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This is something I've wanted to do for a long while, but I horrible at concentration. I can't really vouch for the validity of the order I finished these games in or bought them in, but that's not really the point. The point is the lessons I've learned because of what I have learned. As such, it's very likely there's going to be a LOT of games I won't list, because of shoddy memory, or because they just weren't important enough. Also, I had to remove images for most of the cases. Apparently list urls don't like them. We don't ever stop developing. That's at least one thing that separates us from animals. We continue to grow right until we grow out of our bodies. Ignoring the quasi-religious joke, it's been some of recent for me to look back at my "gaming heritage". I find it kind of fascinating to see where I've come from. How far I've come. How much further I've got left to go. I feel it's pretty prevalent to understanding who I am and why I am. Naturally, it also serves as a nostalgia shock for me PlayStation One - The Childish Era I was born, according to your own definition, in the early to mid Nineties. The exact same year as the PlayStation One, as it turns out. I feel it kind of fitting we were both brought into the world at the same time. I'd like to think we'd both have the same level of impact on gaming in some way or another. That's wishful thinking for my future, though. Kids love to interact and play. That's how they learn, through experimentation. I couldn't necessarily "play" the games, but I certainly f****ed around with them. I didn't see pixels, polygons, hearts, lives, rules, boundaries or anything like that...as far as I know, even though I couldn't put it into words, I saw this natural extension of myself. This grey box which made loud noises allowed me to do things I could only dream of... The Initial Games My first few games were either demos, racing games or Ape Escape, which I'm inclined to believe came with the console. My Dad loved the racing games, as per his enjoyment of motorsport. Specifically, the first few games I remember were: V-Rally - 98 Championship Edition Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace Destruction Derby Ape Escape Gran Turismo Formula 1 - 98 Edition Note that of those games, only Ape Escape and V-Rally were full copies. Although I eventually acquired full copies of everything else (except Destruction Derby), I was mostly stuck with demos. I have a feeling that my need for having the "full game" (why I was willing to fork out $220 on a game we'll discuss later) spawned from this. It's important to note that V-Rally's controls are quite frustrating, and it's no better with most other PS1 games. They're not awful, but at times they can be ridiculously precise, or too restrained and you get characters/cars that move on 35 degree angles. I think that's had a rather negative effect on the way I play today, as I'm always under and over-correcting everything. If I had to blame any game that was most guilty of this, it's V-Rally, which was also one I probably spent the most time on. Thanks, Rally game I never actually won a race in... Like a Library for cool things... You guys know Blockbuster? Let's not dwell too hard on what's happened to it, but rather focus on what it was; a video rental store. Kind of like a library for cool things. Well, I dunno if you guys had it, but Australia had a direct competitor called "Video-Ezy", and my Mum got herself a membership there. As it turns out, they allowed rentals for video games. I could never afford games. I didn't get pocket-money like all the other kids. It was irrelevant anyway, since, up until this point, I didn't know any other games existed (I didn't even know there were other consoles). This place, however, provided me with a new opportunity. I could finally try out some games anytime my Mum wanted to watch a new (old) movie. The end result? I got to try out some of these titles (and later, I purchased some of these games for myself): Rugrats: Search for Reptar Rugrats: Studio Tour Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone *insert some generic racing game either made or published by psygnosis here* Aside from the racing games already in my collection, these games, which I only had a single week to beat, have instilled in me possibly the most poisonous and hated attribute I have today. Speed. I don't know if I've slowly developed ADD or if I'm just less focused that I should be, but I can't sit straight anymore, and it's most apparent when I play video games. I was doing a playtest for somebody's game, and my teacher noted how, in comparison to other players, I just frequently blitzed through everything until I died, respawned and then attempted to do everything again with the same speed. Even though the game called for a slower, more strategical outlook, I had to rush through. It's a f****ing miracle I can play RPGs at all. The Most Important Game I Ever Played What were you expecting? Pokemon? An RPG? Halo? I'm sure you've all experienced some kind of story, where something/somoneone is credited as the non-literal father of something/someone else. This is where I came from. This is my progenitor. This was the first video game I ever remember getting for a birthday. It would have been about 6PM, sitting in the kitchen, right in front of my cake. A 6yo me tore open the wrapping and was utterly amazed. I was pretty interested in bikes at the time, but more importantly, I actually got a video game as a present. I remember the game being easy, but fun. I spent weeks practicing, and I think it's the first game I remember actually feeling as though I was getting "better" at it. I can still remember those times when I finally nailed the stunt jumps and won my first bike race...good times. But for me, there's something more important. Up until that point, I had never ever considered *creating* games. I had just seen these amazing worlds, and been so awe-struck, I never imagined how they came into being. That's when I discovered the level creator. It was limited. Annoying camera. My designs were basic and horrid. But I f****ING LOVED IT. All those years of practice with LEGO finally paid off. I got my first taste of being a creator. I don't think I recognised it back then, but the seeds for the future had been planted.

I figured I'd post this here since I know a lot of you guys here are fascinated by game design and what does or does not work. This is going to be a long-winded and largely boring rant about something very minor that still left me with a bad taste in my mouth. This past weekend, I finished the main story of "A Link Between Worlds" for 3DS. Unfortunately, my gaming repertoire is not nearly as extensive as most of my peers; for most of my life, my only means of gaming were a Gameboy Color, a Windows 95, and a Windows XP. As such, the only other Zelda title I have played is the 3DS rerelease of "Ocarina of Time". That being said, I've read that one article about Zelda that everyone here has also read. And while I haven't played many Zelda titles, I can see the points that the author is making. Specifically, I'm going to home in on one particular point that the article makes: hand-holding. Starting with Navi in "Ocarina of Time", the games have progressively gotten worse and worse about having some means of constantly telling you what to do and how to do it. This is in contrast to the original game "The Legend of Zelda", which gave you an open world and, aside from a few cryptic clues, just sat back and let you explore and figure everything out for yourself. As mentioned in ProJared's review of "A Link Between Worlds", this game largely does away with having some fairy companion constantly nagging you. It is a call back to form, giving you the opportunity to explore Hyrule and Lorule on your own and learning about the many monsters inhabiting the world. In fact, the whole game is supposed to be returning to Zelda's roots with "A Link to the Past", which is largely contested with "Ocarina of Time" for being the best game in the franchise. But wait... according to that article, "A Link to the Past" marks the beginning of the series' decline. Why? It introduced the hand-holding trend. While "Ocarina of Time" may be more infamous thanks to Navi's high-pitched voice, that's only one form of hand-holding that the games have introduced since the original NES title. The other was introduced in "A Link to the Past", and while it's more subtle than "HEY! LISTEN!", the writer of the article argues that it takes away from that sense of total open-world exploration present in the original game. See a large crack on the wall? Put a bomb there and it will open up a secret passageway. Now, here I confess that I must disagree with the article's notion that Zelda was better when you had to throw bombs at every single wall on every single screen because you didn't know which one might contain a secret entrance. Nonetheless, I do see what the writer is getting at: with a large crack marking every location where a bomb must be placed, the game world feels less natural and more artificially constructed. This trend of hand-holding started with "A Link to the Past" and, essentially being a love letter to said game, "A Link Between Worlds" continues it. Pretty much any time the game wants you to put a bomb somewhere, there will be a big crack in the wall to let you know. That being said, "A Link Between Worlds" does go out of its way at times to make it not so simple. It plays around with the top-down perspective, with the entrances to numerous secret rooms being hidden simply thanks to the camera angle. By merging with the walls in the game, you can also shift around the camera and thus reveal that which is otherwise hidden by the top-down view. In one instance, there's an abandoned house in Lorule. If you go inside via the front door, you'll notice a treasure chest containing a Piece of Heart against the far wall of the house, but a large amount of furniture and clutter blocking your way. There's nothing here that can imply how you can reach the treasure chest. Go back outside, and the house looks normal from the top-down perspective, and you still don't know how you would reach that treasure chest. However, if you walk around the house and then merge with the back wall of the house, only then does the camera reveal that there is, in fact, a large crack on the wall. Now you know to put a bomb there, opening up a secret entrance that will let you reach the chest. This, I thought, was a novel twist on old Zelda conventions. Yes, the game does provide that hand-holding crack in the wall to let you know what to do, but it doesn't tell you that there's a crack on the wall unless you take it upon yourself to check it out. This is something that wouldn't have been possible to do in "A Link to the Past", but here "A Link Between Worlds" is taking full advantage of the shift to 3D to add extra puzzle elements to the Zelda franchise. That is an example of something that, I felt, the game did very well. Unfortunately, that's not why I'm writing this long-winded blog post today. I'm writing about something the game did not do well. Something that left a bad taste in my mouth as a gamer. In one section of Hyrule Field, there is a cave entrance with a Piece of Heart sitting right in front of it. However, it is blocked off by a series of pillars that cannot be moved or destroyed by any of your items, and the rock wall around the cave entrance is too rocky to bypass with wall-merging. Therefore, it only takes a small logical leap to realize that what you see is not a cave entrance, but a cave exit, and in order to get that Piece of Heart, you need to find the actual entrance. Not too far away, you'll find two pillars exactly like the ones blocking the cave. Put a bomb against the wall between the two pillars, and that will open up the secret cave entrance that you seek. The problem? There is nothing to indicate that this is what you're supposed to do. Remember that whole crack-in-the-wall hand-holding that "A Link To The Past" introduced? Well, despite following that convention to the tee in the entirety of the rest of the game, "A Link Between Worlds" averts it for this one instance. The wall between the two pillars is perfectly smooth and you can even merge with it without a problem, unlike any other cracked wall in the game. But those pillars, surely they should have been a hint, right? Well, they might have been... if it weren't for the fact that there were a dozen other pillars just like them located throughout that section of Hyrule. In fact, you can even find similar pillars in Lorule. Had those two pillars been the only other use of those pillars blocking the Piece of Heart, that would have been a hint. But instead, the player sees these two pillars and says, "There's a dozen other pillars just like these and there was nothing special about those, so why would these two be any different?" Besides, I can tell you that I was more focused on the actual pillars than the wall between them. Had "A Link Between Worlds" been like "The Legend of Zelda", these sorts of secrets would have been the norm. The player would expect to find hidden secrets with only very vague and cryptic clues, and this would not have bothered me nearly as much. Heck, even look at "Pokemon: Platinum Version". There are items scattered across the world in plain sight, but there are also "hidden" items that don't show up on the overworld map and are invisible until you pick them up. However, the game lets you know that there would be "hidden" items and gives you the ability to use a radar on the touch screen that will pick up the locations of hidden items relative to your position. After a while of using the radar, you can even get a sense of where to expect to find such hidden items, such as a fairly innocuous-looking rock blocked off by a pair of smashable rocks. The game eases you into the hidden item mechanic. This is not what "A Link Between Worlds" does. This would be as if all items in "Pokemon: Platinum Version" were visible on the map except for one single item that was required to, I don't know, find a specific Pokemon needed for completing the Pokedex. And the game doesn't give you that radar or ever mention that some items are invisible. This isn't the only flaw in "A Link Between Worlds". I could not figure out how to play Octoball Derby without looking up a guide on the internet because the in-game instructions for the minigame are even worse than those for the Fishing minigame "LEGO Island 2". There's also one secret cave in Lorule with a frustratingly tedious running puzzle that rewards you with merely rupees. In comparison, something like an unmarked wall that can be blown up seems rather minor, right? But this one is what left me with the worst taste in my mouth. Having bought and upgraded all of Ravio's weapons, two pieces of Master Ore, 19 Hearts, 97 Maimais, and Blue Mail, I'd say that I'm fairly close to having completed the game. Just a few more items I need to find, right? Should be easy to find, right? But wait! Suddenly, this gameplay convention which has been enforced for the rest of the game is tossed out the window without warning. Now, I am forced to question myself. Is this the only unmarked wall? Are there other unmarked walls in the game that I've been missing because the game makes you so used to seeing cracked walls that you don't think to look for unmarked walls at all? Do I have to search high and low for walls to bomb on what may just prove to be a wild goose chase because this was the only wall the whole time? This is not a good feeling to have this late in the game. "A Link Between Worlds" does not take after "The Legend of Zelda" but rather "A Link to the Past". It holds your hand throughout the game like "A Link to the Past", and then suddenly expects you to realize that it let go and is leaving you to fend for yourself like "The Legend of Zelda". The reason I brought up the example with the treasure chest in the abandoned house is because that's how you can do necessary hand-holding in games correctly. It holds your hand up to a certain point to teach you a certain convention (i.e. the crack in the wall), but then you have to think outside the box in order to recognize that convention in a different situation (i.e. changing the camera angle). The example with the hidden cave is an example of how not to do it. If you want to go all-out like "The Legend of Zelda", feel free to do so. If you want to hold the player's hand the whole time like in "A Link to the Past", feel free to do so. Here's my tip to potential videogame designers: don't just suddenly switch from one to another without warning, especially not so late in the game. That's all the time we have for today. I'm sure that, by now, you've caught up on any lost sleep by trying to read this rant.