First off, I want to congratulate Dan, Jeffs, Mike, and everyone on the new, upcoming website. I wish them nothing but success.
However, given that it seems like writing user reviews and blog posts are being locked behind premium, and creating lists both isn't going to be available at the new site's launch, and given the aforementioned restriction and explanation of why the restriction exists, I can't imagine creating lists the way that I have on this website for the last 13 or so years will still be allowed for people who don't have a premium subscription.
It's personally disappointing, although again, completely understandable. After the closure of cohost, I migrated over to posting longer writings over here. I guess that'll be where the lists go for now, until it also shuts down and I migrate somewhere else.
With all that said, I figured I would write one last list. Seeing as the last community spotlight mentions that list creation will also be locked behind premium: I think I would kick myself if I didn't have one last list, one last celebration of games that have meant a lot to me throughout my life. A look back at the stories that have meant a lot to me, and the stories of why they mean so much.
I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who's read my lists, reviews, and that Final Fantasy XIV trial blog I wrote. At the very least, I'm glad they'll be archived on the new website. Anyway, that's enough preamble, let's rewind time.
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So I think this may have been the first video game I ever played. It's either this or Bo Jackson's Hit and Run, a combination football/baseball game also for the original Game Boy. I ended up kind of inheriting my brother and sister's original Game Boys when I was very young, and this was, at the very least, the first game I remember playing and going "Oh. This is incredible." I've maintained a real soft spot for this game ever since. It's not the most popular Mario game, it's not the best, but it's definitely one of my favorites.
This is another game I played while I was very young, at least once I was able to actually play it. You see, as the youngest child, I fell victim to what was one of the more universal "older sibling wants to play video games and younger sibling wants to be included" deals, where my brother or sister would play this game, and then hand me, well too young to be able to tell, an unplugged controller, because I just wanted to hit buttons and again, be included. As I got slightly older, I also remember actually playing against my brother, but as the super moves in this game involved hitting all punches or kicks at the same time, and my hands were so small (and we had the Sega Saturn version) that I had real problems both timing up the input and the shortcut button, or just hitting all of the buttons at once, so me and my brother would end up kind of treating it like a race to fill the super meter, and then once it happened we would just do free supers on each other. Good times.
Back when Wal-Mart had demo computers that you could interact with, I remember being a slight... I don't want to say terror, but I knew how to use Microsoft Paint and how to change the background of a computer, and I, being very young, would just draw like weird smiling faces and cats in Paint and then change the background of all the computers. Or play Solitaire. They moved the demo units up well off the ground at some point, and my parents would let me stand in the shopping cart and keep clicking around. The point here is I've always been kind of technology minded, and I remember playing this game, or at least the first 10 or so levels a lot at the computer we had at home. I think my dad had one of those "Microsoft Games Collection" CDs, that included things like this, a PC version of Tetris, WordZap, Taipei, Jezzball, and things of that nature. I'll admit, even to this day I've never actually beaten this game, mostly because I think those first ten levels are so neat, the tenth level acts as a really cool culmination of all the concepts that the previous levels teach you... and then the next level is "Here's a really annoying maze that you can't really see around you well enough to effectively navigate." Oh well. Those first ten levels, though? Ingrained in my psyche.
My brother I think had a subscription to PC Gamer, and this game (as well as the next one I'll put in this list) were on demo discs that I played an exorbitant amount of. I don't know why "RC Car racing game" really struck a chord with me, but for some reason it did. I played the demo so much. You could only pick from three cars (including a promotional PC Gamer magazine car) and only one track, but I would comb through that track for hours. Sometimes I'd do the races, other times I'd just practice a jump or a turn multiple times until I felt like I had it. One summer, in the weird middle period between Amazon being just an online book retailer and their current online retail juggernaut state, I remember my dad ordered this game (and again, the next one as well) from there. I was so excited when it got delivered I remember running out to grab the package and screaming "THANK YOU" to the delivery driver as they were pulling out of the driveway. And it turns out: I also played a whole lot of the full version after extensively playing the demo.
A lot of this entry can be copied from the previous one. Just like Re-Volt, this game was on a PC Gamer demo disc that I played extensively. I got the full version one summer from Amazon. I played it a lot. As opposed to RC cars being the selling point for me, I think this one was just "Wait, you can drive on the ceiling? That's cool." There were so many curved tunnels in the demo that, even though it was not necessarily conducive to speed, I would just always immediately zip to the ceiling as soon as I entered. Also, and this is just a weird me thing, but this was the first game that I played that had the concept of a "Target the person currently running in first" weapon, to the point where it took multiple Mario Karts to get me to actually call the concept a Blue Shell in my head as opposed to a Leader Missile.
This is another two-fer with the next game on the list, as "games I extensively played at the Gay Dolphin arcade at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina." My grandparents (on my dad's side) would pay for hotel rooms for them, their children, and their children's families for a week down at a motel called the Palm Crest, which sadly no longer exists. We'd spend the days swimming in the pool or ocean, going shopping, playing minigolf, take over a restaurant for dinner, and then walk from the Palm Crest to the Family Kingdom amusement park to ride amusement park rides at night. The Gay Dolphin is sort of the ultimate tourist shop. More "Myrtle Beach, SC" clothing, keychains, mugs, snowglobes than you could shake a stick at, little pool toys or gag gifts, a wall of postcards of old aerial photos of the area, collections of seashells... a little bit of everything, really. And two doors down from the shop itself they ran an arcade. It's this arcade that I feel like is what I associate with "Arcades" in my brain: The black/purple 90s flooring, the layout, the games, the prizes, the neon signs on the outer rim of the room. I remember one year playing one of those Wheel of Fortune themed ticket machines, the kind where you put in an arcade token, a spinning light runs around the table, and you have to press a button to try and stop the light right in the center in front of you. Since it was Wheel of Fortune themed, doing that would spin the wheel in front of you for a ticket prize, as opposed to the more traditional ones of those that I believe just would have a climbing jackpot spot. One year I was playing that and landed the second highest prize on the wheel. I went away, played some other things, and came back. Someone else joined the machine on the opposite side, I had mentioned that I had gotten one of the jackpots, and he said "Yeah I know, I was here when you did it, I saw you come back and had to get my girlfriend to see this." I then proceeded to get the highest result on the wheel. This is a lot of setup to only now start talking about Daytona USA, but they had the Daytona machines near the back door of the arcade. There's something so perfect about being able to play Daytona USA, look to your right out the door, and just see (and smell) the beautiful Atlantic Ocean just right there. They had four of the twin machines lined up so there were many times we would just grab every machine and have a big family race, especially if the previous night we got kicked off the Go-Karts at the Family Kingdom (which happened far more times than anyone would like to admit.)
The other game that I associate with arcades, I played this game a lot with my Dad as I got older. I'm not fully sure why my Dad is a big light-gun arcade game person; he's not (and I'm not for that matter) a gun person, but we would play a lot of them like Time Crisis, Virtua Cop, and especially this game over the years. Maybe he just liked the voice acting. That's certainly a big point in this game's favor.
For as long as I can remember I've enjoyed Pokémon, starting with the show before one Christmas I got a Game Boy Advance with this game and Pokémon Yellow. This was the first Pokémon game I ever beat, with a (quite frankly) ill advised team that there's a part of me that still doesn't quite know how I did it. I remember beating my head against the Elite 4 one night I was spending at my aunt's place until I used the team of an extremely high-leveled Feraligatr, a Suicune, and then like a level 2 Hoothoot that I would send in to use a revive on the Feraligatr if it went down and somehow beat the Elite 4 with that. And then, with it being the first Pokemon game I had gotten that far in, fell for the trap of getting really excited after beating four trainers and then having the fourth one go "Okay cool, now go fight the champion!" and being completely baffled that the Elite 4 consisted of five people.
Writing this list I'm beginning to realize that a lot of games that mean a lot to me were kind of familial affairs. Warcraft 2 being no exception. Now admittedly, "playing" Warcraft 2 may be a bit of a stretch, at least from my end. My aunt was really good at it, and she would try to teach me. I was still young enough that what I liked was turning on the cheat that meant your units couldn't die and then clicking on them until they said funny things. That, and turning on the cheat that meant your units couldn't die and just making a cool base with my aunt, because another game that we would play together was The Sims 1. Also, just looping back to "Young TFP changing the desktop picture on display computers at Wal-Mart", I also found the folder where all the funny voice clips were, and changed the Windows 98 sounds to various Warcraft 2 voice lines, which always made me (and my aunt) laugh.
As another common link, the two games thus far on this list that don't have the story of "I played this a lot with my family" Pokémon Crystal and this, are both about animals, I guess? This was the first game I remember getting when I had my own computer to play with, as opposed to just using family ones. Now admittedly, said computer was previously a family owned one that I would just get passed down to me, but still. It was my computer and I could put all the Warcraft 2 sound effects and poorly drawn MS Paint cats on the desktop as I wanted. Plus, I could play a whole lot of Zoo Tycoon, set up exhibits and keep a bunch of animals happy. All in all, a win-win scenario.