Through the years I have owned games on Atari 2600, NES, SNES, DOS, Windows, Playstation 2, XBOX 360, and Playstation 4. Often Atari 2600 and NES games lacked content and compensated with difficulty. Many games like StarTropics had a good amount of content, but still seemed excessively hard. Early on, I appreciated RPGs. My first true RPG experience (other than action RPGs such as Zelda) was Dragon Warrior (a.k.a. Dragon Quest) on NES. The game had limited graphics, but enough content for a very long gameplay experience. As I grew up, games grew up.
The most exciting thing for me on SNES was Mario Paint for quite a long time. The majority of SNES games were good, though I couldn’t say the same for NES. Some of the best gaming experiences are on SNES. My favorites (starting from the most favorite) are Final Fantasy III (FF6 Japan), Chrono Trigger, Zelda: A Link to the Past, Mario Kart, TMNT: Turtles in Time, Soul Blazer, 7th Saga (check out O.C. ReMix’s excellent classical cover of the soundtrack), Star Fox, Super Punch-Out, Super Mario World, and ActRaiser. I never played Castlevania IV or Illusion of Gaia, but would probably also put them somewhere in my list.
While growing up I didn’t have the opportunity to get every latest console, but I began to find PC gaming more interesting anyway because I could play recent games given some tweaking or upgrades. The first PC game I played was Wolfenstein 3D for DOS. I even started working on a mod (changing graphics and sound in that case), but it wasn’t very good and the data was lost like many things from my first computer (I didn’t think I would care about the stuff I didn’t specifically back up). I played through most of Wing Commander 3 and watched my brother finish the last few minutes of the game. The live action movies in between the missions were revolutionary and seeing Mark Hamill on my computer was just awesome. I got Final Fantasy 7 on PC soon after it came out, and even though the graphics and sound were limited, the game was far beyond any game I knew existed, with its gripping storyline, deep character development, and philosophical undertones.
When I was in late high school I got a free website and started posting game reviews and Warcraft II strategies and mods. Many of the articles from my old website (besidethevoid.com), which I’ve been moving over to here, were originally from my first free web page.
My gaming experience has been back and forth between playing and programming. I haven’t really finished any good games, because I spent most of my time creating mods, Warcraft III maps (which are basically subgames), and experimental game engines. If any engines or games get completed I’ll post them here (and normally also on my GitHub page)–right now one 2D engine called mgep is usable, and one 3D engine called KivyGlops is somewhat usable other than some problems with physics.
I still play console games, especially RPGs. I enjoy consoles because I often fix computers for people so I don’t really like having to tweak my own computer for games when I’m at home. I am glad that convergence (having games launch on multiple platforms at once, or having games ported to/from mobile) has led the game design industry to often make games that are playable at varying quality levels. I wouldn’t have to do so much tweaking to play the types of games I would enjoy and don’t care about using the highest quality. I may be interested in doing some more PC gaming, but for now I mostly stick to Minetest (including modding), my own work-in-progress games, and consoles (PS4 and sometimes others).