Hello! I’m Daniel (he/him) and I’ve been playing video games since I was 4 years old, starting with classic GameCube games like Super Mario Sunshine, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and Super Smash Bros. Melee.
Melee also happens to be my favorite game of all time, although there are many games that are dear to me (HM to Telltale’s TWD, Tales of the Abyss, L4D2, and Halo 3). I first fell in love with Melee in 2015 as a spectator because the game is so fast-paced, technical, and had many huge, entertaining personalities that kept me invested. I could go on a tangent on how much I love this game, but I think it really boils down to a precision of inputs and how rewarding it is to be technically precise in the game. I could spend easily spends solo-practicing different tech in the game, and it’s super rewarding to be able to apply what I practiced in real play. This precision feels missing in a lot of newer games, as a lot of them value raising the skill floor to be more accessible to the playerbase. An example of this is the buffer system in the new Smash Bros Ultimate, which I am personally not a fan of. It essentially lets you preload inputs during the animation of your current move, which makes the game easier to play, but makes the movement of the game much clunkier and a lot less enjoyable to play for me.
While I mostly play Melee now and haven’t strayed off to as much variety as I used to, a game that I really enjoyed recently was Days Gone. I love the Apocalyptic/Zombie genre, and while I think Days Gone was far from a 10/10 game, the game felt very authentic and the characters kept me very invested. It kind of reminded me of the show King of the Hill, but in an apocalyptic era. It’s an open-world, third-person Zombie shooter that follows a motorcyclist who believes his wife is dead, but picks up small clues throughout the game that she may still be alive. Some of the dialogue is a bit corny, but in some ways it really brings the characters to life. I was pretty invested in the wellbeing of the characters and was also very satisfied with how the game concluded.
