THE MOST IMPORTANT GAMES YOU'VE PLAYED

So. I read the "Greatest games You've played" and I thought about it. And I thought about this gigantic long answer I had in mind for it but then I realized that the games I would list wouldn't be the greatest games. But they would be the most important games.

What I mean is that while Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the greatest games I've ever played. Super Mario Bros. 2 had a longer lasting impact on me.

So, caution, before you read forward be warned that this will be massively long and I won't bother with screenshots so skip to the end or read this were I ask you. "What were the games that left a lasting impression on you? And why?"

I will list games in chronological order, not in the order they were released but in the order I played them.

Zelda II - The Adventures of Link
I've already played a bunch of Nintendo games by the time I play this. I've enjoyed my platformers and my Game & Watch games and whatnot and my gaming covabulary is existant. And I know I drew platforming levels in crayon in kindergarten (which should be at least two or three years before I played this game) but still this is the first game I can come up with which blew my mind all properly.

And it was all because of experience points and a world map. I was really bad at this game but the basic idea that I would get better at it by killing loads of things (also known as "levelin up")was really novel to me. You could say I spent most of my time playing this game grinding this game.

Tecmo Cup
So when I've wrapped my head around experience points in Zelda II (and in Castlevania 2 as well. What was it about 2s in those days, Zelda 2, Castlevania 2 and Super Mario Bros. 2 were all completely different than the games that came before them) along comes a godsdamn football game with that stuff. By this time I had also been introduced to tabletop roleplaying. And the idea of a stat-based football game was just to awesome and crazy to pass up. I even made a board-game version of this with stats and d20s and a game master.

Day of the Tentacle
This was the first game I played that had voice acting. I had dabbled in adventure games before this. Leisure Suit Larry and King's Quest and some other old games. Of course I didn't own a computer so I always had to play for a couple of minutes at some friend's house. Day of the Tentacle I also played at a friend's house. Or actually I played at my cousin's in Sweden during a trip there. We were supposed to be "visiting" Sweden but I spent a lot of my time in front of that computer playing Day of the Tentacle. In the end I didn't get very far. And I didn't finish the game until about ten years later using SCUMMVM but it is the game that created my wannabe affection towards adventure games.

I say wannabe because although I loved Day of the Tentacle and I tend to love the games. I'm also very, very bad at them and tend to hate them when I actually have to play them. But I want to like them.

Championship Manager: Season 97/98
All these previous games have led to one game. Sort of. Football games with stats where you manage a club? It's like a dream game come true. Tabletop roleplaying and Blood Bowl combined into an awesome simulator of the greatest game on earth?

Though actually it wasn't Championship Manager that did it for me. Actually there was a demo of a similar game that I don't know the name of included in a magazine and that demo had two months of gameplay that I played over and over. But Championship Manager is the first full-length football management game I played. Like strategy games before it (A list that doesn't seem to have a whole lot of game-changing games for me... oh wait I just came up with one but that's in the future) this game was all about that stuff. And it had an incredibly long-term campaign as well. Of course I rarely was any good at it. Going from Divison 3 to Division 2 in fifteen seasons and that was about the extent of my success. But these games have never been about the success but about the stories that are created through "emergent gameplay".

Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII was quite the hyped game. In the year leading up to its European release the gaming magazine I read had a monthly feature about the game and stuff in it. I didn't even realize games could possibly do things like Final Fantasy VII did (and Final Fantasy VI before it. I had read some "tips and tricks" for FFVI and it detailed strangely divergent paths where if you did x on y then z happened instead of k, but only if you did it within timeframe j, if you didn't then l happened instead.) All this seemed very exciting to me.

Then I got my hands on the game. Again at my Swedish cousin's (though a couple of years after my encounter with Day of the Tentacle) so again I spent most of my time glued to a TV playing the wondrous game that was Final Fantasy VII. I got as far as out of Midgar before we had to go home. But I just had to get my hands on the game proper after that and played through it.

And it was fucking magnificent. As a Euro the closest thing you got to the console RPG was Zelda 2 and Tecmo Cup, Final Fantasy VII opened up a whole new world to me and apparently there were hundreds of these games in existence. I downloaded an emulator and played a bunch of them and by the time Final Fantasy VIII was released I had almost grown tired of them because by then I had come across...

Fallout
So. Fallout eh. This game blew my mind. Or well, its demo blew my mind. I spent a couple of hours downloading the four partitions of the 20mb Fallout demo, installed it and my mind was blown. This was tabletop RPGs turned into a video game. I could walk anywhere! Do anything! The choices were endless! And it had the dialogue trees from Day of the Tentacle as well and I could explore and kill and do all kinds of shit. And everything in a gritty post-apocalyptic universe. Fallout single-handedly changed my perception of what games could be. Just like Final Fantasy VII had shortly prior to that.

I guess in your teenage years your perception of the world really does change on a weekly basis.

Deus Ex
This is a jump of a fair amount of years. After the massive onslaught of games in the late nineties I guess I was content with playing Championship Manager all day long. Though to be honest much of the time was spent playing less important games on emulators and Resident Evil on the Playstation. But after being (re)introduced to the first person shooter with Perfect Dark I got my hands on Deus Ex for a reason I can no longer recall. the First Person Shooter wasn't a genre I was overly fond of, my first experience being Wolfenstein 3d on a mac computer at my dad's work. But with Perfect Dark my feelings had softened somewhat and with getting a computer with an actual graphics card I could delve into this world.

Enough preamble Deus Ex was a first person action game but it was also a roleplaying game with all the good dialogue choice goodness. In my first playthrough of this game I was pretty damn amazed. Having spent my time playing mostly Resident Evil I couldn't tell bad voice acting from good and the storyline of Deus Ex was just incredibly engrossing with all its twists and turns. By now I had become somewhat a searcher of non-linear role playing games. Just like Fallout, never actually finding any of that. But Deus Ex had a bunch of divergent paths in its first playthrough and, as I've said so many times in this topic already, I was blown away. There was so much to explore in such a big world and it was cyberpunk. Which was a genre I was very much in love with at the time. This was the game that proved to me that first person shooter games can have stories too. And good stories too.

Shogun: Total War
I picked this one up by mistake. It was a buy three pay for two deal and I didn't know what to get as the third game. But I remembered my not-at-all brother saying that in Total War when your archers loosed their arrows you follow them as they hit into the enemy. I was sceptical. I hated real time strategy. Command and Conquer had more or less been my first and last encounter with the genre. They all seemed to be about a bunch of guys building a base and collecting resources. The closest thing to fun I had come to was in the game Seven Kingdoms (which had a conversion mechanic and a cool economic model) and Settlers 2 (where I didn't have to fight). But I got Total War anyway, not only because of arrowcam but because my not-at-all brother had said that it also was close to Warhammer.

By this time I was collecting plenty of Warhammer. So Shogun it was and yes it was all I didn't know I wanted from a strategy game. A slower pace, units in formation, formation that mattered, actual strategy! This WAS Warhammer in a real time computer game. I watched with glee as the arrowcam was all that was promised (before turning it off since it was a useless feature) and conquered Japans with my archers. I've always been a sucker for archers. In Warhammer my first army was Wood Elves so I guess you can go from there. Since Shogun I've played nearly every Total War and in a roundabout way you could also say it introduced me to the campaign map mechanic that would make me fall in love with Europa Universalis 3 (though I guess the first Hearts of Iron also did that in a way)

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel
This is not actually a particularily good game. But it is still important to me. Once upon a time (probably at my Swedish cousin's) I had played a squad-based tactical game. For years afterwards I tried to emulate it and create a ruleset for my army men and later with tabletop wargaming and especially Necromunda that itch got scratched a bit more. I had almost forgotten about the idea of a squad based tactical game. Then I stumbled upon Fallout Tactics. Or perhaps not stumbled since I was a fan of the series and anything with Fallout in it was worth a look. So Fallout Tactics introduced me to squad-based tactics and led to Silent Storm and today I bought Frozen Synapse which I hope will scratch a similar itch.

The Orange Box
Another jump of a bunch of years. Having your old computer unable to play new games might be the proper factor. Though in the inbetween I did discover some massively important games that I don't really know if I should put them on the list or not. The one I now came up with is Dwarf Fortress which. Yeah. Should be on the list. The Orange Box can wait.

Dwarf Fortress
I had played Liberal Crime Squad, which more or less was my introduction to ascii graphics. I had been scourging World of the Underdog or whatever the abandonware site was called and then Dwarf Fortress was featured in a gaming magazine and I thought "huh" and downloaded it. A whole day went by. I don't remember if I ate that day or not. Might be I didn't. Instead I played Dwarf Fortress. This was more or less the ultimate simulator game in early alpha. Unlike when I first encountered Fallout the possibilities were actually endless this time. It was Championship Manager and roleplaying and tactics and everything imaginable meshed into one. With a bit of Dungeon Keeper mining for good measure.

The Orange Box (properly this time)
So yeah a new computer and new possibilities. Of course this new computer had already had encounters with Battlefield 2142 and Medieval 2: Total War but The Orange Box seemed as good a time as any to get to play the game that apparently was all the rage. So just like how Deus Ex had changed my view on first person shooters so did Half-Life 2 retrospectively. Having played some first person shooters I sort of knew what they were about but still Half-Life 2 brought it into a new level. With all its variety both in gameplay and environments and the polish the game showed and with commentary tracks in the episodes I got a true glimpse into the minds of game designers and all the things I had never thought of before. The commentaries on Team Fortress 2 and Portal did similar things. And yeah Portal was awesome too. And years afterwards Team Fortress 2 would be pretty game-changing for me too. But right then it was just a fun diversion.


I think I'll end with The Orange Box. There's probably loads of games I could think of still (hmm. GTA3 for example. That game was fairly monumental too. Even if I did play it in like 2008). And I've forgotten most of the console games I've played. Probably because I haven't played many. Guitar Hero may have been a gamechanger but it didn't etch itself into my mind that badly in the end.

But yeah this topic is already incredibly overlong and my Frozen Synapse download is finished so I don't know what I'm doing writing this anymore.

But as I promised in the end I might be interested in some of your games that "changed your gaming life". You don't have to be as godsdamn verbose as me if you don't like, but a little bit of context always goes a long way.