Board 8 > azuarc looks back on life and 45 games that touched it the most [ranking kinda?]

(+) Yeah! (+)

Ive been playing video games for a long time. As long as Ive been alive, effectively. In realization of this, Ive decided to do a retrospective on the 45 games Ive racked up the most playtime on. Why 45? Oh, just seemed like a good number. (I may need to take a day off from posting for my first colonoscopy.) The better question is why by playtime?

And the short answer is, I dunno, how do you actually decide what your favorites are? Besides, people do favorite lists all the time. I wanted to look back on how video games have touched my life, and I feel like its easiest to tell that story by looking at the games with the most playtime. As much as Ive enjoyed quite a few very short games across the last four decades, they inherently dont leave as much of an impact simply due to lack of exposure. If you want to hear about highly memorable games that didnt make the list, maybe Ill touch on that at the end.

There is, however, one obvious problem with this metric: I have absolutely no idea what my actual top 45 most played games are. I am predominantly a PC gamer, and its nice that Steam keeps countbut I didnt start using Steam until 2011 when Skyrim came out and forced me to download it. And, tragically, playtime tracking was simply not a thing before that. So the order of this list is incredibly fuzzy. Im reasonably confident that the top 40 belong on the true list, but my placements will only be my best estimate. Im simply making wild guesses for the bottom five.

Additionally, Im going to disregard some entries that would be too similar. I dont think it would be very interesting to hear my take on each of Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, Guitar Hero: World Tour, Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero, Guitar Hero Rocks the 80s, etc. Cut games will appear as honorable mentions where appropriate. As a result, the threshold for making the list is approximately 100 hours.

For context, I have primarily played or used the following platforms: Commodore 64, DOS, Game Boy, Nintendo 64, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, Steam/contemporary PC

There will be very little that does not appear on one of those platforms. As a kid, I mostly went to my friends houses to play NES, SNES, Genesis and more. I experienced a lot of games on those platforms, but probably cant say I played 100+ hours of any one game. Between what I had access to and what genres lend themselves to this kind of list, there are going to be a great many games that simply have no chance of showing up. And thats without even considering my own preferences. So yeah, sorry, your favorite games probably not here. Unless you just really like Bethesda games.

In case youre wondering, by my count, there are:

• 3 MMORPGs
• ~12 open world and/or western RPGs
• 3 strategy games
• 15 games that dont have a close comparison elsewhere on the list
• 3.5 Nintendo games
• 5 SquareSoft games
• 0 Square-Enix games
• 8 games by the killer Bs (Blizzard, Bioward, Bethesda)
• 2 Commodore 64 games
• 5 true DOS games
• 3 N64 games
• 4 games I played on PS2
• 4 Xbox 360 games
• 13 games on Steam
• 8.5 post-2000 PC games not on Steam

Some of these games I will write about the game. Some about where I was in life when I played it. Or about personal experiences I had. I dunno. Just whatever I think of. So I hope this sounds interesting, and look forward to seeing your reactions in the thread!

The Near Misses:

These five entries could have interchangeably been included with some of the last few on the official list, and round things out to a total of fifty. I consider these the nearest contenders for making the list, though there are many others that might be worthy of discussion.

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Dragon Warrior

Growing up in the 80s, the original Dragon Warrior was a revelation for me. Video games didn't *have* to be hard and based on mechanical skill plus extreme mastery. I had some computer games that this could describe, but they were incredibly clumsy, slow, and arcane. (Or were clearly kids games.) Dragon Warrior was far snappier, while not punishing my 7-year-old reflexes and decision making. The fact that I could just grind endlessly appealed to me in an unhealthy way that only makes sense when you're that age. It was my first RPG, and set the tone for how I would approach many games for a very long time. Such as...

Final Fantasy

Both of these were games I didn't have direct access to. I had a friend who let me play on his NES, and I got stuck at his place during a snowstorm, whereupon I just played the crap out of the game and eventually beat it. The grind felt much more tedious in FF, but the overall gameplay was more enjoyable considering you could see your character(s) and battles were much more dynamic. While I was more dedicated to Dragon Warrior (Quest) early on, playing both DW3 and DW4 extensively as well, FF became the franchise to which I was more tied to overall. Ironically, it would be over 25 years before I'd finish another mainline entry.

Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans

As a kid with a computer in the 90s, I leaned *hard* on shareware titles. My parents would only get me a game at Christmas and one for my birthday, and there was a ten-month drought in-between. The best I could hope for was for my dad to take me to a computer show, and find vendors selling disks of shareware that I could buy with my allowance. Shareware as a marketing prospect was starting to die down by the time Warcraft hit the scene, but I was blown away by the game, being nothing like I'd ever seen. I played the free version of the game repeatedly before eventually convincing my parents to get the full retail edition. I didn't love the campaign -- it forced me to play differently than I did in the demo, and getting obliterated by catapults sucked -- but it also became the first game I would discover could be played multiplayer over a modem...even if my parents heavily restricted me tying up the house's only phone line with it. Played a bit of Warcraft 2 as well, but far less.

Epic Pinball

Another shareware success story, Epic Pinball was released by Epic MegaGames, the same company that would go on to make Unreal Tournament and eventually the Epic Store and Fortnite. Back then, though, they were just a small studio making decent DOS games with VGA graphics. Their first release, Jill of the Jungle stands out in my mind for the graphics and the first use of a soundcard that I got to experience, even if both held up really poorly later. The pinball game came soon after, released with one table, Android, which I played the crap out of. There'd been other pinball games on both DOS and console, but none of them were very good. Epic Pinball simply felt right. I actually envisioned myself playing pinball, and not a pinball video game. My friend and I decided to order the full version, which came with 7 more tables. (They later added 4 more.) While not all the tables were as good as Android -- in fact, almost none were -- I spent hours trying to beat my scores on Crash & Burn and Deep Sea.

Mortal Kombat II

I could write a really long review here since this is stand-in for the whole MK series, and really Street Fighter as well. I wasn't much of a fighting game guru, but I learned how to play all the characters in the first three MK games. After playing the second game, the first felt so incredibly jank it was really hard to go back to. Plus I wasn't a huge fan of the OG line-up. However, the second game added a ton of new options to play, and unlike MK1, the second game felt like it had been more faithfully preserved by the home console editions that didn't force you to pop 50 cents in just to lose to some guy who lorded over the arcade cabinet like it was his job. Whoopsies!

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Up next: Let the games begin!

Tag

Tag

I'm going to try to post a music entry from each game's soundtrack if those who want to guess what's next want something extra to try for, btw.

Tag

Tag

show me on the controller where the game touched youj

Tagging, I guess.

I'm in

I was going to post one per night, but y'know what? I feel like putting one up now.

45. Summer Games
Created by Epyx
Release year: 1984
Platform: Commodore 64
Guesstimated playtime: <100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xqd904vC5Nc

In the early days of home computing, Microsoft systems were pretty damn bad for gaming. But you know what wasn't? The Commodore freaking 64. Load times kinda sucked, but the graphics and sound were a full decade ahead of anything you'd find on DOS. It was also really easy to find a bunch of My First Computer Program games, and we had a stack of like a hundred floppy disks all with *something* on them, often large collections of (mostly) games written in BASIC. Very few could be considered commercial products, though. As a kid I'd hop between all of these, but the one noteworthy "real" game that I played was Summer Games.

Unable to directly name drop the Olympics, Epyx made a series of mini-games for you and your friends to compete in ranging from gymnastics to pole vault to diving. The 100m dash was especially bad for incentivizing you to palm the tip of your joystick and grind it in a circle as fast as possible, the likes of which we didn't really see again until Mario Party. Oh, yeah. Remember joysticks? Hot damn, nobody uses those things any more, but they were everywhere in the 80s until Nintendo said "nah, we got a better idea."

My copy of Summer Games was clearly pirated, and wasn't even a clean copy because whenever we'd load the swimming event, weird artifacts would glitch all over the screen. But as a kid -- this game released when I was four -- with nothing better to do, I would queue up as many players as possible, and then play as all of them until I learned the best possible strategies for all the events. On the off-chance I did have someone over to play real multiplayer, I would completely crush them, but the game had a way of making even people who didn't know what they were doing feel at least somewhat capable. I also learned a lot of national anthems through this game (or at least the first few bars of them.)

Related games: There was also a Summer Games II which I didn't own but got to play a little of at friends' houses. The events in that one felt weird and foreign to me, probably because their implementation was a bit more ambitious. The game was objectively better in terms of performance, though. Winter Games was a title we had at school, and I would often play while waiting for my parents to come home in the after-school program at my elementary school. Because there were inherently other kids around, we almost always got to play that one multiplayer. However, that was the Apple IIe version which ran like a potato compared to the C64.

Still, one of my favorite memories as a gamer happened on that copy of Winter Games when an older kid, Matt, thought he was going to win overall and everything had come down to my final run on bobsled. As I sat in front of the computer to navigate the lefts and rights to make the turns, I felt something close over my eyes. Matt was covering my sight! Rather than fighting him on it, I just navigated the course on muscle memory alone and somehow managed to not crash the sled. In fact, I even got the fastest attempt out of anyone on that run (including my two previous attempts) and ended up winning gold on bobsled and first place in the standings as a result.

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Up next: Another equally old game that's too obscure for anyone to guess. It's also the only other sports game unless racing counts.

Playtime seems like a somewhat odd metric. It looks like I've played Skyrim for 200 hours, but I would say it has touched my life not at all.

I made a list of the top 15 games that impacted me the most once. some of them wouldnt even make a top 100. that would be fun to revisit.

I know the 6 games in my life that have surpassed 1000 hours, but I have no idea how I'd make any list beyond that.

Doubt I'll have much to say, but I'll enjoy reading and following along anyways!

44. Championship Baseball
Created by Gamestar (Activision)
Release year: 1986
Platform: Commodore 64
Guesstimated playtime: <100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67xphWChUr0

The one other game on the Commodore 64 that I can say I specifically played enough hours of in those early years was Championship Baseball.

Growing up, I was a baseball kid. My parents universally cared not at all for sports with one exception -- my mom had fond memories of listening to the baseball games on the radio with her dad, and I happened to have been born right in the middle of the Phillies winning their first (and for a while longer, only) world series. Exhibiting behavior that would have clearly gotten me diagnosed as autistic today, I would sit in front of every game that I could and keep score. You know how baseball fans have those little tables where they log every at-bat like they're a professional statistician? Yeah, I did that. All while being otherwise much too bored to actually watch the game and simultaneously playing eight sides of a board game by myself or banging a ball against the stoop leading into the kitchen.

But I took it one step further. My dad actually encouraged this behavior (the scorekeeping part) by helping me design my own printable page for keeping score, and I would then use it to log the stats and results of my players in Championship Baseball, a title that felt akin to an improved version of one of those Tiger handheld games. (I also had the Tiger handheld and one other game just like it.) I would pretend that the people on the team were the Phillies players of the era, and I would record their stats across each game and even figure out what their season stats were. I know I had logged at least thirty games this way.

The thing is, this shouldn't have even been necessary. Unbeknownst to me, the game was *supposed* to track stats for you. But it would always ask me before and after each game to insert the "team construction disk," which I didn't have, so I ended up playing a single exhibition game with the default team every time. Unlike Summer Games, this wasn't a pirated copy -- we had the real thing -- so I'm not sure where this second disk was, but it wasn't just the back of the main disk.

I also had a copy of Championship Basketball, but since I didn't know or care anything about basketball, I basically never played it. Early basketball video games were pretty awful anyway.

Oh, and speaking of the Tiger handheld, I knew all the potential plays in that one, too, and how to maximize every play, but I would drive people nuts because I'd leave the sound on to use as audio cues for when to swing. People would ask me to turn the sound off, but I couldn't play it without the sound.

Anyway, bye C64. Thanks for playing.

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Up next: From my first handheld game to my first real handheld game.

And since saying the word "autistic" brought up a warning in the previous post, in case any mod drifts in and questions this, I have come to the conclusion at this point in my life that I am undiagnosed autistic. I'm simply describing myself, and it's certainly not being used as a perjorative.

But the above took place at a time when people were only looking for one particular style of behavior that I guess I didn't exhibit since I was able to function and even excel in school. Today, I would have gotten flagged and perhaps gotten some assistance I could have very much used later in life.

tag

i thought you were using "it" as your pronoun in the topic title at first

azuarc posted...

And since saying the word "autistic" brought up a warning in the previous post, in case any mod drifts in and questions this, I have come to the conclusion at this point in my life that I am undiagnosed autistic. I'm simply describing myself, and it's certainly not being used as a perjorative.

But the above took place at a time when people were only looking for one particular style of behavior that I guess I didn't exhibit since I was able to function and even excel in school. Today, I would have gotten flagged and perhaps gotten some assistance I could have very much used later in life.

Hey, this same thing happened to me a few days ago!

Anyway, looking forward to this. Haven't played anything that's come up so far save Final Fantasy, but I'm not surprised. I know I'm on the younger side of this board.

43. Final Fantasy Adventure
Created by Squaresoft
Release year: 1991
Platform: Gameboy
Guesstimated playtime: ~100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MnOLR--jXo

By the time I was 11, my parents had been forced to accept that I was "addicted" to video games. I took to them from the moment I first laid eyes on my dad and sisters playing on the C64, and I was mostly inseparable from whatever games I had access to. Which wasn't a lot because my parents refused to purchase an NES for me, despite an insufferable amount of begging. So I would go to my friends' houses after school every day to play on their systems.

But my mom had signed me up for this traveling summer camp and I would be sitting on a bus for long hours at a stretch throughout the whole summer. For a kid who sat in long car rides about as well as you could imagine, my parents broke down and bought me a Gameboy. And it worked -- I could be completely placated by just sitting with my Gameboy so long as the batteries held out.

The first game they bought for it, alongside Tetris, was Final Fantasy Adventure. I hadn't heard of it, but I had *definitely* heard of Final Fantasy, so I was excited. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be an action game! Still, I spent basically the entirety of Christmas day glued to my Gameboy, and the game holds tremendous sentimental weight to me because even if we had the Commodore, this felt like the first video game that was truly mine. Me. I owned this. It didn't belong to the family and I was just the one who monopolized it. No, this was rightly and truly my game. It felt special in a way that words cannot begin to express. For as much as I participate in the VGM community here on the board, I still call the ending to FFA my favorite video game song and I can't say how much of that is nostalgia or an inherent affinity for old chiptunes.

The real question here is if 100 hours is even remotely correct for playtime. Given how I was often glued to my Gameboy for two summers, I'd say probably not, but I had other games later, and FFA was a pretty daunting endeavor to start a new game on. I probably played through it in full about three times, and a single playthrough was around 30 hours, (HLTB says 11, but I call bull on that,) so I think this sounds about right, but the fact that I'm putting it behind some other games does maybe feel a bit off in my head. Oh well.

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Up next: A game strongly tied to one board member's username.

tag

Enjoying this so far

42. Final Fantasy VIII
Created by Squaresoft
Release year: 1999
Platform: PC
Guesstimated playtime: ~100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oH5dksLgv8

Was this really 1999? I was in college by then, and I feel like that doesn't line up with my experience with the game. Plus one other thing I'll talk about in a second that meant I played it even later than that.

I mentioned during my blurb on FF1 that it would be over 25 years before I'd beat another mainline Final Fantasy, but if there was any game that I *should* have finished, it would be 8. Lord knows I poured enough time into it. But here's the problem: I didn't own a PlayStation. I had friends who did. Friends who let me try the game initially and even start a save file, but this was at a point in my life where those friends weren't just going to sit on the couch and watch me play their game. So just like every other console game, I'd be forced to sit on the outside looking in.

Until...by some fluke, I was at Babbage's, and on the shelf in the PC section was a copy of Final Fantasy VIII! I did a double take. Wait, what? This is a *console* game. Console games don't show up on computer! What the heck was going on?

I didn't have the money that day, but I bought it later, installed it, and found out what was really going on -- someone had created a kind of shell of the PlayStation 1 OS, and I had been sold a version of FF8 that I had to play through that shell. Nothing about the game was changed -- literally nothing, including the input prompts or the fact that I had to save to a "memory card" even if the file ended up on my hard drive. So I was playing a very literal port. It would be more accurate to call it an officially licensed pirated copy. Or at the very least a ROM.

But it was prone to crashing.

If you'll recall, back in those days, autosave was not a thing. And while sometimes I would learn my lesson and save every couple minutes to be safe, there would be stretches of the game where either I'd forget or the game's mechanics wouldn't let me...and then it would crash and I would routinely lose 15-90 minutes of progress. It also ran just a little bit slow compared to the real PS1 -- not enough to completely change the experience, but enough that I could feel it. Add to the fact that I was a compulsive perfectionist who had to draw 99 copies of every spell I found for every character and then never use them because it would weaken my junctioned stats (while never learning about the myriad of very broken systems for the game,) and you can imagine that my progress was incredibly slow. I also had to start over for some reason that escapes me when I was at the equivalent of the end of disc 1.

Eventually I got frustrated and quit. I had played the first ~30 hours of the game an average of 3 times, but never made it to the end...as such, I ought to count this as an honorary beaten game. I otherwise liked it, but I hated the draw system because I had adopted the mentality with JRPGs of "do everything you possibly can before advancing the story," and the effect of that was jaw-grindingly slow when the game's systems were taken into account. Oh, and the two-minute long unskippable GF summons. When I play a JRPG, I want to shut my brain off and just watch what happens for a few seconds while everything plays out, so mid-combat input prompts or exceedingly long cutscenes that put me to sleep are both negatives in my book, and FF8 had both, often at the same time.

If you're wondering, the FF game I finally beat is XIII. I've played a decent chunk of 7, a bit of 12, like an hour of 9, and gotten reasonably far in both FFX and FFX-2. (And also XIII-2.) But none of those are on the list.

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Up next: However, maybe this game counts?

41. Final Fantasy Tactics
Created by Square
Release year: 1997
Platform: PS2...kinda
Guesstimated playtime: ~100 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7W5zevSY-A

Tic-tac-toe, 3 FF in a row! Man, we're really burning through all the Square games at the beginning.

If you've picked up on my tendencies as a gamer yet, you can imagine about how well this went. Mandalia Plains, Gariland, Sweegy Woods, Gariland, Mandalia Plains, Gariland, Sweegy Woods, Gariland...Endless. Grinding.

And I probably loved every minute of it, too. This game caught my attention in a way that an RPG hadn't since the original Dragon Warrior.

Thing is, the encounter in Dorter Trade City was brutally difficult, so you were HEAVILY discouraged from continuing the game, and that was literally the fourth encounter in the game. Meanwhile, running up the totals on your JP was kinda intoxicating. I played this on a friend's PlayStation when it debuted, but I didn't get to truly experience it until years later when I bought a PS2. Somehow I stuck with the game long enough to beat it. I'm not sure how. But eventually I felt equipped enough to continue the story, and I'd nibble one story beat at a time while continuing to level in-between. Because I was so fixated on maxing one character class (sorry, job) and then moving on to the next, the times when I would attempt a story fight, they were often extremely difficult since my team wasn't really set up to be a well-oiled machine so much as just whatever job I felt like putting them on next. This really caught me out of position a few times, as you can imagine, because my Ramza was basically never prepared to fight a solo battle.

Anyway, at some point, I just got bored and blitzed the story. I don't remember a thing about what happens after you confront your brothers, and I don't think I really understood the plot all that well before that point, either. Considering I was averaging one story beat every 4-5 hours of gameplay, this was understandable. But at the time, I really did love the gameplay.

Today, I can barely stomach it. I've gone back a few times, and each time I just kinda reflex-gagged. There's just too much micro and too much leveling needed. I have about 34 hours in Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, which is an indie FFT, but better in just about every conceivable way, and I couldn't bring myself to finish that one, either. The only way I could play a game like this is if I could legitimately just pick one of the starter classes for each of my characters and go. But obviously that's not nearly as interesting when you can mix and match abilities from all the different jobs.

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Up next: A game that's supposed to be a bit more relaxing.

I agree, FFT-likes just don't hit the same. Not even in it's own series, where I should love FFTAdvance but I just cant get into the godawful hit rates. Most recently, I also tried Triangle Strategy, which was... competent, but eschewed mixing jobs in favor of having character roles fulfilled by units instead (and being slow at it at that.)

My guess for next one is one of the Animal Crossings; I know I was one of the people who coped through Covid lockdown with it, although Wild World and City Folk personally affected mr a but more.

I could never get into Fell Seal. I have always had unique feelings about the sphere of influence that FFT cast.

Fell Seal was pretty good. I'm not sure how to compare it to the very first time I saw FFT 25+ years ago, but it was clearly made to be a direct improvement on all of FFT's systems, and it accomplishes that easily. If it fails for someone who likes FFT, either the story isn't gripping enough (understandable) or playing Fell Seal at a desk just doesn't hit the same as playing FFT did in front of the TV at that point in your life. These days I don't really want to sit in front of the TV at all, but I know many people feel the opposite.

40. Stardew Valley
Created by Eric Barone
Release year: 2016
Platform: Steam
Playtime: 114 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WuKj7a3ces

Our first game with an exact playtime. Thanks, Steam!

As a kid, I had a subscription to Nintendo Power. My parents refused to get me a console, but they had no problem getting me a magazine about video games. Not sure how that worked. Anyway, in the issue where Harvest Moon was first previewed, I was completely infatuated with the idea. It sounded like a really cool and different idea for a video game. We were already in the era of SimCity and the like, so a farming sim actually sounded like a lot of fun. Years later, I'd download a SNES rom and actually try it, and it was basically everything I thought it would be.

Except slightly disappointing. There were a considerable number of limitations to Harvest Moon, most of them revolving around time and energy management.

So ~20 years later, when somebody decided to make a "new Harvest Moon" (and I was mostly oblivious to the actual sequels,) I knew it would be something special. Boy was that ever a massive understatement. Stardew Valley is freaking huge.

And in being the Harvest Moon game that I always wanted, it actually became a bit too much. One of the problems I always had with Harvest Moon was that I'd play for a bit and then run out of steam and stop, and I had the same issue with Stardew. I've started dozens upon dozens of Stardew runs, but I think I've only gotten to summer in like 3 or 4 of them, and only progressed into year 2 once. That game didn't last much longer.

However, the gameplay loop of Stardew and the constant sense of progress is intoxicating for a gamer like me. There's always something to do. Always some way to achieve. Always a different angle to the game to open up even if I don't give a crap about fishing. One of the hardest parts of the game for me is reconciling when I can spend time in the mines versus tending to my farm...but you have to go into the mines or you'll never have sprinklers, at which point all you're ever doing is watering. Yuck. The mines might not represent the most intense and riveting action game I've ever played, and that's even more true if you get out into the desert, but all the town interactions and the million other things you can do absolutely keep the game compelling.

So while I may not be a very good Stardew player, I've given it an attempt on quite a few occasions, like when there's a new patch where I never access any of the new content. And for this type of game, Stardew is all I need. I'm aware there are a gajillion clones, but I don't think any of them will offer me anything I can't already get here. Maybe some day I'll explore the world of Stardew mods, but I'm too lazy to mess.

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Up next: A game that opened up a genre for me.

Tag! Glad this topic exists, hope more in the same family pop up. Getting into the core of what people enjoy about this hobby and how it ties into their lives is super great. Maybe I'll do one of my own eventually.

azuarc posted...

Shareware as a marketing prospect was starting to die down by the time Warcraft hit the scene, but I was blown away by the game, being nothing like I'd ever seen. I played the free version of the game repeatedly before eventually convincing my parents to get the full retail edition.

I played warcraft 2 at a friend's house as a kid and become obsessed, so I get it. Similarly either saved my money or begged my parents to buy it at sam's club

Today, I can barely stomach it. I've gone back a few times, and each time I just kinda reflex-gagged. There's just too much micro and too much leveling needed. I have about 34 hours in Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, which is an indie FFT, but better in just about every conceivable way, and I couldn't bring myself to finish that one, either.

It's not just you. I think the genre felt better before games in general gained more QoL features. clicking and moving/microing every team member is so tedious, and the round to round tactics aren't engaging most of the time. I've been surfing around trying to find games that scratch the itch I'm looking for, but I'm not sure it exists.

However! Based on what you've said here, I'm confident you'd enjoy Tactical Breach Wizards. Also, obligatory Into the Breach rec if you're into story-light roguelikes/puzzles

Oh, and the two-minute long unskippable GF summons.

Yeah, FFVIII's summon animations were absolutely ludicrous. Luckily, summoning in general was also kind of a trap- on my playthrough I summoned over and over to my own boredom (no mp cost!!!) until it stopped working. Equipping 99 whatever to strength and pressing attack was so much better for many reasons

the FF game I finally beat is XIII.

Ha, I think that's the first playstation-era FF title I didn't beat. Some others took years and years, but I eventually got there. Specifically, my copy of FFIX's disc was scratched and would crash on the final dungeon's intro cinematic every time

I've started dozens upon dozens of Stardew runs, but I think I've only gotten to summer in like 3 or 4 of them, and only progressed into year 2 once. That game didn't last much longer.

No shame, you probably got further than I did. According to people I know, nothing super interesting is waiting at the end of that journey. It's a game you're supposed to play until you get bored and then move on. It's either gaming catnip or gaming meditation, not sure which

this felt like the first video game that was truly mine. Me. I owned this.

Had a similar experience with my first gameboy game, and sank a similar number of hours into it. It's challenging to imagine the psychology of being a tween (or younger?) in 2025 and owning a smartphone

I think I'll do one but I'll wait as I don't want to step on any toes

39. Hollow Knight
Created by Team Cherry
Release year: 2017
Platform: Steam
Playtime: 116 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xkM8mWC4Kk

Oh, god. Where do I even start with Hollow Knight? Out of all the titles to impact my gaming habits in the last five years, this one probably affected my game selection the most.

As a kid in the NES era, I had played tons of platformers, but never really any metroidvanias. I had limited chance to play NES Metroid and didn't really get it, either. Super Metroid was fun for the short spurts I was able to play it, but even attempting roms of it later, I'd get to a certain point and just stall out. Not that I couldn't find anywhere to go. I just ran out of interest.

But HK was one of those games that developed such a cult following that I felt like I *had* to give it a try. Sometimes that works out (Vampire Survivors), sometimes it doesn't (Outer Wilds); but I understood what I was about in a sidescroller like Hollow Knight. I died once or twice in the Crossroads before eventually finding my way to Greenpath, and then...I stopped. I got lost somewhere and didn't feel like trying to find the path I needed, and just put it down for 6 months.

But the enthusiasm of the cult kept whispering in my ear, and I figured WTH, let me give it a second look. I beat Hornet, grabbed the Mantis Claw, reached City of Tears, and very nearly quit again in Soul Asylum. I had just moved, and bought an ultrawide monitor. I wanted a game to show it off to a guest, so I fired up Hollow Knight and cleared through that area and continued on after they left. What followed was a whiny, ranty stumble around different parts of Hallownest as I got stopped in different areas or simply got lost without a clue what to do. In many cases, that was because I was being stupid. And then I'd see what I needed to do, and that would make me even madder, because how the hell did I miss that? The degree to which I was oblivious compared to the astuteness of people I've watched do their first playthrough since is staggering.

A few of my highlights include dying more than once to Flukemarm, beating Dung Defender and then completely missing the switch behind him, finding the Mantis Lords about 30 hours into my playthrough, and dying so so many times on Watcher Knights and Traitor Lord. The funny thing is, after I beat the game with the first ending, my first instinct was to just start the game over and go for the speedrun achievements. Ten hours? Pff, I'm sure I can do that now that I know where to go! (My first PT was 40 hrs by that point.) And then I'd do it again...with zero interest in pursuing the true ending. Like a year later, I eventually decided to collect enough soul essence for that, but I hit the final boss and just couldn't be bothered to kill it. The runback of having to beat THK first was just enough of an obstacle that I didn't want to stick it out.

If it wasn't painfully obvious already, I'm not really into fighting tough bosses or getting good. Godhome was never going to be on the agenda. I'm not sure if I even finished Colosseum 3. Optional content is just that.

But the seed took hold. The idea of playing a metroidvania seemed awesome -- it always had, really, but I'd just never really gotten to try any. Soon after I'd play Ori 1, Ender Lilies, Astalon, Deedlit, Timespinner, Guacamelee, Yoku's, Blasphemous, Bloodstained, and many more. None of them really recaptured the positive feelings I had when playing Hollow Knight, though. That's probably why for several years I joined the legions of fans who would watch other people do their first playthrough on Youtube or Twitch. It's a surprisingly good game to watch someone else play, provided they're any good at all.

Related title: Silksong. So obviously I waited like everyone else with eager anticipation for the sequel. Unfortunately, to say that this game was not made for me is an understatement. Which is really disappointing, because if I take away a lot of the core concepts that make the game so goddamn difficult, everything *else* about it absolutely is for me. One of the things I loved about HK was its large open map, which I've only really been able to kinda replicate in one other game...but everything I did in Silksong felt very on-rails even if there were technically maybe two options at any given moment. I hate that everything does double mask damage. I hate the new healing system. I hate how the game seems to reward you far less than basically any metroidvania I've played, and in so doing feels like the game is simply punishing you for playing it. I gave up after 12 hours, never even reaching act 2. It's a shame, because for as much as it was frequently touted as a hard game, Hollow Knight was an incredibly accessible title, and Silksong is anything but.

Nearly my exact HKSS experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBLmE2qoLVg

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Up next: A game I would have felt very differently about at release.

I thought surely someone would have something to say about that HK write-up, but okay, here we go...

38. Cyberpunk 2077
Created by CD Projekt RED
Release year: 2020, but really 2023
Platform: Steam
Playtime: 119 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u15tEo0wsQI

I never played the original 1.0 Cyberpunk. I hadn't really heard that much about it before release, so I wasn't as hyped as many, and when it came out and kinda flopped, I just sat back and grabbed the popcorn. A cyberpunk setting didn't really interest me, regardless of what the gameplay was, and I didn't have a great track record with Witcher games.

So a couple years went by, and bit by bit we began to hear of CDPR gradually redeeming themselves. It was another No Man's Sky situation, and people were saying that not only is the game worth playing now, but it's really good. So when I went looking around for a new Bethesda-like (since Starfield sure as hell was not it,) Phantom Liberty dropped and the game went on sale. I figured this was as good a time as any to give it a shot.

In many ways, Cyberpunk is the Bethesda game that Bethesda could never make. It's mature. It has interesting characters. The worldbuilding is tight and replete. The individual quests and missions feel real to the setting, rather than purely a random contrivance as an excuse for gameplay. The game's first mission requires you to carry a naked woman out of an ice-filled bathtub covered in other bodies, discarded there by the gang who captured them all, which is a really jarring way of telling you this isn't going to be the same-old you're used to. The Heist as a way of kicking off the main story is amazing, especially after all the time you spend with Jackie. Cyberpunk doesn't perfectly scratch the same itch because there are certain things I do actually like out of the old TES gameplay loop, and at some point I do get a little tired of dealing with the other drives in Night City, but overall it's a huge step up from Fallout.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what to say without straight-up summarizing the game. Cyberpunk is a game I enjoyed and put time into, but I don't have any singular specific memories that really stand out in spite of solid writing. I played a female nomad who eventually started using melee weapons, and went through each of the endings, starting with The Devil. I didn't buy Phantom Liberty initially, so earlier this year I decided to finally pick that up and did a second playthrough. I told myself I was going to try netrunner, but I never really committed. Maybe I ought to try that some time because some of the clips I've seen of netrunner gameplay look wild. But I did get one run of Phantom Liberty finished, and due to the way that's structured, it's very open for going back for replay since you can't really save scum those endings.

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Up next: A sequel.

I am enjoying these write ups but havent played very many of these games, so I dont have much to say.

I tried Hollow Knight once and it didnt really grab me, but Ill have to try it again some day. Hopefully its a you are here situation where Im in your shoes, trying and losing interest, but Ill eventually come to love it.

It's certainly a slow starter. You have to play until you get the second movement upgrade, the Mantis Claw. You won't understand the essence of the game until you hit that point. Unfortunately, depending on how quickly you work through the game's content, that's going to be 3-6 hours into your playthrough, so I fully understand not wanting to commit to that much time or deciding before that point that you're out.

Steiner posted...

i thought you were using "it" as your pronoun in the topic title at first

Thank goodness I'm not the only one. >_>

I'm fine with basically any pronouns, but I would prefer not to be called "it," ty.

Cyberpunk 2077 gets an official stamp of approval from Bossman coolguy

Though I was mildly annoyed I soft locked myself from doing the secret ending. Oops

azuarc posted...

I thought surely someone would have something to say about that HK write-up, but okay, here we go...

Not much to say, hollow knight is a good game. It's greater than the sum of its parts, which could explain why others in the genre haven't felt as good to you. Great artstyle as well. I've never been a fan of souls type storytelling (I detest playing a character I'm not allowed to understand or at least think I understand the basic history & motivations of) but I forgive this one.

I'm trying to remember my second favorite mvania, but drawing a blank right now.

azuarc posted...

Cyberpunk is a game I enjoyed and put time into, but I don't have any singular specific memories that really stand out in spite of solid writing.

This is kinda what everyone I know says about the game. Makes me question what's going on. How did it affect your life?

I've enjoyed cyberpunk since reading snow crash and watching blade runner, so this game should've been up my alley, yet it somehow wasn't. Then the company offered to fix it if I paid them another $30+. I was offended and did not do so. If it's fixed even without the dlc I could envision giving it another shot

banananor posted...

Then the company offered to fix it if I paid them another $30+. I was offended and did not do so. If it's fixed even without the dlc I could envision giving it another shot

Phantom Liberty is not required for version 2.0. I don't know what your experience the first time around was, but I never really encountered any bugs or glitches, and the game systems generally seemed well-designed.

That I didn't write much about how it extended beyond the "pages" isn't indicative of it not being evocative. I'm just not sure what to zero in on as particularly interesting to someone who hasn't played the game without just reciting what the game is about. Of course, if you take too close of a look at the worldbuilding, the "realism" starts to break down -- how can a city survive with this much crime, how does it sustain itself, why are all gangs themed around core identities like U.S. Patriotism, pumping yourself full of steroids, or being punk feminists? But as long as you don't mind a little spectacle, the story holds up within that setting, and most of the sidequests do, too. The fact that your character is (supposed to be) dying also helps play up moments in the story when V keels over.

IDK. The game's a paradox. It's simultaneously very memorable and very it-all-blends-together. If anyone can shed some light, I'd love to know why that is.

That's fair!

Good to hear about 2.0. I don't think I ran into any major glitches, maybe just poor performance in general. Tbh I'm the kind of player that enjoys (loves, really) the kind of ridiculous glitches that people were complaining about

I think I usually jump through a few early hurdles in most RPGs, especially WRPGs, and I didn't clear them this time- Extended beginnings/tutorial segments, big menus/inventory management, sluggish low level character gameplay, that sort of stuff.

In all fairness, it's in good company- I originally bounced off of Morrowind, mass effect, and Witcher 3 on my first attempts and then was able to come back to them later in a better frame of mind. Painful early games can make the lategame more satisfying

37. Secret of Mana
Created by SquareSoft
Release year: 1993
Platform: SNES
Guesstimated playtime: ~120 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpbSFMxyODU

Talking about Secret of Mana is such a weird sensation for me. It's a game I have such incredibly *fond memories* of, and yet I know that there are some extreme limitations in the gameplay that would mean I'd be unable to view it the same way if I ever played again. This will be the only SNES game to make the list on original hardware because my friend lent me his Super Nintendo for like a week and I did nothing but play SoM. Not only did I grind the crap out of the magic system, but I've done multiple playthroughs, so I think this hour count is about fair. I couldn't conscionably place it higher, though, even if it's the game that I casually tell people is my favorite game of all-time so I don't have to try to actually decide what my favorite game is. (Picking favorites is hard, okay?)

I mentioned earlier that I subscribed to Nintendo Power. NP made a BIG deal out of Secret of Mana, spreading its coverage of the game across three issues. And it looked phenomenal to me. There was some particular alchemy of the art, music, animation and all the promise held in those pages of the magazine that made me fall in love with it. When my friend got it, we played in co-op together for part of his run. Sadly, he didn't wait for me to continue each day. But I'd eventually start a playthrough of my own. And even if poison really sucked and getting chain stunned by green jellies was obnoxious, the game was magical up until hitting Elinee's Castle. The werewolf fight to get the girl and then the Spikey Tiger fight at the end wound up being the two hardest parts of the entire game and they were both in the first 20% of the story. The one thing I found incredible is that they made you play that far into the game without any healing magic. (Hi, Seiken Densetsu 3. Yeah, I see you over there, not giving any healing spells until the first class change.)

But I generally loved the rest of the game, even if I took grinding to an unnecessary level and I found running around the Upper Lands incredibly frustrating. Seriously, the amount of grinding you can do on this game increases with quartic scaling because each new magic you get also raises the cap on your spells, they take longer to raise, AND you get them stupidly fast in the endgame. It really is a shame we never got to see the original vision of this game as it would have appeared on a hypothetical SNES CD drive. All you Chrono Trigger fans can thank this for happening, though.

One of my favorite parts of Secret of Mana is the soundtrack. With a few notable exceptions (Danger), I love the whole OST and I was absolutely infuriated when the remake came out in 2018 due to how completely irreverent it was with the original. I've generally not been a fan of how Square handles the music of its ports and remakes, but this was a whole new level of awful.

The last thing that I think is important to talk about with SoM, and easily forgotten today, is how innovative and different it was at the time. I had never played an action RPG that had party members. I had certainly never played a *co-op* action RPG (unless River City Ransom counts?) People like to bitch about the menus, but it only took me a minute to learn, and was extremely effective at managing all the different game systems. Some of the choices they made were easily seen as a mistake in hindsight, like the charge-up mechanic of weapon attacks or freezing targets in place when a spell is cast, though the latter was probably also a hardware limitation. It could have also done with a bit more in the storytelling department, but they were really strapped for cartridge space. They did an awful lot with what they had to work with, even if the last third of the game basically went "okay and then they did all the things and killed the final boss and lived happily ever after the end."

Related titles: I was shocked when I played this game for the first time, and everything in the story seemed to bear passing resemblance to Final Fantasy Adventure, my first game on the Gameboy. Of course, I know now that they're part of the same series, renamed in the west from Seiken Densetsu, which ultimately became known here as the Mana series. But, importantly, we didn't get Seiken Densetsu 3 for two decades until Trials of Mana got an official release. In the meanwhile, I had played the fan translation, and SD3 does some really cool things with its story and characters. The fact that you get six different character choices, each with their own unique introduction and some additional unique story beats later on is something I wouldn't see again until Dragon Age: Origins.

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Up next: The picture next to "power fantasy" in the dictionary.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 2

36. Dynasty Warriors 7
Created by Koei-Tecmo
Release year: 2011
Platform: 360
Guesstimated playtime: ~120 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PstUGPU5394

Speaking of games that grabbed me from the word go, let's talk about Dynasty Warriors...2.

I'm not sure how many over-the-shoulder games I'd really seen by the time DW2 debuted -- I'm sure there'd been a few -- but none involved just straight up mowing through entire crowds of bad guys like an over-the-top action hero. Combined with an interesting setting I knew absolutely nothing about, I was immediately intrigued. That's saying quite a bit considering how rough the original Dynasty Warriors was. (Note: DW1 is called something else in Japan, so DW2 literally is considered the first musou game.) Still, for what was basically a launch title for the PS2, they were certainly putting the hardware to use. Similar to how Dead Rising would be lauded for all the zombies it would display on the 360 years later, DW2 featured a lot of dudes on-screen. Still not as many as the game's ambitions wanted to show, and enemies would frequently phase in and out of view, but to say it was a new category unto itself was not unreasonable.

It would be years before I'd eventually buy myself a PS2, but I would go back and pick up DW2. And then DW4. And 5. And ultimately 7. By that time the series was on next-gen consoles and the formula had been refined considerably.

Loosely, Dynasty Warriors 7 involves picking a character from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, following them through five important battles they would have witnessed, and then the game ends and you've probably unlocked somebody new. The battles are huge, sweeping affairs, but there were over 60 characters to see the campaign of. Most handled differently from each other and there was an entirely separate mode where you could play a near endless stream of challenges as well. So if you were into the formula, it's not hard to see how one could spend a lot of time here.

But of course, what Dynasty Warriors is best known for is how over the top everything is. Giant crowds of mooks to plow through with comical super moves called musou attacks. And some very memeworthy writing, even if they did finally start pronouncing Cao Pi correctly.

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Up next: Another game where you are a larger-than-life fighter.

35. One Must Fall: 2097
Created by Epic MegaGames
Release year: 1994
Platform: DOS
Guesstimated playtime: ~125 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0FNUDLdT4A

Epic Pinball wasn't the only DOS shareware title on the list, nor even the only one by Epic. In fact, there's one more still to come.

The original OMF started off as a bad Street Fighter clone. This falls in line with most of Epic's early projects, which were generally rip-offs of other series. Jazz Jackrabbit was just Sonic with guns. Kiloblaster was a Space Invaders clone. And OMF was similarly ill-inspired until someone said, "but what if...robots?"

One Must Fall 2097 then became a much more inspired mech battler with incredibly rocking menu music.

The premise of OMF2097 is simply that humanity watches people in giant robots engage in prize fights. As a new pilot, your goal is to work your way up the tournament ladder and win, before moving on to the next. As you progress and improve your skills, so too do your opponents. By the end, literally everyone has everything maxed out, so ultimately it come down to skill, but in the meanwhile you can gain an edge over your opponents if you can earn performance bonuses. For a PC DOS title, there was a decent amount of skill expression, especially given the ten different robots you could play as. The shareware version only had the first tournament unlocked and three robots, but you could loop back through it as many times as you wanted, which is exactly what I did, over and over. The default robot, Jaguar, was a perfectly fine option and I learned all the combos for fighting in Jaguar, but that didn't serve me well when my friend got his hands on the full retail version and we were battling in 2P head-to-head. Some of the robots don't look remotely humanoid, so they're a little weird to respond to.

One of the fun bits of OMF was that all your opponents on the ladder had some degree of personality -- a name, a portrait, and unique lines they would taunt you with before the battle. Additionally, there were a fair number of fun secrets. If you won a fight a particular way, you could be challenged by Jazz Jackrabbit, for instance. Because your opponents only gained new stats at the start of a new tournament, I learned to maximize my stat increases during the first run by hitting all the special bonus fights I could, including getting the finishing bonus for pulling off the equivalent of a fatality. So yeah, even when Epic was being inspired, they were still ripping off other games.

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Up next: A series that got worse as time went on.

I played the hell out of OMF 2097. Jaguar hell yeah. I can tell we came from the same space.

34. Dungeon Siege
Created by Gas Powered Games
Release year: 2002
Platform: PC
Guesstimated playtime: ~125 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7aYfjE8h48

In 2002, I was in an apartment with three college friends. We barely left the house, mostly staying at home, playing EverQuest. But there were two other games we occasionally deviated for. One was Diablo 2. The other, at the one friend's behest, was Dungeon Siege.

At first glance, Dungeon Siege looks like it's just a clone of Diablo 2, but it's a much more dynamic and interesting game. Not necessarily better -- Diablo 2 was immeasurably polished and meant to do something very different -- but if you took the top-down view and grabbing loot off the ground as indicative of the genre, you had a bad read.

In the opening moments of the game, you are a humble farmer whose crops are now burning, and you have to make your way to safety, fighting past hordes of creatures called Krug. What's interesting about this is that your character starts with literally no skill or stats whatsoever, but you have the option of grabbing an improvised melee weapon, a small shortbow, or two magic spells to begin your adventure. And in so doing, you develop experience not in levels, but towards the fighting style itself. These also reflect stat gains as you "work out," gradually leading to increases in strength or intellect. What's interesting about this is that you don't have to just use one, but can swap between them as you see fit, meaning you could be a fighter using combat magic, or an archer using nature magic.

You'd be forgiven if you thought this didn't make it deviate much from the Diablo gameplay loop, but therein lies the second major difference -- party members. You could recruit a team of up to 8 characters and manage them all simultaneously. Outside combat, you're literally expected to form presets to create formations or to instruct your mages to switch spells. There's no AI control. Everyone does exactly what you tell them to. And so you end up controlling your own little squadron, akin to Pillars of Eternity.

And the third major difference is that the world isn't procedurally generated. Every moment in the game is pre-built to give an extremely tailored experience, like the mansion overrun by spider creatures that you must pass through, getting ambushed by a large group of tiny spiders that appear behind you after they crawl through the rafters (which you can see happen) and down a web at your flank.

Two of my roommates continued their initial playthrough together, while I fell behind, but Dungeon Siege is another one of those games that I restart constantly and never finish. (I did once.) I've even come back to it on occasion in recent years, sometimes to play the massive expansion that adds an entire second campaign and a bunch of new spells. So, whenever I start, I have to decide which one I'm going to not finish.

Related games: I also played a modest amount of Dungeon Siege II. DS2 changes a lot of systems from the first game, and generally not for the better. We don't talk about Dungeon Siege III.

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Up next: A game that has been referenced tangentially somewhere in the last five write-ups.

Dragon Age: Origins?

Indeed.

33. Dragon Age: Origins
Created by Bioware
Release year: 2009
Platform: PC
Guesstimated playtime: ~125 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EhWCAHBbjU

Enchontment? Enchontment!!

Already directly name-dropped earlier and a reasonable parallel to the last game in a number of ways, DAO was an incredibly ambitious title whose main selling point is that you can play as one of six characters, each with their own unique backstory. Character classes are limited to just warrior, rogue, and mage, but with considerable customization options for each, including some bonus classes once you unlock them.

I have a lot of memories of DA:O. It's one of the first games I played that feels like its fully voice-acted. I think it's the first game I played that makes you create an online account to get bonus items. It might also be the first game I played that had DLC story content that I wouldn't just call an expansion, though it had one of those, too. It's basically the only game (that I've played) besides FF12 that lets you assign your party members priorities to follow. It's also incredibly difficult if you try to brute force it, and features a lot of branching choices (or fake choices) putting pay to Bioware's tradition of writing interesting moral dilemmas. The world is completely original and the subtitle "Origins" seemed a bit presumptuous until a new Dragon Age game released a couple years later.

When DA:O released, I was living with two guys, one of whom did ALL of his gaming on 360. Meanwhile, I owned a 360 but focused almost exclusively on PC. When I watched what he put up with trying to play this game on 360, I wondered how anyone could endure this game. Most of the things I did felt like they were only ever made to work on keyboard and mouse. He got pretty far into the game, though. (We had a similar experience with Skyrim, but at least Skyrim was designed with console controls in mind.)

One particular part of the game that gets a bad rap and I need to talk about real quick is The Fade. After the introduction of the game, you're given four target destinations afterward, and have to ultimately go to all of them, but the Mages' Tower is one of the two recommendations, where you have to work through this alternate dream dimension called The Fade. In this plane, you can change your form and you are separated from your allies. People make such a big deal about how hard The Fade is, and to be fair, I struggled with it the first time, but when I came back later, I was shocked by just how immensely simple it actually is. It really isn't hard at all, especially if you play a mage.

Of course, everything's easier if you play a mage because out of all the recruitable characters, they're almost all warriors, and mages are just plain stupidly broken. If you pick all the crowd control options with your MC mage and just focus on locking down the most threatening targets in each fight, you can trivialize the game immensely. The encounters are rigged so that you seldom fight one opponent at a time, but a good mage simplifies the calculus of battle considerably. If you and Morrigan both cast the right spells, you can hold 4 or 5 enemies in place long enough for the rest of the team to clear everything else and work through the remainder one at a time.

For a game called Dragon Age, there aren't many dragons. I think there's three total, and two are completely optional. The story goes on just long enough for me to stop at exactly the same point each time. I always get to the third area with the dwarves, clear out the deep roads, and then decide I can't be bothered to return to Denerim. I've done that 4 or 5 times now, with only one actual completion.

Related games: I bought Dragon Age Inquisition one day like a year ago, and after enjoying myself for about two hours, I tried to change my settings to skip the loader. The game irrevocably broke on me and I couldn't get it back to the way it was, so I ended up returning it. I've also played part of Awakening, which I didn't include in the main write-up even if it just casually throws Broodmothers into one of the earliest parts of the story, and the Broodmother section of DA:O was one of the most disturbing sequences in my collective video game memories. If I was making a list of top story moment memories, the Broodmother would have definitely been on it.

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Up next: A game with an astounding number of subclasses and build options.

I've played very little dragon age. I've heard it's good and have picked some titles up through bundles or something, and adore some other bioware RPGs. My theory is that it's hard to overcome the initial hurdle and get invested in d&d adjacent fantasy settings.

However! Some of my relatives definitely bonded over DA:O, 2, etc, by making all the guys make out with each other whenever possible.