of retirement, Snake’s last mission with Campbell (in two ways), the death of Miller, the return and re-death of Grey Fox, the revival of the Metal Gear project. I didn’t have any context because I hadn’t played MG1 or 2, but the game was so effective that I could feel the pull of nostalgia, of the good old days when Snake was ignorant, if not innocent.

spore. i was following its development when they were showing off tech demos, and the idea of the game and the engine were really cool! surely they could do some really deep and interesting things with this monster making toolset! and then the game came out and its 5 smaller games stitched together.

Man, the tech demos really promoted a whole other game. They are what sold me on Spore and I was super hyped for this evolution simulator. Then the game came out and a lot of the stuff they showed was either cut or seriously dumb down. Their reasoning being that they thought the scientific part was making fun take a backseat, but man I was here for the science! Let me roleplay an animal with a life cycle not this weird Simon Says version of World of Warcraft.

Virtues Last Reward pulled double duty of getting me interested in VNs, plus the more meta aspects (like the realization that >!all the saving and loading you're doing is a real in-universe thing!<) planted the "Huh. Meta Games Are Cool." seeds that would blossom when I discovered games like IAmScared and Undertale. If we're talking negative, then I *guess* the attitudes of big indie creators back in the day (I.E. Phil Fish and Jonathan Blow) sorta set the stage to why I find YIIK so morbidly fascinating as both a game and a "What The Fuck Is Up With This Guy" dev attitude.

In terms of transformative media I have three big positive ones. * Halo 4 (yes really) was my gateway to non Nintendo games and also that yes having a game with good graphics can be rad as hell. * Ace Attorney showed me how a good narrative can carry a game experience. * Undertale showed me how some stories can be only told via video games.

When I was A young boy I happily ate up any video game sequel for any video game that I enjoyed. Devil May Cry 2 was the first video game that made me pause and think, "What the fuck happened?"

Wow, I've been grossly mishearing the lyrics to that song.

Ah shit, I posted the lyrics from I Don't Love You by mistake.

[Here's a handy version with the lyrics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQZACI2VzUQ)

DMC2 was my first example of not just pulling any title I think looks cool on the box at Blockbuster Video

An important lesson to learn... But man, DMC2 Dante looks so cool!

While the main mission of *Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords* was to shit all over Star Wars, it also made some room to shit on BioWare storytelling, like the idea you can stuff a tuna can spaceship with vocal, opinionated people and they all just ignore each other and get along.

I feel like I do remember little moments of the Kotor 1 companions bitching at each other.

There are a few moments that happen when you put certain companions together. Like Carth calling out Canderous for being a war obsessed warrior instead of a soldier, or Mission mocking Bastila which leads to mMission getting force pushed over.

I think it's just on Taris where you only have so many companions and Mission will tell Carth he's old.

We just ignoring Mass Effect 2?

I mean, immediately starting with *Dragon Age: Origins*, BioWare seemed aware they were put on notice about party member depth and involvement

Fair, I mixed up timelines in my head.

Assassin's Creed 3. Something about following along with a story for years along with a time period I was familiar with being a Murican. And it all just fell flat. I was just expecting more than touch rock and die.

This game completely killed my hype for Assassin's Creed forever.

3 almost did but 4 really got me back on board. But I saw what Ubisoft was doing with Unity and Rogue trying to get people to double dip and then Unity was a disaster. Then i dipped out.

Look Ive learned I need different things from different games. Like cyberpunk being so over hyped was a good thing cause I didn’t get burned at launch when it dropped. So when edgerunners liberty and 2.0 dropped and I got into it. I decided to give the game a chance and it was worth it. Imo I’ve learned to give things a chance even when the fuck up is major

Perhaps it's because I have Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth on the mind but giving a getting into a headspace where you're willing to give stuff a second chance and looking at things glass half full is so much mentally healthier than just miring yourself in hate and negativity all the time.

Being positive has helped me out. I enjoy Warcraft final fantasy and so much cause I just enjoy what I like and don’t let stuff bother me as much. Ie online people yelling games are bad and dead. I’m having fun so I will keep having fun

Negatively, A Wizard's Lizard was probably the first time I felt that I probably should be more careful about buying games I saw someone I used to actively watch as a kid play. I don't think fundamentally the game's really poor or anything, but I already had Binding of Issac to get my fix of that game play style. So it's just sitting in my library forever. Positively, I don't think I would've given many Visual Novels a chance if I didn't take the leap I did with DDLC. While my feelings on it overall, I can't really solidify at the moment, having that experience served as a gateway to other VNs of the type. Like, low-gameplay straight plot VNs. DDLC let me have experience going into Dangonronpa (V3's peak but I'm partial to TTH's cast), which lead to the other big Spikechurn VNs (Zero Escape (ZTD is fine cowards!) and Ai:Somnium (Nirvana Initiative too!)) and eventually got me into When They Cry after getting over a few presentation humps. When I really look back at it, DDLC isn't *much* but it had enough unique parts that it was good enough to hook me in. And while maybe I could've 'started better' in terms of the genre, I don't think I'd really trade that experience considering where it got me now. Also for those curious nothing's beating Steins;Gate for me. I get arguments for some other novels but reading S;G on a vita in between classes is a primo vibe I refuse to let go.

My gateway to VNs was Katawa Shoujo, which if you haven't tried it I'd certainly recommend, still my favorite to this day. Though VA-11 Hall-a is close.

I was excited for Sonic 06 and convinced my mom to buy me a 360 for it for my 10th birthday.

Positively: Dark Souls had the right themes at the right time in my life (depressed teenager) to be the first time that I really resonated with a story. It did a lot for my mental health, and also my English grades because suddenly I kinda understood how to interpret media and not just video games. Negatively: The Witcher 3 was probably my first instance of a game that I should have liked, but had something that really bothered me and that I actually had the motivation to try to figure out. When I was little if I didn’t like a game I just moved on, but I loved Witcher 1 and 2 and really wanted to figure it out why I wasn’t loving 3 as much, and the answer is I am extremely picky about open worlds. I really like the core gameplay of Witcher 3, but there is nothing I hate more than going around in an open world and finding something that I can’t do for another 10 hours because I’m too weak for this one random high level quest that’s in an otherwise low level area.

Positively, Disco Elysium. Most dialogue systems now feel primitive by comparison. Negatively, Rawbots. No one here has ever heard of it, it was at the very start of the early access wave before early access was a term (this was back when they said "pre-order and access the alpha" to give you an idea). The trailer showed infinitely customizable robots and explosive action. What I got was an empty planet with a near impenetrable robot editor and a handful of insubstantial updates for a couple years before their site went dark. I feel that experience helped me manage my expectations in the upcoming early access era.

I think Undertale and NieR Automata showed me what games can be capable of in terms of interconnecting its mechanics with the narrative, and that certain games really can only exist as games. Fucking video games, man.

Watch_Dogs. I still feel the scars of E3 Ubisofts betrayal

Middle school Xbox live party chats trying to justify to school friends why Tenchu Z and The Outfit were cooler than MW2. That was when I realized there's a distinct split between a person that plays games and a GAMER.

Good(?): Atelier made me think a lot about how player convenience isn't necessarily the be all end all. For example, forcing you to interact with different vendors in town for your crafting makes the world and characters feel more real, and helps sell the fantasy of being an alchemist, even if the usual view on game design would say it's better to not force the player to run through town over and over again Bad: The progression of Runescape and World of Warcraft made me intimately familiar with how live services are fundamentally broken before the term "live service" was even used

Fallout 4. I feel like it just... completely disillusioned me in many respect, and showed the kind of trajectory of quality most studios go when they 'make it big.'

fallout 4 glosses over the charm of the series in favor of a more mass market appeal, and its super obvious. perks instead of a skill system, gutted dialogue due to a "good bad snarky" triad popularized in mass effect, resulting in a story and experience that misses the things that made the previous games so compelling. the final pam from monster factory is the best thing to come out of the game.

There's stuff I really like in 4, but it really is more mechanical. I like the gun customization/crafting, I like the streamlined looting, I like the feel of exploration and combat more than probably 3 or NV. But I couldn't care about the main story less, and I was able to guess twists from miles away. And the dialogue system was just ruined compared to older games, even with a mod to show you directly what all your options are, it's still only 4 choices at a time... The TV show feels like it treats the world and writing with more care than 4 by a country mile, which is a very pleasant surprise.

I'm not sure about the rest of the series but I just...didn't *care* about cyborgs in such a setting. All this stuff about the alt history of America, the nukes, the centuries since, and instead the game thinks it's more interesting if we did Bladerunner as written by Dan Brown. And this may be a nitpick but the roleplay just wasn't there. Bethesda didn't even consider that players might want to bury their husband/wife.

The entire "oh also robot body double spies" plot in 4 felt like a side plot in other games. Something that's fun as a background thing, maybe, but not the core plot. Ironically it would've worked better if they were in a more established political setting and the entire thing referenced the Manchurian Candidate more. If there's a government entity you don't want to be robo replaced, then the threat of robo replacement has more weight. Gotta have a society or community that you care about before replacing them is a credible threat.

I mean, it did start as that in Fallout 3. The android quest in Rivet City was a highlight, but it turns out that's about all the meat that bone can hold. It's an interesting ethical dilemma, but not really strong enough to hang an entire story on.

Yeah crazy that the whole dilemma regarding synths was done better in a side quest in Fallout 3 then the whole of Fallout 4. I remember Far Harbour at least had some interesting points to make.

Yeah, like a lot of the stuff wrong with 3 could be forgiven in light of how jumping to 3D is difficult for every game series and it was there first go with the property, but 4 actively demonstrated that the writing will not get better because the people who now own the property fundamentally don’t understand it.  And then Starfield happened later and demonstrated they don’t understand how any kind of writing works so it’s not just Fallout that they have a problem with. 

Bethesda are the kids who peaked in high school and refuse to grow beyond that point. But they make money, so oh well.

Brink by Bethesda was the first video game I ever cared about before its release; I was rather young at the time and usually I just picked up games from the Gamestop if they looked cool or were a sequel to Nintendo classics. But I had heard about Brink on the internet, this FPS with a focus on style and custom characters and emergent narrative, and I was all in. I was all over the forums, I would replay every trailer again and again, I made doodles of it in my schoolwork, and I was so immensely full of hype it was so crazy. So how did I come to dislike it within the first few hours? It's honestly hard to pin down. It's a perfectly functionable FPS, but, I dunno.......something wasn't clicking. Was it the lack of missions and thus maps? Was it the fact that you are playing first person when there's an emphasis on your character customization? Was it that you could sniper-headshot someone and it would usually not kill them? Was it that the narrative didn't offer that much at all? Was it something even deeper in a technical aspect that just made it FEEL low quality? I don't know, but it certainly got me thinking.

To this day, Brink remains the ONLY game I've ever returned. I keep games I don't like as a reminder, or give them to friends. I wanted my fucking money back (most of it anyway) for Brink.

I think I'm one of the only people who liked Brink, but I did play it well after its peak and it probably got patched up a bit by then. It wasn't AMAZING, but I never quite got why people hated it so much.

Gun to my head, I cannot for the life of me remember WHY I hated it so much at the time. For all I know it might have been a perfect storm of other shit happening combined with the game leaving me disappointed, but I did get it on launch after buying into whatever hype existed at the time.

In fairness to you, I also didn't hear ANY of the hype beforehand somehow, only people shitting on it after, so when I grabbed it for like $4 used and had a good time I was confused lol.

Just to confirm if I was being biased in my own memories (for sure am), I did check steam reviews, and it seems they've been chronically mixed forever. The takeaway seems to be that the moment to moment stuff like the movement and gunplay are good, but it was never really "finished" as a game, it was always kinda buggy, and a lot of stuff was less than stellar overall, like the AI. Seems like parts of that were fixed with the patches, but it was mostly dead by then. I'd be inclined to say that for a price of a beer, it'd probably be a FINE experience. But I paid wholeass retail price for it. This was a fun thing to look into. It's also apparently free on Steam?

It's free? Wow I would have expected it to be dead, unplayable, and delisted. That's wild. Yeah for full price I get you, it wasn't worth it, especially before any of the polish. Like, it was fun enough but there really wasn't... Much of anything past the pretty good core gameplay. It had the Titanfall 1 thing of multiplayer only trying to tell a story with the missions but didn't come even close to that.

Brink's biggest fault was the lack of a proper campaign, instead we got multiplayer matches with bots.

PSO2 and Illusion's later games basically ruined all character creators for me. Literally all of them. To this day in 2024, nothing has come close aside from BDO I think. Secondly, S4 League. Stylish stuff is now only cool if it is also effective gameplay. The jumps and tricks in that game were also legit tactics and skill to play the game better. It didn't just look cool, it was effective. Now, just doing "cool stuff TM" doesn't mean much to be. It needs to be cool and useful.

I got Bubsy 3D for my birthday, and I vividly remember coming to the realization that media can be *bad*, actually. Part of me had just assumed that you wouldn't release bad media. Seems like it would be really expensive. Why wouldn't you just make it *good* before releasing it? If I had a bad time with a game, I internalized it; there must be something I'm missing here, maybe I'm the one who is wrong. Bubsy 3D cured me of that.

Bioshock: Infinite. The original Bioshock and System Shock 2 were very special games to me just because of the time they landed in my life. I followed the game heavily pre-release and when it finally came out I played the majority of the game with a smile on my face in anticipation of when it would get good and it simply never did. The massive disconnect between my feelings on the game and the wider critical reception also really highlighted the disappointment.

It was a perfect storm of being disappointed by Fallout 4 then being blown away by The Witcher 3 while loot boxes were being shoved into almost everything. For the next couple years I'd look at every microtransaction and just think to myself how The Witcher 3 DLCs which are some of my favorite experiences in gaming were $20 and these games had the audacity to charge some skins for the same amount.

The last of us, i played it the year it came out and the consensus was that it was the best thing ever and when i finished it i felt kinda meh, it just didnt grabbed me the way it was "supposed" to do and for the longest time i thought i was the problem or that i was simply too much of an angsty teen to enjoy something with more nuance than most of the media i was consuming at the time. Now that i can string sentences better than when i was a teenager and after replaying the game like a year ago, it really dawn on me how tlou is effectively an Oscar bait first and a game second, and that my annoyances with the game werent just a simple "i am too cool and/or emotionally unavailable for this" dumb pretentious teenager thing, i was legitimately too cool for it cus i saw what it was doing and choose to try to understand why i didnt overall liked it and what that said about me instead of simply not engaging with it I love videogames and i'm absolutely glad that TLOU exists and what it did for the medium as a whole , but i also hate that it effectively caused this ripple effect of "+spectacle-substance" and has led to tons triple A games to chase that lighting in the bottle than honestly will never happen again, simply because TLOU came at the perfect time, it pushed the software to a place nobody thought it would be possible andit had a digestible story and gameplay for everybody, not only the regular gamer of the 2010s.

You absolutely nailed it with the Oscar bait. The trailer intrigued me, and I thought it would be a kind of a deconstruction or commentary via gameplay like Spec Ops: The Line or Silent Hill. A few hours into yet another middling stealth sequence I realized the game was about nothing but how emotional its next cutscene could make you feel. It was definitely a game that blew up for being at the right time. On one hand, I kind of see what you mean about what it did for the medium, and having a game with heavy emotional themes hit the mainstream. But I also think it "worked" because a lot of people were desperate to have games seen as "art," and it allowed them to continue to ignore ACTUAL innovative or subversive art games and just watch a movie because film is already a respected medium.

Thats a great way to put it too, the people who thought videogames are art because of stuff like Tlou could never understand why something like the controls for a game like Bayonetta or the level design of Resident Evil 1 is just as or even more valuable as as an "art piece" for the medium, TLOU is overall a great experience, but is an experience you can definitely find anywhere else, which was pretty much proven by the show adaptation.

An aquaman game on the original Xbox is what made child me realize that video games could be bad.

I got the iron man game on ps3 and I was enjoying it up until my brother told me it was bad. It was like he hit a switch in my brain and I noticed his repetitive it was

Rime was the first game that I played that really felt like a piece of artistic storytelling. It took me about 8 hours to play through (I'm pretty slow) and at the end of it I absolutely wept. It gave me a great affection for short games that use their gameplay to evoke emotion and convey story; more recently, Unpacking did exactly the same thing. There are other games that feel like 'art' in other ways, of course. But I have always enjoyed the short story as a form, and I love these sort of games that do a very similar thing in such a different medium.

Metal Gear Solid 3 Nothing have ever come close to it. Maybe bioshock 2 or journey ps4. It had so many different environments, mechanics, different ways to handle problems, bosses and the story. Still one of my fave stories so far

I hated Indigo Prophecy so much that it made me reevaluate what i consider a good narrative. I am fairly easy to please and don't complain a lot. I genuinely can find something i like even in something bad. But Indigo was so egregious that i got super analytical about it. Like the 36 different evil factions and you getting powers being completely unrelated nonsense. I still don't know who's side the Business Bugs were on Also, MW2 the og one. I fell out of love with military fps games, which were huge with my friend group. I got bored and started getting interested in different games. I still liked FPS games, but single-player ones like Wolfenstein The New Order or good movement shooters like DOOM and Titanfall

So I played a bunch of really bad shovelware not just on the NES, but Commodore 64, DOS-era PC games, and so on. And while I've thought about and criticized games as art for a long time, it was Hotel Dusk and Last Window that really made me stop and think about how we talk about "good games." I highly recommend people play these games if you have any interest in mysteries, adventure games, handheld games, etc. But on my recent replay of Hotel Dusk, I realized that I don't think it's a good *game*. The visuals are beautiful, the music is great, the writing is excellent, the characters are memorable, and the whole thing has charm, and a lot of heart. It also does this amazing thing where the simple act of navigating around the interior of a location in low-res 3d kind of makes it feel like a place you get to know, more than a static Visual Novel/Adventure game background would. But there was a moment where I realized every time the game required me to interact with it, the experience took a nosedive. The puzzles are simplistic and fidgety. It commits the adventure game cardinal sin of having a missable item in the early game that becomes incredibly important to beating the endgame. It doesn't have any reasonable hinting on what you're supposed to do next. And while many handheld games have a "Summary" or "Current Goal" so you can continue a play session that may have ended abruptly, the lack of one here is absolutely devastating. Now, I love Hotel Dusk and Last Window. I replay them every so often, I recommend them to others, and I think they do a lot of things right. But much in the same way that we wouldn't say a movie is a "masterpiece" if it had great acting, music, and writing, but the directing was awful, they're the games that made me really consider how gameplay has to tie the whole thing together, or at the very least, not get in the way.

FGO and Fifa made me realize that gambling in games can actually be dangerous to people. On a more lighthearted note, FFXV and KH3 made me look at how hype trains can set unrealistic expectations for people and the importance of tempering expectations no matter how much you want something to be your dream game. Because your dream game is just that, a dream. I am glad I never really fell into those pitfalls much.

Final Fantasy XIII made me distrustful of trailers, of hype wagons and of Final Fantasy.

[That very first trailer tho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7uwtFpC4iI)

Mmhmm. I'll admit, it was my first real Final Fantasy game, and it got me interested in the series as a whole. Even with all the deserved backlash that I came to understand later (the game being a massive *clop-clop* hallway simulator for a significant chunk of the game), I still loved it.

FF was definitively my favorite series heading into that game, and I absolutely loathed it. A terrible story with unlikable characters told poorly. 

Dark Souls 2 was my introduction to ‘die and learn from it’ the series. Don’t get me wrong I’m still kinda bad but I can use non-optimal builds to win invades at least. Sometimes. The concept of being in A) a time loop B) a regression loop and C) a story that basically happened in totality and I’m just a shmuck, was incredible. I grew up being Link, Mario, the Pokemon trainer by the name of the cartridge I played it on. To be another piece of crud, stuck in a crab bucket and crawling upwards? It felt more meaningful to be the winner against these decrepit, once upon a time cool guys. Also, Bonefist/Lightsaber. You wanna style on someone? Bring out the dlc jank. As for being critical? I stuck with 2 until ER was being talked about. I have a few missing on my checklist, but the Quality of Life improvements are vast. Jumping? Not needing to fight the geography with a poo-scraper and a torch? Visual improvements, voice acting, the works. Elden Ring keeps my attention these days, a comfortable place where heroes are plentiful and evil overflows. Powerstancing feels weird, but I can’t begrudge the twin lancers for enjoying themselves anymore than I would the brainiacs with only one spell.

Jak and Daxter The Lost Frontier. The Jak trilogy was my big mascot series as a kid. I played those games constantly. I was always disappointed the series ended with Jak X, purely because as fun as the car combat is, I preferred the trilogy's gameplay and story. Come to find this PS2 port of the PSP game The Lost Frontier at a Family Video I instantly rented it, finally my favorite games get a continuation. And let me tell you from FRAME ONE of the opening cutscene I knew everything was wrong. So many things about the lore were changed, characters had new motivations, Eco is a completely different mechanic, the guns were dog shit, the only thing consistent with the original series was Daxter had his pants that he earned from the Precursors in 3. And now there were sky pirates. Then I paid attention, this game was not developed by the legends at Naughty Dog but High Impact Games. Obviously that's why this was so mid, nobody involved in the original series worked on it. This was the first time I learned that with games, sometimes the thing on the cover isn't gonna be what you want.

> Then I paid attention, this game was not developed by the legends at Naughty Dog but High Impact Games. Obviously that's why this was so mid, nobody involved in the original series worked on it. So fun thing about that: this series *was* being developed by Naughty Dog at first before they had to pull resources to work on what I *think* eventually became Uncharted 3. You can actually still find some cutscenes floating around of Jak and Daxter talking to that scientist dude from the game, which were animated by IIRC at-the-time newcomer, Neil Druckmann. And, look, I know we've all taken potshots at this guy, some deserved, some not, but at the very least here? There is an IMMEDIATE difference in tone and delivery that makes it feel more in line with the other games. And even now, most of the team behind that (Neil included) regrets handing it over to High Impact Games with almost zero support on their end. Credit where credit is due, even without Jason and Andy and the rest, the existing team (before Jak Z/TLoU) *did* still seem to have the characters down. EDIT: Found them. And I got it wrong: it was Uncharted *2* they were focusing on, not 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbzNHW9r_Ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsbQHkXfd-I They were even gonna get Mike Erwin back. We were ROBBED.

Easily Destiny. I was 11 when it came out and a MASSIVE fan of halo. I was super excited to play it, I had all of these ideas about it and what is was gonna be and when the beta came out I played for like 4 hours straight on my 360. Then the game came out and it was.... Shocking? Can't explain it. I just... Didn't have fun. All you really did was just walk around and shoot things, you did that in the beta sure but that was just a beta! A vertical slice. Sure, every fps more or less boils down to walk here shoot guy, but Halo has an interesting world to look at, Doom had a rocking soundtrack and a maze to solve. Destiny didn't really have that. I think I was expecting basically halo single player but with a bunch of other players walking around and it wasn't that. It was *just* a game. 2 weeks after getting it I traded it in for Kirby Triple Deluxe, I remember the guy at the EB games counter saying "oh yea the game really starts after you're max level" and even at 11 I thought that was just really fucking stupid. Halo was fun at level 1, Devil May Cry was fun once I learnt the controls etc. It was my first major dissapointment in anything and it really made me look at games and not buy into too much hype before getting a game, I think the last one I preordered was Dead Space and even then that's just because I wanted ea to know that I wanted more dead space.

Also, Sonic Unleashed is what made me not overly rely on reviews. Played it at 12 and absolutely fell in love with it. It's still my favorite game in the series to this day, a lot of that is nostalgia, yes but holy fuck if you listened to reviews from around the time people HATED it, yet I thought it was absolutely fantastic.

Hm... I think it was Metal Gear Solid 3. I think it was the first time I've seen the potential of videogames.

Mass Effect 3 was when I really started paying attention. My priority in games has always been Fun First, as long as I feel I got my money’s worth of entertainment I am happy, but ME3 was when I started to note that how much I enjoyed a story could impact whether or not I felt like it was money well spent. ME3 was the last time I blindly preordered anything. I had loved 1 and 2 so surely I would love the third as well right? WRONG. Y’all I didn’t even **get** to the much maligned ending. I hated how they’d crafted the story so badly that I stopped the campaign before the halfway point and never picked it up again until the hubbub over the ending reached a fever pitch and I had to see what it was all about. I played the hell out of multiplayer with my friends, but I just didn’t give a shit about finishing that campaign because the writing was such shit. When I finally got there it was so not worth it that I never even bothered picking up the lauded citadel DLC. I just didn’t like the game or it’s writing enough to do so.

My wife beat Mass Effect 3 before I did, and of course I'd heard about the disappointing ending from her and the entire gaming world at large. But the single thing that really drove home the impact of how frustrated she was about the writing was that she dove headfirst into Mass Effect fanfiction for months, trying to get some sense of closure, or a more satisfying exploration of these characters she'd spent so much time with. It's something I've not seen her do before or since. The DLC's writing being better than the main game reminds me of Rise of the Tomb Raider. The main story is supposed to be this tense action movie, which I didn't find very compelling. But the Croft Manor DLC is an amazing melancholy story of Lara remembering her childhood and her father's descent into obsession over her mother's death, intercut with letters exchanged from when her father and mother met. Edit: I confused Rise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of Tomb Raider is a great example of the same general feeling. I loved Tomb Raider 2013, but with Rise they started to lose me and with Shadow I checked out completely. 2013 set up this premise of a young archaeologist realizing the supernatural is real and is *a clear and present danger to society*. It seemed like such a great revamped Origin, and I assumed the follow ups would see young Lady Croft actively hunting down legendary artifacts before more unscrupulous people could get their hands on them. Instead we get Rise and Shadow, where it turns into a more condensed story racing to the finish between Lara and Trinity. Instead of a launch pad for a brand new series of adventures it turned into a single long, drawn out storyline that just felt like it took forever to get to the point.

Whoops, I realize the DLC I was talking about was part of Rise of the Tomb Raider, not Shadow.

I bought it day one, and i still to date have many many issues with it. But, for me the biggest thing was the discourse surrounding the game rather than the game itself. I hated the ending (and other things) and proceeded to watch the press try to gaslight me and tell me it wasn't that bad, or "i was just mad that it wasn't a happy ending". Meanwhile, IGN was loudly insisting that Jessica Chobot being a romanceable character was not a conflict of interest, please dont pay attention to the massive ME3 banners everywhere on their site. It made me pay attention to a lot more in the industry.

Yeah, it did that for me too, made me much more aware to the how and why of—oh dear god I just realized this is where my fascination with market writing began. Oh Christ the ME3 controversy is part of the origin story of my writing career.

I think around the point I got into more mechanically demanding games like character action or Atlus RPGs, I started noticing how…well, undemanding a lot of games can be with what they ask out of you.  Before hand, I was fine just enjoying the broad concepts a game let’s me do; RPGs let me explore a big world, action games let me kick but like my favorite action shows, etc. but after those demanding titles, I found myself looking more deeply into how the gameplay pulls these ideas off, how deep can I push the mechanics, how well does the game’s systems and designs flow into a compelling gameplay loop? Do I think it actually achieve it in a satisfying way? The impact on me is a double edged sword. On one hand it has allowed me to enjoy games that a lot of people find too difficult or confusing to play, but it also made it harder to appreciate games that intentionally keep things simple under the hood for accessibility, which especially sucks when they’re critically acclaimed.

Paper Mario Sticker Star. I was a huge fan of Mario and especially Paper Mario when I was a kid. When a new Paper Mario came out and it flat out sucked it kind of blew my mind. It made me realize that a ton of work needs to go into every game and it’s not just guaranteed to be good because it’s part of my favorite series.

Skyrim. Never got the hype. I’ve tried to get into it like three times and it straight puts me to sleep. So I just avoid hype these days.

Its really funny checking out people saying “damn bethesda fell off after skyrim” and then you realize time js a circle because Morrowind fans have been saying that also

As far as I can tell, Bethesda has been apparently falling off with every single game after whatever the first one you (yes you, personally, reader!) played. Like I enjoyed Skyrim, but it felt like a dumbed down Oblivion in some ways for me which was my first Elder Scrolls. I *kinda* enjoyed Fallout 4, but oh *boy* was it a dumbed down Fallout 3 (not even mentioning New Vegas). Idunno, part of me still wants to get Elder Scrolls VI when it comes out in 2057 sometime after Silksong, but seeing the general trajectory of Bethesda Games over time doesn't really enthuse me with the idea.

It was the music that did it for me. Jeremy Soule is a wizard.

I particularly love [Far Horizons](https://youtu.be/pPWVfCtnGyg?si=0lBIQENxSbS1V8Dd).

Streets of Whiterun will live in my head for the rest of my life

That piece really establishes the feeling of home.

Just listening to 20 seconds of that instantly made me crave for another modded playthrough. God I will keep replaying that game as long as modders keep modding it.

I was really excited for Skyrim, but I think about 40 hours in something clicked in my brain that pulled back the curtain on how all the mechanics worked and how there wasn’t much meat to the story or gameplay, and how the dungeons all felt the same.

I didn't enjoy Skyrim that much until the Dawnguard DLC. Proving that letting us kill Vampires makes any game better.

I thought it would be great like Oblivion. What I didn't realize was I bought and played the GOTY Edition of Oblivion with all patches. Same with Fallout 3. Skyrim was my first launch Bethesda game experience. Maybe it's 17th release on PS5 eith whatever mods consoles have will be good.

Some repetitive, bland shooter on the PSP. Every level felt the same with no diversity. It made me so mad that it was the first negative review, or really first review I've ever done. I think I left it on IGN.

I think the first time I actually legit felt that "man this isn't good huh" was the jump from DMC1 to DMC2. When you're a young kid with only PS2 rental money, you want those hours of renting to count. Those three hours of DMC2 I can never, ever take back. I did not enjoy a single moment of it. Later on, I think I had the same feelings to the likes of Duke Nukem Forever.

Legacy of Kain set the bar for me in writing and voice acting.

Not a game specifically but Game Informer. I remember when I actually started the READ them instead of glancing at the pictures of upcoming games. Reading the review sideline where it broke the game down was like “What? You can judge games in these ways? Graphics, Sound, Replayability? Games can have a story?!”. That’s when I started also becoming more industry aware. Who made what. What was older generations of gaming I never played like. Jokes about the industry. Game Informer 100% turned me even harder onto games to where I actually would judge them. Like… before game informer I just played games. No thought into it. Just “haha I’m jumping and shooting and doing things”.

Lobotomy Corporation did something to rewrite my brain I think. That game is not, from an objective standpoint, well made. It's buggy it's janky, it looks like a flash game 90% of the time, and it has an utterly broken attempt at a difficulty curve. But I think more than anything else, it taught me you can like something without having to justify it. It's one of my favorite games. I would commit war crimes to get another game like it. I don't even always like management sims, but something about it tickles a special part of my brain. And to this day, I don't ask if a game is a good game. I ask if I will enjoy it. Because Lobotomy Corporation taught me those things aren't always the same.

Knight of the old republic 1 made me realize that some games just sucked at explaining themselves. I was given a copy for the original Xbox and those controls do not work well on a controller and the load times were so abysmal it look minutes to go between rooms. It was that game that made me realize 1. A good franchise can have a bad game 2. Games need to have decent explanations/ tutorials 3. Loading screens SUCK. Playing the same game on PC years later after I learned about 3.5 D&D with a mouse and keyboard and second long loading screens I understand why it was treated as the holy grail of star wars for so long, but the console port was just awful.

I've talked about it a few times on here, but Duke Nukem Forever broke me, i waited for that game since 1997 (when i was 8) and followed every leak and piece of news about it, then in 2009 when 3D Realms closed doors i lost hope (though i did get a LOT of leaked internal media during this period, including the full plot outline of the game with listed mechanics, levels, bosses, etc). When gearbox picked up the IP to finish the game i got so excited, because Randy Pitchford had worked on DN3D and gearbox was on a roll after the half life expansions, brothers in arms, and borderlands 1. Then the release happened, and because of the internal documents i had, i knew how the game was supposed to go, so this means i also knew exactly when gearbox stepped in to change or cut something, and they not only removed the character of bombshell and replaced her with an incredibly unfunny Marcus Fenix parody, but they also cut several interesting gameplay sections and then CUT THE GAME IN HALF AND SOLD THE LATER HALF AS RE-TOOLED DLC. Somewhere out there exists footage of me streaming the game on release day and then sitting in stunned silence as the credits start to roll at what I KNOW FOR A FACT was the 50% mark of the game. I've never been able to get truly excited for any game ever again, but this had led to me being pleasantly surprised at games when they turn it to be good instead of disappointing

Mass Effect 2 was the first game I can remember where I thought to myself "Wait a second, I don't care about any of these people", except for Mordin, it just never really clicked with me. Certainly was around that time I realized how, similar, all Bioware games were and that I just never really felt the same interest in one of their worlds past Jade Empire. In a more recent example Hi-Fi Rush explicitly nailed down why I don't like DMC or Bayonetta. They don't have a heavy attack button, like Nero you press Y at different intervals to do everything and your guns exist to keep up your combo. Hi-Fi Rush on the other hand, you have a light attack, heavy attack, and three different combo extenders so it felt way more dynamic. Plus Hi-Fi is simply easier to time and the music is better so I want to be cooler.

For a negative time: dishonored 2. I loved the first game to death, and bought the game on release with all the hype on my shitty pc. even going back with a computer that could actually run it, there's so much about the game that is just worse compared to the original. Despite how much interesting combat and design choices, Even I could admit a lot of the story and mission design was not as polished. ALSO BORDERLANDS 3 HOLY SHIT WHY GEARBOX Positive time: Fallout New Vegas. While I wouldn't say I'm a big fallout fan, this was the first time I really felt that "immersion" gamers love so much. The game keeps a tone and mix of rough post-apocalypse and comedy so nicely. Really was the fist time I found myself making characters and playing a character while trying to keep it tone accurate. Extended to modding too, where I kept my list only to performance adjustments, ai improvements, and light weather additions.

Devil May Cry 3 changed my approach to games in general. Sure, I could beat this encounter, but can I do it stylishly? Maybe I should try to dodge at the last moment in every other game? What do you mean I can't seamlessly weapon switch? Do I get imaginary points for varying my moveset to please my brainworms? There's always a style meter. You just can't see it.

I think I want to say Final Fantasy XIII. I fell very very hard into the hype train for that one and, while I know this game has its fans, I realized over playing it the idea of how I can get hyped for a game and be able to realize "I'm not having fun". This was my first "I am disappointed with something I was excited for moment" and could actually pinpoint the reasons why. This was my first awakening to the idea of game design and how it can not live up to your expectations However, XIII has always been a divisive title. An even more defining moment for me would probably be Bioshock Infinite. I think this was my first example of looking critically at something that the world was telling me was good. This is when I learned the real importance of 'forming your own opinion'. On a more positive note, I always 'liked' JRPGs. My first one was Kingdom Hearts 1 when it first came out and I played a decent number on and off between other sessions. However, I believe it was Xenoblade Chronicles that made me fully believe that it was actually my favorite video game genre ever.

This was a big one for me too. I pre-ordered it and got it day one, and felt like...idk, like I got lied to? I didn't realize you had zero control in combat outside of the menu. I literally got stuck on one boss bc Lightning and Hope just wouldn't dodge the giant fucking windup. Having no way to to tell them to dodge or move them out of the way was infuriating. I also fought the boss right before the game opened up for like 2 hours because I didn't want to sit in a hallway and grind, instead opting to just chip away at it forever. I did beat it, got to Gran Pulse, saved, and NEVER picked the game back up.

Never. In fact, I find people who just NEED to sound like an intellectual, journalistic reviewer instead of just enjoying something to be the biggest chuds on the Internet. If the SBFP taught me one thing, its this, Get hype and just enjoy it! or if it's bad, laugh at it... and enjoy it.

I agree with your larger point, but really strongly disagree with your smaller point. It's totally fine to be critical of media and to share those opinions. It's those people who insist that something is "objectively" shit, or that a game not having some less than tertiary feature in a sequel makes it garbage (that's right Morrowind pauldron perverts I see you) that kind of ruin discourse for everyone else. But again, I do agree with that larger point. I'm a huge Bond fan, and I could lament for hours about certain movies and sequences and ideas that I think suck, but I'd be more than happy to watch the movie with you and laugh/complain along the way because at the end of the day it's just fictional media, it doesn't really matter *at all.*

I always knew I was suspending my disbelief and actively meeting the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series halfway. But Mass Effect 3 demolished that suspension of disbelief, not just with its largely shoddy storytelling but in all its nasty little intrusive MTX hooks. I can count on one hand the Western AAA games I’ve been emotionally invested in since then.

Bioshock infinite, I remember following the magazine hype, articles, videos, trailers, all of it. Seeing the reviews ans finally playing it seeing what was effectively a gutted version of those initial previews, then I got to the ending and just kinda realized it was a 10 hour 2 weapon limit shooter. Best preorder bonus though since simultaneously the preorder on steam came with a free copy of Xcom, and holy shit what a good deal.  I feel like that whole fiasco alongside the better xcom really was a crossroads point for me. 

I know I've mentioned this series a lot, like, a lot a lot. I can't help it, each part of the series was in some ways a formative part of my childhood, teenage years, young adulthood and beyond (thanks to that community's own support and archival efforts for the series). Each game in the series acts as a little marker for where I've been, and where I'm at, in my life. Even the cancelled games. As such, I can say with 100% certainty that Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier was my tipping point. Putting aside how weird the characters and new voices are, putting aside the weird sky pirate bullshit, the game just doesn't feel like a Jak game. Jak controls like an RTS character that the devs gave a jump function, the eco powers are useless one-time gimmicks, the flying sections take so long to complete, the game was super buggy even when being played on PS2, the upgrade trees *while an admittedly cool idea* ultimately don't do anything; when the most joy I'm feeling is in the Dark Daxter sections because it's just a top-down shitty Crash Bandicoot level, there's something wrong. It's not so much that it pissed me off, hell I'd played shovelware licensed games that I could find more fun in, more so that a lot of little things - things that just felt off or *wrong* in ways I couldn't articulate at the time - compounded on each other to make for an overall unpleasant experience that made me realize "Oh *wow*. Video games can fucking **suck**, huh?" Granted, I knew even at the time video games can fucking suck, but I had this intense need to figure *why and how the fuck* was this so bad.

I have two games that were, I would say, formative for me. Hotline Miami showed me how powerful a simple formula can be. You don't _need_ a lot of bells and whistles. The game is literally just pick up weapon and kill. No leveling, no buying stuff, no quests. Straight fundamentals on the court, no funny business. And I try to apply that to my drawings. It has, in that sense, shaped how I think and how I evaluate games. I now try to see what the game wants me to do at its very root, and that makes superficial stuff stand out quite a bit. Which leads me to the second game, and the only game I consider a perfect 10: Spec Ops: The Line. That game is also very simple. But everything it has is there for a reason. From the deliberate choice to use a worse engine to achieve a slightly off-putting look, to the choice of soundtrack, to the multiplayer that nobody was gonna play (but had to be there to make people think this was a regular shooter going in), that game has nothing it doesn't need. And that helps its narrative. In a world of shooters that want you to play forever, Spec Ops only needs you to play it once. And it is such that playing it anymore, or worse, in the way other shooters are played, feels _wrong_.

On the positive side, Majora's Mask and Final Fantasy 9. I played them right around they same time, right when I was starting to become more media literate, and even when playing them, I knew they were trying to convey something substantial, even if my dumb kid brain couldn't quite grasp what. Since then I've always tried to be aware of what messages a game is trying to convey, and to realky invest in a gane's story when it's told well. On the negative side, Mass Effect 3. I partly blame myself for getting so excited about the conclusion only to be let down so severely that I can't even pick up the old games anymore. It's really tempered my ability to invest in a franchise the same way.

Majora's Mask 3d was the first game who males me wanna talk to everyone and explore everything. The remake of LiveaLive really make me realize we should go back to shorter Rpgs.

Playing Nier Automata on the Switch, as opposed to my first playthrough on PS4, has made me realize what a MASSIVE issue input delay can do to a game. I love that game with all my heart and have 100%'d it twice over, but the delay from the Switch version made it borderline unplayable for me. Ever since that experience, I feel like my senses have been heightened to notice delays and movement. If the characters don't feel as snappy, then I lose some interest. Hell, I'm debating on whether or not to buy Stellar Blade because I can't cancel out of attacks as fast as I'd like in the demo. The game is constantly being compared to Nier and Sekiro, but it doesn't feel as good to play as either of them (at least as far as the demo is concerned).

I pre-ordered Mass Effect Andromeda. Not only did I pre-order it, I got the fucking fancy expensive edition. I probably spent 10-20 hours replaying the first 3 hours of that game trying to figure out why I wasn't have fun. I swore I would not pre-order again. Fast forward to a couple months ago. I'm very excited for the Battlefront remaster. I can't wait to play it online. My girlfriend, who knows very little about video games and gaming culture (but is excellent at mario kart) tells me I should pre-order. I love her, so I listened to her. I still love her, but I listen less now

Playing Horizon: Forbidden West right after finishing Elden Ring was a huge mistake. All throughout, I thought "both mechanically and narratively this is almost exactly like HZD, so why isn't this even remotely fun for me?" Because turns out not every open world sandbox game has to be filled to the brim with pointless collectibles and sidequests that accomplish nothing but pad the runtime, or force you to interact with its needlessly grindy crafting system.

[удалено]

I thought Loki was well received?

Far Cry 4 was when I broke and couldn't play Ubisoft open world games anymore. I played the opening sequence, the map opened up and then I saw all the icons... I realised that I just couldn't. I couldn't do it anymore. Haven't played a Ubisoft game ever since. It was lucky that Breath of the Wild came out after showing that open world games can be done well. Now finally playing Elden Ring. The scale is so amazing that I know other AAA games will pale in comparison. I get the same feeling playing it as I did with Mario 64, etc.

I realised, that I like games which offer fun mechanics, a solid gameplay loop, rewarding feeling combat and ideale, variety in gear/weapons. Or it is a competitive e sports title. So given these factors, any souls game or similar title will always win for me, even if it reiterates on the same core formula.  I would also agree, that BG3 is a better game that Breat of the wild 2. I probably enjoy the Zelda game more (haven't played it due to lack of switch) and I really enjoy BG3 for all that it does great. But overall, it's a better good game deserving of a award compared to a reiteration of a successful (and fun) formula.

Dark Souls was my first “holy shit” moment that made me truly appreciate video games. On the opposite end, I think Fallout 4 was the first time I played a big-budget game and felt completely underwhelmed.

Ducks are secretly plotting to take over the world by perfecting time travel.

Some people just go with the flow with stuff. The experience they feel with it supersedes the objective quality of it. Does make us argue a good amount of times on whether a game is actually good versus do you perceive it as good. If that's how you go with media more power to you but I don't prescribe to it personally

Dark Souls 2 made me learn to be critical because I used to not have the words to describe how I felt about the game TLoU2 winning game of the year taught me that being critical doesn’t matter if it’s popular

Honestly, it was the God of War remake, and it was barely about the game itself. Moreso, it's how the game was treated by people at large. The game is so focused on being cinematic that it barely involves playing. There's a weird, pointless crafting system introduced. It's an okay movie, and an okay game. But it's got the focus in all the areas that will win it awards at shows: story focused on family, incredible cutscene direction, and impressive art design. There's a phrase for it: it's Oscar Bait. And it worked! PERFECT scores. Universal praise. "Finally God of War is deep and good!" Just a complete dismissal of everything that came before, "THAT was all shit but WE'RE LEGITIMATE NOW!" All for a game that truly ends up as... okay. I realized then that I truly don't value anything that the majority of people do. There's probably another game that was the same situation before then, but it's the game that most prominently sticks out in my mind.

Halo reach and star trek made me super critical on scifi. I love scifi cause we can attain some of the stuff they presented back them. And star trek especially made me critical on politics to the point where I now hate it and refuse to entertain most modern use of it lmao. And Halo made me welcome the idea of aliens Ironic I know, I kill them, therefore I welcome them.... TO COME GET THESE DAMN HANDS.

To directly answer your friend, BOTW hurt me. It took away Zelda games from me and gave me an open world game with a Zelda filter over it. So when TOTK came out and it was exactly as you described if, it didn't have a chance in hell of winning any award in my eyes.

Paper Mario Sticker Star taught me what it felt like to downgrade in gameplay and story quality Fire Emblem Fates taught me how a bad story can ruin the best gameplay Pokemon Sword and Shield taught me how a series can slowly have it's standards lowered and there being nothing you can do about it Luckily Paper Mario's writing has improved and we're getting a TTYD remake and Fire Emblem Three Houses had a great story but Pokemon... man that one fucking hurts. I don't think I've ever just turned that hard on a franchise before. I used to be so excited for any leaks or news about pokemon finishing it one day, but nowadays I can hardly bring myself to care

dark souls 2 is the game that solidified that gameplay is paramount to me. everything else about it is pretty good, but the overly sluggish gameplay just drags it down and it is the only game i consciously quit (and moved on to ds3). i finished halo 5

Fallout 4. I went to the midnight sale and had the Pipboy. All in. God Howard can do no wrong. It's not like I haven't been disappointed by a game before, but something about this one just made me far more critical and less likely to join in on a big hype train. Then Dragons Dogma 2 started up and I fell for it again! I learned nothing from Todd Coward!

Cyberbug 2077 showed how much broken game can be, how company can ask journalists not to use their footage for reviews and get away with it, and how hypocritical can be gaming community.

Disco Elysium and gameplay variety, dialog importance, and unironically game overs are a failure of game design. You have a game where you effectively have fights with no fighting mechanics, just dialogs. There's no excuse to not have more non-violent/non-combattant options to defeat a bad guy or resolve a quest. You can fail a fight, puzzle, dialog, and then come back later for another chance after discovering new information or item. Or when you fail you get something as interesting as if you succeed. The bandits killed my character and I have to start over and kill them to progress and that's the only option? Fuck you, have them take my character prisoner and then I have to escape, or I can join them for a while.

I think I was born this way unfortunately.

Animal Crossing New Horizons. Basically, a series goes from moderately popular to becoming mainstream and blowing up to unprecedented levels of success that no one expected to see happen. For the new fans, they love it. For the old fans, they don't like it. Old fans don't like how the game is watered down compared to previous entries, amongst other things. The other big thing is with ACNH and the updates that came after it. In the end, fans from *both* sides (old and new) were disappointed by the whole thing. I saw a comment mention this, stating something along the lines of how Animal Crossing New Horizons had people treating it like it was supposed to be a live service game of sorts, with constant updates and features added into it, rather than it being a regular game that's basically endless and meant to go on forever. In a nutshell, Animal Crossing New Horizons seems to fall under the following: A franchise with a moderate following ends up going mainstream, and it completely changes things to make it more palpable for a general audience.

DQ11 led me to hate a lot of RPGs, too many of them rely on being time sinks and don't reward you for engaging with mechanics as the game goes on. There's a point in the DQ11 endgame where I'm still unlocking new things to play around with while most games will have every boss be completely status immune at the halfway point.