What’s the first game that comes to your mind, when you have to name one that enriched or transformed your life in a positive way - and why?
I have to name FABLE since it’s the only game that made me cry. I can’t and don’t want to explain why. Maybe some fellow players will understand.
Other then that, TOEJAM & EARL is one of the few co-op games that me and my sister could play, which i can remember fondly.
I do wonder if this was something in early game that made you cry. The only, if not latest game that has made me cry was something that happens in Minecraft Store Mode, I would rather keep spoilers out for anyone who were to want to ever play the game but generally Telltale like to play with your emotions, I haven’t yet played them all yet.
Anyway I can’t say I can think of a game that may have enriched or transformed my life but I would say that a combination of many have made me think more about life. I mean with all these Zombie games, who isn’t going to be ready for a zombie apocalypse?
Peter Molyneux’s lies will do that.
My thoughts and prayers are with you.
I can’t say specifically which game I liked most, I forget things but I do recall that when it was someone else’s turn on the console, I played this literally to its death.
It wasn’t even particularly well made, it was only slightly better than a Tiger Game but this handheld game made me realise that I was better than other kids at some things, no one could beat my scores. NO ONE!
It gave me the inspiration to go try take on my friends in other games and beat them at Atari games, Nintendo games and on the Amstrad CPC-464… It didn’t happen but I still tried.
I still remember the tune, 30+ years later.
Dun da da dun dun, dun da da dun, dun da da dun, da da da da dun,
Dun da da dun, dun da da dun, dun da da dun, da da da da dun
(rinse & repeat, ad infinitum)
What a classic.
Good times.
I could say “The Curse of Monkey Island”, but everyone in a 100km radius knows that already. So I’m going to say something different:
Kentucky Route 0
KR0 was the first game that completely expanded the boundaries of what I had defined in my young head as “game”. That was some 7 years ago, when I played mostly the same genres (point and clicks and casuals) and very sparsely at that.
KR0 made for some of the most exciting discussions I had with someone who is still, to this day, one of my best friends.
KR0 came before my Steam account, and before I knew that games could have multiple endings like those “choose your own adventure” books I obsessedly read at my school’s library when I was a kid.
KR0 felt poetic, mysterious and lyrical in all the right places, like that high school crush you were too young to understand you really liked and couldn’t quite see their imperfections because of that.
Aside from Fable, I haven’t played the other games mentioned here.
I thought Fable was really cool too, but I never got around to finishing it for a bunch of reasons. Oh well.
Does Garry’s Mod count? XD
I never had a game that “transformed my life” In a positive or negative way.
The closest thing I have to that is probably Minecraft just because the amount of time I soaked into it, and it’s probably the first non flash game I played and that it’s the thing that sparked my love for games in general.
Videogames as a whole are able to enrich your life, but transforming it? Can’t say I’ve played something as good as that, but I do have some games that were outstanding in what they evoked in me as a person.
Lisa and Masochisia were games I’ve felt a deep connection to, because they had stories I could relate to in a direct and sometimes very abstract way.
And Enter The Gungeon reminded me why I’m playing videogames to begin with, back when I couldn’t look at walkthroughs and explored games on my own and all that just because it has an in-game wiki. It’s still not telling you every little statistic about the items and what secrets you can find, but it’s enough to keep you in the game and not look up everything online. Every discovery felt genuine and like I’m the first to see those things. It was awesome. And the game is packed to the brim with unique encounters, secrets and items.
Silent Hill 2. It’s an experience unlike any other game I’ve played, and it’s a ride that you’ll remember the whole way through. It’s a shame of what happened to the franchise though…
Halo Combat involved did that to me. Made me Frightened of the Covenant, i couldn’t even finish the first level when i first saw the elites. Granted i was pretty young.
Probably Age of Empires 2. The music, the not-extremely-fictional histories, the way they were narrated, the fun with multiplayer. Even today, the memes.
As far as transformed or enriched, I’m afraid I could come with a decent number of books, movies and even paintings but not sure about videogames.
Maybe vanila and burning crusade Word of Warcraft since It saved me from doing barely nothing while injured for a good couple of years since I wasn’t able to read as much I wanted due to physical limitations at the time because of the position.
Maybe Bioshock, the tittle that convinced me deeply a videogame can challenge other art expressions, since I didn’t have any personal examples to convince myself personally, and letting me discover a wide range of several types of art wich enriches my lyfe.
While I do have a lot of good opinions about other games, I think those are the only ones that answer your topic.
Thank you everyone for your answers so far. I’ve read them all during the last week. Even thou I do not have time to resond to everyone at the moment, I put some of the titles you all mentioned on to my steam wishlist, where possible.
I gave this some long hard thought, after my ‘D&D isn’t a videogame’ soul search I came up with a new (unsurprising) title: Borderlands 2.
Both the sheer amount of time I spent on that game, the imaginative and well fleshed out (for the most part) DLC content and the strong emphasis on a memorable story probably did more for my D&D game than anything else did.
Probably Undertale, I don’t really know how to explain it, but the aesthetics (in the way Extra Credits defines it here: Aesthetics of Play - Redefining Genres in Gaming - Extra Credits - YouTube) are delivered in such a brilliant way and it’s so full of personality that makes the experience something very genuine and interesting, something that I feel is very rare in gaming, at least on the state the industry is. It’s surprisingly cohesive, nothing is missing and nothing is there just because, it made me realize that something else was possible outside of what was previously established. It’s a very disruptive game.
Or maybe Saya no uta, while it’s not really a game, it’s a visual novel, it was probably the most impactful piece of fiction I’ve ever experienced, both in a good way and in a ‘bad’ way. It’s so unique and breaks taboos in such a way it’s nearly impossible not to be touched by it, although that can happen in a multitude of very different ways. That experience is very subjective, I’ve come to realize.
Super Metroid was the epithome of the mechanical masterpiece, although not in an individual sense. The way they (in a broad sense, including the level design) harmonize with each other and work on delivering on the core aesthetics of the game created one of the best experiences in gaming I’ve ever had. The experience is complete and fully rewarding after a couple playthroughs though.
You know kiddo, I got to Borderlands 2 having a “mature” perspective about videogames already but it’s one of my favourite games by far, for the simple reason I find it extremely fun. 500 hours in and I keep coming back from time to time.
That said, it would probably had fullfilled the role of Bioshock of convincing myself of videogames being art having all parts covered, from art direction to voice acting and history (wich shocked me punt intended) with a joke about kantian aesthetics made with blood as a graffitti with his beautiful monologue of Hamlet in the tongue of a psycopath. I remember being in cover, listening and saying to myself “No, it can’t be… holy shit, it is, it’s Shakespeare!”.
True that the history of BL2 is nothing crazy but the care and love for each character and sentence make up for it.
I have thought for ages about a good answer to this (and am possibly over-analysing) and I think I’ve pinned down a single game. Initially I thought that I’d go with my first tentative experiences of gaming on the ZX Spectrum…Space Invaders, Treasure Island Dizzy, Daley Thompson’s Supertest or Spellbound. However, then I thought that although transformative, and what made me a gamer to this day, perhaps they weren’t world shattering…perhaps the Dizzy or Magic Knight games are well constructed puzzle platformers, but I’m not sure they’re truly capable of having much of an impact.
So then I thought maybe my time on the Amiga would be a good choice? Certainly I have incredibly fond memories of the Lucasarts games, and The Secret of Monkey Island will remain one of my favourite games of all time and I’m certain has made my life better. Plus there’s the likes of Supercars 2,Kick Off 2, Captive…but on reflection by this point in my mind I think I’d already been snagged by gaming. So what got me hooked? Which games or system truly made me a gamer? I think that honour goes to the Sega Master System.
Growing up in the UK we never saw much of Nintendo. In fact I think Nintendo didn’t know or care about the UK market at that point. We had our own ecology of home computer games and the big N were making huge inroads into the US. However, scrappy underdogs Sega wanted sales and thus I acquired a Master System. I have so many fond memories of my time with the thing, from Ys The Vanished Omens and Golvellius, to Shinobi and Power Strike, but the game that truly had an impact upon me was Wonder Boy III The Dragon’s Trap. I know it’s been re-mastered and re-released, but I’m unsure as to whether the structure of a game that’s almost 30 years old will retain the magic that it had way back when, but tiny me was captivated by the game with its smoking pigs and password save system. The music is still firmly implanted in my head (see below video) and I feel that it stretched what I expected a game to do and gave me an experience that still sticks with me to this day.
I recently got it and replayed it and it’s still a great game to this day 
the boss fights are way too ez though, lol
