Category: My Favorite Games

The featured photo on this post is my attempt to create my own likeness in The Sims 4¹Or more accurately, a preview Create-a-Sim tool they launched to promote The Sims 4, and it came out pretty close. The character creation is still my favorite aspect of the otherwise-unremarkable The Sims 4, mostly because it wisely chose to embrace the cartoonish aspect instead of trying too hard for photorealism. (Also because it let me make a character whose beard color didn’t match his hair color, allowing me to finally see some representation in a video game!)

When I say “otherwise-unremarkable” I should probably clarify: even though The Sims 4 is my least favorite in the series, I’ve still put more hours into it than just about any other video game apart from SimCity. Maxis games for me tend to be less “entertainment” and more “all-consuming obsession.”

My favorite in the series is still The Sims 2, because it built on everything that made the first game work — and make the first one become absurdly profitable to an unprecedented degree — without straying too far from the core focus. The biggest improvement there was the Create-a-Sim mode, which allowed for more customization of characters without any hint of straying into the uncanny valley.

I happened to be working at Maxis on SimCity 4 while The Sims 2 was in production. I can still remember the first time I created a family in Create-a-Sim mode, and then when I launched into the game, it showed me a screenshot of the whole family posed together, smiling and waving. It was mind-blowing. I was still unfamiliar enough with 3D that it had never occurred to me you could render into a 2D texture. That moment in the game seemed to epitomize everything that made Maxis games so appealing: applying technology to something that wasn’t intended to be cool to nerds, but to give more universal audiences something charming and delightful.

It’s wild to read about the history of The Sims franchise. At every step, they made a decision that seems like it should never have worked, but it all came together to work magnificently. The process of building and decorating a house feels so different from the actual simulation that they could be entirely different games, and yet they build on each other in a perfectly elegant curve that seems like under-appreciated genius: a better and more efficiently-designed house helps your Sims do better in their daily lives, which in turn helps them afford better stuff and bigger houses.

Of course, it’s at least as much a Republican Capitalist Nightmare abstraction as SimCity‘s economic model is, but the sense of humor in The Sims is what makes it work. In contrast to the more blatant slapstick throughout the game, it’s more subtly satirizing consumer culture and its own promotion of that culture. At least in the earlier games. I felt like The Sims and The Sims 2 made a clear delineation between its abstractions and the real world, for instance by playing 1950s shopping mall-style music when in “Buy” mode. Along the way, the people shaping the franchise seem to have forgotten — or never understood in the first place — that it was all supposed to be a joke.

The genius of The Sims as a core game mechanic was being able to recognize people’s moment-to-moment lives as a coldly impersonal abstraction: to put “I’m lonely” and “I have to go to the bathroom” as roughly equal imperatives. The genius of The Sims as a classic video game franchise was recognizing the absurd humor of that abstraction, and leaning into the absurdity.

When I first saw The Sims, with its characters speaking gibberish before spinning around in mid-air to change clothes, or peeing themselves, or setting themselves on fire, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. Eventually, I began to appreciate it as brilliantly stupid and let it take over an enormous chunk of my free time.

My favorite story about The Sims is one I’ve told dozens of times, and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on this blog but can’t find it at the moment. In short: the game recognized I was gay before I did. When I first launched the first game, it included a starter “family” of two women called the “Roomies,” and it invited you to move them into the neighborhood and make friends. My plan was to make another family of two men and move them into a different house. I’d thought I’d introduce them all to each other, have them pair off into couples, all go into the Music career, and eventually I’d have my Sims recreate ABBA.

I hit a snag early on, though, when I tried to have my two male roommates develop a friendship with each other. They got along a little too well, choosing to have long conversations with each other at the expense of all their other needs. Before long, they had the option to “Hug” each other, which was nice to see. One of the guys had a different idea of platonic relationships that I did at the time, though, since a heart appeared over his head. At that point, the guys had the option to “Try for a Kiss.” What could it hurt? I thought. It’s only a video game.

From there on out, the guys were inseparable. I brought the girls over and tried to start conversations between them, but the guys showed little interest, and things got somewhat awkward. As in real life, I tried to force one of the guys back onto the “proper” path and had him constantly striking up conversations with one of the women, inviting her over frequently, offering her back rubs. It was during one of these interchanges that his “roommate” entered the room, went into a jealous outrage, slapped the both of them, then stormed off into the kitchen to make dinner. Being a character in a Sims game, he set himself on fire almost immediately. The other Sims panicked and tried to put out the fire, but they were too late — the spurned man, just after a breakthrough in realizing his true orientation, died in the fire. I moved his urn into the backyard, which automatically created a tombstone.

His former roommate was inconsolable. He’d go out to the backyard and stand over the grave, unable to do much apart from “Cry.” His new ladyfriend eventually got bored and came out to join him in the backyard, trying to start up a conversation to cheer him up. The two Sims now had the option to “Dance,” which I chose, causing the man and the woman to dance on his former boyfriend’s grave.

For years, I thought of that story as being the perfect example of how even a seemingly absurd and comical abstraction could expose so much of my suppression and frustration while living in the closet. The best intentions. The repression. The curiosity. The guilt. The secret desire for retribution and a different life. When I told that whole story to my first boyfriend, though, he said, “You should’ve known you were gay when you bought a new video game and the very first thing you wanted to do was recreate ABBA.”

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  Or more accurately, a preview Create-a-Sim tool they launched to promote The Sims 4

So I mean, I get it: yeah, no shit Diablo II is one of my favorite games. It’s the video game equivalent of saying you like Rumours or the White Album.

But recently I bought the Diablo II: Resurrected remaster, and it was uncanny how quickly I fell right back into it. I’m realizing I didn’t just play Diablo II, I was completely subsumed by it.

Strictly speaking, the first Diablo had a bigger impact on me. It was my first exposure to so many different things: roguelikes, procedurally generated levels, action RPGs, and narrative (more or less) in non-adventure games. Even more strictly speaking, it was the Hellfire expansion that had the biggest impact on me, by introducing the Monk character class. I had completed the first game a few times over before starting another play-through with the Monk, and I’d gotten to be level 10 or so before I tried unequipping his weapon. His attack power shot way up! Which made sense, because monks are supposed to excel at hand-to-hand combat. It’s one of those times I was shown how much a game can do not with a pre-determined story, but with interconnected systems.

But realistically, there’s no way that I’m ever playing Diablo again, even if they do come out with an opportunistic cash-grab a spectacular new remaster. With the sequel, it wasn’t even an option whether I’d play it again or not. I felt compelled to.

So now here I am with a backlog of dozens of Steam games built up over the years, which I’m ignoring to go back to playing a game that came out 20 years ago, for what might be the tenth or fiftieth time.

One of the most hilarious aspects of playing the remaster is the character selection screen, which gives you a button to toggle between the remastered presentation and the original. This is a pretty standard feature in video game remasters and re-releases, but here it’s used only in the pre-game screen, not the game itself. (At least, that’s the only place it’s easily accessible). I say it’s hilarious because without it, you might believe that Blizzard hadn’t actually done much of anything besides make new versions of the cinematic sequences — which shouldn’t be understated, actually, since they’ve improved the character designs a lot from the bafflingly ugly originals. Otherwise, the game looks exactly like you remember it. You need the button to be reminded just how generous your memories have been to a game that was still using turn-of-the-century technology. Oh no. That’s not what I remember at all!

Diablo II is my favorite of the series because it takes all the lizard-brain-dopamine-dispensing mechanisms of the original and expands on them in all the right, insidiously clever ways. I haven’t yet gotten past the first act with the remaster (because I keep starting over with new characters), but I’m still hoarding all the gems and jewels I find along the way, practically rubbing my hands together at the prospect of getting access to the Horadric Cube. The game has always been a ridiculously fancy and expensive overlay on a random number generator, but soon I’ll get a whole new set of random numbers to see!

I don’t know what other game are going to be in my “my favorite games” list, because I’m thinking of them as I go along. But I would bet that Diablo II is the game I most resent liking. I didn’t get nearly as obsessive as some others did — min-maxing has never been my thing, and I think I only played online a total of twice, quickly discovering I only enjoyed it as a solo game — but I still think of it less like a player and more like an addict.

I hate how it so perfectly doles out rewards so that I’m always looking forward to the next hit, turning over every loose boulder and opening every chest inexplicably left in the middle of an open field. I hate how it makes me carefully weigh the pros and cons of the bonuses of any two pieces of armor, even though I know it doesn’t actually make that much of a difference. I hate that I look forward to entering the next area, even though I already know what it looks like, or unlocking the next skill, even though I already know what it does. It annoys me how it’s such a brazen system of repetitive habit and exposed mechanics, and I find it so completely satisfying.

My disappointment with Diablo III is probably a good indicator of exactly what Diablo II does so well. None of these games are particularly remarkable for their storytelling (although you can tell that some of the people at Blizzard are very fond of the lore they created), but Diablo II has just the right balance. Enough so that you’re not just looking at a scroll of random numbers, but not so much to get in the way. When I was a couple hours into Diablo III and learned that the main story would have me traveling the world assembling the pieces of a magic sword, I could hear the low, raspy groan as part of my soul left my body.

I don’t have a ton of experience playing the smaller, simpler roguelike games out there, but of the ones I’ve tried, none have had exactly the same feeling of satisfaction as advancing through Diablo or its sequel. I’ve got no doubt that Diablo 4 will be huge and bombastic and meticulously crafted and balanced (full disclosure: I’ve got a friend who’s working on it), but I’d like to play something again that gets that simple feeling of risk, reward, and exploration.

(SimCity 3000 art borrowed without permission from Ocean Quigley’s blog)

I think SimCity 3000 was the first game I ever lost a day to. I was at my parents’ house for a holiday break, and I stared playing it in the morning, and just never stopped. I got up for meals, but spent the whole time distracted thinking of city improvements and rushed back to the computer. I stayed up too late in the den, redistricting and listening to jazz long after my family had gone to bed. And I say that I “lost” the day because by the time I went to sleep myself, I didn’t feel like I’d actually accomplished anything except for learning the game’s systems.

One of those systems was the land value calculation, which was the first time I remember recognizing how video game abstractions aren’t the pure simulations that they might seem to be. There’s an inherent bias in SimCity 3000’s simulation, in which you were incentivized to maximize land value over having a more balanced city. I’m not sure whether it was deliberate, or just a side effect of having such gorgeous building art and lots that responded to rising land values by transforming into perfectly landscaped green spaces.

Whatever the case, it felt as if providing all the basic city services and building parks and recreation wasn’t some kind of altruistic responsibility, but a game about attracting rich people. It was essentially a game about making Lafayette or Ross, CA.

Years later, even after I’d worked on the sequel, I read the observation that the economic model for all the SimCity games was some kind of Reagan-esque fantasy of using tax cuts to solve any problem, and shaping a city with the ultimate eminent domain. I guess it seems obvious in retrospect, but I couldn’t help feeling as if I’d been subtly indoctrinated with Republican ideologies.

But the reason it remains one of my favorite series is that for me it was ultimate case of getting a bunch of interconnected systems and figuring out how they all work together. Cities: Skylines has become the best city-building game available, largely by mimicking the SimCity games almost slavishly, fixing the rougher parts and taking advantage of improving computer power to expand on it over and over again. But the games feel very different to me. Cities: Skylines feels like building a city, while SimCity 2000-4 feels like encouraging a city to grow.

I think SimCity 4 is pretty great, by the way, and it’s one of the games I’m proudest to have worked on, even though my contribution isn’t really part of what makes it great. The only reason I picked 3000 as my favorite is because I can’t play 4 anymore; I spent so many days building the same roads over and over again during development that it feels robotic. I do wonder if I could go back to it now and enjoy it.

I should also mention that the reason I’ve still got so much love for the SimCity series that I’ve never had for Skylines — even though Skylines is a better game in several ways — is that there was so much creativity applied to the rewards for understanding the systems. The buildings in every version, especially the most recent SimCity, are just beautiful, and it’s no exaggeration to say that they instilled in me a better appreciation for architecture as I drive around a city. The music has also been amazing in every version, and 3000‘s might be my favorite. But so many aspects, from the often-gratuitous animations, to the sound effects, to the digitized portraits of your advisors in 2000 that conveyed so much character in so few lines of text, feel that they were put there for no other reason than to be delightful.

I think I’d already declared Final Fantasy Tactics my favorite game of all time before I’d even finished my first play-through. I’d never played anything like it; it was my first exposure to tactical strategy games, story-driven strategy games, Final Fantasy as a years-long franchise that existed separate from blockbuster hit Final Fantasy 7, the job system, and even the super-deformed character style.

That’s probably why no attempt to recreate it has gotten it just right: so much of it depended on novelty. I get the impression that very little in the game is completely new, since it existed in Ogre Battle or Final Fantasy IV or any of dozens of Japanese games that I’d never heard of. But it was all new to me. So it defined not only how that type of game should work, but also how many details and interacting systems a single game can, and maybe even should, contain.

After all, this is a game where the damage an attack can do will be based on attack power (of course), defense (sure), level (naturally), resistances (standard RPG stuff), which direction the characters are facing (interesting), differences in elevation (very interesting), faith and bravery scores of the characters (okay I guess), gender (now hang on a second), and zodiac signs (what?). On top of that, there are all these interesting ways to manipulate the time and turn order of a battle. Then there’s an entire job class called Calculator whose abilities take effect based on esoteric arithmetic properties: every character whose level is a prime number, for instance.

There’ve been two sequels for the GameBoy Advance that added some interesting aspects to the game’s setting of Ivalice, but they feel like shallower imitations instead of full games in their own right. And there’s been something of a remake in the form of the War of the Lions version, which brought new cut-scenes and a new translation clearly intended to bring the English-language versions of the game the depth and gravitas the story clearly delivered.

Which I don’t like at all. And it annoys me that War of the Lions has become the only version of the game that’s still playable without digging out my old CD and my original PlayStation. I miss the awkward translation of the original. A few memorable lines from the original were kept for the new translation, but it seems like the vast majority of the dialogue in the game was carefully edited to remove any poor translations and instead have the stately, flowery English that was no doubt intended by the original writers.

I used to think I was being condescending when I preferred the awkward original, in a sense saying tee hee look at the funny Engrish. But now I don’t think it’s actually that, so much as missing the earnest charm that comes from these cute characters waving their tiny hands in the air and shouting nonsense before they incinerate each other or stab each other to death. The original seemed happy to be bizarre to American audiences, while the remaster feels as if it’s desperate to be taken seriously.

Which is a problem when the story is so humorless and overwrought and frankly, such a mess. It’s about factions and houses in decades-long wars conducting impossibly convoluted schemes to form alliances and undermine the power of the church to ultimately summon demons who will take over the planet. Or something like that. I’ve played through the game four times now, and I obviously couldn’t figure out what it was all about through any of it. I’m not even that embarrassed, since characters are named like Zalbag and Dycedarg and you’re just expected to be able to keep up.

I’ve spent the 20+ years since I first played Final Fantasy Tactics looking for a tactical strategy game that I enjoyed as much. Advance Wars is pretty great, although nowhere near as deep. XCOM: Enemy Unknown is probably the closest I’ve found to capturing that feeling of figuring out how a bunch of interconnected systems work with each other. But the holy grail of a true successor remains elusive: something with just the right combination of complexity, expansiveness, depth, and charm.

One of the more pointless aspects of social media that I miss is the “what’s your favorite?” list-making. It’s been a while since I’ve gone back and updated my list of favorite video games, so why not do it as an ongoing series of posts instead of a one-time list? No order except in the order I remember them, and I’ll keep going until I run out.

On the one hand, I hate being reductive with What Remains of Edith Finch, distilling an hours-long experience into a declaration of what it “means.” But I also feel the need to state over and over again just how much it accomplishes, quietly, in the same way that watching someone perform actual magic would have me looking around in wonder, asking other people if they just saw the same thing I did.

As a good illustration of just how much I was impressed with this game: the writing is near-flawless, and it’s one of the least remarkable things about the experience. When I first got interested in writing for video games, the bar was set so impossibly low that competence seemed exceptional. But over the years, the industry — or at least the small part of it that I’m interested in — over-corrected with what was frankly pretentious over-writing. More and more, I saw dialogue with little sense of character voice, and passages more interested in chasing some kind of literary flourish instead of practical effect. What Remains of Edith Finch could easily have devolved into something insufferably maudlin or twee, but instead, it’s accessible, varied, often poetic, and often joyful.

But the most remarkable thing to me is that there’s no imbalance in the game. It’s not a game with weak mechanics but good writing, or an interesting environmental design but shallow interaction, or any of the trade-offs you’d expect to find in even an excellent game. Instead, every aspect of the experience works together to deliver its meaning, which is an extended metaphor for death and how it informs our understanding of human existence.

The stories in What Remains of Edith Finch are varied in length, tone, interaction style, and presentation; it seems that the only thing they have in common is that they all end in death. The first story suggests that the game will take off in the direction of magical realism — which, to be clear, would’ve been charming on its own — but it’s not long before you’re dropped into a new situation as mundane as a child sitting on a swing. You have to figure out not just what’s going on in the narrative, but how you’re supposed to interact with it and drive it forward.

There’s a little bit of confusion: are they really going to make me go through the entire process of doing this? Because, you quickly realize, it’s not about being told a story, it’s about sharing an experience. The thing that makes these stories poignant is that you’re going through them, seeing them first hand. For those of us who were raised to believe in an afterlife (and are still undecided about the question), it echoes one of the most fundamental questions we had as children: if heaven’s so perfect, why do we have to spend all this time miserable on Earth? The answer, such as it is, that satisfied me, more or less, was that you can’t fully understand the wonder of our flawed and joyful existence unless you experience it yourself.

And as you wander through the Finch house, you can peek into windows on the door to each room to get a rough, distorted idea of the person who once lived inside. But you can’t really know each person’s story until you’ve experienced its end. These aren’t mysteries, really: you know that each story ends in death, and more often than not, you know how the character dies. And since death is as inevitable in this game as it is in the world outside of it, the deaths aren’t always tragedies. They give context to the lives that came before them, letting you experience first-hand what made these characters more than just a collection of random memories.

As a result, the stories have moments of startling impact: turning a senselessly tragic death into an experience of curious joyfulness, or showing the wondrous imagination that coursed through a life of seemingly tedious sadness. You’re left with a feeling of profound connection, to everyone who’s lived and everyone who’s going to die.