In this thread, post a game that had a heavy impact on you, and or made you feel like it changed your life. One game series that is one of my favorites has impacted me (sort of though, I've had this view before playing this series) I have a really bad disgust towards anything violent and hateful. When I played the Hotline Miami series it really portrayed the view of all violence leads to the total destruction of mankind, if we can't stop it it’s a matter of time before we get swept away, making everything of us useless. Really dark theme, huh? I highly suggest you play through the series if you havent played it at all.
Grand theft auto vice city. And I didn’t even play it. I would spend hours watching my younger brother play it, he was about 10 and I was 11. He taught me the words hooker and slapper. My mother wouldn’t let him get grand theft auto San Andreas when it came out. It wasn’t really a good impact and now I know how bad that game is for kids. And once I found out what a hooker was years later I hoped my break hadn’t known at that age what a hooker actually was.
This may be a somewhat common choice, but pokemon. it was the first video game i owned for myself as a kid, the first one i beat, and the first one i had real fun with. (pokemon diamond in particular) started my love for video games. plus i played it with my friends as a kid and up until semi-recently with some of my friends but apparently now its "uncool"
Dunno if this counts, Halo Reach. A distraction mostly, but it got me through some pretty hard times.
Animal Crossing City Folk. My sister and I used to play that game together all the time. So calm and soothing, but also goofy
Heh, the Mass Effect trilogy Liara romance storyline is how I figured out I may be gay. Watching the cut with the female Shepard vs watching them on YouTube with the male Shepard. Same lights, same music, same Liara performance. Fascinated by the FemShep version. Bored by the MaleShep version. Nerdiest way to figure it out ever, but it may definitely wind up leaving the biggest mark on my life. Otherwise...Super Mario Brothers. First game I bought with my own money and was sort of a gateway drug to a love of computers and electronics.
Legend of Zelda, specifically Ocarina of Time on the GameCube. Got me through a pretty rough spot in my life. Now I have it tattooed on me
World of Warcraft. I even have a tattoo on my right arm, the symbol of the Alliance. The game has it's flaws, but it is one of my favorites because of how many good stories, friends, laughs and "epic" moments I had on it, from raiding with a serious guild from 6PM to 2AM to kill The Lich King (a character I loved since Warcraft 3) to casual moments like flying across Pandaria just to see how beautiful it is and shouting stupid things at Stormwind City (like "I need shampoo to wash my worgen, he has fleas!") to see people laughing and reacting. I'm not currently playing it because the game isn't being fun to me at the moment, especially since it is really hard to find an active guild nowadays. I find 3 types of guilds only: The super hardcore ones, where you need to grind and play everyday to compete; The "small group guild", where they invite everyone, but only a small group of friends are playing together there. The "active-inactive" guild, with a massive number of players, almost 20 people active during some periods of day, but no one is interacting, and nobody seems to want that. In other words, the game is that: Just a game, with strong points and flaws. But the stories I had in that world, the friends I made... that is what means a lot to me, more than the game itself.
I'm admittedly not much of a gamer these days and I can’t really say that any game has considerably altered my life (well, there’s FIFA: Road To World Cup ‘98, but how an English schoolboy developed a keen interest in association football as a result of that game is the absolute last thing anyone wants to read). I’ve got a lot of time for OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, though, and I’ll happily wax lyrical about it until I’m blue in the face (and so I will). The demo for that game came out when I was a university fresher and, during the final term of my first year, I played the retail release to death. It provided instant gratification: drifting was a lot of fun, the landscapes looked great and the soundtrack still sounds terrific. It also made life a little easier during a difficult period: I was struggling to make new friends and, in order to block lingering thoughts of same-sex attraction (consciously trying to convince myself that I was straight hadn’t even reached its apex yet), I threw myself into studying. And, before then, my gaming palette was pretty insular and narrow. I only wanted to dip in and out of games, so I would have lacked the patience that was required for the likes of Final Fantasy and Silent Hill. Ratchet & Clank was probably my limit as far as open worlds were concerned, and thus my interest in games was largely confined to linear platformers and sport titles, as well as the occasional beat ‘em up. I was also a bit sniffy about licensed games at the time, but I guess that’s largely because most people start to develop a critical faculty from the age of around 11 and, as a result, begin filtering out seemingly undistinguished stuff from their radar. I absolutely loved, say, Sylvester & Tweety In Cagey Capers as a kid, but that was only because I didn't know any better (although that sort of innocence did make gaming more fun in its own way). But OutRun 2006 (which sold fairly poorly in the UK, IIRC) did encourage me to broaden my horizons and be a little more imaginative with my gaming picks: I almost certainly wouldn’t have taken a chance on Fahrenheit later that year, for instance.
X-Treme express not only was the game that got me into gaming but it also helped me through some tough times when growing up and me and my brother's used it as an escapism when our parents got into a fight (It got so bad once that me, my older brother and younger brother agreed for one of us to call the police (Which i'm surprised the neighbours didn't do) heck I still play it to this day, mostly just for nostalgia but i'll never forget those times when I kept on derailing my younger brother and he had no idea how to get back on the track. (It's only on PS2 in the UK, Australia and Japan)
Got so much hate when it came out(N64), luckily I was not interested in what other wrote on the internet as a child. Completed it whitout walkthrough, exept for the final 3 maze on the moon and that annoying horserace to win an important mask. Was absorbed of the game due to the shapeshifting with the 3 masks and you manipulation in time got me deep thoughts as a kid.
Minecraft was a big part of my childhood, basically the only game I could run on a 1GB ram laptop with Windows Vista on it. I'm so happy it's gaining traction again.
I finally played The Last of Us last year, and boy did that game completely change my life. No other game has ever had me as emotionally invested in the characters before. Now every game I play pales in comparison to that. I would say that the Uncharted series changed my life too. I was going through a rough patch and those games helped me get through some tough times. I always pull those out if I'm feeling upset or anxious about things.
Final Fantasy VII. I was totally invested in the characters and the storyline, and the environmental message was really powerful. Plus, anything with a soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu is going to be worth it.
Persona 4, it's just so well made and the story is powerful and talks about global issues and it's never boring to play