My Favorite Video Game

I haven't played an especially large amount of video games, but the ones I do play are almost always among the best.  There's one though, that stands far above all the others.  I've played games where the fates of entire worlds are placed in my hands, but my favorite game features absolutely none of those incredibly high stakes.  Sure, there's a story, and an exciting conclusion, but nowhere near the level of some of my other favorites.  At the end of the day, it's basically just a puzzle game.

Portal 2 is my favorite video game.  There's no violence, no killing, there's a gun, but it fires portals (shocking), and it solves puzzles.  I just recently starting playing the game again because I have a computer that can actually handle the graphics.  It's been a few years, so my recollection of the puzzles is hazy at best.  It's almost like I'm playing the game for the first time again.  I get to laugh at the absolutely hilarious dialogue once more, no small feat for a video game to pull off.  Humor's a difficult thing to pull off, but Portal does it almost perfectly.  The gameplay is smooth and the game looks good too.  I've never been one for hyper-realism in my video games, it's why I'm so partial to Team Fortress 2, and why I've been going pretty hard at Borderlands 2 the past couple months (I'm sure I'll have something to say about that game, just not now).  There's no cartoony aspects to Portal, but the scale of everything in the game is just so vast, it can't possibly be real.

I don't think many people would deny that Portal 2 is a great game, but I don't imagine many would call it their favorite.  What does it for me?  Simple.  When I first played the game, I played with a couple friends watching, and that experience made everything so much better.  The game is great, but the interactive aspect of that first playthrough made a great game so much better.  I've heard the same thing from other people who've played the game, playing it with other people around made it better.  The game might not look all that interesting on the surface, but trust me, it's probably the most fun I've ever had playing a video game.

Half-Life 2 Thoughts

City 17, setting of much of the game.

As I've written about before, I'm catching up on one of the most iconic video game series ever made, the Half-Life games.  Today, I finished up what is arguably the greatest video game ever made, Half-Life 2.  I'm only ten years behind on this one, and so much has already been said about this game, I'm not sure what more I can add.  I'll give it a shot though.

This game took me a month to play through, but honestly, I went through most of it in less than a week.  It was incredibly addicting and very fun to play through.  The only reason it took this long is because I took a self-imposed break from computer gaming to work on other things.  I'm not sure if I would consider this the greatest game ever made, nor is it my favorite game (Ocarina of Time and Portal 2, respectively, if you're curious) but this game is certainly up there.  Thankfully, this game is much, much easier than the original Half-Life, and it also has an easy setting.  Yes, I used the easy setting.  Sure, I could have played on a harder difficulty and easily beaten the game.  But that would have meant playing in a way that I don't really like.  I like brazenly walking into rooms filled with enemies, walking up to some poor saps face and shooting him with a shotgun.  It's a very straightforward approach, and perhaps hard to believe considering that my favorite game is essentially a puzzle game, but that's how I do things.  That's what makes gaming fun for me, and I'm glad this game could accommodate that playstyle.  The original couldn't, which is why it took me so long to get through.

This game has received all sorts of awards and praise, so I don't feel like saying anything about that is necessary.  Unlike the first game, this one doesn't feel dated at all, the graphics may not be up to 2014 standards, but they still look good.  I was worried about this game even working on my not-very-powerful laptop, but it worked just fine, which I was very happy about.  I've written extensively on Team Fortress 2, which of course utilizes the same engine as Half-Life 2, but that game is newer and has gotten much, much bigger in the seven years since its release, so it doesn't work nearly as well as Half-Life 2 does.  I won't pretend like it's got the world's greatest storyline, because it doesn't.  Video games seldom do.  But it's told in an effective manner, and the lack of cutscenes is always nice.  So, Half-Life 2, not my favorite game, but it's still really, really good.

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Video Games and Getting Older

It's funny how your priorities change as you get older, especially when it comes to video games.  Even just a year or so ago, I couldn't get enough of them.  I could easily spent 6 hours or more at a time playing a game.  I should say that if I'm playing with other people, I can still go for long periods of time, but that's a bit different.  That's more of a social experience rather than a purely gaming one.  When it comes to individual gaming, I just can't do it anymore.  Not like I used to. 

There are quite a few games that I have started that I haven't finished.  I have the Metroid Prime series, the Half-Life series, and a couple of Legend of Zelda playthroughs that I started but have yet to finish.  I would love to finish them all as soon as possible, but I just have no drive to spend long hours playing them.  It's probably going to take me years to finish all of those.

I don't want to say that video games are a kid's activity, cause they're not.  However, I get the feeling that as I get into adulthood, it's only going to be certain kinds of games that will be appealing.  Multiplayer Nintendo games are probably going to be in because let's face it, lots of people like and play Nintendo games like Mario Kart and Smash Bros.  Providing Team Fortress 2 maintains its popularity, I'll still be playing that because there's no time pressure to it.  I can play for half an hour every few days and not lose anything.  Cheap, innovative indie games are probably in as well because they'll be short and provide decent money value.  I don't want to take anything away from expensive, mainstream games with a lot of DLC, but I just don't have the time or the willingness to invest in games like that.  That's just the way it is, and I'm not really too sad about it.  I never liked those big games anyway.  

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Mario Kart

I play a lot of Mario Kart with my younger brothers.  I use the Offroader, which I hear isn't very good, but I enjoy it.  It's big, so you can shove people around, and it actually accelerates.  Now, I don't usually win when we all play.  My brothers use better carts, and being big means you get hit with more stuff.  Now, one of my brothers gets ridiculously mad at the game.  He's a very competitive person, and he definitely expects skill to be rewarded in kind.  Now, if you've played Mario Kart, you know perfectly well that skill is usually rewarded with blue shells.  I'm a competitive person too, but I've learned a valuable tool that everybody should utilize when playing multiplayer Nintendo games.  Never try to win, you'll just end up tossing a controller out a window.  Just try to have fun, and wait for the other guy to get mad.  Then you win.  Or if you're playing Brawl, use Snake, lay mines and grenades everywhere, get kills somebody else spent a minute working on.  See, fun.  But seriously, especially with Mario Kart, it just doesn't pay to get too bent out of shape on the constant blue shells, and other annoying hazards.  You'll just end up losing your voice.