It's been funny to see how many former students have reached out to tell me they think it's funny/awesome/weird/rad/awkward that I play video games. I've been playing video games since my dad brought home an original NES when I was maybe five. Of course, I think Kyle played a LOT more than I did, but I can certainly hold my own at MOST games. Unless it's a first person shooter a la Goldeneye. These I suck at. But give me a car racing game or a puzzle game (TETRISSSS) and I'm golden.
Once upon a time, in Lillehammer, Norway, we home stayed with a lovely Norwegian family who had a young son, maybe 12 at the time, and they had an NES. At one point, four of us girls were installed in their downstairs family room to hang out and we were offered their NES to play with. At some point, I had made it to World 8 of Super Mario Bros. and the son was watching me play. He was shy and was kind of scared of us (mostly because his mom kept pushing him to practice his English with us, and I understood why he didn't want to) but it was clear he wanted to say something. Eventually, he was able to tell me that he'd never beaten the game because he couldn't get past a certain part of the next level. I said "Oh! I can teach you!" and I showed him. He was SO excited and it was the most animated and excited he was the entire time there were weird American girls in his house.
Granted, I grew up having to play Luigi to Kyle's Mario, and Kyle is a vastly more gifted gamer than I am. Though beating the main quest line in Breath of the Wild before him is among one of my greatest personal accomplishments of my entire life. And Mario Kart is probably the only game where he and I are approximately evenly matched. Read: this is the only game I think I've ever beaten him at. When we lived together, I spent more time just watching him play Twilight Princess on the Wii and attempting to hold my own with him in Guitar Hero. But that jackass is good at every video game you hand him, so, I've come to terms with being not as good.
But I do love them, and I love all kinds of them. And here are some of my favorites:
Paperboy
I don't know why, but the simplicity of this game tickles me. It's surprisingly harder than it looks on the screen, and I think I've made it all the way through the week only a handful of times.
Tetris
This is a Forever Favorite of mine, and it makes me sad that in no iterations of the new NES models (the virtual one on the Switch, the NES mini we have) have the original Tetris that we played for hours and hours as kids. Jack has an emulator version that's reasonably decent, and I have the Tetris 99 game on the Switch, but it's not the same. (And that damn Switch game is stressful af!)
Frogger
I LOVE Frogger. It looks so simple, but that is a deceptive little game. It requires patience and a steady hand. In February, when we were in Vegas and spent the day at the Pinball Museum (... side note: February feels like a hundred years ago now...), I spent a TON of time on the Frogger machine. The first time we were there (... yes, there were multiple visits...), I ended up setting all five of the high scores on the machine. I enjoy the sound effects and the little musical ditty at the beginning of the game -- it's so nostalgic to me because Frogger is one of the games we have for the Atari and I've been playing it as long as I can remember -- even longer than the NES, because that Atari was first (but when I was a kid, it belonged to my Uncle Terry, who would set it up on the tv in my grandma's bedroom for the grandkids to play).
The Sims. All of them except Sims 3, I guess?
I was an INSTANT Sims fan. Instant. From the first moment I installed the bootlegged copy of it onto my first Dell computer my freshman year of college, I was hooked. HOOKED. There was a period of time that semester where Jess and I would be playing on our computers simultaneously and yelling at them to stop peeing on the carpet and just go to work already! On my currently laptop, I have Sims 2 and Sims 4, and I love them both for a lot of different reasons. Sims 2 is a nice evolution from the original, and though it took me a long time to truly appreciate (and understand how to play...) Sims 4, I'm a total convert to that one now, too. I guess I skipped Sims 3. I think it was too much of a leap for me at the time, and I remember it being dark -- like graphics-wise, just dark.
Puzzle Pirates
This one is a bit niche, because not a lot of people have heard of it, and I'm not even sure how I learned about it, but I've been playing it since maybe my junior or senior year of college. It was an online game that eventually got packaged into a downloadable version. I don't really engage in every possible element of the game that's available, but their puzzle games -- and they have an impressively wide array of them -- are super fun.
Stardew Valley
I discovered Stardew Valley by watching an ASMR video where the creator was playing a day in Stardew and explaining about the game and how it worked. I was intrigued, so I downloaded it and was also hooked instantly. It took a lot of game mechanics from other popular games (like Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon) but took it to a pretty cool new level. It has everything I loved about FarmVille mixed with a Sims-like attention to interpersonal relationships to advance the story, mixed with a little monster combat. I deeply enjoy it. And it figures into one of my favorite classroom moments in the last few years: I have it listed in my syllabus About Me page as a video game I love, and a student, thinking he was being cheeky, asked me how far along I was in the game. I said "Oh, I think year three or four? I have a couple million gold..." and he kinda just stared at me, and a kid next to him was like "... do you know what that means? What does that mean?" and the kid says "It means she's a beast and should be respected." Hilarious.
Breath of the Wild
Hands down, this is my favorite game ever. I want every game to be like this one, even though then that would make it not so special. It is by far the most visually stunning video game I've ever played, and I love that even a skabillion hours in (like over 300 I think), there's still things to do. I still have some side quests I haven't done, and I just got the DLC in December and have a bunch of clothes to go find (LOL). I love it. And I didn't really intend on completing the main quest line when I did -- I was looking for a shrine that was close to the edge of the castle, and suddenly, there was a cut scene and I was in the castle and, whelp, I ended up face to face with Calamity Ganon and I ended up finishing that whole battle. WITHOUT DYING, TOO! I was so proud. But this game, man. It's just brilliant. I can still spend an hour just wandering around the world, and now that I have the DLC, I also have the Hero's Path so I go and explore places I haven't been, even in all that time. Somehow, though, all those places I haven't been are full of Lynels or Hinoxes and it was getting irritating to keep heading into uncharted territory only to come immediately upon a Lynel ready to kill me just by looking at me.
But I could do without the Korok seeds....
Skyrim
When I finished the main quest line in Skyrim, it was also almost by accident? I had spent almost an entire summer working through it and getting better at the open world game thing. When I first starting playing it, Skyrim was so overwhelming because it was the first huge open world game I'd ever played, and I've never been great at the whole first-person combat thing. It was a long road in the beginning, trying to not die every two seconds. I remember it taking like two or three days for me to creep past an abominable snowman creature. It was frustrating, but I kept at it. And I think I've barely plumbed the depths of what Skyrim has to offer. I did buy a house, and tricked it out with whatever was available, but there are a lot of skills I could go back and work on. The magic stuff still baffles me, and there are a ton of side quests I never did. I'm glad I played so much Skyrim, though, because it definitely prepared me to actually enjoy Breath of the Wild -- I might have given up on BotW early if I hadn't had the experience with the open world, non-linear nature of Skyrim.
Honorable Mentions go to:
Diner Dash (online; laptop)
Super Mario Bros 3 (NES)
You Don't Know Jack (laptop)
Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins (GameBoy/DS)
Mario Kart (64, Wii, DS, Switch)
Smooth Moves (hahaha) (Wii)
Guitar Hero and Rock Band (Wii)
RC Pro Am (NES)
Games I Miss and Can't Find Online Anymore:
Noah's Ark
Insaniquarium (granted: I found this on Steam but it's only for PC :( )
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