For reasons that aren’t quite clear to me, I like to track the media I consume. So you can find my music history at last.fm, books I’ve read at goodreads, and movies I’ve watched at trakt.tv, but i don’t use anything for the games I’ve played. (maybe there’s a site that tracks them? Steam?)

So here is a list of games I’ve played along with some nostalgic commentary. I focus more on my memories rather than the gameplay so it would make most sense for this post to be in a private journal but since I don’t have one of those - here goes.

Age of Empires

In class 8th/9th, a friend (Vishal) lent me a digit cd which had a lot of trial games. “AoE Conquerors Expansion” was amongst them. This was the first strategy game I’d ever seen and I was hooked! It only had the 1st scenario of the Monetzuma campaign. I’ve remember playing that single scenario in almost every way possible; never on hard settings though as I was slow (still am btw) and used to take my time to build base etc. Later, I bought the full game’s cd and this was how I used to pass time during 10th boards.

I’ve played AoE 3 as well and even though some of the mechanincs are nice, I still play AoE 2 (HD) most of the time. (it runs just fine on Wine)

I played a 1vs1 multiplayer match a few years ago but got my ass kicked in under 15 minutes. That day I realized that in order to win, you need to keep making Villagers. The guy gave me a link to some youtube channels with tutorials etc. I tried learning all that stuff for some time but memorizing build orders and thinking fast just isn’t for me.

Right now, I’m super psyched about OpenAge, which is an opensource AoE engine being written from scratch. Last I tried there was only a map with basic terrain generation but I’ve read that games can be played now. The core is C++ but there are some Python parts as well, so I might contribute something tangile to it (someday.)

Freedom Fighters

This too was given by Vishal around 9th/10th and is perhaps the only FPS I’ve ever completed; mostly because of the cheats which would give you a different arsenal (sniper, rocket launcher etc) so you could do some parts with a sniper rifle and the others with an AK. I don’t remember much else about the game. Sad.

Freecol

Another strategy game that I loved playing. I think I discovered this on one of the digit DVDs. The recent history (of American colonisation) was an interesting aspect of the game. Many a nights were spent reading about the founding fathers etc.

I think I’ve never reached the “post-independence” level of the game though and since it works natively on Linux, it might be time to give it a spin.

It is open source and is written in Java. Hasn’t seen a new release in a long while though. I think I’ll have to build it from source.

Plants vs Zombies

I remember calling Ravi once and asking him why he wasn’t at my place already when he replied “Bhai ek game khel rha hun. Faadu hai.” Man, was this game addictive! For days, all that mattered was my plants.

I played the android version last year but it wasn’t as much fun. I still play the original (on Wine) though. I wonder if there’s a widescreen fix available for the game because 1024x768 looks lame.

Tekken 3

I don’t remember the first time I played tekken but I imagine it was on that arcade-game-machine somewhere. What I do remember though is playing this in 12th (and my drop year), practicing combos (with Paul & Eddy), having matches against Amit & Ravi.

I don’t play it anymore because I don’t think my laptop keyboard will be able to take the beating.

Fate

This came pre-installed with my previous laptop (Dell 5520) but I only discovered it during my 3rd semester. Since I’d never played an RPG before and I needed something to take my mind off exams, I was easily hooked to it. I blame this game for my D in Maths that semester.

Because the game was “free-with-dell”, it was under trial mode - so you could only play for a limited number of hours. I was very angry when I realized my hours had ended so I tried to hack my way into the game by trying all sorts of things - rewinding system clock, modifying registry etc. I even tried to modify the source code (javascript) of the launcher that performed the time check and started the game. Sadly, nothing worked.

Later, I torrented the game, but realized I just wasn’t interested anymore.

Skyrim

I was introduced to this by Abhishek (or was it Shivam?) and only started playing it because another RPG sounded cool. But man, was I blown away by the world. Everything was epic, from armor to dragons!

The three of us used to play the game at home and discuss it in college. Fun days!

I think I’ll play it again someday with a Game of Thrones mod. That’ll be cool.

Endless Sky

The latest addition to my list of escapist-things-to-do. I found this last month by mistake when the KDE launcher suggested me to install it.

KRunner recommends endless sky

I’ve always had a thing for ‘space’ so I googled around and boy was I interested in a “space exploration and combat game”. What made me even more interestd was the fact that it was Open Source and was actively being developed.

At the beginning, I fully immeresed myself in the game, playing for over 10 hours a day. Since it was Ramzan, I would fast and just play the game all day. When I was not playing the game I would read about it, on Reddit or Steam. When there was nothing left to read, I started chatting with other players on Discord, discussing game strategies with them.

It only has one major storyline (and another incomplete one) but there are a lot of plugins available, though I haven’t tried any of them yet.

It is written in C++ but I’ve gone through the code and it is very readable. Nowadays, when I’m bored I go through the commits and issues of the game (on github) and always come out impressed by the subtleties of the game.

The game is far from v1.0 and is actively being developed so it’ll be nice to come back to it an year or two from now.

Others

I’ve been typing constantly for about 2 hours now and am getting bored by this. I’ll just skip these:

  • GTA Vice City - why can’t we swim?

  • GTA San Andreas - ma, look at all these mods!

  • NFS Underground 2 - look at the neon under my car, yo!
  • NFS Most Wanted - police pursuits were rad
  • NFS Carbon - amazing muscle cars and customizations

  • NFS Prostreet - damn those realistic drift & drag races

  • Prince of Persia - running on walls