BREATH OF THE WILD

i enjoyed this one immensely! i think this is one of the first games i played shortly after my parents gifted me and my brother a switch. of course, he ended up playing it more than me at the time, and i think i didn't really start until about 2019-2020. i was starting my sophomore year of high school i believe and played it through the peak of covid. it holds a very special place in my heart. i think after the first play through i played through it about a dozen times, restarting and restarting. i think im one of those people who when they like something, they like it. my friend has said i'm like that with everything it seems. i get obsessed very easily over things, if i find a store or song i enjoy, i'm revisiting or replaying that song about a hundred times until i know everything about it. i'm like that with this game. surprisingly i never ordered the art books or lore books about it, everything i garnered from playing this game over and over.


jeez, i remember the most memorable part of this game was when i first saw one of the dragons. i was on one of the towers that you unlock, specifically the one that was by hylia bridge, and i remember seeing it come down from the sky in the distant and being absolutely terrified at first. it was nighttime when i saw it, as it was outside in the real world, late at night playing by myself while the rest of the house slept and i was experiencing the most magical and awe-inspiring thing i've ever had in years. my life was very bleak and depressing at this point as i was at the height of my depression
i opened the paraglider and i truly expected it to attack me, but it was so beautiful that i had too see it closer, and then experiencing the winds that swoop you up and make you glide right next to it with the music kicking in was truly the most amazing thing i've seen in a while. i think after that point on i was completely hooked. i was absolutely estactic when it won game of the year.


rito village. it's my most favorite spot in the entire game. i think this one was beautiful too when you first enter and cross the bridge then the screeching starts and it shows the divine beast atop the perch. this had the most interesting designed village ive seen in a game. coincidentally, the rio champion, revali, was quickly my favorite champion. not many people enjoy his character but i found it intriguing, especially as he was the only one without a power born with him. his entire story was interesting to me, with all the little cutscenes and such. maybe i liked it cus it strayed from the typical family relation the other characters had with the deceased champions? the others were repetitive to a point, but i think rito village was the third one i unlocked in my first playthrough. then i had the most use out of the gale from it. the mountains were also very beautiful, i took so many screenshots at the time but i have since bought a new updated switch and so lost all the photos i took of that first playthrough. the music is also very beautiful to me.

the ending was amazing. i did cry ill admit, but as i said, i played this during the height of my depression and so finishing this game after so many sleepless nights and dealing with what i was dealing with at the time, it felt bittersweet. it was an amazing story and the way it all pieces together at the end was phenomonal. i enjoyed this game all the way through and there was so many moments that left me in awe.
breath of the wild always holds a very special place in my heart, it was one of the first zelda games i was introduced to and consequently, ended up nabbinhg a twilight princess game as i still have my wii from when i was a kid, and then played through totk. totk is the same sort of premise except you do see another world beneath, which i think was my favorite add on in the game. but i don't think it can ever hold a candle to botw, as it certainly wasn't the first type of open world game, but definitely had a sort of charm to it that caught everyone immediately. totk didn't seem to have that same charm, was still very interesting and fun to play! but it didn't hold that same feeling botw brought to me.

RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2

surprisingly, i have actually not taken any photos of this particular one. which is genuinely surprising due to the fact that i enjoy it alot and the views in this game are absolutely incredible! i haven't actually finished a complete playthrough of it, as i have been slowly working my way through it and i tend to need a couple hours at a time to get a decent amount of way through the story. i did find this youtube video which actually goes through the story in a cinematic format, here: Red Dead Redemption 2 - Wild West | Cinematic Game Movie
i plan on watching this later, preferable after i finish the game? not sure.
so far, i have been enjoying it! i will try to not go too far into spoilers, as i know that some of my friends have yet to play but i saw it on their steam wishlist. as do others. but the storyline is completely amazing, and every twist and turn i experience in it has been a joy to see. the missions are fun, and i like being able to explore open world games a lot, and i wont lie, this game has me sort of hooked onto the cowboy themes. my friends know this well.
back to the game: the missions are cool and i have some silly moments in it. i think one time i was speeding down the dirt road on my horse during a mission and had ran into another npc, which consequently got me shot and i died on the spot. not my proudest moment. another time i couldn't figure out how they wanted me to carry out a mission and i ended up killing the guy, which was not the intended goal. i know there is a bug in the game during a mission that takes place in a swamp and one of the npc's get stuck while picking up a body and you have to shoot someone in order to fail and restart the mission. i think i was stuck on that one for a bit until i consulted reddit.
hopefully i will be able to get some screenshots during my next playthrough, as i would love to put some of them here for my own enjoyment.

GUITAR HERO

my childhood game. before super mario bros and mario kart. i actually still play this one to this day! my wii has held up pretty good and i remember when netflix used to be free on it, and i would watch invader zim on it religiously.


i think a lot of my music tastes came from here. these games in particular overlapped a lot with my parents' music tastes, who had frequently went to concerts and shows(sometimes even got backstage passes to some bands they knew personally!) were blasting this music in the car, on trips, when they had parties (and boy did they have a lot. may be why i dislike parties as i got older) so in sort of every song and music i come across, i have a deeper love for rock or rock adjacent music.


these ones i grew up with, mostly metallica and world tour were my personal favorites. apparently metallica still sells for a decent amount, around 40 bucks today. which is crazy to me cus that might be the release price initally when it first came out. but to me, its a classic. they all actually have slight differences in UI, and i think, if i remember, warriors of rock had a brighter color scheme or colors in general compared to metallica and world tour. which is sort of interesting, because i remember as a kid i found metallica bland with the colors but liked warriors of rock because it felt brighter and less depressing to me.
i never did reach the hardest level, the highest i can play on guitar hero is hard, which on occasion i still sometimes run into a song that i have difficulty playing on hard so i switch over to medium. i remember during my parents' parties they always had the wii on and frequently guitar hero would start getting played. we'd all take turns, adults and kids (and despite my cousins, who were the same age as me around 7 yrs old, still attended these parties with alcohol and loud ass music and drunk people and we'd all gather together in the backyard to play on the trampoline. fun!) and just enjoy the music. i think sometimes there was also live music playing too, as i said, my parents knew some musicians and people who were just musically inclined, and my dad has a few guitars he messes with. so these parties had guitar hero, live music, and music from the speakers playing too. it was a lot, but they all were playing rock music. so i was very familiar with all the songs on guitar hero and consequently, early 2000s and late 90s rock/metal music. so guitar hero is one of the few games i can reach for after months of not playing and still enjoy it immensely even years later. it is perhaps the only game that i grew up with, as zelda and mario weren't something i consider i grew up with, because i lost interest in it until recently, the past few years. guitar hero is still a game that stills holds up after so long despite there being no support for it anymore, and i do really love the character designs themselves too! pandora and midori were my two favorites.

I HAVE NO MOUTH AND I MUST SCREAM

this one was... very interesting. i played it off steam, and was something i was eyeing for awhile before i decided to get it. it's honestly not my sort of game but the storyline was very interesting. each character had a backstory and i think the voice lines in it helped it immensely. it's obviously an old game, if you've seen the UI before, so the voice lines were actually a nice surprise when i first played it.


the ending was. something. i don't tend to get super queasy about stuff, as studying medical sort of makes you immune or expectant of it, but it is a darker game with a loud dark storyline going on. i have yet to read the book about it, and i do plan to eventually. AM as a character was interesting! i read somewhere that the author was the only one who he trusted himself with voicing AM's lines, because AM has a specific and deep hatred that had to be conveyed in everything he does, including his tone of voice. and ellison really nailed it. i dont think i can think of anyone else who can characterize AM as well as ellison did, which makes sense, as he is the author and created AM. i don't want to go too far into how the story ends, so i'll go over some stuff that i thought was fun.
throughout the game there's about dozens of different endings you can take, and a multitude of deaths. which honestly surprised me because i sort of expected it to be a straight through story with really no options on exploring much, but it does really well in letting you explore possibly everything. i do recommend reading through the manual the game does come with, which i think you might have to search online? i can't remember. but the manual does help in explaining the mechanics of the game.
the dialogue that some of the characters say is actually sort of funny. there is some humor in it, not really intentionally but just stuff that they say and how they say it that makes it sort of silly.


this game was genuinely a little surprising in how well the gameplay and exploration is done. i didn't expect a lot! the line AM does of cogito ergo sum was done well, and the slowly revealing hatred he has for every human and why he decided to end humanity for being ungrateful for the way they can experience the world so much yet AM being stuck in a computer and unable to feel anything but having the desire to, which ends up manifesting as a deep hatred, was, well, good. it was a good game. this game is also the background for my steam profile LOL

ULTRAKILL

i loved this one a lot! the beginning boot up sequence where you are essentially getting booted up as v1 had me smiling already. it was clever!


i spent a while on this game. up until this point i hadn't played many first person shooter games, mostly when i was a kid playing at my cousins place, but this really was like the crack in having me delve more into games and such. i wasn't a very game centered person up until recently, like, the past year or so. that was mostly due to me having bills and working and school but now i do make some time to enjoy games now since theyre rewarding, fun, and fulfilling for me. its another thing to do.
i never really seem a game like this, but i was familiar with dusk! i liked dusk a lot, and it also sort of reminded me of doom too. the pixelated look and the pretty simple graphics was charming, and i think it was a good game to delve into with first person shooting games. it wasn't very overwhelming and focused a lot on just letting you learn and to have fun with it. the UI wasn't overbearing at all, and there wasn't hundreds of things being thrown on you other than just shoot and kill as many as you can. later on, obviously if you heard of ultrakill, you hear of the speedrunning and P scores you can achieve, but in the beginning, it's still extremely fun off the get go.


lust was maybe my favorite level in the game. i think violence is a close second. lust for the very obviously pretty colors, and as you can maybe tell, i love the color pink and red. i sort of forget what level gabriel gets introduced, but the voice lines were great! i'm personally a sucker for religious themes in just about any type of media, so ultrakill sort of hit that spot for me immediately. the terminals are also pretty nice. but back to the religious themes: the storybuilding in the game, despite not being super obvious unless you look around and read the books and infer from the environment around you, was maybe a little lacking in the beginning until it picks up and you meet gabriel. the idea of god abandoning humanity and the angels as well is cool, i guess. however you see it since in here, humanity is completely wiped. its eerie in the beginning, especially when you reach limbo and then it suddenly turns all red and everything is on fire then you're like okay well, this isn't right. from what you can remember from preachers and such in the real world, limbo isn't supposed to be on fire.


i loved violence. the mannequins were actually super fucking freaky at first, but it provided a great challenge since they're like one of the last enemies that you get introduced to. and another thing! the other machines you run across, were super fucking cool. i loved v2 and the idea that they were made as a machine for keeping peace but end up being as bloodthirsty as v1 is, makes you wonder more about the story or background between v1 and v2. the swordsmachine was also cool, and the idea that they can both get enraged despite being machines does make you wonder about how far their ability to feel is, even if limited. theres a lot of story that is left to the player to wonder about.
this game was the most fun i had playing a game. i did end up delving into the lore pretty deep and the earthmovers were amazing to learn more of. i know the community behind it tends to be a little negative, or ... odd i suppose, but its still super fun. anytime my close friends asked about it i ended up sending a paragraph gushing about the game, to give an idea of how much i love this game. the gameplay aspect is fun and the lore it has behind it all, which tends to be easily overlooked the first time through due to how fast paced it is, is cool!

THRESHOLD

currently playing through this one, albeit fucking slow because even tho i get obsessed w stuff easily i rly have trouble staying engaged w things. anyway. good so far.

BUCKSHOT ROULETTE

so i played this one sort of infrequently, mostly due to that i play this with my friends mostly. theres a story mode that i shld probably like. do. ive seen it around and i heard good reviews with it and im actually planning to play another game a friend reccommened from the same developer called mundaun and im actually interested in that one but im also broke right now.
anyway this game has like super good sound design. i think its genuinely my favorite part of the game is the sounds, which i think is like pretty important cus if u got a game that has poor sound design u just end up turning the volume off completely and it sort of takes away from the experience i think but so far i like it. uhh the mechanics r cool. yeah

HADES

this one is cool! i liked it, i enjoy the story so far. im not super into the point of view it has since im more incline to first person views more but its still good. sound design is good and i should definitely play it more since it provides the same sort of challenge that ultrakill sort of provides? slightly different but the reward system is sort of the same. im just not good w this point of view TOT. still like it and i should also finish this one...