“All right, I’ve been thinking, when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down — with the lemons!”
Monomi Park is a game development studio that created a game called Slime Rancher that has proven to be a modern classic in the making. In years to come, generations will look back on it with the fondness and nostalgia that I hold for the games of my youth, but a lot has changed since I was a kid. For one, the approach to game development is much more varied, I grew up in a time when games took between 3 and 5 years to develop and save for some minor publicity you didn't get much in the way of a preview of what was to come. Slime Rancher 2 is an example of how far we've come and how players today are much more involved in guiding the creative process.
When I think about classic games I can't help think about my childhood as they are what I grew up with, and when I think about the games I played, the ones that became a phenomenon are those that I think hold the most significance for me even now. The Pokémon franchise at this point is extensive but despite all the games that have been released, the one that still holds pole position is Pokémon Silver, released in 1999 and later remastered as Pokémon Soul Silver.
Released in 2016 after a long and arduous development process where development restarted multiple times, The Witness was Jonathan Blow's long awaited follow up to Braid which was an indie game hit in 2008. The Witness takes place on an idyllic island that is essentially the manifestation of Zen.
The original QUBE game [stylized as Q.U.B.E. despite not being an acronym] is yet another 3D First-Person Puzzle game in my collection. It was an interesting little game, it didn't overstay its welcome, it had a somewhat innovative puzzle mechanic and a familiar art style. The second game in the series, QUBE 2 however didn't carry on that legacy, unticking each of those boxes.
There are some games that I can only describe as "an experience" because giving any other overview never does them justice. These types of games are the ones where everyone who plays them ultimately experiences the same thing but their reaction to it varies wildly. Stray is a game that I fell in love with the moment I first played it, and since then it has also become one of my favourite games to watch people play.
You probably didn't think it was possible for me to be even more nerdy than I come across but I'm going to share something I don't tell people much. I like to write theses (dissertations) for fun. I can hear a million students groan in horror at that admission but it's true. I love gaming and my degree was in Computer Science with Games Technology, despite that combination my actual thesis for my degree was the design of an Encryption Algorithm to replace DES as a competitor to AES. I never wrote a thesis about gaming because it wasn't actually an option surprisingly, there were key tests that had to be met and writing about games wouldn't meet those tests.
