My Favourite Games
This page will be about..you guessed it, my favourite games of all time. I'm a gaming freak. I play more video games than sports, or TV, or school work, or..well lots of things. Here you're gonna find out just what has captivated me over the years, and why I like them. The games listed will span over a series of systems, including SNES, PSX, and PC.
Subspace
Final Fantasy VI
Meet people from all over the world. Then kill them..."
Hahaha what a dumbass catchphrase, but it so accurately describes the game!
This is my #1 favourite game of all time. My absolute favourite. This is by far the best game that I have ever played. It's a massively multi-player game, with controls and feel that resembles slightly like Asteroids. Instead of shooting down rocks, you fly around huge arenas hunting other people. It's incredibly fast paced and addictive, requirely a carefully honed sense of timing and at least months of experience to be successful.This is a multi-player only game (although I suppose you could fly around the tutorial for a few hours...). You choose an arena you want to enter, go in and start blasting. One of the reasons it's so great is cuz it's so configurable. Different arenas have different settings, which make for endless variations on the game (some are fun, others are...lame). Some popular ones include Trench Wars, which is supposed to resemble a World War I ground battle, complete with riflemen, machine gunners, and artillery (I don't know of a graphics set for it, so it looks weird having World War I with ships). There's Star Wars, which brilliantly showcases how flexible the game can be.
You can see the graphics set used here is fairly good, changing all the subspace ships into accurate representations of the ships in the Starwars universe. There's also a soundset so that instead of the usual bullet and bomb sounds, you get the laser and torpedo sounds of Starwars (I think they're ripped from Xwing vs TIE Fighter). Also, the settings for each ship is well thought out, and the Imperial and Rebel sides are well balanced out.
There're Capture the Flag zones such as Warzone and Turf Zone, which is kinda fun cuz you have to use a lot of teamwork, and vary the ships within your team to maximize tactical possibilities. Then there's the ever popular League. It's based loosely on SVS (Standard VIE Settings), though the ships have been tweaked somewhat for a more fast-paced game. League play is based on 4 on 4 action, with each member getting 3 lives. 1 substitution per slot is allowed. There are several different leagues, such as Pro, Ameteur, Euroleague, and United League. Squads compete weekly in 4 on 4 play, and after usually around a dozen games, the top teams move into a play-offs much like football. I'm currently on the squad Demonic. I play for the Ameteur division of the squad (no I'm not good enough for pro ^_^), which finished the regular season 9-1 but was eliminated in the quarter finals (sigh).
OK OK, let me tell you a bit about how Subspace plays like. Like I said, it's based loosely on Asteroids. It's got a simple Newtonian physics engine which affects all the ships, bullets, and bombs' momentum (ie: you can make your bombs stay still by flying backwards to counteract the foward velocity of the bomb, etc). The game is so fun cuz it's almost impossibly hard to master. Tons of tactics for every situation (1 on 1, 2 on 1, 4 on 4, 10 on 10, defending base, attacking base, etc) have been developed, and the game really does start to grow on you the longer you spend on it. It's hard to pick up because the physics of the game make the ships hard to control, and there are ALWAYS a handful of veterans hanging around newbie zones looking for an easy kill. However, as you improve, you grow to appreciate the skill involved in the game, and it's fantastic. You can see that the graphics are nothing fancy, but they're good enough to serve their purpose, and when you have 8 guys on screen at once, all firing dozens of bullets and bombs...who cares. The game runs very smoothly, and lag is quite reasonably low (I get around 30 ping, 0.1% packetloss). The sheer fun factor of this game has had me hooked for the last 3 years. Others have been playing the game even longer... It's so fun that it has developed a very tight-knit and dedicated player-community. You wouldn't know by the way things are run that the developer has dissolved, and that the company-run servers have all shutdown. It is ALL player-run: The zones, servers, webpages, and leagues, all of'm, and things have been going smoothly. Of course, you've never heard of it. I've yet to see a single advertisement for the game, and since the company's gone out of business.. Oh well (I originally found the game while looking for Asteroids in Yahoo. One of the search results said "It's asteroids but it's multiplayer"). Subsapce v1.35 is free! What are you waiting for, download it!
Misc. fun stuff:
- Currently on a squad called Demonic, in the Ameteur League division
- Finished regular season with Kill-Death of 13-4
- Been playing the damn game for like 3 friggin years. I plan on wasting another 20 years on this game if it's still around (which it probably will, LOL)
- Learned the majority of internet lingo that I know from chatting in this game
- Plays as tritoch_, but I plan on changing name to Alsipsclar next season. Usually fly the Weasel.
Long ago, the War of the Magi reduced the world to a scorched wasteland, and magic simply ceased to exist. 1000 years have passed... Iron, gunpowder, and steam engines have been rediscovered, and high technology reigns... But there are some who would enslave the world by reviving the dread destructive force known as "magic." Can it be that those in power are on the verge of repeating a senseless and deadly mistake?
This is a classic. My favourite RPG of all time. For those of you who don't know what an RPG is, it's a game genre whereby instead of concentrating on the action aspects, it's almost like an interactive movie/novel with some battles thrown in to keep it fun. Battles take place in a menu-system, half-turn based (each character has a timebar that must be recharged everytime an action is taken, such as casting a spell. Some are faster than others, so it resembles a turn-based game, though it is not really so.) Movement consists of basic up, down, left, right. The overworld map area is used to explore, and you can enter towns/caves to purchase items, solve puzzles/gain clues, do battle, whatever. As you progress through the quest, more clues lead to new subquests, and you fight progressively harder enemies (while gaining EXP and strengthening your own party), letting the plot unfold until finally you reach the end boss. Square has mastered the console RPG with its Final Fantasy series. What's so great about Final Fantasy VI? The music's great. Real moody, and adds a lot of atmosphere to the game. The graphics are rather bland (hey, it was on the SNES), but the new version that's come out with the Final Fantasy Anthology for the PSX has some new cutscenes in it that look great.
The Old Magitek Armor...
The New Magitek Armor!
The storyline itself is nothing new..Guy wants to take over world, kills emperor to gain more power, ragtag group of heroes has to prevent Armaggeddon and save the world... but there are some plot twists and interesting moments, the characters are very fleshed out, which is what I like most in plot, and there are some really moving scenes concerning certain characters during the quest. It's given me some memories..ahh nostalgia hits hard. The Opera House. Kefka's Notorious "Mwahahha" laugh...There's not all that much that I can say about it, other than that it's a great RPG, and if you're an RPG fan, you've probably already played this through twice.
Misc. fun stuff:
- I beat Kefka in 1 turn, using Terra armed with Genji Glove, Offering, Illumina, and Ultima Weapon (9999 hp each hit, hits 8 times a turn). Used Magic Box and Econimizer to cast double Ultima, then mimed it with Gogo. Can't really remember what the 4th character did..Perhaps it was Cyan and the multi-hit sword skill.
- I did the turbo-joystick / Lete River trick, left it on for a few days, and by the time I fought Ultros on the river, Terra had learned Ultima by herself.
- I believe (mere speculation here) that the kingdom of Figaro and Edgar's character was based on the opera The Marriage of Figaro. In it, Count Almaviva, head of the household, a real ladies man, flirts with all the girls in his household but get rejected by all of'm.
- I'd recently read a book called the "Demolished Man", and in it there are Espers (ESP-ers); people with telepathic capabilities that are feared and respected for their powers.