When I was a toddler, I played any games I could get my hands on, so I secretly played "boomer shooters" and stuff I found in my dad's and uncle's rooms when they were gone.
When I was old enough to have my own games, I played Tonka Joe, Zoo Tycoon, and Her Interactive. I still really liked DOOM and Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
I briefly got into point-and-click adventure games and F2P MMOs around high school, then I've been into cRPGs ever since. I also got a Wii in high school and could sometimes borrow a classmate's brother's PS2, too, so I could finally play some console games.
I've pretty much always been a PC gamer.
Top 5
Best Games of All Time
- Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen
- Mask of the Betrayer
- Planescape: Torment
- Culpa Innata
- Battle Girl High School
Favorite Games of All Time
- Oblivion's Construction Kit
- Guild Wars: Factions (Not that I really played with people after 2015, but I still like studying the mechanics. I guess I pick Factions for best PvP, but DoA and the core end-game PvE was the best online gaming ever without contest.)
- Neverwinter Nights 2: Original Campaign
- Dragon's Dogma
- Just Dance 2014
- Nancy Drew: Curse of Blackmoor Manor
Uncommon Recommendations
- Culpa Innata
- Anachronox
- Arcanum
- Divine Divinity
- Prince of Qin
- Lost Eden (DOS)
Misc
Most nostalgic games
- Zoo Tycoon
- Nancy Drew: Danger on Deception Island
- Verpets
- Detective Barbie: The Mystery of the Carnival Caper
- Matchbox Caterpillar Construction Zone
Favorite MMOs
Ranking Bethesda games
- Oblivion
- Daggerfall
- Morrowind
- Fallout 3
- Skyrim
Funniest games
- Anachronox
- Oblivion
- Deadly Premonition
- Chaos Wars - The dub actors are all from the localizer's family, and some sound like children voicing adult characters. Wildly bad.
- Secret Little Haven - It's very intersectional. There is a boy in your high school class who likes to talk about guns "and needs to get serious help!!" (lol not weird for a high school kid to talk about guns at all) and this dad who thinks all women hold men back so he had to leave his wife to keep his son fully influenced by masculinity. I still laugh thinking about these strawmen.
Most disappointing games
- Guild Wars 2 - Don't get me started.
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Empty open world games, snap from the unique game narrative to the novels' story, overly long and dramatic cutscenes they could have just made a Netflix show with instead. TW1+2 were some of the best games ever.
- Sunset - Tale-of-Tales was going through a bad time then
- Starbound - Beta to 1.0
- Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp - Nothing like Animal Crossing. It's just the standard predatory game loop thing again.
Most coveted lost media, cancelled games
- Blind Justice
- Guild Wars: Utopia
- Culpa Innata 2
- Anachronox 2
- Alternativa 2
Favorite developers
- Troika
- Tale-of-Tales
- id
- Valve
- ArenaNet (until GW2)
Dev diaries that got me into gamedev
- Tale-of-Tales (Mix of artistic and technical)
- JaGEx (Was fairly open about in-game economics and the business side of the company)
- Bethesda (They let random devs talk about anything they wanted for a post or two. It was kinda rant-like.)
- Gas Powered Games (Design-oriented, especially for level design and character progression)