5 games that shaped my gaming life

Games have been an important part of my life for years. Along with Music and Films they have entertained, inspired and sometimes even educated me. Some of these have been throw away experiences that lasted as long as i played them, while others have stayed with me long after i stopped playing them. These are the games i want to talk to you about today, Games that were almost more to me than just entertainment.



My first dedicated gaming system was actually the original Gameboy, i got it for Christmas one year bundled with Super Mario Land and Tetris. While Nintendo's Russian puzzler was extremely addictive and super fun to play, it was Mario's first outing on the Hand held platform that i spent most of my time playing. I was so addicted to the game and so in tune with the gameplay that once i completed it i actually turned the system upside down and played it that way just for the extra challenge! The music, as simple as it was on the Gameboy system was iconic but also completely unique to the Mario Land series, something that made the game feel less like a 2 bit remake and more like its own game, which of course it was. Platform games improved graphically on the system over the years that followed, Mario World 2 was a prime example, but they never held the same interest for me that the first Mario Land did.



GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!! I played the original ISS so much and scored so many goals that i drove everyone else in the house nuts with that simple word shouted over and over. ISS was the first time i had ever played a football game on a console and felt like i was playing a real game of football. It was a step ahead of everything that came before. The animations were fast and fluid with characters that actually looked like adults, rather than the super deformed players featured prior to its release in 1995. It had crowd chants, tricks, superb animation, addictive menu music, an editing suite where you could change your teams kit colours, and most importantly it had commentators celebrating whenever you scored a goal.

I didn't play sensible soccer until much later, and although the top down perspective "Sensi" can rightly claim to be the first true football game available released (3 years earlier than ISS) i would still take Konami's offering over it.



Staying with the SNES, It pains me to admit that i was a bit of a late comer to the party where the Legend of Zelda is concerned. My sister bought me a copy of Link to the Past for my 11th birthday in 1994.

Link to the Past has wonderful art and brilliant gameplay, as always it has a decent story that keeps it simple and allows you to concentrate on the task in hand. It's also the first game i owned on a console that had an on board battery powered memory pack built into the cartridge. Just as well when you consider just how big the game was. I would spend hours looking for cave entrances and fairies that could heal my wounds, all the time spurred on by a great soundtrack that made the most of the SNES's soundcard. This game in short, was the game that started me off on RPG's and made me a fan of games that you had to spend more than an afternoon playing.


Well, let's be honest, you knew this would be on the list didn't you?

Of course you did.

Released in the UK on November 17th 1997, Final Fantasy was the first of the series to appear on Sony's Playstation console. I bought it within a couple of weeks of release not really knowing much about the games history or what i was getting into. Many people will site this game as their gateway drug, the game that opened their eyes to the JRPG genre, i'm one of them.

Final Fantasy VII benefited from the increased data capacity that came with Playstation's CD format, but even so the game was so large that it took 3 CD's to fit all the content in. I recently started playing through FFVII again and a few things stood out to me. The story telling is still superb, even if the translation of the original Japanese dialogue is a bit sketchy in places. Use of Music was a stand out feature the first time i played this game back in 1997, something that still holds true today. I have bought two game soundtracks in my life, one of them was the FFVII OST.

As technology improved and Games got longer thanks to memory cards and on board battery packs it became more and more of a rareity for me to complete a game. Cloud's story in Final Fantasy VII was so compelling that i stuck with it all the way through to the end. Finishing this game was honestly one of my proudest gaming achievements (and this was a time before achievements were a dirty word)



I literally spent hours getting my infiltration of Shadow Moses as perfect as i could, i've never played a game before or since (except perhaps for the other MGS games) that have instilled in me such a dedication to getting things just right. I would happily lay under a truck for ages trying to figure out the movements of the guards and see if there was a weakness i could exploit.

The solution to the Psycho Mantis boss fight was an inspired use of the console, while all the other boss fights were just the right side of infuriatingly difficult. I'd be annoyed if i died fighting a boss but then go straight back and say "can i have some more sir?"

I was amazed by the cinematic feel to the game, from the opening credit sequence to the final scenes at the end. The script was tight, voice acting was excellent, and every character felt fleshed out and real. MGS truly was an immersive experience for me, the music, story and characters were all well done and made me care.

I think the reason why i picked these 5 games out is that they all share some of the traits i've mentioned, no matter if it's the iconic music from Mario Land, the revolutionary animation in ISS, the Immersive gameplay of Zelda and FFVII or the combination of all these things as found inMetal Gear Solid. Maybe these aren't the 5 greatest games in the world, but for me they will always be the games that i hold most dear.