Every time I think I have a new favorite game, Twilight Princess rears its ugly mug. There's some intangible, nostalgic essence to this game, the likes of which I cannot escape from. Midna's voice just does something to me. This game makes me feel comfortable. I can't really explain it, and I don't entirely know how it happened. If someone asks me my favorite game, I'll always say

"Twilight Princess, but"

Morrowind somehow exists; An Open World Fantasy RPG with an actually fascinating setting, stories, and inhabitants. Caius Cosades, Divath Fyr, Dagoth Ur, and Vivec alone comprise a more interesting cast than the entirety of Bethesda's other big Open World games. The one exception is New Vegas, of course. For a long time, I thought New Vegas was the only exception, but Morrowind's proven me wrong and then some.

All that said, Skyrim's still pretty fun - it just doesn't fascinate me in the way Morrowind does.

New Vegas still rules, but I've always gravitated more toward Fantasy settings and mechanics, and Vvardenfell itself just feels like it was made for me.

I love the ash storms and grey foyadas, the rare grasslands and rocky beaches. Guar, Alit, Kagouti and Kwama roam beside a vast network of dirt paths, flanked by hills swarming with Cliff Racers. It's just familiar enough, and just weird enough, to completely enthrall me. Just alien enough to feel otherworldly, but not ludicrous enough to be unapproachable. What a mystifying place.

Majora's Mask is a religious experience. Playing it feels like I'm entering a videogame world made out of emotions instead of code - and yet, the rigid exoskeleton of Ocarina of Time contains this amorphous thing, and somehow manages to direct it into a playable form. This prison has a lock, and the key belongs to the game's three-day time system. NPCs go about their routine, until their world ends, or you restart the clock. Rupees and heart pieces can be found, but the real treasures are the Masks. Even a useless mask is valuable, because of the emotions it represents.

I had a Magmar named MAGMALADY. She started off as a minor disappointment (I think I wanted an elekid from that egg), but by the time I'd beaten Red, she was my best friend.

Monster Hunter is like if chores were fun, and Dark Souls combat were good. Every weapon massively shifts your playstyle, and they're all fun, except for Dual Blades. Freedom Unite is my favorite mostly for aesthetic reasons - I love the crappy 3D graphics, and the musical style gets me. It's also much less interested in slowing the game down with any kind of narrative.

Dark Souls combat is fantastic. It's a step above the simple blocking and swiping of Ocarina of Time, but more relaxed than the insane pressures of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls III. But Dark Souls's combat, in my eyes, is just the shoes you wear while you explore the incredible setting of Lordran.

Final Fantasy VII was a defining experience for me - it opened up the JRPG floodgates, but, perhaps more importantly, it cemented my obsession with relatively early 3D graphics. The music's also ensane.

To me, this is Super Mario Bros. This is the game that defines all other games - the absolute baseline for extreme quality, the textbook you read when you're the guy who's gotta write the textbooks. It's not doing anything crazy - by my standards, at least, given that I've played Majora's Mask - but Ocarina of Time basically presents the most digestible, streamlined kind of 3D videogame I could ask for. It's got combat, puzzles, platforming, great writing, a bit of first-person shooting, a bit of third-person shooting; it's the template "everything game," a gorgeous 3D re-imagining of The Legend of Zelda with an emphasis on atmosphere and de-emphasis on speed and combat.

The dragon morph wheel is the single coolest thing I have ever seen

A snes game would look at this game and get hungry, whatever that means

Dragon Quest III might be the more immediately interesting game - I was completely sold from the instant I realized I got to actually make my own party, and that they'd basically never talk or anything like that - but Dragon Quest IV builds itself brick by brick, chapter by chapter, until it's chosen by my heart. Party members are set to auto battle, and you can't change it. I love this.

cr. lk > dp > Electric Snake

Half-Life is one of the oldest games yet. It's janky - you get stuck on the environment a lot and need to reload a save - but somehow, it's also very graceful. You glide from setpiece to setpiece at a brisk pace, you're basically never stopped by anything except the enemies that'll obliterate you with precision-aimed grenades. The story's "optional," in that you'll only pick up what you're willing to listen to, you'll only know what you've come up with as explanations for what you're seeing. This means that you might not always have the strongest grasp on where exactly you're going or why, but it lets the gameplay speak for itself. It's an exciting 3D adventure where every combat encounter is also something of a choose-your-own-adventure puzzle. Do I whip out my RPG, or just go nuts with my shotgun and take advantage of my excess health and armor?

The best thing about Half-Life is that it practically never stops throwing you into fun scenarios, leaving you to your wits (and huge arsenal), putting its trust in you to somehow accomplish its relentless assault of air vents, grenades, and enemy crabs through whatever means you manage.

I only play this game when it's dark outside and/or I'm sleep deprived. The surreal atmosphere and aimless nature of the game beg you to get absorbed in it. You might start to drift off and think about something else, to make plans for tomorrow or reflect on the previous day. Yume Nikki is a strange, comfortable, uncomfortable walk in the subconscious mind of a person. For me, it pushed the boundaries for what I'd consider to be a "videogame" - I still remember back when "walking simulator" seemed to me like a valid insult to lob at videogames. But videogames aren't just Morrowind, or Dark Souls, or Tetris. They can be a lot of different things. Yume Nikki is the closest a videogame has ever gotten toward being a person, I feel.