Seeing as my fellow admins wrote their own Thanksgiving-themed posts (a long time ago…) on games they were thankful for, I thought I better get my tail into gear and write one of my own. I intended on publishing this quite some time ago, but Listmas came up, and I wasn’t able to get to it until now. Well, I better not put it off any longer.
Ahem. And so, in celebration of (a super late) Thanksgiving, I shall make a list of a few of the games that have a particularly special meaning to me.
First off, Pokemon Stadium. I first played this game with friends back when I wasn’t much of a gamer, and I had such a blast with it, I went out and bought an N64 for Christmas. To my surprise, I quickly found that the game was not much fun at all to play by myself at home, and it has since been sold. But, its legacy has far outlasted the game itself because it is this very game that got me into gaming in the first place. Without it, I wouldn’t even be here writing a post for this lovely blog to begin with. What a scary thought.
But, I must admit, that was a rather unfair game to start out with, as I don’t think any will be able to compete. But, here goes. The next game that needs mentioning is Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which I actually got shortly after Pokemon Stadium, considering a console would be rather lonely with only one game to play. This game became one of my favorite games of all time, but not just because of how much I enjoy playing it. I’ve brought this up before, but I spent some very important years of my life in the house where I first played this game, and it is this game that has clung to the memory of those years more than any other. When I play this game, I feel at home, like I’ve been transported back to another time I can only dream about. The closest I can come to experiencing those days again is to play one of the major games of that time, and I am grateful this game has done that for me.
I am also grateful for Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, which I only bought because they were having a sale at Blockbuster, as it was not a game I had ever heard of before until I laid my peepers on it in the store. While I didn’t get very far into this game on my first attempt (those flying levels used to be hard, back when I was really bad at games), and the poor thing got abandoned for about a decade, it was thanks to this game that the R&C series always remained at the back of my mind. And a day finally tame, thanks to another sale, this one at Gamestop, that I bought the remaining two games from the first trilogy, and I was hooked. I couldn’t believe I had spent so many years without playing such a fabulous series, and if I hadn’t played that game, I may have missed out.
I am also grateful for Final Fantasy VI, the game that got me into cosplay thanks to an overwhelming urge I had to make a costume for Kefka. The day of my first masquerade was one of the best days of my life, and it just might not have happened if it weren’t for FFVI.
And Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, for being an awesome game and for inspiring my very first finished novel, even if it was only a fan fiction novel, and for goading me into writing fan fiction again at all. It’s been wonderful to get back to writing stories, and this game helped a lot in making that happen.
So there’s my list, and now it’s your turn. What games are you guys thankful for?
A Thankful Duck
Well, you already saw my list of games :), but your post really made me think about just what the heck we would all be doing if we *hadn’t* been introduced to video games. A terrifying thought, surely. But so much of the attachment to games seems to depend on how relevant that one gateway game was. Despite the many games that preceded it, it wasn’t until I played Super Mario World that I really latched onto gaming as something more meaningful than a a way to pass time. Maybe the stars were aligned just right or something, but playing that game felt like so much more than simply pushing buttons on a controller to make fun stuff happen on a screen. It transcended into something that’s hard to put into words, but we, the video game players, just know when it happens. Can’t say it’s like that with any of my other hobbies!
I probably got into gaming thanks to Pokemon Stadium, but it was Banjo Tooie and Majora’s Mask that made me love them so. But, prior to Pokemon Stadium, I used to be afraid of video games, for some reason. That game caused me to stop fearing the lovely things, and I then got to playing all the games I used to merely watch, such as Donkey Kong Country. My life would be sad without gaming. At least, I don’t want to imagine life without these wonderful things.
All it takes is the right game at the right time, and an otherwise normal person becomes a gamer for the rest of their life. It’s almost insidious isn’t it?
Its a scary thought that if I didn’t play Pokemon Stadium when I did, I may have never become a gamer. I better not think about it. It’s chilling.
I feel the same about Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Almost didn’t play that one either, got pushed into it by my brother. Was intimidated by it for a while, games were so different from everything else at the time. I guess they still are.