Why games are good: 4 games that changed my life

So, I've been challenged by @roxane to write a post about four games that changed me in some way or that I absolutely love. Just today, @lesateliersphv also challenged me to write such a post. Thanks to both of you for challenging me and thanks to @deadspace for organizing such a cool challenge on Steem. I think this is an awesome idea and while I didn't have enough time yet to read all the other submissions, I'll definitely do when I have some spare time on my hands. I chose to talk about games that influenced me because I already talked a lot about games I love when I started posting on here. My first series was actually about exactly that with the twist that I was exclusively talking about indie games. You should see with my selections that I'm quite an indie lover, I will never cease to be ! The header image I picked for this post used to be my wallpaper before I discovered Wallpaper Engine, it is quite fantastic. All the games from this image come from the period I started falling in love with indie games, I'm still sad that Journey is a PlayStation exclusive but oh well... Enough talking, let's get straight into my picks !

The title of this post may be too extreme but in this specific case, it really isn't. Super Meat Boy literally changed my life, but first let's talk a bit about this beauty. Made by Team Meat, aka Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes, it is a quite hard platformer that benefits from some of the smoothest controls I've ever experienced, it's always your fault when you fail. You control Meat Boy in his quest to save Bandage Girl from the evil Dr. Foetus who kidnapped her. It is filled with references to older games like Mega Man 2 and, the obvious one, Super Mario Bros. (same initials). To this day, it still is one of my favorite games and will probably still be for a long time.

When I discovered Super Meat Boy in the Humble Indie Bundle 4 in late 2011, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. After playing this game and watching Indie Game: The Movie (my favorite documentary ever) a few months later I knew that I wanted to work as a programmer. Ever since, I have that dream of being an indie game maker that got stronger and stronger every year thanks to people and studios like Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), Derek Yu (Spelunky), Bennett Foddy (QWOP, Getting Over It), Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable, The Beginner's Guide), Playdead (LIMBO, INSIDE), Double Fine Productions and Twisted Pixel Games (too many god damn good games to be listed here) to only cite a few.

But it's not over ! Super Meat Boy is also the game that started my passion for indie games which is not something I take lightly since it is one of the reasons I decided to create a Steem account ! I wanted to share my passion for indie games with others but also to do everything I could to help share the amazing work of most indie game developers that sadly get unnoticed in this market dominated by big corporations. Indie games just have that personal touch, that connection between the developer and the player that most big budget games fail to have. With game making tools becoming easier to use update after update, I can definitely see a future where the market won't be dominated by big corporations anymore but by passionate people.

This may be the most generic game to put in such a list but I wouldn't include it if I didn't hold it so dear to my heart. Do I really have to explain what Minecraft is ? Well, just in case... Minecraft is a sandbox survival game that takes place in a world made of cubes. It took the world and YouTube by storm years ago and keeps attracting new players everyday, it also is the most profitable indie game ever made and one of the first to really take off ! While I'm not a fan of what it became, I still have a lot of good memories of it. The creepers that would ruin your day in a split second, the joy you would have when finding diamond, the blocks that didn't care about gravity (helping builders a lot) and the community that gathered around it, especially on YouTube with all these music videos made by die-hard fans !

I had to put it in this list because, while Super Meat Boy started my passion for indie games, Minecraft was the starting point of my passion for games. I was already playing before but I was that kid who goes on a garage sale and buys any game he can find, no matter how good it is. Minecraft is the game that made me actively search for game news online, particularly on JeuxVideo.com which was and still is the biggest french video gaming related website. This game also is the game me and my closest friends bonded over. We used to make Minecraft sketches on YouTube and were pretty serious about them. We put a lot of time and effort on those, way too much actually ! Of course, looking back at most of them, I can't help but cringe but at the same time be proud of what we did at such a young age while most of the other kids were just talking about their latest trickshots on Call of Duty (yeah, let's just say I don't like that game) !

After our Minecraft period, we discovered Steam and all the games we could play through this platform. My computer was far from being capable of running anything, it already struggled with Minecraft, but I still enjoyed playing on 10FPS. I remember using GreenLuma to crack Steam which unlocked all the games from the store so I could install and play them. Of course, I'm ashamed of what I've done back then but whatever, I didn't know what I was doing and I bought most of the cracked games since then anyway, but I'm getting off topic. What I wanted to say is that we kept bonding over Team Fortress 2 which is partly why this game holds a special place in my heart.

Team Fortress 2 is not only in this list for that bonding experience but for something else too. It quite literally helped me get whichever game I wanted, whenever I wanted and without having to ask my parents if I could buy it. From the outside, you could say that I was a spoiled child but when looking closer, you would realize that my parents were never paying for my games. It just so happens that Valve added a trading mechanic in Team Fortress 2 when it became free to play. At first, I was trading like any random player, not really caring about the value of my items. Then I came upon Backpack.tf, a website that lists all the items available in the game and shows their real world value. This was mind-boggling, I couldn't believe that people were paying real money for virtual items in a game but at the same time I thought it was so cool that all these people cared about these items enough to give them real value.

From that time on, I started trading more seriously. I was doing what any reseller would do, buying items cheaper than what they were worth from people who wanted to quickly cash out and selling them at their full price to people who couldn't wait for a better deal. At my peak, I was making $300 a month by doing nothing more than trading from time to time with other players who contacted me. You can see how a kid with that kind of easy money would spend it all on video games, well that's kind of what I did ! I currently have over 900 games on Steam, most of them coming from that period. Some games I bought were never even played. I must say though that this also had a bad effect on me, it completely desensitized me to money and I'm now used to spend too much money at once, which is something I try to work on. My inventory at its peak was worth around $2,000 as you can see by clicking here but, due to my desensitization to money, I later lost most of what I had left on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive betting. At least it served as a lesson to never bet again. You may be wondering why I stopped trading virtual items, there are two main reasons. The first one is that I was getting bored, doing the same thing every time was getting really frustrating, even if I wanted to I wouldn't have kept on trading. The second one is that just like we are seeing on Steem right now, the bots took over. No matter how good my prices were, bots would always offer better prices and since bots don't need to sleep, they were available all the time, making it impossible to compete unless I ran a bot myself !

While I had no problem picking my three most influential games, the fourth one required me to think more than twice about it. I finally settled for this one but I could have frankly chosen another one if I was in a different mood. This game is the most recent one of this list and got released three years ago. Made by the creator of The Stanley Parable (another game that could have ended up in this list), The Beginner's Guide is what I like to call an anti-game. It lets you explore a bunch of games made by a mysterious developer who was a friend of the narrator. By exploring you get to see what this creative mind was capable of and how he used video games to express his feelings and to critique the world we live in. I call this game an anti-game because it doesn't follow the 'rules' of video games. I mean by that that it is far from what people think about when they hear the words "video game".

Anti-games are getting more and more popular nowadays and thank god. Those are my favorite kinds of games, I don't care about games that all look the same and don't seem to want to innovate. The Beginner's Guide is the game that made me actively look for anti-games but I had already played some before. The first one I've played must have been DLC Quest which is a critique of abusive DLCs selling. I was gonna make a joke about how they should do a follow up to this game with loot boxes but while writing this post I learned that they did ! What an amazing world we live in ! Most recently, an anti-game made a lot of noise on YouTube. I'm talking about Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy which offers an amazing experience and isn't just a "YouTube game" like most people could think at first glance. Perhaps the biggest example of an anti-game I could find from those I've played this year is Awkward Dimensions Redux, it's free and consists of "mini games" that have no correlation whatsoever except that they all let you explore the mind of Steven Harmon (its developer). While it is far from being perfect I recommend giving it a try if you want to experience something different.

There we go, those were my picks for this challenge. Honestly, I could have picked any other game for the last one, it really depended on my mood at the time of choosing. So many games changed me in other ways: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was my first competitive game, Rayman was the first platformer I liked, Spyro The Dragon was the first 3D platformer I liked, Portal was the puzzle game that made me start loving this genre, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was everything I could have ever dreamed of as a child, Trials Evolution was the first sport game I loved, Flatout 2 is my favorite racing game ever, and I'm sure I forgot to talk about so many other games that had an influence on me. Now I believe it is my duty to challenge two other users to do the "Why games are good for you" challenge !

So, here are my nominees: