• 28 Sep, 2025*

Video games are such a unique medium that I don’t think any other can fully capture. The combination of art, music, interaction, and cinematography is something that I think gives video games the ability to leave such an impact on us.

My friends and I wanted to create a collaborative post where we all gush about our favorite games. So without any more delay, here is everyone’s entried (warning: this is a long one).

My entry - Halo 3

When I first saw Halo I was blinded by its majesty. I got my start with Halo 2, on my various sleepovers to my Uncle’s house as a kid in the mid-2000s. I’d play on his gamecube every now and then, but I would spend most of my time playing and replaying the Halo 2 campaign. The initial chime of the guitar on the Bungie splash screen was enthralling. I didn’t understand much of what was going on (I was like 5 at the time and called Master Chief “Halo”), but the spectacle was something else. I was hooked. My family didn’t have an XBOX so I always yearned for playing Halo 2 when I’d go to my Uncle’s. There was a bit of a falling out between my uncle and my family (nothing really bad, just my uncle can be a bit of a prick sometimes), so I didn’t get to see him much for years.

Fast forward to roughly 2007, my uncle and family reconciled, the XBOX 360 was my favorite game console, and Halo 3 had just released. I went over to my uncle’s house and he showed me the game that would enthrall my autistic brain to this day. I jumped straight into the campaign, and was met with familiar faces (I don’t call Chief “Halo” anymore). I was hooked. It was love at first sight. I got all the way to The Storm before it was time to head home.

A few months later, I got to go on a trip to Blockbuster (god I’m old), and I managed to convince my dad to rent Halo 3. We took it home, and I sunk my teeth back into the campaign. It was so much fun. I got all the way up to the level “Cortana”, until I got stuck and couldn’t get passed it. We eventually had to return it back to Blockbuster, but I never forgot Halo 3.

I would go back to my uncle’s house every now and then. I’d be playing mostly Halo 3, but occasionally I’d play some other game like Left 4 Dead, or some coop game he had like Alien Homind HD, but I always wanted to go back to playing Halo. I’d use his XBOX live account to play multiplayer or custom games with random people. On my birthday in 2008 my dad bought me my very own copy of Halo 3, and let me tell you, that opened up Pandora’s box. I was already obsessed with the game, but now there was nothing barring me from engaging in my favorite game. I still have that copy to this day.

I’d mostly play on his XBOX LIVE account, playing campaign over and over again, or custom games with my friends from school. My best friend at the time and I would try and recreate our own “machinimas” in the game. We never published anything to youtube, but we would often make our own “machinimas”. For the uninitiated, Machinima was a channel that was basically the Mecca for video games, and often would feature these videos of people making shows in the games. This concept of “machine cinema” aka machinima was a whole genre of videos. My friend and I watched this one series from the channel GuitarMasterx7, in which Master Chief and his friend Pvt. Richard Eater (yes, the character’s name was Dick Eater, don’t ask why a couple of nine year olds were watching this) would go on these adventures full of Family Guy-inspired cutaway gags. My friend and I would take the characters and the comedy style and make our own “machinimas”. Even staying up all night acting out our machinimas or occasionally taking a break to play something like GTA IV.

Sometimes, we would even make our own Halo fan fictions and act them out using nerf and airsoft guns. My friend would be Master Chief, and I would be my spartan in Halo 3. I always made the point of what he looked like: Security/Marathon helmet, Hayabusa chest, EOD shoulders, Orange primary color, green secondary color, and purple tertiary color. Yes, it was an ugly color scheme, but it combined my dad’s, my mom’s, and my favorite colors. My friend acting as Master Chief was the leader of this rebellion, and I was the UNSC special operations Spartan that was supposed to stop him. We’d fight, we’d team up, we even made fake out deaths for drama, it was a blast... I miss being a kid.

I basically was playing Halo 3 like it was my full-time job. I’d come home from school and play multiplayer with strangers, or custom games with my friends from school. We didn’t have playtime tracking back then, but on average I probably played 6-8+ hours per day, 7 days a week, for years up until Halo: Reach launched in 2011. Conservatively, I probably played upwards of 6,000 or more hours of Halo 3.

What’s funny is for the most part, I prefer Halo 2’s campaign and multiplayer. The campaign was more plot rich, and I loved the gunplay of Halo 2 and the hitscan battle rifle. However, I and many others hold the sentiment that Halo 3 was the more complete package.

The campaign for starts was simple, but cinematic and action packed. While Halo 2 was more character and dialogue driven, Halo 3 was more action and scene driven. Halo 2 is more quotable, but Halo 3 had such memorable scenes and spectacle in the campaign. The assassination of the Prophet of Truth, battling scarabs, Chief reuniting with Cortana, the Flood crash landing on Earth, the final jump into the frigate hanger in the final mission. The game, though simple in plot, wasn’t without it’s banger quotes:

The Arbiter: Were it so easy...

Elite: Shipmaster, they outnumber us 3-1! Shipmaster: Then it is an even fight. All cruisers fire at will! Burn their mongrel hides!

Sgt. Johnson: Send me out... with a bang....

With the campaign, you had the multiplayer as standard. What made Halo 3’s multiplayer different was how its guns handled. Most of them were projectile rather than hitscan, so there was this slight learning curve/skill gap. What was a fun addition was equipment: bubble shields, shield recharge, power drain, landmines, etc. The maps were so much fun, with some being carried over from previous titles like Last Resort.

What gave Halo 3 true staying power was forge, where people could create their own maps. Anything from simple weapon drop replacements, to obstacle courses, to race tracks, the world was your oyster. However, forge would have been nothing if it wasn’t for the revamped custom games.

Custom games was where you’d gather your friends or randoms and play whatever. You could play standard slayer, or you could play some wacky infection map and gamemode. Infection itself made its debut in Halo 3. In Halo 2, you could play “zombies”, but it largely was based on an honor system in which you’d have one or two people on the green team as zombies, and the rest on another team. If you got “infected” you would have to manually change to the zombie team, which wasn’t always honored. Now it was an official game mode, with automatic team changing. On top of this, you could add individual modifiers based on if you were the “alpha” zombie, or the newly infected. This allowed for games to be born like:

Fat Kid, in which a single starting/alpha zombie with a massive health pool would chase players at a snails crawl. Paired with Omega Journey where players had to bust their way through obstacles, made for tense but fun gameplay. Newly infected would be basically one-shot-to-kill, but move incredibly fast.

Halo on Halo where players would try and race around this ring to get into a hornet to kill an alpha zombie that was trying to snipe you out of your mongoose.

Skycastle was controversial, it used the Fat Kid game type, but now players tried to rush to a floating castle to survive. Not everyone liked it as they thought it was a lot harder on the zombies. Duck Hunt had players running through an obstacle course trying not to get sniped by the alpha zombie. (kinda like halo on halo, but without the mongoose).

Smear the Q***r, where pink zombies would try and infect players in vehicles trying to run over them. Thankfully this got changed to “Pink Things” in modern days... 2000s were a different time man...

and much MUCH more...

Custom games with friends is really where I spent most of my time playing Halo 3. There was just so much to do and I found the casual fun a lot more enjoyable than standard multiplayer.

Something cool happen and you wanted to save it? Theater was your tool. You could go back to previous gameplays and record clips or pictures. Often people would use theater mode to make some fun picture to add on their file share.

Oh file share! I miss this feature and I wish it got adopted into more games. File share was neat because you could save your maps/gamemodes/clips/screenshots to this little spot on your profile for players to see. It was always fun to check out other people’s file share in pre-game lobbies. That’s where you’d find someone who saved Duck Hunt, or a screenshot of some anime girl made out of guns and spawn points, or a group of spartans looking like they’re dancing the “Solja Boy”. If you had something cool enough you might get featured onto the Bungie Favorites tab, where rumored had it if you got featured, Bungie would grant you the mythical Recon armor. This was a big deal, and there were so many rumors going around on how to get Recon since only Bungie staff and special people would get it like DigitalPh33r (the guy who made the Arby n’ the Chief series).

While the community isn’t what it once was, I’m glad I’ve found a group of people big enough to damn-near recapture that old magic. While I mostly play Halo 2 these days (by proxy of there just being more events) I still return to Halo 3 to scratch that nostalgic itch.

Ava - Dragon Age: Origins

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I have already written quite a bit on Mass Effect on my blog, so this time around, I’ll give Dragon Age a bit of my love, especially the first game, Dragon Age: Origins. It’s an RPG made by BioWare from 2009 and takes a lot from previous games like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. I started playing it because I was on Tumblr between 2010-2018, and the Dragon Age fandom was big on there and always had great gifsets and memes, and that got me into it. Yes, I have indeed read the Cullen tiddy fic, and I was there for the Anders wars and I am here to say that I’m an Anders apologist!

I’ve poured over 80 hours into a single run, and still, there is so much undiscovered, so many other choices to make, so many different origins to choose from. That’s what made the game special, especially back then: So much content, so many quests that didn’t just feel like filler, and differing stories and paths depending on whether you pick a warrior, mage or rogue and either an elven, human or dwarven background. That puts you at six different origin stories you can experience, that all start you at different locations and changes how the world reacts to you. My starting character was an elven mage. I always tell myself to do even more playthroughs, but you know how it is....

I know many people find it clunky, especially as the game gets older and older and we are used to controls feeling different and a bit of quality of life changes games just naturally ship with now, but I personally love the top down view. I love pausing and giving everyone a task to do, I love meticulously planning out a move into a room, I love not immediately seeing all of the map or the inside of a dungeon.

What also sticks out to me in the game is how well done the writing is, and how it dared to be a little cheeky or rude at times. This is something I see often in older games of a franchise, even older Animal Crossing entries - how game companies apparently have stopped being comfortable with having certain characters just be assholes since then. Nowadays, much less or no characters that just don’t like your character, discriminate you, or even insult you to your face. Every character instead worships you, or even supposed villains or morally grey characters don’t really act against you or at least have some redeemable qualities or some noble reason for why they can’t support you. All stay very respectable in their evil speeches.

But I like harsh approval systems, and I like when games let you royally fuck up, and I like the threat of a character just leaving your party and being bitter and disappointed in you and telling you what a vashedan bitch or blighted ball-less whelp you are (or someone else is). That’s exactly what Dragon Age. Origins gives me, but it’s never juvenile or over-the-top edgy with it, just realistic.

Going deeper into the actual writing though, and I love the world building of it all, in the smallest details you can find in the world, dialogue you happen to overhear and more. All the characters are complicated, everyone kind of sucks, and has their own motivations and history disconnected from you. You are embedded in the narrative and its moves with enough agency to feel like your decisions have impact and are worthwhile as a player, but with enough lack of control and oversights over it all that it doesn’t feel like you are the center of everything. Things are muddy, you are manipulated, taken advantage of and told the wrong information at times, and you have to choose between two evils and cannot walk away. You can, however, also miss out on decisions and have to live with the consequences. You might run out of time, and people die because of you.

I like how deeply political it all is under the surface of all the dark fantasy. There are a lot of questions around monarchy and the reign of a king (who do you want to reign? What king deserves to die?), the weight of an important task on your shoulders as one of the only Grey Wardens left to deal with the blight, and questions around how ethical the entrance ritual of the Grey Wardens is. It shows the intricacies of racism and classism via the extreme discrimination and systemic abuse the elves (even you, if you are an elf) face. Who gets access to healthcare, and who gets labeled sick when they aren’t, just to deny them services, kick them out of their home, segregate them just to be sold as slaves? How are the Orlesians treating everyone else and extracting resources everywhere to hoard it for themselves? How does the extreme xenophobia affect the dwarf culture and how they treat dwarves who go to the surface? If you play a woman, you might become victim of gross misogyny and have to defy gender norms of a few ingame cultures (especially with very gendered cultures like the Qunari). Big parts of the game deal with religion and different faiths, and church dominance on society. What’s divine, and what’s magical in a world where magic and gods are real? How much influence should the Chantry have? What magic should be allowed, what shouldn’t be? Is it okay to use blood magic if you use it for good? There are the typical discussions around safety vs. freedom; magic users and elves fighting for freedom, and others attempting to lock everyone up that engages in magic or is deemed different or inferior, abusing them and purging them at will for “safety” or revenge. Do you help someone without a profit incentive? Why or why not?

My favorite parts are The Arl of Redcliffe, and of course, the Landsmeet part, but my least favorite part is The Deep Roads. I guess maybe that is stopping my replay ... knowing I will have to go down there again.... and, well, unfortunately, I will not be playing Veilguard as it is very far away from what I enjoy in Dragon Age and forgets and even retcons important lore of the previous games. But at least I can always go back to that classic.

Kami - Yokai Watch 2

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For me, choosing my favorite game of all time was pretty easy. It’s Yokai Watch 2. It’s honestly, a criminally underrated game, and in my opinion at least, better than every mainline pokemon game ever made.

Because, well, it actually does something with its rpg mechanics. It has an actually interesting story, fun characters, good sidequests and tons of endgame content that can get really difficult. It’s also just better at being a creature collecting game than pokemon is and makes legendaries feel rare and special. The creature catching is more fun, and the shinies are more than just color swaps.

Now, let me elaborate on all of that. First up, the starkest difference, and the one that is immediately noticeable. Unlike pokemon, Yokai can talk. They’re actual characters. Most of the major story characters are yokai! And, crucially, you do not catch most of them during the story. This fixes one of the biggest problems with Pokemons creature catching: You’re never really excited to catch anything but the big box legendary. That’s the only pokemon that actually gets foreshadowing. Everything else, you can catch as soon as you see it. The only exception I can really think of are Cosmog & Type Null in Sun and Moon.

In Yokai Watch however, you see all these cool Yokai as part of the story, as actual characters. You get to fight alonside Kyubi and Venoct in the Yokai War hours before you get them. Heck, Kyubi even has his own small Fox shrine that you could theoretically stumble upon at the beginning of the game! They show off the personality and power of these yokai, their cool designs, and make you actually excited for when you are finally able to befriend them. And once you can befriend them in the Endgame, it’s not just a one-and-done situation!

Both Kyubi and venoct have their own questline! Kyubis require you to actually research him, find out about his backstory about being the guardian of Springdale, and then finally fight him in the dead of night on your schools rooftop. And he’s tough to beat as well! The first fight with him is a freebie, but for the second one where you can actually befriend him, you gotta bring your A-Team! If you fight him right after finishing the story, chances are, you’re going to get demolished.

And this isn’t just exclusive to Kyubi and Venoct, this is more or less true for every S-Rank Yokai (which are kind of the Yokai Watch equivalent of Pokemon legendaries, we’ll get to that later).

Most S-Rank Yokai you can befriend, of which there are a lot mind you, have some sort of interesting Quest Chain or unique unlock requirement to go with them.

And lets get to how you actually befriend Yokai. Because, unlike pokemon, the process of making friends with a yokai is a lot more involved and interesting than just doing some menuing.

First of all: After every battle you have a chance to befriend the yokai you just fought. Especially for S-Ranks, this chance is vanishingly small by default. In order to raise it, you have to give them their favorite foods! This is different for every yokai. Unlike Pokemon, you cant just stock up on 999 hyperballs and be set for life. If you want a specific yokai, you have to actually hunt for them. You have to figure out what their food is and buy it, which, some of those foods are actually locked behind quests. This already makes the catching process a lot more interesting. While the battle is going, you can also do certain quicktime events to increase your chance of befriending the yokai, like catching heart whisps. Befriending Yokai is an actual thing you do. It is a process. It doesnt start and end at pressing one button and maybe inflicting some status effects, Its more than just pressing false swipe once and then hoping for the best.

Now, the way you encounter “wild” Yokai is also leagues above what Pokemon does. Yokai Watch does not have random encounters. Most areas don’t even have overworld encounters. When you’re near a spot where you can encounter a Yokai, your yokai watch sends out a signal to alert you. You can then search for them, and initiate the fight yourself. I cannot emphasize how much more enjoyable this makes the process of collecting new yokai. When I get a wild encounter in Pokemon, my first reaction is annoyance. The game forces them on you. The creature collecting game makes you dread encountering creatures. That’s, quite frankly, insane gamedesign. In Yokai Watch, when you encounter a Yokai, it is your choice. It is a thing you do because you want to. In pokemon, I’m annoyed when I get a random encounter. In Yokai Watch, I actively seek them out in the hopes of getting cool Yokai. The difference is that one is forced onto you, while the other one isn’t.

And, unlike pokemon, duplicates actually do something. You can turn Yokai you collect into souls, which are powerful equipment items for your yokai that all have unique effects. And, most importantly, you can merge souls to level them up. So, no matter if youve encountered a yokai once or 10.000 times, it’ll still be useful to catch them. In pokemon, unless you’re trying to go for competitive stats, there isn’t really a reason to catch more than one pokemon of any given species, meaning that encountering multiples of that species just turns into a chore. Oh, right, there’s even more ways they incentivize actually catching stuff. You have Yokai Fusion, which is exactly what it sounds like, and legendary yokai, which you can only befriend after catching a specific set of other yokai.

And, let me get onto the battles, because... Oh boy. In pokemon, no matter how strong you are, battles will always take a minimum amount of time. You get a battle start animation. You get both pokemons entrance animation. You select an attack. You get an animation of the other pokemons HP going down. You get a fainting animation. You get some text saying you killed the other pokemon.

This takes probably a good ten to fifteen seconds and happens for every. single. fight. This pace works for fighting gym leaders or legendaries. During those fights, you have meaningful decisions to make. They won’t be over no matter what, you might actually have to think. This absolutely does not work for the 50th random pidgey you encounter on route 66. It turns random encounters into the most boring, excruciating menuing slugfests of all time.

Yokai Watch 2’s battle system fixes it by just... Not having turns. You don’t need to select your attacks. Yokai attack for you. This means that random pidgey #55 will die in approximately 1 second without you needing to do literally anything. You don’t need to slug through menus for a fight that you know you will win no matter what.

But! Strong Yokai still take effort to beat! This is because Yokai Watch’s battle system is a lot more active.

First up: It is really easy to switch out Yokai. You can do it anytime, and there’s basically no cooldown. Harder battles are a manic experience of moving around your Yokai, switching out dying ones for higher hp ones, desperately waiting for you healing items to go off cooldown, while also juggling having to clear enemy inspirits by playing various minigames. Not to mention soultimates, which are basically from way before Z-Moves were a thing. To activate a soultimate you have to play minigame. You can’t exit out of this minigame at any time, and your yokai cannot attack during it. This means, that during battle you need to balance cleansing yokai, switching them out, using healing items, and potentially dealing more damage with soultimates. This gets especially interesting when enemies have their own soultimates that can potentially get interrupted when you do enough damage. Do you have enough time to finish your own soultimate before theirs goes off? Do you just try and deal enough DPS normally? Do you start casting a healing soultimate in the hopes that your Yokai survive and you can use it to immediately heal them back up to full with it after the enemy soultimate goes off?

Not to mention that Yokai Watch bosses have actual mechanics. Yes! You heard that right! What a crazy idea, I know. They have specific bodyparts you need to target, minions you need to focus or ignore and attacks to interrupt. Yokai Watch 2’s bossfights feel like actual bossfights. It is more than just “which number is bigger”. This battle systems makes hard fights require actualy strategy and fast-paces decision making, whereas fights that you’d obviously win no matter what are over in a matter of seconds. By the way, did I mention that Yokai Watch 2 also has a boss-rush mode? Yokai Watch 2 has a boss-rush mode.

Anyways. Side quests! There’s tons of them. Unlike Pokemon, which only really has one endgame questline, Yokai Watch 2 has way more, and they all unlock unique content. There’s one where you timetravel to the edo era, one where you go and defeat a sentient wok in the depths of hell, one where you go to a theme park and participate in a Kabuki Theater Play/Show match with one of the strongest yokai in the game, one where you try to cast a movie for a hollywood director yokai, and so much more. The amount of interesting sidecontent this game has far eclipses any pokemon game ever made. Honestly, it probably eclipses every pokemon game ever made. And they all have cool rewards!

If you like Pokemon: Please give Yokai Watch 2 a shot. Get to the endgame, collect some S-Ranks. You’ll have a great time. I cannot fully put into words just how much I love this videogame. It’s awesome.

Winther - Serious Sam

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Choosing one game is of course a difficult task as there are many very different games I have fond memories of throughout the years. The endless hours with Civilization I and II on PC, being totally immersed in Final Fantasy VII to IX on PlayStation, grinding to a 100% completion in Super Mario 64 and GoldenEye 64 or the addictive competitiveness of iRacing during the pandemic. However, I wanted this to be about a FPS, because there is something about the simplicity of that genre that appeals to me. Point and shoot. I have generally preferred the more shoot-em-up style games over story driven shooters. I have played Quake over IPX at my schools computer rooms, and spent an obscene amount of hours playing against bots in Unreal Tournament. Even though I preferred these arena style shooters, I never really wanted to play multiplayer. They were mostly single player games for me. Basically, I liked to just run around and shoot at moving targets.

Which leads me to this game series, Serious Sam. I first read about it in a PC magazine I subscribed to and later the magazine had a demo on its CD-ROM. It was a game changer. The Croatian game development company Croteam had made their own game engine for this game, because they wanted something optimised for maximum numbers of enemies on screen at the time. Back in the late 90s and early 00s, the two big game engines was Epic’s Unreal engine and iD’s Quake based engine. It is no small feat making a 3D game engine and what they achieved with this game was groundbreaking at the time.

I don’t know the exact specs of my gaming PC in the spring of 2001 when I got this game, but I think I had an AMD Thunderbird 1GHz and a GeForce 2 graphics card. I could run this game fine enough, and it was like tailormade for me. Single player, large open areas, no plot, lots of massive cool weapons, an adrenaline pumping soundtrack and literally hundreds of enemies on screen at the same time to shoot. Circle strafing became the crucial strategy. This was everything I enjoyed from playing death match games against bots in Unreal Tournament, just in a proper single player game. At the time, Counter Strike was the game at the time, which I have also had some fun with playing on netcafés when it was just a mod for Half Life, but the slower tactical gameplay never really soothed me. I wanted it fast-paced with non-stop shooting and tons of enemies. I was finishing ninth grade at the time, I had just met my then girlfriend and now wife, and well, life was good. Overall nostalgia for that point in time likely also plays a good deal in my love for this game.

It was followed up by a sequel a year after, and it was basically everything a sequel needed to be. Just improving on perfection. No need to radically change anything, just new levels, new weapons, more monsters. Bigger, better and louder. The two games got a resurgence when they released a HD remake in 2010, which was the exact same games just with improved high definition assets. For anyone wanting to play this game today, I would recommend that version. In 2011 Serious Sam 3: BFE was released, which re-sparked my joy for the series again, but I think I only played through that game once. It has a pretty awesome final level, but it had lost some of its uniqueness. It felt and played like most other shooters at the time, and I haven’t really been following the game series since then. For me, the two original Serious Sam games still stand out as a groundbreaking innovative style of FPS game that challenged the mastodonts of Quake and Unreal at the time.

Cris - Animal Crossing

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Sometime in 2003 (I think) my parents bought my first computer for me (a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo 400, I believe), placed it on the desk in my bedroom, and subscribed to an ISP to get it connected to the Internet.

Since I had grown up in Munich, Germany during a significant period of my childhood (1995 to 2000), I could understand, speak, read, and write in German. It was through the Internet that I got exposed to and became fluent in English, but at first, I browsed almost exclusively German-language websites, most notably, nintendo.de.

It looked completely different back then (and sadly, I have never been able to find an archive). You could tell that it was a labor of love. They had all the latest information, all the trailers, and even a forum.

I wish I remembered more about how I first became aware of what became my favorite video game of all time: Animal Crossing for the Gamecube, but I know that it was on that nintendo.de website. Once day, after I had returned home from school, I was just browsing the pages, when I stumbled on what probably was this trailer of the game.

Side note: I am 100% sure that some of the footage in that trailer (which is from E3 2002) was present in the trailer that I saw, but I’m not 100% sure that it was the exact same trailer. I’m astonished that this person went out of their way to preserve this footage.

It must have been sometime in late spring or early summer of 2004 that I first became aware of this game. I was approaching my 15th year of age, at which point I went to 9th grade. Portugal was firmly “Sonyland” back then, and being a fan of Nintendo video games got me often brutally bullied at school. Somehow though, I could never find myself interested in anything other than what Nintendo was publishing at the time (and it wasn’t for lack of exposure from peers and the Internet alike).

Not only did Nintendo back then release just the most fun and charming video games, many of which became beloved classics and favorites of mine (the Gamecube being my all-time favorite console), but they were also throwing out a lot of odd experiments that turned out to be excellent games, such as Luigi’s Mansion and Metroid Prime (yes, back then, nobody believed that Metroid Prime would be anything good).

From the moment that I saw the trailer for Animal Crossing, I knew that there was something special about it. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was (I was 14 after all), but looking back, it was just so plainly obvious that there was a gap in the market for this exact type of game, where you control a character, head out into a town, and “live your life” however you see fit. You can chat with the NPCs, decorate your house, catch bug and fish, buy and sell items, write letters, and that just scratched the surface of what the game had to offer (which for that time, was a lot).

A big plus for me was that everything looked colorful and adorable. It didn’t help Nintendo’s “kiddie image” back then (and I also got bullied at school for not liking “realistic” and “manly” games), but I was a big fan of it! Nintendo’s unique style of cartoony characters was one of the selling points for me. In a way, I think that Animal Crossing may have been one of the first true “cozy games”, almost two decades before the series brought that genre to the forefront in 2020 (if you count from the Japan-only release of the original N64 version in 2001).

I think that I had to patiently wait until Christmas before my parents bought the game for me.

When I started playing it, I became hooked.

Animal Crossing was everything that the trailer had promised and then some. In its simplicity and repetitiveness, it was one of the most fun experiences that I have ever had playing a video game. All of the small (and big) tasks that I could undertake, such as fishing and catching bugs, digging up fossils, planting flowers, cutting down or planting trees, buying and selling items at Nook’s, decorating my home with furniture, designing pattern’s at Able’s, talk to the villagers, send them mail, participate in holidays and events, travel to the island (I had a GBA and the cable to link it to the GCN), and travel to other towns, were intuitive and rewarding in and of themselves. As I “progressed” in the game, I couldn’t help but feel astonished at how much I had achieved, and the “real” work that went behind it. It was a different kind of power fantasy that tapped into this very human desire to have a “home of one’s own”, both in the physical as well social sense.

For once, I also didn’t feel constrained in my experience, but was free to enjoy my time in that world as I pleased. There were no clear objectives (beyond paying off my loan). There were no frustrating or stressful bosses to be fought. There was no violence. There was no story. Yet, there were memories from memorable moments, and very many of them. The potential to have those experiences was endless in a way, because the game was programmed and designed in such a way that it would have been statistically impossible for me to do and see everything that the game had to offer. In a way, this made it so that the story of the game, became the player’s unique story. No one player would have the exact same experiences and memories. We take these “user-generated” gameplay mechanics for granted now, but in the early 2000s, there were an absolute novelty.

The world of Animal Crossing was one in which I wanted to live. It felt safe there, and it was fun.

I want to say some more about the social aspect of the game though.

Serie’s creator Katsuya Eguchi once had this to say about his inspiration for the game:

Animal Crossing features three themes: family, friendship and community. But the reason I wanted to investigate them was a result of being so lonely when I arrived in Kyoto! Chiba is east of Tokyo and quite a distance from Kyoto, and when I moved there I left my family and friends behind. In doing so, I realized that being close to them - being able to spend time with them, talk to them, play with them - was such a great, important thing. I wondered for a long time if there would be a way to recreate that feeling, and that was the impetus behind the original Animal Crossing.

Another thing is that I’d always get home really late. And my family plays games, and would sometimes be playing when I got home. And I thought to myself - they’re playing games, and I’m playing games, but we’re not really doing it together. It’d be nice to have a play experience where even though we’re not playing at the same time, we’re still sharing things together. So this was something that the kids could play after school, and I could play when I got home at night, and I could kind of be part of what they were doing while I wasn’t around. And at the same time they get to see things I’ve been doing. It was kind of a desire to create a space where my family and I could interact more, even if we weren’t playing together.

There is this famous (37 million views) video by Jaiden Anomation where she rips in a funny way into how later installments in the series watered down the character of the villagers. I felt so seen by her in this video (and have re-watched it several times over the years), because one of the main ingredients that made up the secret sauce of the Gamecube title, was exactly how quirky the characters were.

I can’t imagine that the dialogues in the original, Japan-only N64 release were as brash as those of the American and European Gamecube GCN ports, but Eguchi’s vision for what essentially is a “social simulation” game, combined with the excellent writing of the North American release, really brought the game to life, in a way that the series has never been able to replicate since.

There is a lot of talk about “AI relationships” these days, but Animal Crossing was way ahead of that trend. Interacting with the villagers on a daily basis could feel repetitive sometimes, but I have played so much of the game that I can tell you with confidence that you will always find reasons to be amused by what the characters say about you, themselves, or other villagers. The writing was that good. If you played as much as I did, then you would end up building a parasocial relationship with these cartoony, anthropomorphic animals. You would become fond of them. You would begin to treat them differently, and believe it or not, they would begin to treat you differently as well.

There is a YouTuber, who goes by the name Hunter R., who started a channel in 2023 year almost entirely dedicated to the intricacies of the game, particularly its code. I devour every single video he releases. I just can’t get enough of learning more about this game. I think I might be actually obsessed. Regardless, you can tell from listening to him explain the mechanics that a lot of thought (and manual labor) went into every line of code that was written. I think that this is especially evident in how the villagers interact with you, and how they, very gradually, begin to treat you like an actual friend.

I will never forget how I befriended Lobo, for example. He has had a cranky personality from the beginning of the series. Accordingly, when you talked to him at first, he would be rude, dismissive, and distant. I totally disliked him in the beginning. He kind of even reminded me of some of the real people in my life who I thought were just pointlessly mean to me. After a good many weeks or months of interacting with him however, his tone began to noticeably change. His personality didn’t, but his tone did. Do you understand how significant this is? This is the power of great writing. One day I just found myself admiring how my own feelings for Lobo had changed, and how I now saw him as my closest friend in my town. How did that ever happen?

Of course, this was a game released before the Internet and online play became ubiquitous. Animal Crossing: Wild World was such a huge leap for the series, primarily because it enabled online multiplayer and on a handheld to boot. It managed to be a fully-fledged Animal Crossing title that you could carry in your pocket. That was impressive (and I played the heck out of it too), but in order to make the social aspect of online play more relevant (and because Nintendo reined in the liberties that the localization teams took), the villagers’ personalities were watered down so that their dialogues wouldn’t hurt Nintendo’s “family friendly” image).

Animal Crossing on the Gamecube however, was a social simulation by necessity. There were ways to play “with” real people (I’ll get to that), but those were indirect and other than in Japan, kids in North America and Europe would never have enough other owners of the game around them to experience those. The NPCs had to act in a manner that would evoke feelings of community in the player, or else Eguchi’s vision would not have truly have been executed. That is what I believe makes this game stand out, and why I believe that no other social simulation game out there has been able to beat it in this aspect. There are plenty of social simulations on the market, both new and classic titles, but there is something very fundamentally different and satisfying in the act of walking up to villager, chatting with them, and get a different interaction almost every time, indefinitely. It makes it feel like the villager is “sentient” in a way. They appear independent and autonomous. The dialogues don’t feel scripted. Again, you’re not playing through a story with a definite beginning and end. You’re just socializing with the villagers.

I therefore really wish that Nintendo would release Animal Crossing on the Gamecube NSO. I’ll immediately pay whatever price they ask for the subscription if they ever do. To make you understand just how much I love this game, I will confess to you that once I left my parent’s home at the age of 21, I have played this game on Dolphin for hundreds, or maybe thousands of hours. Every time I’d return to Dolphin, this would be the game that I would return to. I have since stopped using emulators and downloading ROMs, but whenever I feel the urge to that again, it is always because I want to return to Animal Crossing, and that despite the fact that I’ve been playing New Horizons this year. It just doesn’t feel the same though.

One cool thing about the Gamecube release is that the box came with a memory card with 59 “blocks” (about 4 MB) of space (of which the game needed at least 57 blocks to save its progress). I had a third-party memory card with 129 blocks (if I remember correctly) already, and I wasn’t using all of it, so I immediately could play on two towns! (This was necessary to unlock the last store upgrade, by the way). With those tools, I was able to experience some of that “indirect” gameplay. I had exactly one friend who I lent the game to a few times, and whose town I visited, and my sister used to play with me as well.

So indeed, the real-time clock, coupled with the indirect multiplayer, how your town changes as you allow others to play in and visit it, and the expertly-written villagers, truly gave me that sense of community that I was, perhaps, missing in real life. It’s a kind of magic that the more recent, diorama decoration-driven entries, where multiplayer has devolved into a marketplace, have been unable to capture.

All of these experiences have combined to make Animal Crossing on the Gamecube my favorite video game of all time, potentially forever.

I was so obsessed with this game as a teenager, that I would even read other people’s “diaries” (blogs) of their experience playing the game. Two of those diaries were so fun for me to read, that I have re-read them a few times over the years.

The first one was written by a German guy who went by the nickname “Schrody”. If you can read German, and if you understand German humor (from that time), and you love the original entry in the series (that’s a lot of requirements), then I highly recommend that you to read his diary. Still, to this day, his writing makes me laugh until I can’t breathe anymore. I love his diary so much that I downloaded the archive, so that I don’t ever lose it.

The second was written by an American, Joe Fourhman, and may be one of the first really long pieces of English text that I ever read in my life. It was not only funny, but also very insightful. In an era before every little detail about a video game could be uncovered on the Internet, this guy was doing actual research to try to understand the mechanics, and he was actually working towards 100% completing the game. He even played every day for an entire year, thinking that the game would somehow reward him for it. I really loved his 27th entry in particular, where he made a list of items that were difficult to obtain, and divided them up into four categories: minor, major, extreme, and suicidal. Poor Static.

This leads me to the wider community of Animal Crossing for the Gamecube, because there are very many other weirdos like myself who endlessly obsess about this obscure video game. I want to briefly mention some of them and how their work has impacted me.

First up, JVGS. Unlike him, I was not consistent as a teenager. I deeply regret that. I restarted my towns all the time (though some I did take quite far, unlocking pretty much everything). I really wish that I had not only preserved my original save games (and backed them up), but continued to play them. JVGS has his original save still, and he’s been playing it on real hardware to this day (his blog goes all the way back to 2011). He’s a legend in the AC GCN community.

Next up, the legendary James Chambers and Cuyler, who have both made some insane contributions to reverse-engineering efforts of the GCN entries of the series. They have developed so many incredible tools (many of which I have used), like a save editor (that even allows you to alter the map), and one that I personally “contributed” to: the letter scorer tool. I am that “Cris” who in 2018, asked Chambers if he’d be willing to dig into the code behind the letter system, out of sheer curiosity.

I also want to mention Brackenhawk, who leads the still very active Animal Crossing HD Texture Pack group. I hope to see this project, and the decompilation of the game, finished someday.

Last but not least, I have to give a shout out to the one and only BrianMp16, an Animal Crossing speedrunner who not only legitimately 100%-ed the game, but also legitimately became the first “bellionaire” in its history.

I want to finish my portion of this collaboration with this old and touching story about a sick mother whose son suggested she play Animal Crossing with him. It illustrates really well what makes this entry in the series so special: While he quickly lost interest in the game, she got really into it and sent him a lot of letters, which he found when he randomly booted up the game again a long time after she passed away from her illness.

The sad story made the rounds on the Internet in late 2005/2006. How the it spread is actually a story of its own: The original tale was shared by the son on the IGN forum/message board. It was then picked up by a Korean guy who translated it into Korean and published it on his blog. Another guy then took the Korean translation, and turned it into a comic that he published on a Korean gaming website with the aptly chosen TLD thisisgame.com. The text in that comic was then replaced by the original English text from the post on IGN, and made its rounds in the west again.

I spent a good two hours trying to find all the original sources but couldn’t figure out how to find an archive of the story on the IGN forum. I only found the Korean translation (which includes the original English text at the bottom, sadly without attribution), and a repost of the comic. Funny enough, the Wayback Machine did preserve the comic from the website that it was originally posted on, but I can’t figure out how to retrieve the page that it was displayed on either.

All of these wonderful people have contributed to me getting even more enjoyment out of my favorite game, and I’m very thankful to them.

May the community continue to grow, and may the legacy of Animal Crossing on the Gamecube, my favorite game of all time, live on.

Mono - Minecraft

monocyte.blog/

i have to go for the low hanging fruit. it has to be minecraft. i, as most of the kids from my generation grew up with the game.

i remember my first experience with minecraft was from a friend playing a cracked copy on his laptop. he tried to show me you could tame ocelots, which i think were just added at t