Top 10 All Time

My Top 10 Favorite (Video) Games #

Currently this list does not have a strict order.

Fire Emblem 7 & 8 #

I first played this game on the Game Boy Advance when I was in middle school. For some reason the art style and especially animation really spoke to me, and I found the gameplay loop very compelling. Fair warning though that this game may be on this list mostly because of nostalgia.

One aspect of this game that I really enjoy is the process of building your party over time and making sure you train the right characters. It’s very satisfying to help a weaker character finish enemies to get experience with the goal of making them a core part of your team composition later on. This is often fairly difficult - since the characters are weaker after all - which only adds to the satisfaction when you pull it off.

Another cool mechanic in FE is building supports between characters. When two characters fight side by side they will over time build a relationship, which leads to little dialogue bites. It’s satisfying to discover these as you play through the game.

Both training weaker units and building supports are examples of “meta-challenges” in FE; they aren’t required to finish the games, but give you self-directed and sometimes difficult optional objectives during the battles. Because these challenges are self directed they make me feel like I am expressing myself more as a player, which makes the game feel more interesting than if I was just solving the same battle puzzles as everyone else.

XCOM 2 + War of the Chosen #

Very similar appeal to Fire Emblem.

Overwatch #

Darkest Dungeon #

Bananagrams #

Fun variants:

  • Open a book in text format with some program that can search text and make it so that you can only use words that exist in that book.

Islanders (maybe) #

Bad North (maybe) #

Honorable Mentions #

  • Apex Legends (when playing with friends).
  • Counter Strike: Global Offensive
  • Team Fortress 2
  • Skyrim

Rainbow 6: Siege #

Very intense and engaging game that requires a high level of focus. Every movement made in this game produces audible sound, meaning that movement gives away your position and makes you vulnerable. However, like in most shooters, if you proactively move to shoot at a particular point, you will still have an advantage against someone reacting to your movement. This leads to a dynamic where both you and your opponent are trying to determine the location of the other without giving away their own location - once one person knows with certainty they can simply move to attack and will have a strong advantage.

This dynamic is framed by the asymmetric nature of all game modes, which have attacking and defending sides. Attackers must move to engage the defenders, meaning that they start out disadvantaged (they are moving and making noise while defenders are not). To counter this, attackers all have remote control drones that make noise when they move around. These are easily destroyed, but can be used to determine the locations of defenders, giving attackers advantage.

CoD: MW2 #

This game was trash but at least it let me make a YouTube video with 160k views.