Hello, I am Kevin Means and I am a senior majoring in IST Design and Development. As I was growing up I got the opportunity to play many video games on the NES and PS2 systems and most of my favorite games and genres come from the time I spent on those two consoles. The types of games I have always found myself going back to are Action RPGs, Platformers, and Shooters.
One of my favorite games on PS2 is Kingdom Hearts which was also my introduction to Action RPGs. Kingdom Hearts features fast-paced combat with an epic, yet infamously confusing plot that drew me in and left me playing for hours. I have spent many hours theorizing how the story will eventually end in Kingdom Hearts and am excited that the story will conclude soon with Kingdom Hearts 3. Bloodborne, another Action RPG I have sunk too many hours into, 
also features fast-paced combat and a confusing plot. However the biggest difference for me is its interconnected world. As you progress through areas in Bloodborne you have to fight your way through numerous enemies, trying to get to the next boss, when inevitably you will come across some door leading to a side area. If you are curious enough and open the door you will realize that you just found a shortcut all the way back to the beginning of the area so you may rest before going out on the hunt again. These types of shortcuts are littered throughout Bloodborne and really help the player see how the map is laid out and how it connects with itself, creating one of my most loved parts of the game.
After Action RPGs my next favorite game type are Platformers. Platformers are one of my earliest loves in video games with one of my first games ever played being Super Mario Bros 3. One aspect of Super Mario Bros 3 I really enjoy is the variety of worlds you travel through. There’s a desert world where the sun attacks you, a water world where bridges determine which way you can proceed, and a giant world where Mario is normal sized but everything else is gigantic. My next favorite platformer is Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy and was my first 3D Platformer. The world was once again my favorite part of this game albeit for different reasons. The varied areas of the game were nice but what really stood out to me was the complete lack of any load screens once you started the game. This was the first 3D game I played that featured a world whose areas connected with each other and yet had no loading screens whatsoever, and this was done in the year 2001!
The last genre I really enjoy are shooters. This was another genre I got into early in my childhood when I started playing Contra on my family’s NES. Contra is famously known 
for it’s 30 lives cheat, now known as the Konami Code, and for starting out as a fight against some unknown military and ending in a battle against aliens. However my favorite part of the game is the variety of guns the player may pick up while playing. They had everything including a machine gun, flamethrower, and a lightning gun. The best gun by far though is the spread shoot which spewed a wall of 5 to 7 bullets in front of the player destroying everything it touched. The next shooter I truly enjoyed didn’t release until 2007 when we were introduced to the world of Rapture in Bioshock. Like many other of my favorite games the setting of Bioshock was what stood out to me. Rapture was an underwater dystopia filled with lunatics trying to murder the player. Rapture felt foreboding and the fact that it was on the bottom of the sea made me feel truly isolated. This sense of isolation is what drove my motivation to get to the end of the game and meet the people who have been guiding me via radio throughout my journey, just so I could hopefully meet the few other sane people left in Rapture.