Star Fox 64: This is extremely nostalgic for me, as it very well might have been the first video game I ever played. It has pretty much endless replayability as to this day, I keep coming back to it and keep on trying to beat my highest score. It's kind of sad what happened to the Star Fox franchise after this, but I've found this game just endlessly compelling and with a very rich lore from supplemental material, with that Pokemon-level of "just enough" worldbuilding to be the perfect sandbox for fan creation. Memes are good too.
Diddy Kong Racing: This one is not necessarily one of my favorite games or one I even played that much. But like Star Fox, it was one of the first games I ever played as a kid, every time I visited my uncle's house. And it
has defined me in one forever inseparable way: it gave me my
username. The music in this game is just incredible.
StarCraft: Brood War: One of the most notoriously difficult and high barrier-to-entry games ever. So it was very lucky for 5-year-old me that the game came with built-in cheats to basically make you invincible, produce units instantly, have endless resources, and see the entire map. One of the first games with a heavy story focus and brilliant sci-fi writing that I've learned to appreciate more and more as I've grown. This is a game that has stuck with my basically my whole life. I was too young to ever be actually good at this game as a kid, so I didn't play multiplayer at all (man, it would be cool to have experienced dial-up multiplayer though), but I did when StarCraft II dropped years later. StarCraft II ended up taking a huge shit on the lore but I at least was able to enjoy multplayer and eSports for the short while that it was on top, and it was actually my main community before coming to Smogon. Though I don't really look back at it too fondly because of the toxicity. Sarah Kerrigan was one of my earliest crushes too, especially after infested. I think that may have messed me up somehow.
Halo 2: I was a Halo kid like most people my age. Basically, I enjoyed it for the same reasons that I enjoyed StarCraft, and this game made me a fan of shooters in general. This is another game where I got deep into the lore and read the books and such. Fun times eating the classic Burger King nuggets and reading only the Covenant scenes in "The Flood" lol. I started on Halo 1, but Halo 2 was always my favorite of the series. I had it for PC but it was only for Windows Vista, meaning once I upgraded my PC it no longer worked. But I'm excited that it's finally on Steam, and I look forward to finally being able to play Halo 3 all the way through once that drops. I've been so patient for 13 years.
The Battle for Wesnoth: A Tolkien-esque turn-based open-sourced indie strategy game. This one has a lot of bittersweet memories for me, so I really thought about not including it here, but it just has defined me so much that I have to. In middle school, I was heavily involved in the user-made content side of this game's community, where I met a lot of cool people (including Smogon/Pokemon Showdown's very own Zarel!) but it was also where I learned a lot of harsh truths firsthand, like the reality of online harassment and how cruel people can be. So it has been tainted for me a little, though it helped me grow in a lot of good ways; I modeled my own "good cop" moderating style here on a moderator I knew there.
Boktai 2: Solar Boy Django: A lesser known Kojima production. Though it does have a Solid Snake cameo in it! I first discovered this series through the various crossovers it had with Mega Man Battle Network. I don't talk about it much but Boktai is hands down my favorite..."thing"? Not only my favorite video game series, but my favorite...let's say, work of fiction or even piece of art ever. It has engaging puzzles and gameplay and amazing music (my favorite composer, Norihiko Hibino) but I think my favorite aspect is the lore and mythology of the world. The player is basically thrown into a world and story with minimal cast where everything important has basically already happened. The past is hinted at, sometimes explained, but never shown. The best comparison I can think of is imagine if A New Hope was the only Star Wars that existed. No prequels or sequels filling in who the Emperor is, what the "Clone Wars" actually were, what Jabba the Hutt looks like, where the Empire came from, why Darth Vader is in a suit, how the Force works, etc. All the ways this drives your imagination wild. I spent years of my life joyfully constructing the timeline and theorizing the internal rules of the world with my friends.
Like most though, what makes this my favorite is just perfect nostalgic timing. I got it in 4th grade, and still have fond memories of my mom sitting at the kitchen table calling up every game store listed in the phone book in order to get it for me by Christmas. Then I started to get onto the internet more and made friends through a fansite; they were all much older than I was (I was a COPPA-ignorant pre-teen, they were all late teens and early 20s) so they basically raised me in a way. And we're still friends to this day. So it really means a lot to me. And it is what got me into the various things that inspired it, like Western films, Jazz, Norse Mythology, and Gothic literature. Those close to me know I am like, REALLY into those things, so now they know why.
Metroid: Zero Mission: Hmm...I'm seeing a sci-fi pattern here, lol. Metroid was my
second favorite game franchise growing up. I possibly found it similarly fascinating how Metroid Zero Mission hints at a backstory without ever spelling it out (though eventually it is explained in various manga and other games in the series), and I found the universe of this series so interesting. It's one of the fictional universes I'd actually want to live in (most video game universes are too dangerous lol). The bonus ending art depicting all of these various cyberpunk cities that Samus visits always looked so fascinating to me.
Of course there is a lot of nostalgia for this one as well. As a 5th grader who was forced to go to South Korea with my parents and was too young and close-minded to want to try anything, I ended up just playing this game most of the time instead. At school, my friends and I would argue every lunch whether Samus or Mega Man was better based on one having powers the other didn't. And they joked that I cried out for Samus in my sleep. Good times.
Pokemon SoulSilver: FireRed was my first Pokemon game, and one I have a lot of nostalgia for but...I think in the long run, SoulSilver is the one that had the deeper impact on me. I quit Pokemon after Diamond and Pearl, and thought Gen 5 looked horrible (looking back, I think it was the last truly great Pokemon generation). But in July 2012, I decided to get SoulSilver, and it made Pokemon take over my life again. I played this game basically every day that Summer and I just get filled with such nostalgia thinking back to it. I loved having all of the phone numbers of the gym leaders and that I could call them whenever I wanted; it was like I had actual friends! Little things like that and their availability and locations changing on days of the week made this a rich game I could really just self-insert into.
At the time, I had just left the StarCraft II community, and was looking for a new one to join. I had dabbled in Yu-Gi-Oh a bit that summer as well, and thought about joining that community, but in the end, this game led me to Smogon which definitely changed my life completely. That connection I think puts SoulSilver over FireRed for me.
Mega Man Zero 4: This one I have a weird relationship to as it is almost a simulacrum of nostalgia for me. Mega Man is notoriously split up into several subfranchises, and so while I grew up knowing Battle Network, I didn't know anything about the classic series, X series, Zero series, or Legends series. But I always heard bits and pieces of it because like 90% of people I know did grow up with these games. It was like the video game equivalent of Harry Potter; something as a kid growing up in the 2000s I couldn't avoid seeing and hearing about everywhere even if I didn't read it myself. All of my roommates grew up with it, my cousin and brother grew up with it, hell, even new people I meet tell me "oh yeah, of course I grew up playing Mega Man Zero!"
So when the Zero/ZX Legacy Collection was announced last year, and most importantly included an easy mode, I was really excited to finally be able to play the games and kinda "fill in the blank" of my childhood, so to speak. Amazingly enough, it worked. It has only been 3 months since the game dropped but it has already affected me enough to be included on this list (you can even tell by my current avatar, which is Zero at the time of writing this). After playing it, it was like I had been a fan for my entire life. I ended up playing the 8 main Mega Man X games as well afterward. This position really stands in for the entire Zero, ZX, and X series. I put Zero 4 here because out of the 14 games I played, it is by far my favorite, and I found the story in MMZ to be surprisingly emotionally deep with some serious heady sci-fi themes.