With a physical video game collection nearing 500 titles, the backlog is already infinite. Here’s a look at the games I’m meaning to get to the most.
It was around six years ago at this time of year that the world came to a screeching halt as lockdowns associated with the COVID-19 pandemic brought everyone indoors with more time on their hands than ever before.
I was working as an overnight intern at WGN-TV at the time, with my shifts going from 2-9 a.m. as I was still adjusting to a fully nocturnal lifestyle. Being sent home indefinitely certainly altered this, and my responsibilities at work drastically decreased as everyone was figuring out how to navigate working remotely.
Being up in the early hours of the morning essentially on standby to help someone out, I had a ton of time to occupy myself with other things while keeping my work e-mail open. I watched movies, read about political and baseball history and reconnected with my childhood passion of video games.
Having owned a handful of consoles and a few dozen games from my childhood, I then decided to get every game and console I had in one place and began collecting video games – with a library that has grown from around 70 games to 471 today, playing all of the games we have is already damn near impossible.
I’ll be the first to admit that despite owning so many games, my wife and I typically play a select handful. We love the Super Mario and Super Smash Bros. series, we both play plenty of rhythm games and then occasionally fall under the spell of an especially addicting title, such as The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Yet with plenty of available time and a still-expanding collection, there are truthfully dozens of games that I haven’t even touched that are sitting in my closet as an untapped adventure waiting to be had.
Many of these games are ones we’ve purchased on reputation alone despite little-to-no familiarity with a given series or genre, while others are unexplored titles that are part of a familiar series.
I ultimately was able to single out four titles that I especially want to play through that remain untouched within our library – games that I feel like my wife and/or I would truly love that have just not been given the proper chance yet.
While my fixation on the Super Smash Bros. series and rhythm games has kept the backlog in place for quite some time, these are the titles I’m hoping to dive into at some point in the not-too-distant future:
1. Final Fantasy X – PlayStation 2, 2001
Despite one of my favorite games ever in Tales of Symphonia being a Japanese RPG, my experience in the genre as a whole remains quite limited. While I had played through Final Fantasy VII as a kid and dabbled a bit in Tales of Vesperia, the two most famous JRPG franchises remain mostly untapped for me today.
Perhaps the best way to fully immersify myself in the genre is through the 2001 blockbuster Final Fantasy X, originally released on the PlayStation 2 with ports to numerous other consoles in the 25 years since its release.
Often cited as an example of the tropical-inspired frutiger aero artstyle that was commonplace in tech and media in the early 2000’s, Final Fantasy X is set in an equatorial fantasy world with a protagonist that had just been transported 1,000 years into the future after his home city was attacked.
The game has long been known as a maximalist, lengthy adventure with a seemingly endless body of cities, dungeons and enemies to explore. While I previously started playing the game a few years back, our PlayStation 2’s incredibly slow booting time has been the biggest reason I haven’t returned to FFX – or any other PS2 game for that matter – in recent years.
Yet as someone who wants to further explore the JRPG genre and come across adventures I’d find just as riveting as Tales of Symphonia, this title offers an incredible amount of promise.
2. Metroid Prime – GameCube, 2002
Like very many gamers who are around my age (dangerously close to 30 years old), my primary exposure to the Metroid series came through Super Smash Bros. games, with the main protagonist in Samus Aran being one of the more recognizable playable characters.
Yet just months after the 2001 release of Super Smash Bros. Melee, the Metroid series returned from an eight-year hiatus with the 2002 release of Metroid Prime, an action-adventure/first-person shooter hybrid that brought Samus to a 3D environment for the first time.
While I’ve literally never played a Metroid game in my life, a gamer would have to be living under a rock the size of Jupiter to not be aware of how highly regarded both Metroid Prime and its sequel were on the GameCube, with especially the former often cited by critics as one of the best games of its generation and of all-time.
As a lifelong fan of Nintendo games, I’d love to eventually play through at least the most important titles in all of the flagship series that are often represented in Super Smash Bros. games, with Metroid Prime standing out as one of the most prestigious Nintendo titles I’ve simply never fired up.
3. Banjo-Kazooie – Nintendo 64, 1998
While my favorite game ever may be a JRPG, it’s no secret that I grew up on platformers. Although Super Mario games caught the bulk of my attention, the Spyro and Crash Bandicoot series also had me completely engrossed in the rewarding adventures those games offered.
That makes Banjo-Kazooie stand out as a notable omission from the games I played the most as a kid, most likely due to me not getting a Nintendo 64 until near the end of the console’s lifespan in April 2001.
Regarded as one of the best games for the console, Banjo-Kazooie is a kid-friendly adventure that appears to build off of many of the ideas and concepts introduced to players in Super Mario 64 two years earlier, with sandbox-type environments and a variety of obstacles and enemies to maneuver through.
One of the best-selling games for the Nintendo 64, Banjo-Kazooie feels like the third piece of a trio of platform/adventure games that have helped the console age so well, alongside the aforementioned Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, as well as a hallmark achievement of the partnership between the developer Rare and Nintendo.
4. Half-Life 2 – Xbox, 2004
This feels like the weirdest inclusion on the list to me, as I spent hundreds of hours playing Half-Life 2: Deathmatch on my PC throughout much of the mid-to-late 2000’s, with the game providing the bulk of my online first-person shooter experience.
Despite obsessively playing the online Deathmatch for several years, I had never explored the critically acclaimed blockbuster that is the base game itself in Half-Life 2.
Never being much of a first-person shooter guy, the idea of playing a single-player campaign mode of a shooter game felt incredibly boring to me as a kid – especially after dabbling a bit in Half-Life 2: Episode One, one of the game’s sequels that introduced my father and I to the series in 2006.
Yet as the series has stagnated over the years and the memories of packed HL2DM servers fade, the appeal of playing through Half-Life 2 on a console is greater than ever – with a chance to get a firsthand look of all of the elements that inspired the hundreds of custom maps I played on Deathmatch.
Furthermore, as a title that’s still often regarded as among the finest of its genre, it feels like I have as good of a chance enjoying a single-player playthrough of Half-Life 2 as I do with any other first-person shooter.
Leave a Reply