Okay, that last year was pretty emotionally taxing, so let’s lighten things up! 1995’s Stonekeep is a delightful fantasy adventure that has everything you could ask for: thrilling dungeon-delving, excellent comedy writing, charming (if terrible) live action actors, a rich backstory and companion novella, and, uh… completely bizarre, rushed, and stupid design choices. When you’re young, it doesn’t matter how good or bad a game is, how perfectly-balanced or completely broken. And Stonekeep is a broken-ass game. Three areas in the game use the same recolored visuals, even though those visuals don’t make sense in any of them. Enemies can’t walk through
Author: scwiba
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1994
We have a bit of time traveling to do for this one. Every other game so far is one that I played at least relatively close to its release in the US. Not so for System Shock, which arrived on the scene all the way back in 1994. But for me, System Shock didn’t come into focus until twenty years later in 2013 — at just the time and place when I needed it most. I don’t write about it often, but this is one of the realities of my life: I have depression. The kind of debilitating depression that at times makes
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1993
On that same shareware collection that brought Wolfenstein 3D onto my family’s home computer, there was another, even more important game to me. Probably the most important game in my life. We’re talking, of course, about Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold. Nah, I’m just messing with you. We’re talking about DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! As good as it was, there’s no surprise Blake Stone is completely forgotten in the wake of the game that came out just a week later and literally changed the world: id Software’s Doom. Doom forever changed the landscape of videogames. It codified an entire genre, appealed to people who’d never considered themselves gamers, ruined
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1992
Get psyched! It’s time for some profound carnage. My family got its hands on a reasonably powerful PC sometime in 1994; I’m not entirely sure how, given how much my mother already hated the Atari, Nintendo, and SNES. Maybe she convinced herself that the family would use it mostly for educational games and word-processing, and there’s at least some merit to that theory. See, in the old days games were significantly harder to find and purchase for the PC than they were for dedicated videogame consoles. A lot of them used the shareware model, where the first portion of the game
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1991
In the last five years, we’ve made it from Final Fantasy I all the way to Final Fantasy IV. Dang, they sure could churn those things out back in the day. In contrast… to the more recent development cycles. Final Fantasy IV (or what we in the US knew as Final Fantasy II) was the first of the series on the SNES, a system that eased a ton of the limitations imposed on the previous games. Those black backgrounds during the battles that seemed so horrifying to me back then? Gone. More things could be going on in a scene, the colors
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1990
Here we are at the end of the NES’ reign. The final NES game on this list is also my absolute favorite on the system, and in my opinion maybe the greatest action RPG ever. The visuals might be dated, the mechanics might be way simplistic, but to this day there are only a handful of videogames that can bring me to tears by the end — and one of those games is Crystalis. Final Fantasy and Mario 3 made me feel fear, sure. But fear is primal, and scaring a child is easy. How many games, on the other
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1989
Creation. I live to create, and the older I get, the more the world of videogames becomes synonymous with creation. I’ve been making game mods for 15 years now. Before that, level editors were my obsession. Before that, there was SimCity. Can you believe the first SimCity came out in 1989? Admittedly, the version we had at home must have been the Windows port from ’92 — and even before I played that one, it was SimCity 2000 I got my hands on in a second grade classroom for about 30 minutes every couple weeks. What a strange game this
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1988
On the topic of videogames that scared the heck out of me as a kid: Super Mario Bros. 3. No, really. I was a… very highly strung child. But hear me out. While Final Fantasy is the first game I remember seeing, the Mario games are some of the first ones I remember playing. The combo Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt cart was a staple in my household. I forget whether we had a Mario 2 of our own or if we borrowed it from one of my brothers’ friends, but there was a lot of that game too. And Mario 3 — we never owned it, but rented
30 Games That Made Me Who I Am: 1987
I was born in November of 1987. I opened my eyes on a world where Star Trek: The Next Generation had just premiered. RoboCop, Predator, and Spaceballs were brand-spanking-new. The Princess Bride was still in theaters. And the Zelda, Metroid, and Castlevania franchises had all debuted their first installment in the US within just the last few months. What I’m saying is that 1987 was a magical time for a nerd like me, even if I wasn’t old enough yet to know it — old enough to watch TV, play videogames, or… to lift my own dumb head, actually. To me though, 1987 is,
Game-Developed: 30 Games That Made Me Who I Am
I started this blog five years ago today. Whatever else has happened in the last five years — the ups and downs, rough patches and bright ones — digitaleidoscope has been a profoundly positive influence in my life. It’s been a place for me to be in love with videogames: to explore the love that I have, to deepen it, and to share it with others. While digitaleidoscope turns 5 today… I’m looking ahead to another birthday. In just over a month, I’m turning 30. Three zero. 30. And for most of those 30 years, I’ve been a gamer. For a long