The Checklist

Oh boy, here it is. My ludicrous, self-appointed, Sisyphean task: to make my way through the list of games below - in the order in which they were released. This, in the interest of playing the games I've always meant to but never got to, educating myself on game history, revisiting some old favourites, and, well, having some fun. I'm not expecting to finish them all, just to give them each a try (although even that seems less and less likely with each addition). A sizeable fraction of these games found their way onto this list because of Giant Bomb, especially their Game of the Year podcast.

I just recently figured, so that something even mildly productive can come out of this insanity, I should write a little bit about each one as I go! I thought about splitting this out into a separate blog, but... nah.
Every now and then I'll probably hop into one of these slightly out of order, because sometimes I just get a hankering for something in particular.

For a list of every game I've ever finished, click here.

My first gaming experiences were on a late-90s Windows PC, and were mostly educational in nature - there was this one game that I can't remember the name of for the life of me which I had to get mum to launch from the DOS command-line before Windows had a chance to start. Amy? Something like that. I think she was an anthropomorphic dog. That was my first video game.

My brother and I played the odd game on a succession of underpowered family computers. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was the first non-educational game I remember owning. After that, it was Rayman 2: The Great Escape, my most-cherished childhood game, and Age of Empires (which, if I remember correctly, came free in a Nutri-Grain packet, probably to promote AoE II).

Then we got a GameCube, and the world opened up - Pikmin, Rayman 3, Simpsons Hit & Run and a chain of shitty movie tie-ins. This led to the purchase of the GameCube's successor, the Wii, and me getting way into Zelda. I got back into PC gaming a while later when a friend convinced me to install Steam and The Orange Box, which led me to buy a gaming laptop (on which I spent way too many hours exploring Skyrim and Minecraft), and eventually culminated in building a PC for myself several years later.

In more recent news, my extraordinary friends got me an Xbox One for my 21st in 2015, and I got a Switch at the start of this year (at the midnight launch, no less).
So, yeah. It's safe to say games have played a sizeable part in my life - probably too sizeable. But there's something about the joy of discovering a new world, of inhabiting personalities and roles that I never could in real life, that keeps those virtual hooks in me.

• PC (I built it in 2015 - it's getting a little long in the tooth, but she's still good)

  • GPU: XFX Radeon R9 270X

  • CPU: AMD FX-6300

• Microsoft Xbox One (also plays Xbox 360 games)

• Nintendo GameCube

• Nintendo Game Boy Advance (also plays Game Boy / Colour games)

• Nintendo 3DS (also plays DS games)

• Nintendo Switch (with Switch Online - NES and SNES games ahoy!)