My Top 115 Favorite Video Games (105-101)

Click here for the introduction!

105. Resident Evil 4 (GameCube)

I do not have the religious reverence for Resident Evil 4 that many have, but I definitely recognize the game’s impact and it’s certainly a memorable experience. RE4 was a huge deal back when it first released in 2005 as a GameCube exclusive (yeah, remember that?). Many of my friends were playing it and talking about at the time, so much so that I kind of…got sick of it. Also, a good chunk of the game was spoiled for me as well because of my constant exposure to it before playing it myself. Despite all this, I still remember my first time with the early village sequence as one of the tensest and most harrowing sections in a game I’d ever experienced. I love the game’s atmosphere, its environments, its self-aware camp, and its ridiculous characters and varied bosses. RE4 is a game that just keeps one-upping itself and surprising the player with one exciting, nail-biting, interesting sequence after the next. Just when you get comfortable with a certain scenario and think you know the rules, the game throws a wacky curveball at you, or perhaps a chainsaw.

104. Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Wii)

Epic Yarn is my favorite of the “experimental” Kirby games, which include a game where you control a spherical Kirby with magic paintbrush strokes (actually there are two of those) and one where the pink cream-puff is split into a swarm of ten mini-Kirbys. I like Epic Yarn because unlike these other alterna-Kirbys, it’s still a traditional platformer; it just gives Kirby a new aesthetic and set of mechanics within its fabric framework to play around with. The word that always comes to mind when I think of Epic Yarn is “delightful”. It will charm the pants right off of you…which Kirby will probably then unravel and turn into a sled or something.

103. Yoshi’s Woolly World (Wii U)

The third and final title on this list from the booming “yarn genre” is Yoshi’s Woolly World, a special game that surprised me with not only its creative level design, but also an intimate and emotional adventure that I could feel was created with a  lot of love and effort. There’s something inherently nostalgic about Woolly World. Simply put, it is the video game equivalent of wrapping myself up in one of my Nana’s hand-knitted blankets and sipping a cup of tea on a cool autumn night.

102. Pikmin 2 (GameCube)

Pikmin 2, which I actually played on Wii, is special to me because it helped bring me fulfillment during a time when all I felt like doing was lying in bed in the dark, but it’s also a delightfully unique experience with an indescribable atmosphere. There’s something about venturing further and further down into the depths of one of Pikmin 2’s many underground labyrinths, not really knowing what’s going to be on each new floor, that’s intoxicating. This is only compounded by the game’s uniquely bizarre soundtrack, which drew me into a world that felt like a dream. The main goal of Pikmin 2 is to discover and collect “treasures”, a bunch of human junk ranging from Duracell batteries to bottle caps to references to Nintendo’s history, in order to pay off a debt. Discovering each treasure and seeing what extravagant name Olimar and Louie’s wonderfully characterized spaceship comes up with for these mundane objects is simply a delight and one of my favorite aspects of the experience. If you seek to complete it thoroughly, Pikmin 2 is a long game, and it can be both challenging and exhausting, but while it’s not a game I’m likely to return to that often or at all, it is a treasured experience for me and one that felt immensely gratifying to journey through and complete.

101. Kirby’s Return to Dream Land (Wii)

I fondly remember the day that Kirby’s Return to Dream Land released in late October of 2011. After getting out of work and visiting two different GameStops before I was able to buy the game, I brought it home and found myself transported back to being a little kid with a Game Boy, playing Kirby’s Dream Land for the first time; back to the summer of 2000 when I first played Kirby 64. The so appropriately-titled Return to Dream Land, the first traditional Kirby game on a home console since Kirby 64, was a very welcome return to form for the series. This game is just good. It feels so artfully and perfectly traditional in so many ways, yet doesn’t feel stale or recycle too many old staples. In fact, I sort of wish one or two more classic bosses showed up even, as most are brand new. Even only five years later, I already find myself feeling a bit nostalgic when I listen to the soundtrack. Return to Dream Land is simply a joyful video game, elegant in its traditional design, and nearly unmatched in its level of polish.

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Check back again next time for #100-96!

The Power of Video Games: How Pikmin 2 Helped Me Fight Depression

This is going to be a much more personal one. In my last "The Power of Video Games" post, I talked about how Ecco the Dolphin for Sega Genesis instilled a sense of fascinating terror in me that has followed me into adulthood. This time, I'd like to talk about a much different video game and quite a different experience.

I've been struggling with various anxiety conditions for as long as I can remember and as I've been told, anxiety can often open the door for depression to sneak in. Unfortunately, for the past two years, this sort of situation has been exactly what I've been dealing with. It got pretty bad last year, after my dog and best friend, Max, fell suddenly and rapidly ill over the course of a few weeks and then was diagnosed with severe, terminal cancer and consequently put to sleep all in the time of a single day. After this, coupled with a post-college stagnation in my life and a worsening resurgence of many of my anxious hang-ups, I began to get depressed.


Max

Now, depression isn't "feeling sad". It's not lying in bed for a few days after a break-up or crying all the time. I've heard and read about the symptoms of clinical depression, but really I can only describe my own experience and "sad" isn't the way to put it. Activities and situations that would normally make me happy and bring me joy began to bring me nothing at all. I began to have trouble getting out of bed and mustering the energy to do much of anything at all. I would try to go out with friends, but I would feel isolated in social situations. I don't think most people really noticed because I'm naturally quiet a lot of the time anyway, but there's a big difference between being my normal quiet and introversive self and feeling depressed. I would feel exhausted by social activities and feel like I had nothing to offer or to say at all. Afterwards, I would go home feeling lonely and worthless.

Likewise, activities that would normally bring me enjoyment during my personal time started to fall flat. This includes reading, writing, and of course, video games. I tried playing a lot of games, but I found myself struggling to really find that "sweet spot", that rich sense of immersion I normally get from the medium. There were moments of enjoyment here and there, sure, but it wasn't like before. There was just this sense of emptiness in me that seemed to be swallowing any and all positive vibes.

Late summer of last year, I decided to play three GameCube classics in anticipation of their upcoming sequels the following year. First up was the original Luigi's Mansion, and following that I decided to tackle the Pikmin series. I've owned the original Pikmin since its release, but never finished it. I started anew in the game and after finishing it, I picked up its sequel, Pikmin 2, which I'd never experienced on GameCube and which had conveniently just been re-released with enhanced pointer controls on the Wii.

I was able to get through Luigi's Mansion and Pikmin without much trouble since they are both relatively short experiences, but Pikmin 2 was another story.

I remember starting the game and enjoying what I initially played quite a bit. The improvements and new features compared to the original game caught my attention and this updated interface, lack of the 30-day time limit that made the first Pikmin feel rushed, and gigantic, real-world objects like a Duracell battery and a crushed soda can charmed me so much that I remember scolding myself for never having played the game before.

"Why have I never played this before?"

But then things hit a wall. Pikmin 2 is a much longer experience than the first game and try as hard as I might, I began to struggle to play to play the game for any lengthy period of time. As depression tugged at my ankles more and more and I began to sink deeper and deeper, I found it hard to do much more than sleep. I had to force myself to try to play Pikmin 2, but I began becoming overwhelmed and having to turn the game off after about half an hour of play. Real-time strategy games have never been my expertise, but Pikmin's unique premise and charming world attracted me. I wanted to get into the game, but its strategic nature and high-risk style of challenge began to make me stressed and overwhelmed. I just didn't feel up to managing these hundreds of tiny creatures and conquering the game's many challenges. I knew there was something about the game that I liked, loved even, but I just could not muster the energy.

So to give a broader picture of my life at this point, I was basically just waking up, going to work, coming home, trying to find enjoyment in something, usually failing, and going to sleep. On days off, I would sleep most of the day, wake up, eat something, and then sleep some more. I tried spending time with friends, I trried gaming, I tried doing other thing I enjoy, but everything just "fell flat". That seems to be the best way to describe it because that's how it felt, and how I felt. Just flat, empty. I didn't really have anything to look forward to and I just felt like nothing.

But then something happened.

One night, I was lying in bed around 9 o'clock at night. If you know me at all, you know that this is nowhere near my normal bedtime and is very unnatural. Like many other days, I didn't feel like doing anything and I simply just gave up, crawled into bed, and shut the lights off. But I knew this was wrong. I wasn't really tired. I didn't want to do this. I knew I was doing exactly what I shouldn't be doing. I was angry at myself. I wanted to fight this.

Reluctantly, I opened my eyes, dragged myself out of bed, and I decided to try. To try to overcome this. I turned on the TV and booted up Pikmin 2. I just wanted to try to play it, if only for an hour. To try to get some enjoyment out of an activity that has typically brought me so much fulfillment.

I don't know if it was the particular part of the game that I was in, or if my mood was just right, or maybe it had something to do with Pikmin being unlike any other game I'd ever played and thus it ignited something lost within me; it was probably some miraculous combination of all of these things. Whatever the case, that night I finally broke the barrier and got into something. I forgot about being depressed, forgot about anxiety, forgot about everything wrong in my life, and I simply lost myself in the weird and wonderful world of Pikmin. Everything suddenly clicked and the game didn't seem so difficult anymore, playing it didn't seem like an insurmountable task. As I journeyed deeper and deeper into one of the game's multi-leveled cavernous dungeons, I began to feel something again.

For the first time in months, I really felt something. A hole being filled in. Accomplishment. Joy.



Working together

By the time I had finished playing that night, after about a five hour session, it was well into the early hours of the morning. I hadn't looked back once while playing. I just played. For me, at the time, to find myself having been deeply involved with something while feeling no nagging feelings or no fatigue, felt like a miracle.

And honest to God, it was all uphill from there. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't magically cured of all my anxiety and depression. I didn't open my window shouting about Christmas morning and go running through the flower fields smiling and laughing. Oh, I still had issues; oh I still do have issues. But after that night, after Pikmin 2 dragged me up and pulled me in, I began to feel better. No, not to feel better, but to feel more normal. I was enjoying a video game again, and I realized that I had only just scratched the surface of Pikmin 2, a lengthy, atmospheric, and challenging experience. When I finally finished the game towards the end of the year, I felt exhilarated. After conquering the game's terrifying final creature, rescuing my partner, Louie, and salvaging every last piece of treasure in the game, I felt a massive feeling of accomplishment. Not because I'd finished a video game, I've finished many of them, but because I felt like I had dealt a serious blow to depression, that I had spit in its face and fought back, that I had cut through all of its shackles and conquered something (and not only that, but legimately enjoyed something) that depression told me I could not.

After that, I began to enjoy playing games again. And after being able to enjoy myself when I was alone, I began to enjoy spending time with friends again. I began to look forward to things again, become excited about things that I'm passionate about again, and to feel some hope again. And there are no words that can accurately describe how good that felt and how thankful I am for these kinds of feelings that so many take for granted.

I am far from being in the perfect place in my life today, I'm still wrestling with depression and discontent, and I will always be fighting a war with anxiety. But I am far better at this present moment right now than I was one year ago. And although at the end of the day, it's because of my own perseverance and determination that I've been able to fight back against depression, it was Pikmin 2 that helped pull me back, and it's this strange, wondrous video game, this fresh, unique experience that was unlike anything I'd ever played before, that I ultimately want to thank today.

Thanks Miyamoto and Co.