The Gamer Tag

I love doing tags because they’re such a fun and relaxed way to gush about the things I love.  Usually, the tags I see are book-related, but I recently read A Geek Girl’s Guide and her responses to The Gamer Tag and decided that it’s perfect for me to give a general overview of my gaming tastes!  Let’s get started!

1. What is your all-time favorite video game?

Final Fantasy X is my favorite game of all time.  It’s the first major video game I played as a kid that didn’t involve Barbie or Elmo and the reason I play today.

2. What is your current favorite video game?

My favorite games exist more as a collection of titles that I hold in high regard more than one specific title.  A few that I would single out are To the Moon, Mass Effect 2, and The Elder Scrolls V:  Skyrim.

3. What is your favorite video game genre?

I split my time fairly evenly between RPGs and Indie games, often cycling between the two.  For example, I’m currently playing The Witcher 3.  Once I have finished it, though it may take me a while, I’ll probably go on a several-month binge where I play a ton of smaller indie titles.

4. How long have you been playing video games?

Since I could hold a controller.  Since I’ve had a console in my house for my entire life because my mom is a gamer, I have been raised with gaming as a primary hobby.

5. What’s the first game you ever played?

It’s a little fuzzy because I have vague memories of playing several games as a toddler.  On my family’s computer, I played a lot of Humongous Entertainment games, like Freddi Fish and Spy Fox.  With the PlayStation, I have fond memories of Barbie:  Super Sports and Elmo’s Letter Adventure.

6. What game have you clocked the most hours into?

Minecraft wins by miles.The main server I play on has about four months of game time over a period of five years.  I’ve talked about what this blocky title means to me extensively before.

7. What’s your longest gaming session?

I game for long periods of time a lot, but a specific day I remember was the summer before I went to college.  First thing in the morning, I turned my PlayStation 2 on and played until I went to bed late that night.  Since I was playing Final Fantasy X, I can actually state the distance here, as I made it from Besaid to the Calm Lands in a day.

8. Who is your favorite game developer?

Naming just one is really difficult, but I’m going to go with Bioware.  They’ve had their recent missteps, sure, but the fact is, seven of my favorite gaming experiences of all time come from their studio.  It’s going to be hard to top that number.  Also, I’m not playing Anthem until it’s significantly further along and more stable, so I haven’t had my opinion potentially marred by that title yet.

9. Who is your favorite hero character from a game?

Sticking with the Bioware theme, Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series is amazing.  I know that she (I played as female Shepard) is technically just a vessel for the player to use in order to interact with the world, but her motivations and thoughts are so interesting.  Of all the games I have ever played, this series has the best instance of truly shaping the protagonist into who the player wants her to be, either good or bad.

10. Who is your favorite villain?

It’s kind of cliche to believe this, I’m sure, but GLaDOS is my personal favorite.  What a crazy little artificial intelligence.  She’s especially fun when she gets more backstory in the second game and the player learns a little more about what happened to her.

11. Who is your most hated character of any game?

Kairi from the Kingdom Hearts series.  Honestly, I don’t hate her because she’s bad or annoying, but because she’s utterly useless.  In the entirety of the series, she has been given no real role in any events yet other than to constantly go missing so Sora can rescue her.  Hopefully, she gets more of a storyline in the future.

12. What gaming systems do you own?

All of the modern systems, a PC, 3DS, PS3, PlayStation Vita, and PlayStation Portable.  I primarily play on the PC unless there’s an exclusive, however.

13. What was your first game system?

The original PlayStation.

14. What’s your favorite gaming system and why?

The PlayStation 3.  The PlayStation 2 is the console that I used for the bulk of my childhood, so I have fond memories of it.  That said, however, I don’t think I truly came into gaming as my primary hobby until the PlayStation 3.  I credit my newfound interest in gaming at that time to the fact that I was finally able to play Mature-rated games, which allowed me to dive into the likes of more story and lore-focused franchises like Fallout and Bioshock.

15. Do you prefer to play male characters or female characters?

I always choose female characters.  While I don’t take issue with video games choosing to use male characters for story-based reasons, I find that I struggle to get as attached or immersed with a male character as I do with a female protagonist.  In my ideal world, every game would allow me to choose between playing as a male or female variation of the same character.

16. Do you follow walkthroughs, or do you play through on your own?

I’m not ashamed to pick up a walkthrough if I can’t find an item.  At the end of the day, I game for fun and if a puzzle is about to make me rage quit, I don’t have an issue with grabbing the answer off of the internet.  When playing story-focused games, however, I try to avoid looking up what the different quest outcomes are on my first playthrough.  If I enjoy the title enough, I can always go back through with a guide and try to get the optimal outcomes for each quest, but I like to go in blind at least once and just do what I believe is the right solution.

17. Have you ever been to a gaming convention?

No, but it’s a dream of mine to get to PAX or E3 at some point in my life.

18. What game are you most excited to come out in the future?

This is more of an ongoing release, but I really need all five episodes of Life is Strange 2 to be out now so I can binge them.

19. What’s your best memory of a video game?

My best memories are probably of the early days of playing on the Minecraft server that I like to explore with my husband.  I had never really played the game before, so I was learning on the fly, which made for some interesting experiences.  My husband wanted to give me an easy task, so he told me to go plant some saplings.  This seemed simple enough, but he didn’t tell me that the amount of available sunlight affects mob spawning, so I planted so many trees that I effectively made the place we had settled into a giant mob spawner.  Whoops.

20. What’s your worst memory of a video game?

I have a history of not paying very close attention and saving over other people’s games.  My mom and brother have both felt the pain of finding out that I accidentally overwrote the save of a title they had nearly finished.  With my mom, it was with the end of both Final Fantasy X and Riven, and with my brother, it was the end of Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus.  My mom felt so much pain over the thought of going through the puzzles of Riven again that to this day, nearly twenty years later, she still has never finished it.  The moral of the story here is to never trust me around a save file.

21. Which video game character do you see yourself as, or if you had to be represented by a video game character, who would it be?

In my childhood, I always pictured myself as similar to Yuna from Final Fantasy X.  She’s soft-spoken, calm, and determined to whatever she wants in life.  We also have fairly similarly-colored hair.  As an adult, however, I actually identify with the ultimate gamer from the Danganronpa franchise, Chiaki Nanami.  First of all, she wears this adorable animal sweatshirt that I want in my own wardrobe immediately, and secondly, she’s quiet and prefers the company of video games to other people.  Basically, she’s me in video game form.

If you’re interested in doing this tag, consider yourself tagged!  Let me know your responses to some of these in the comments below!