What makes a good or better game

[Rhyis.]

i'm not sure ive ever used that gif before

[Demosthenes]

When a game... makes me feel. Now let me preface this with a counter point, because games like Cup head, league of legends, pubg, fortenite, doom I still consider good and/or great games. And I don't play those games as a life less android, I mean I get excited, frustrated, laugh, and smirk at things. But those kind of feelings are the ones i'm talking about.

I'm talking about those games where they make you feel something on a deeper level. You all know what I mean, it's hard to put into words, or to even really agree, but games like Final Fantasy VII, Shadow of the Colossus, Nier: Automata, FFXI, these games made me truly feel them and they are beyond great to me. let me expand on just these few:

-97/98 I'm a teenager, trying to be cool, trying to hard to fit in, in a predominantely white high school with a graduating class of 266, inside the largest county (land mass wise) in the state of Virginia. Kids would bring their rifles to school back then, jocks were still a thing, and the internet was literally being born on a weekly bases... fuck most people were using AOL and BBS boards and my computer at the time was a COMPAQ pentium 133mhz. My mother spent 3k dollars on it.... It was top of the fucking line, and kids in school were still rocking 486's trying to raw boot MS-DOS 6.22 so they could load wing commander III and watch mark hamels intro videos lol.
I remember getting a physical copy of Final Fantasy VII from babagges in valley view mall. It was on the 2nd story near the middle of the mall, and I remember computer games were on the left wall, towards the back of the story. I remember getting home and being one of the only kids at school that had a 3dfx graphics card that could render a game like VII. I remember playing it with some cheap logitec or madcatz controller.

I remember falling in love with everything about it. I remember the heart ache of Aeris and the raw channeled sorrow and anger that came when cloud omin-slashed Sephiroth. I remember the confusion at learning that I was just a nobody and not a super soldier, like I had told people. I remember these things because I had never felt these things, in that medium, or even in real life ever. before.

Fast forward 8 years... I'm 25 almost 26. I'm in Iraq in the middle of a war, and every single thing I thought I understood about the human condition has been shattered and swirled into a maelstrom of chaos. Freedom, justice, righteousness, revenge, ALL the things that I thought I had a firm grasp of, often attributed to emotional lessons I'd learned in FFVII, was gone in an instant, and the brutal bluntness of reality laid heavy on me as a person. And I remember on a resupply run from FOB Wilson (the same FOB that ended up catching sadam hussein in a fox hole with a million dollars in US currency about 6 month prior) to Camp Spicher. The platoon we were embedded with stopped off at the BX on base, so we could get smokes, and snacks, and maybe make a moral call, and pick up some porno mags and maybe grab some new DVDs or Video games. The Xbox 360 would be coming out next month, and my ex-wife would stand in line in the rain at circuit city in greensboro NC to get me one. She would mail it over, and I would immediately plug it into a 220V outlet, and Fry the power supply, and send it back to her.

But the 360 was a distant thought, and folks who have been deployed will know what I mean when I say that deployed BX's are weird. They would re-stock sporadically, and with no set time frame, and I don't know if you guys remember, but Tuesday was when new media was released back in the states! lol CD's, DVD's, Games...always on tuesdays, but that didn't apply in a warzone. So you would go to the BX nearly every day, because you never knew when they'd have something in stock that you'd been waiting on. this was before Amazon became the titan it is today. It was around, but not like today. So here we are, our one trip to Spicher for the month, and i'm purussing the dust covered copies of ps2 and xbox games that everyone already had copies of like madden 04 or hockey games, or weird kids games that had no actual business in a fucking war zone, but were there because people that handle the logistics of these deployed BX couldn't give a shit about saying not to send crap like that. And I shit you not.... I flipped through a couple of the rows and saw Shadow of the Colossus. And... I knew about this, I had dabbled with ICO before, and vidya game magazines were still money makers at this point, and everyone bought the newest ones because what the fuck else were you gonna read taking a shit.... the fucking Iphone hadn't been invented yet lol. So I had read the initial reviews, and I was like... holy fuck this came out THIS MONTH... wtf is it doing here!?!

So I immediately grab it up, we re-mount and head back to the FOB, and as an EOD team, our schedule is dictated by IED's not pre-planned missions or anything like that, so I pop it in, that night, and I literally can't stop playing it. The lonelyness that hero felt was exactly how I felt, even surrounded by my brothers in arms. I was in this strange world with a single driving mission to hold onto, surrounded by what seemed like impossible monstrosities and this game was the exact same. fucking. thing. I slept 5 hours that night, and then bogarted the TV the entire next day and skipped breakfast, lunch and dinner, and played it till I had beaten all ... 16? colossuses... and that moment... when in this strange world your only friend gets ripped away and Aldo falls, I felt that. And I had no idea how often I would feel that in the coming years. I had no idea that these video games with their unique ability to depict loss and sorrow, would play my heart strings like Arvo fucking Part. I also had no idea that they would inevitably soften the blows that were to come. The losses that were permanent. The ones I still feel.

And I remember the first time I logged into FFXI. I went Bastok because it seemed like... the American South. and It felt familiar in that short camera fly over. I started as a warrior, and like all of us, I was broke.

And I don't just mean Gil wise.

I mean... as a person... I was broken away from this reality that I knew (an E-3 in a roach infested florida dorm room, that you could smoke in, because it was 2004.) I was shown this INCREDIBLE different world, and even though the medium through which I experienced it was foreign to anything I'd ever known.... I remember being a different person. and I remember in that moment, that I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to grow strong, and defend those who were weak. I wanted to be the one who people relied on. I remember making the run through south and north gustaberg, and through the tunnels of Konschtat highlands until it opened up into this GIANT field with a huge cermet temple in the middle and monsters that I wasn't able to defeat. I remember the fear of trying to make progress in Valkrum dunes, and the sheer JOY of leveling up once or twice a night.

I remember skipping fucking sleep, and going to work. I remember 1-liter aquafina bottles full of marlboro light cigarette buts. I remember putting it down to get ready to head to Iraq. And because it had consumed me. I truly wanted to be apart of vana'diel. Everything else felt shallow and un-remarkable.

And I remember coming back from War, and being so utterly different from the person I was, and how my fiance at the time didn't treat me the same, and how I would rather spend time staring at my spinning moogle, than try and think about a life outside of the game, because the life outside of the game.... was lost. It was broken, and wrong, and false, and everything i'd ever truly cared about was trapped inside IT, and the only way I could preserve those things as I had known them, was to become a RDM in Aht'urghan. Because when I was in Vana'diel... The world I left behind, didn't matter to me. It had turned itself inside out, and I didn't want it. I remember when my marriage fell apart later that year (2006) and I got divorced and I remember feeling even more shattered, and meeting my friend Bradley (doomtrout) on Valefor, after I bought an Account with Maat's cap. I remember meeting my Christine in 2007, and I remember putting FFXI down again and not touching it until 2009. I remember sitting in the TOC on Kandahar after re-enlisthing. After carrying my friend Phil Meyers through the Afghanistan Rain. I remember thousands of people saluting him and I remember the weight of the box as it dug into my collar bone. And I remember the thing I said to the flag drapped over his box in the blinding lights of the C-130. I told him "Death is light as a feather, Duty heavier than a mountain" while the tears streamed down my face. And I remember the salvage bans happened just before I went through that, and I wanted SO GOD DAMN BAD TO BE IN VANA'DIEL. I didn't want what this life was giving me, because this life, GAVE ME FUCK. and I remember HATING. Hating everything. Hating so much and so hard that it scarred my fucking soul.

I remember joining iiZerg I remember playing with a legitimate linkshell of people that were on voice comms ALL THE TIME. I remember white, and gredival, and braarg and haha and panda and reain and cream soda, and I remember feeling like this was what I had always wanted. I remember taking all the table scraps because my DKP was so low compared to everyone elses and still feeling like I constantly won! I remember learning about these other people and their lives and who they were and I knew at that point, that no matter what. I would always return to vana'diel. It might be for a month, it might be for a year, or hell this last time, I logged in for a day and then re-canceled.... But I will always keep vana'diel with me.

One day when Tyler Atticus is old enough, I will tell him the stories of vana'diel, and I'll take him through with me, and i'll tell him about the time Panda D2'd the tank that was holding cerberus. And how haha trained 8 psychflayers to khimara. And how the game grew, and how people left it behind, or stayed with it. I'll show him what it was like to stare across that frozen waste that was xarcabard. and I will weep when I show him the sanctuary of Zi'tah, because I always think of my brothers and sisters that died and the music always makes it o.k. And I will tell him about Lawrenzo Moses. Who left the world to early, and I will let him hear him play the music. I will tell him that I did not know him, but that I knew him like I knew myself.

These are what make games great. The memories that we create and associate with these games. The games are just a means for us to truly understand ourselves.

Pick whichever you want. https://imgur.com/gallery/zbC9e

[Mertron]

Pick whichever you want. https://imgur.com/gallery/zbC9e

doesn’t even have the best one

[Mertron]

the drummer one is good though

[Lucienne]

How far from reality it allows me to escape and for how long.

[Roranora]

How far from reality it allows me to escape and for how long.

FFXI confirmed for goat

[Koyangi]

It led me to ya'll.

[Anoat]

shep poured his god damn heart out just now and y’all making tldr jokes, fuck let the dude get shit off his chest just because a lot of it involves ffxi time don’t mean you gotta act the way y’all do. There’s a lot of real shit in there and when people open up its important not to shut them down, god damn it spam act like adults there is time for titty talk later

[Day]

god damn it spam act like adults

uh bro you ok

[Mertron]

shep poured his god damn heart out just now and y’all making tldr jokes, fuck let the dude get shit off his chest just because a lot of it involves ffxi time don’t mean you gotta act the way y’all do. There’s a lot of real shit in there and when people open up its important not to shut them down, god damn it spam act like adults there is time for titty talk later

for the record this was also tldr

[Mertron]

anyway, i find the best part of the video games to be the boobies

[Cantih]

I read it. Unlike the last guy that posted a wall of text, this one IS actually worth reading.

[Rhyis.]

shep poured his god damn heart out just now and y’all making tldr jokes, fuck let the dude get shit off his chest just because a lot of it involves ffxi time don’t mean you gotta act the way y’all do. There’s a lot of real shit in there and when people open up its important not to shut them down, god damn it spam act like adults there is time for titty talk later

How 'bout you take 20% off there bud.

[D44kpunk]

a cool main character

he's gotta have good hair too.

and a burly companion + a hot chick friend

[Koyangi]

What makes a good game is one where there isn't any way to trade real life money for in-game money or services.

[Lokus]

If I end saying "why the fuck did I spend all those hours and years playing that stupid ass game?" then it was indeed a great game.

[Mertron]

If I end saying "why the fuck did I spend all those hours and years playing that stupid ass game?" then it was indeed a great game.

sure are a lot of ffxi votes in this thread

[NynJa]

If I end saying "why the fuck did I spend all those hours and years playing that stupid ass game?" then it was indeed a great game.

Might wanna drop that in the BOTW thread cause theres plenty of people who dropped 100+ hours and bitch that the game was terrible

[Day]

https://twitter.com/FINALLEVEL/statu...91931399573504

[Roranora]

GTA3 was indeed monumental and redefined vidya in multiple ways