I am a huge Pokémon fan boy. It was the franchise that initially hooked me into gaming, and I still have a blast going back and playing the old games to this very day. Now Pokémon Red wasn’t the first Pokémon game I ever played, but when I did get to play it, it was awesome. Just the knowledge that if Red and Blue hadn’t come along there might well not be a Pokémon game franchise at all, I owe a lot of my childhood to it. So when I finally beat the game for the first time (I was around 10 or 11) it was something special.
Especially when reflecting on all of the trainers I had defeated, the hard work I had put into training my Pokémon, and all the times I had defeated my rival Blue, hearing him say ‘Smell ya later’, my victory felt even more deserved. Personally I think the rival in these games was the best one so far, owing partly to him being both your first and your final battle in the game. It was a champion that you had travelled in competition with throughout your journey, and a champion you wanted to beat even more because of it. It was personal, and that made it so much more epic.
Around the same time COD:WAW and the zombies mode in it blew up, Gears of War 2 and it’s Horde mode showed up. I loved both, and for me, the Horde mode in Gears 2 was the best it got. Just simple wave based survival at its finest. Of course, it was frigging difficult too. When my friend and I decided to go from wave 1 to 10, on hard difficulty, on a fairly challenging map, we didn’t know what we were in for. We fought bravely to get to the final wave, wave 10, and we got slaughtered. Again and again, playing for hours and hours, we failed. But it was by no means frustrating, it was so much damn fun, a seemingly rare quality in challenging games.
Sometimes I can’t believe how long I have owned Minecraft. But roughly 5 or 6 years ago, my friend (the same one I played Gears 2 with) convinced me to buy it. Sure enough, I have never regretted, and I find myself drawn back to it time and time again. When I first played it though, I was at my friends, and he loaded up a new world, and let me go free with no help or direction.
Ask anyone who has played Halo 3 about the last level and two things are bound to come up. First, the disappointing final boss battle, and second, the amazing drive-as-fast-as-you-can segment immediately after. Halo 3 holds a special place in my heart, and while ‘The Covenant’ is probably my favourite overall level, the second half of the final mission is definitely the more impactful. Driving in your dead friends’ Warthog, while the Arbiter kills Flood on the mounted gun, while the ground is falling and exploding around you, as you prepare to fire the Halo, is definitely as legendary as it sounds. Combined with a soundtrack that I still hum when I’m alone, and a friend with which you have played through the rest of the campaign with, and that moment is burned into my memory for eternity.
