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Age of Mythology + Age of Mythology: The Titans (Ubisoft Exclusive)

Year: 2002, 2003
Publisher: Microsoft, Ubisoft
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Genre: Real-time strategy
Completion: Both main campaigns

AoM remains my all-time favorite RTS, for marrying my previous obsession with the original Age of Empires with my then-burgeoning love of Greek and Norse mythology (I was no less fascinated with Egyptian myths but I had less information on that available to me at the time). This particular edition is one of those shitty budget re-releases, of which the main issue was that each and every copy of it had the same serial numbers, which made it unplayable in multiplayer at the time. Nowadays it's a non-issue as I currently run the Extended Edition via Steam (plus its much, albeit not unfairly, maligned post-EX expansion Tale of the Dragon).

Borderlands

Year: 2009
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Gearbox Software
Genre: First Person Shooter, Action RPG
Completion: Main campaign, 3/4 DLC campaigns, 78% Steam achievements

Borderlands was released at the exact right time to fit my at the time growing interest in shooter games, cushioned by my familiarity with RPG systems, while also having intrigued me by its procedurally generated guns. While the story is ultimately kind of dull, especially in comparison to its successor, its worldbuilding was a high point for me and set a great foundation for its franchise.

Borderlands 2

Year: 2012
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Gearbox Software
Genre: First Person Shooter, Action RPG
Completion: Main campaign, all DLC campaigns, 74% Steam achievements

Borderlands 2 is one of those weird cases where a developer has taken an already very good game (albeit a little rough around the edges) and refined it into a sequel that's a better game in almost every way. My main complaint is the writing's overreliance on lolrandom humor and topical references that came across as extremely dated when I replayed it in 2022.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

Year: 2007
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: EA Los Angeles
Genre: Real-time Strategy
Completion: No

At the time I picked this up, my only experiences of the RTS genre so far had been the Age of Empires, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Warcraft series, and this represented a serious change of both gameplay style and overall tone from the two, with the real life historical theme of the former and the cartoony fantasy aesthetic of the latter. I picked it up because of my friend who played it and it looked cool enough to give a shot. Overall, it proved to be too different to my preferences in RTS to bother with completing its campaign, so I neither did that nor picked up its expansion, Kane's Wrath.

Devil May Cry 4

Year: 2008
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Genre: Hack 'n' Slash
Completion: Yes

Honestly, I don't have much to say about this game that other people haven't said better than I could. Yadda yadda, Dante becomes playable too late, too much backtracking, etc. I liked Nero from the start, though. This was my first foray into the franchise aside from trying DMC3 at a friend's house once, which intrigued me enough for me to pick this up in 2009. At the time, it was between this or Fallout 3 - which while I did play that, I'm glad I picked this up first since Fallout 3 proved disappointing after having played New Vegas first. This game also prompted me to pick up a PC compatible Xbox 360 controller, which to this day remains my 'ol' reliable' for playing console-orientated action games on the PC.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Year: 2006
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Genre: Action RPG
Completion: Yes

While not my first RPG, it was the first game I remember buying with my own money, and one of the first I remember following the pre-release hype, as well (the other being Neverwinter Nights 2 around the same time). I had played Morrowind previously on an Xbox I borrowed from my uncle, and loved it, and while as far as I'm concerned, it has little in the way of the things I specifically loved about Morrowind beside the setting of Tamriel and its open world nature, it still has its own unique brand of charm, though ultimately it plays second fiddle to its successor Skyrim in most respects.

Fallout: New Vegas

Year: 2010
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Bethesda Game Studios
Genre: Action RPG
Completion: 1/4 faction paths

What do you mean, it's stereotypical? To date this is the only Fallout game I've actually liked - I gave both of the Bethesda-developed ones a shot after this, but I think all this retro-Americana stuff is straight up Not My Thing and the only reason I think I could tolerate it here is that it's cushioned within the more 'open frontier' vibe here compared to other more recent Fallout games. And, you know, miles better writing.

Far Cry 3

Year: 2012
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Genre: First Person Shooter
Completion: No

SPOILER WARNING: Read at your own risk!

So, while there's a lot of good things about this game, a one-two punch of two flaws, one critical and another more trivial, caused me to put this game down. First off, I had killed off Vaas, the antagonist featured prominently on both the cover and in the marketing material for the game, only at what seemed to be the halfway point of the game, what remained just felt bland in comparison - and then I gave up after having scaled a bugged radio tower that wouldn't unlock its map sector. Another thing that was memorable for me was the silliness of needing specific animal skins to upgrade your wallet so it could hold more money. I don't know, it's to this day the first thing I remember about this game aside from Vaas.

Mat Hoffman's Pro BMX / Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (XPLOSIV)

Year: 2000, 2001
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Runecraft, Neversoft
Genre: Sports
Completion: No

Picked this curiosity up at a thrift store in 2020, although I've never played it due to it being incompatible with modern systems (at least I couldn't get them to run on my PC). However, I own copies of both games in this multipack for the PS1, so I'll probably have some notes on them there whenever I get around to starting my PlayStation sections.

Neverwinter Nights: Deluxe Edition

Year: 2002-2004
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Bioware
Genre: Computer RPG
Completion: 3/3 main campaigns

Neverwinter Nights is probably the one game I've spent the most hours on (between 5 different copies), probably only rivaled by live service games like RuneScape and Warframe. Between the campaigns, especially HotU, the unusually intuitive module creation toolset, multiplayer servers, and the absolute shit ton of community content, this game near absolutely dominated certain segments of my teen years, and is something I come back to every so often still now, especially with the Enhanced Edition.

I first came in contact with this game in small stack of PC games a relative lent me once my family finally got hold of a modern desktop PC sometime in 2003 or 4 (we had previously been running an old PC running Windows 95 where I could play Age of Empires and those Humongous Entertainment point 'n' click games, but not much of anything else that I can remember. That said, this wasn't even the first game out of those games that I picked up, personally. That honor would belong to Age of Mythology (the vanilla version), which I had already downloaded and played the demo of ad nauseam, and getting the full range of civs and more than just 2 stages of the campaign was amazing. Anyway, I digress, this section is about Neverwinter Nights and not Age of Mythology. Neverwinter Nights was actually the third game in the stack that I picked up (after The Sims, though that was more included for my mom and sister's benefit than mine). I honestly had no idea what to expect from the plain box art but I gave it a shot, and after a lengthy installation process involving 3 discs, I had met my new obsession. I had had a brief brush with RPGs through having previously borrowed that same relative's Xbox for a brief time prior to my family getting an up-to-date PC, and played Morrowind, but only really scratching the surface due to my understanding of RPG systems being... not there at all. So NWN ended up being the first RPG I properly learned how to play. But that was not all. The copy I had borrowed from my relative was only the vanilla version - and from my adventures online, I could see some players were packing fancy 'prestige classes' and some other stuff, which made me envious, so at some point in early 2006 I was taken to an electronics store and allowed to pick out one game. I actually passed over Age of Empires III, which was only a few months old at the time, in favor of this very edition that's being covered here, so that when time came to return this stack of games, I'd be able to continue playing NWN! That's when I finally got to play the vastly superior SoU and HotU campaigns, and finally try out the expanded class system and levels beyond 20, which was the cap in vanilla.

So, those were the first two copies of the five I'd eventually interact with, with the first copy being the OG vanilla release, this copy being the 'Deluxe Edition', containing both major expansions as well as the premium modules Kingmaker, ShadowGuard, and Witch's Wake. The next two would be digital copies of 1) a so called 'Diamond Edition', which as far as I can guess seems to be the NA version of the Deluxe Edition, which would probably then be EU-only? I have no idea - which I got for free on GOG at some point, and 2) the aforementioned Enhanced Edition that released in 2018, which I currently run when I want to play some NWN. The fifth copy? That'd be the console port that I own on the Switch. The less said about that here, the better. You can read more about that there.

Oh, and to end this on a positive note, this game also sparked my overall interest in D&D, though it'd be about a decade until I'd actually get to play it with a group.

Rome: Total War

Year: 2004
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Creative Assembly
Genre: Hybrid Strategy
Completion: No

For Christmas in 2004, I asked for a strategy game, due to my at the time obsession with Age of Empires. And what I got was this, a much more involved game that was way too complicated for my tiny child brain so I unfortunately never really got far into it. Since then I've gone back to it at least once and stuck with it for a bit longer but it didn't really appeal to me in the same ungabunga sense as training up a huge army and wrecking face in AoE does.

Team Fortess 2

Year: 2007
Publisher: Valve
Developer: Valve
Genre: First Person Shooter
Completion: 62% Steam Achievements

Getting into TF2 marked the start of my second era as an online PC gamer (the first era being multiplayer maps on Neverwinter Nights), and was what helped me get good at shooters after having previously only ever played Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 on the original Xbox. So what got me into it? Silly Gmod videos on youtube! Like at the point I was getting into TF2, in 2009 or 10, it was over half of everything I watched on Youtube if I wasn't just listening to music. I stuck with TF2 until the eventual release of Overwatch, which in hindsight was probably a mistake, considering Overwatch ended up the way it did and killed my interest in team shooters ever since. But at least I'll have TF2, which is still going, to go back to if I ever get into the mood again.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Dark Crusade

Year: 2006
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Relic Entertainment
Genre: Real-time Strategy
Completion: 2/7 campaigns

Dark Crusade was part of a trend in the mid-late 00s, to release 'stand-alone expansions', games that were based on and compatible with their predecessors but could also be played without them - In this particular instance, Dark Crusade would include every faction playable in Dawn of War at the time in its campaign, while the Skirmish mode would only let one play as the new factions introduced here - the Necrons and the Tau Empire, and to unlock the other factions for skirmish and multiplayer play, one would need to input the CD keys for their respective release (Winter Assault for Imperial Guard, and the base game for everything else). Overall, I liked the extra depth of strategy presented by the campaign map, just not enough to complete it once for every faction.

The Witcher - Platinum Edition

Year: 2007, 2009
Publisher: Atari
Developer: CD Projekt
Genre: Action RPG
Completion: No

I'm not sure why I dropped this game after only having played it a little. Might be that I had something else I was more eager to pick up (which has happened many other times, make no mistake), or if I was just not vibing with it. Otherwise, notable in my collection for being the first unmodded game I saw titty in. Though, since then I've actually read some of the books and watched the first season of the Netflix series, so who knows, maybe I'll pick this up again if I feel like getting into it. Or more likely, I'll just pick up the third game, which is apparently where the games actually got really good.