my favorite game at thirteen was for sure NiGHTS, which reminds me, about the question of what a game needs to capture the fantasy of flight, NiGHTS feels just about weightless but it‘s still thrilling because the friction of chaining, the clock ticking down, trying to make one more lap, your score building but if you push it too far, the chance you might lose it all. flying being so spatially free needs some kind of friction, but it doesn’t need to be baked into the mechanics of flight itself.
that said, flight in NiGHTS doesn't feel as good as when i first figured out how to keep the dodo in the air in GTA 3 for the first time.
I’ve been mulling the “favourite game when I was 13” question over for a while. Wolfenstein 3D came out when I was 13, and I certainly was impressed by it but I don’t think it was my favourite at the time. Doom hadn’t come out yet, Star Control 2 hadn’t come out yet.
_Probably_ it would be one of The Secret of Monkey Island, Scorched Earth, The Fool’s Errand, or Ultima 6. I’m not sure I could honestly pick between them. I doubt I’d ever thought about what my “favourite game” was, I just liked a bunch of them.
when i turned 13, my fav games were most likely just wind waker, f-zero gx and metroid prime. big gamecube baby over here. i was only months away from my first real video game disillusionment (twilight princess on gamecube) but i think that‘s roughly true of most people, right? that’s partly the point of the prompt?
Regarding favorite game when I was 13, first thing that popped to mind was Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. People always bring up the “Sanity Meter”, and maybe this was the first time in my life I was able to take a step back and be like “oh this is just a gimmick but it's kinda cool” and also the first time maybe I recognized + loved a certain level of janky-ness? I remember spell casting being slow and the battle system feeling like a fun crapshoot.
I've always been tempted to return to that game but haven't heard many people mention going back to it so kind of afraid of messing with those memories of feeling so deeply disoriented, pleasantly scared, and enjoying something that didn't feel like the tightly-constructed Nintendo games I was used to up to that point
@soapboxcritic It's still pretty fun, or at least it was when I last played it five or six years ago.
Just remember to save manually because I bone-headedly assumed it would automatically checkpoint me, and it didn't, and I died on the last sequence LOL!
After looking at this list, I‘m going to go with Street Fighter II*. The * means that it’s “whichever is the most recent revision of the game that I happen to have access to at the time”.
Street Fighter II would have been on my list as a 13 year old. Its hard to remember nearly 20 years later what I was into at the time. I was playing a lot of Super Nintendo at the time as that's what I had. Zombies Ate My Neighbors & Super Mario All-Stars would have been favorites at home; with Sunset Riders, Smash TV and Lucky & Wild being arcade selections.
@soapboxcritic I recently played Eternal Darkness for the first time and I loved it! Been playing a bunch of horror games from the late 90s to mid 2000s recently, and Eternal Darkness definitely held up the best out of a bunch of the ones I’ve played. I wouldn’t be afraid to go back and play it!
