I fell in love with Dragon Quest at a young age with DQIX. They announced this game not too long after, and I was crazy excited for it - but I didn't really understand that it was a remake of a Super Famicom game, so when the day finally came, I was a little let down by the lack of a character creator and the "downgrade" to first person battles with sprite graphics. I dropped the game for a few months, came back to it on a random night and got absolutely sucked in. Something just clicked - the dream world plot was so mysterious, I realized how huge and grand the world was, and the class system proved to be addicting.

I still have so many moments from this game permanently ingrained in my mind and I plan to replay it again soon. The evil world you visit in that final stretch of the game was so immersive and the whole summoning scene where a demon demolishes a castle blew my mind. Gradually coming to love this game's older style was probably the beginning of my descent into dungeon crawlers

I've scarcely felt so undecided on a game, this is genuinely an oddball experience. This is basically a retelling of Evangelion but in game form. The cutscenes and sound have incredible quality, but actually playing it - crazy shit. The first couple of stages set you up to think this is a 3D fighter as you control Eva 01 and fight angels, but just as soon as you get used to that, you're slapped in the face by an 8 second mission where you're fighting with the controls trying to aim a missile. Then you're mashing buttons hard enough to give yourself an aneurysm as you chase down Jet Alone - and then its a fucking rhythm game with Asuka. Your head will be spinning, but not for long, because you can clear this entire thing in like an hour. Is it even fair to call this a game? It feels more like something you'd play with at a museum exhibit

I was extremely surprised to click the page for this and find that Schuld has mostly negative reviews. This is a very short German RPG Maker game that mimics Inferno by Mr. Alighieri, but I always found it pretty imaginative. It takes place in a modern apocalyptic society where cigarettes are money, you're dodging weird bandits and Biblical figures, it's a strange game. It's definitely corny overall and the gore is kind of cheesy. You've also got an ending that is extremely cliche, but for like a 45 minute game you could do way worse.

In the early 2000s I would spend summers with my grandparents who lived pretty far from me. My grandfather loved toys and video games, and had a pretty huge collection built up over the years of consoles - and that's how I spent my early childhood with stuff like the Intellivision and Atari Jaguar. Utopia is one of the first "city builders" to exist, and on top of that, it supports two players. Player 1 gets the island on the left, Player 2 gets the island on the right. You can passively build your wealth by planting crops and hoping for a rain cloud to come by, and you can get your hands dirty and buy a boat which you can use to chase after schools of fish. After you rack up enough money, you can place buildings, which don't do much other than increase your score. This is basically the entire game, rinse and repeat - and I absolutely love it. You barely need to pay attention to it and it's endlessly relaxing. The game lets you decide how long each "round" lasts and we'd always crank it up to the highest and just shoot the shit.