Mihai Pricop’s Gaming Profile

Hello, my name is Mihai and I am a senior in Computer Science. I have been a PC gamer ever since I was able to use a keyboard and mouse. I actually had never owned a console up until I bought a PS 3 (3 years after it was released) so I can play the God of War series. I love playing all kinds of video games, but the ones I enjoy most are the games that are challenging either from a mechanical or problem solving point of view. Therefore, the first category I will be talking about is puzzle games.

I have to always be on the lookout for new puzzle games since they seem to be less popular than other more graphically intensive games. I discovered the game VVVVVV when I bought it through a Humble Bundle. It’s 2D platformer and you have one mechanic available. You can flip gravity. There are lots of checkpoints and the music is amazing, so it I enjoy playing it when I am trying to wind down. The other puzzle game I really liked playing is The Talos Principle. This game involves a dystopian future, a virtual world and artificial intelligence. These are three themes that I was always interested in. Of course the game is very challenging, and it requires a lot of out of the box thinking to pass the challenges. For example you sometimes need to go back to rooms you already solved and set up elements in order to pass the current rooms.

My next category has to be MMORPG’s just because I spent so many hours playing them. GTA 5 has an amazing world that allows you to set up amazing scenarios. Whenever the developers decided to add heists in the game I started also playing the multiplayer version of the game and I loved it ever since. I still keep coming back to the game from time to time since it is frequently updated and I can catch up on the new heists. The other MMORPG I played was World of Warcraft. I started playing in vanilla but I was still very young and didn’t get much of the game. Whenever I started playing again in The Burning Crusade I was hooked. The online aspect was something I hadn’t experienced before at that time so this game will always have a special place in my heart even though the more recent updates made the game less appealing. The game itself has an immense world packed full of lore so I always enjoyed running around and exploring every corner.

My last section will be adventure or RPG games. I started playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion when I was too young and didn’t know enough English to actually understand the story of the game, but I can still remember I had a lot of fun running around killing things. Whenever Skyrim came out I sunk hundreds of hours into it in the first few months. I played through the game multiple times, and every time I would chose a different play style. I really liked the ability to take different paths through the game and reading through all the lore surrounding The Elder Scrolls. This used to be my favorite game just because the world was built with great attention to detail. That all ended when The Witcher 3 was released. The games are played similarly but the amount of detail in the Witcher surpasses Skyrim’s. The two biggest differences between the games are that the decisions you make in the Witcher affect the following chapters in the story, and you can even get different endings to the game. The other difference is that all the quests and objectives are indistinguishable from the main quest line. Every contract and every treasure has an incredible amount of lore surrounding it, and this creates a level of immersion I haven’t seen in other games.

I also play Dark Souls 3 because I like dying a lot.