James Decker – Gaming Profile

Though I can’t remember a time BEFORE I was playing video games, I’m told by my parents that I played video games from around age 4. This coincides with the same year I learned how to use a computer, the magestically clunky technique of typing with my index fingers as I observed my father incorrectly did. The minute I found out there was a seemingly unlimited supply of games on the internet, my obsession began. Still mostly 2-dimensional games at the time (at least in shockwave and flash), I found my first love in the platformers genre.

What attracts me most to platformers is the progression that most in this genre possess. Typically beginning with simple obstacles, almost none during most tutorial levels, these types of games gradually grow more and more complex, but don’t require any explanation as far as progression. Although, in any of the many side-scrolling Mario titles, for example, new types of obstacles may be incorporated, simple yet effective sprites such as the koopa-look-a-likes that maintain armored shells with spikes, it is easy for the player to comprehend that Mario probably doesn’t want to curb-stomp those turtles, and just wait for the much more adorable looking ones to abuse. Similarly, in another type of game such as Ori and the Blind Forest, though it IS at it’s core still a platformer, the story is infinitely more complex. Don’t get me wrong, credit is definitely deserved for the writer who decided the entire plot for Super Mario Bros. should consist of a dwarf with a mushroom for a head saying “Thank you Mario! But the Princess is in another castle!,” and who also, just for the record, somehow ALWAYS knows the castles backdoor but REFUSES to give Mario the Memo.. 8 times! But the depth to which the story, the animations, and the game mechanics went in Ori and the Blind Forest shows that, without too much explanation, even a game with that many mechanics doesn’t require more than a few seconds of explanation on a new experience before you can get back to the action almost immediately. The other two genres of games I like are hard to narrow down, but I’m going to choose for the sake of argument Co-op Zombie games and Rouge-Like games.

Zombie games are particularly close to my heart, because after i bought my first xbox (xbox 360) left 4 dead was the first game I purchased and I LOVED it. It’s an FPS as most of these zombie games tend to be, but relies heavily on cooperative play. Although the “common infected” in L4D act as most zombies do, there are special zombies that can incapacitate players, attract hordes of common infected, and others that are so massive they require all 4 players working together (or a serious pro, more likely an easier difficulty) to take out. Along these same lines, I enjoy the game Killing Floor because it is similarly a co-op zombie game. However, what intrigues me even more about killing floor is that unlike in L4D, when you want a new weapon you have to buy it with currency collected in game. This added a whole new complexity to the genre. Although L4D and Killing floor have a bit of replay-ability, nothing beats the replay-ability of an intricately designed Rouge-like game. Rouge-Like games are games that typically consist of a procedurally-generated dungeon crawl and follow a rule of Perma-death. This makes every replay unique from the previous playthrough(s). One example of this type of game is Rouge Legacy. This game is so wonderfully quirky that the game mechanics in and of themselves often make me laugh.[SPOILER ALERT] (This probably won’t spoil anything, but the internet freaks out when anyone talks about anything anymore..). This game is at is core a platformer/dungeon crawl. Although in most rouge-likes I’ve played, when you die, you restart as the same character, Rouge-Legacy begins with the “first ancestor” who you play as, in black and white until you die. Once you “respawn” however, you have the choice to spawn as one of your three offspring. These offspring can have traits and conditions of all type, everything from being either male or female, homosexual or straight, up to Irritable Bowel Syndrome (your character randomly farts throughout his lifespan) and Coprolalia (an occasional condition of tourettes characterized by compulsive swearing). Nuclear Throne is another interesting game, but unlike Rouge Legacy which allows you to keep certain abilities that you can choose in a skill-tree, in Nuclear throne, when you die, you lose everything. It is also a shooter, rather than a platformer-based dungeon crawl, it has top-down perspective. It is INCREDIBLY difficult, in my opinion, though I am notably not very GOOD at any of the many games that I waste far too much time playing, which makes you SO ANGRY everytime that you die that you HAVE to play again to redeem yourself. Though most of the games on this list DO often force me to get extremely angry and swear loudly in public, it’s this unforgiving nature of games that make them all the more fun, in my opinion. I play all of these games. But right now, I’m going to go play Rocket League. I just didn’t know what genre that game would perfectly fall under..

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