When I first became a wrestling fan as a child, one of the first things I did was convert all my old action figures into wrestlers and stage matches with them. They all had different gimmicks and they all did different things and what they were capable of and what they did was governed by how they were shaped. When I got the Game Boy Advance, I took those ideas for wrestlers and turned them into wrestlers within my gameboy, making them look completely how I wanted them to and do what I wanted them to do. I learned how to make the CPU Logic behave exactly how I wanted. Since I was freshly a teenager at this point, I took every action figure I had growing up and sold them to the Goodwill so some other kid could play with them, because I had them all here in this video game and they could do even crazier stuff than I could ever get the toys to do. This was in 2001. I have played various Fire Pro games for what I'd approximate as 500+ hours a year every year since then. I could give up all other video games and be completely fine.

Originally, Tetris 99 was on here. The day I started writing this list was the day Nintendo announced the Switch online program had 38 million subscribers. Then, thinking about how Nintendo operates, I realized that one day they would shut Tetris 99 down and there'd be no way to access it. So, I have instead decided to put Tetr.io in favorites list, because it plays better and has Tetris 99's charm inside of it, which is the miracle of Tetris combined with the ability to play with hundreds of people everywhere immediately.

Personally connections to the story aside, this is a game that feels like it arrived from a wholly different timeline. One where everyone that got into making video games were way into Tennessee Williams instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the midst of the arc that video games have been undergoing in the last decade, of the debut of the Father's Story Time era of big budget productions, Kentucky Route Zero gives me actionable hope.

I expect I'll spend my life playing this game once a year. I love stories about heists and thieves, and this is the best one told in video game form so far. On top of that, its use of such a specific alleyway of cyberpunk plays into how I grew up with computers. Pair those things with a beautiful tale of friendship unspoiled by dialog, and a loop that digs deep into my perfectionist urges, and you have A Game For Me.

I think we've all read enough about how good Elden Ring is over the last two years so I'll keep this short.
+Not usually an open world guy but I think this is the best way I've seen it done
+Made me miss my dad real bad
+Helped me conquer a childhood fear
+First From Software game I've ever beaten