5. The American Girls Premiere

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Okay, guys, you’re gonna have to bear with me on this one. I got this game back in the height of my obsession with American Girl dolls and books (an obsession which…may or may not still exist in some form) — it was among the first of the PC games I really loved, right up there with Oregon Trail II and other such goofy educational games I played ad nauseum in the late 90s/early 2000s. But what the heck was an American Girl-themed computer game like, you might ask? Basically, it was a platform for creating plays starring the American Girl protagonists and the side characters that populated their book series. You would pick your backdrop — say, Kirsten’s farm or Josefina’s sala (living room). Then you could add set pieces like furniture or toys (most of which seemed prone to glitching so that you were constantly having characters walking through chairs and other such nonsense). Next, you picked the characters you wanted in your play. You could tell them where to move and what action to take — digital stage directions, if you will, limited though the selection may have been.

And then came the best part — adding the dialogue. Now, if you were one of those fancy people who had a newfangled microphone setup for your desktop PC (an unimaginable luxury to 13-year-old me), you could record your voice to create the dialogue for your play. But for the rest of us peons, there was the computer-generated voice option — think Stephen Hawking’s speaking computer, but with pitch issues and abysmal pronunciation.

Sound terrible? Believe me, it was not. For me, the true fun of this game came not from creating cute little stories for the characters, but from setting the stage, plugging in dialogue, picking a voice and pitch that came halfway near an approximation of what you wanted, and then listening to the computer absolutely mangle the dialogue you typed in. Oh man…it was great, you guys. The amount of hours I and my friends spent trying to finagle our pixel-y characters into moving where we wanted and devising weird phonetic permutations for our dialogue to force the computerized voices to bend to our will was honestly impressive. There are inside jokes that were created by this process that I still think about and giggle over sometimes.

In short, I loved this game for so many reasons that I’m sure the game creators did not intend — the weird memories and dorky jokes this game spawned were worth the price of admission alone.

4. Super Smash Brothers: Melee

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This is a game I’ve probably spent more time playing than any other (not as much as my brother, who I’m pretty sure earned each and every trophy, but still). This was one of the first ones my brother and I got with our GameCube, and it was always the first one we pulled out when friends were over, or when we just had a free afternoon. I eventually stopped playing it one-on-one with my brother — one can only get sent flying into the backdrop so many times, you know? — but I remember many happy hours of whaling on dear friends with cutesy Nintendo characters, and I get super nostalgic on the rare occasion I pick this game up again.

I’ve played the Wii version of the game as well, Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, but Melee remains my favorite (mostly for nostalgia-related reasons; let’s be honest). It was perfect for so many things — hanging out with friends, playing around with it on your own, tournaments at youth group lock-ins, you name it; playing this game was always a good time, no matter how badly I got trounced.

3. Super Mario Galaxy

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One of the reasons I love this game is because it was the first console game I ever played all the way through, and that sense of accomplishment alone makes me remember it with fondness. There are so many more reasons to love SMG, though; it’s arguably one of the best Mario-centric games out there, both technically and story-wise. It’s got wonderful atmospheric music, gorgeous settings, some really unique gaming mechanics, and one of the more heartfelt storylines of the Mario games.

My favorite aspect of this game is the way it plays with gravity effects as Mario travels around from planet to planet. Sometimes he’s jogging around on a tiny planet that’s almost small enough to fit within the screen; other times, he’s slinging between planets and asteroids using special jumping-off points; still others, he’s activating things that change the way gravity affects him on the current plane. It all just feels so innovative and fun, and I’ve never seen anything quite like it before or since. In terms of overall feel and approachable gameplay experience, this game is one of the best as far as I’m concerned; it’s just delightful in every way.

2. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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Though I’ve never met a Zelda game I didn’t like (aside from some side-eye in Majora’s Mask‘s general direction), this one stands out from the others for me. It has a great premise, with Link as a denizen of a village in the sky, where everyone gets around by riding on the backs of giant, colorful birds. There’s the usual setup — Link and Zelda are close friends, Zelda is stolen away by a mysterious, nefarious entity, Link must rise up to achieve his true calling as a warrior and go out into the unknown world to save Zelda, picking up new weapons and learning new skills along the way.

But though the game follows the usual formula for the LoZ series, it feels fresher this time around. It includes many of the things that have always made the series great, but it has a lot of new stuff, too — in particular, it has some great new mechanics that really enhance the gameplay. Unlike many Wii games, it uses the Wii remote to advantage, making it an integral part of the way Link’s sword works and the different powers it has. And then there’s the flying aspect — I’ll admit it took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I did, maneuvering Link’s bird around Skyloft became a highlight of gameplay for me. And though some of the weapons Link acquires are the same as those from other LoZ iterations, there are several new ones that are totally different than anything from the preceding titles, and it’s a ton of fun to monkey around with them and test the limits of what they can do.

Overall, this game is a great blend of the familiar aspects that make this series great, and some clever new elements that make the game feel fresh and exciting to play through.

1. Dragon Age: Origins

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This game is honestly the video game I’ve been looking for all these years but had never found until now. I love fantasy RPGs in theory, but they all seem to either have something missing, or have some annoying aspect that I can’t get past. Not so with Dragon Age: Origins — it sounds dumb and sappy to say it’s the video game of my dreams, but you know…it really is. It’s got cool settings that are detailed but nonetheless don’t feel too difficult to navigate. It has amazing characters with complex personalities that you can actually get to know, and with whom your character can have a variety of different relationships, from coldly professional to hostile to warm and friendly to romantic, making the characters and the interactions between them feel  true-to-life. It has a decent fighting mechanic that you can use to hone your characters’ skills in whatever way you like (or even set it on super-easy mode so you can focus on the story, like I’ve done). And best of all, it has a compelling story that gives every gaming session a great sense of depth, and makes it so that you feel like you’re accomplishing something important and weighty every time you play. There’s honestly nothing I would change about this game, and I’ve loved every minute of it that I’ve played so far.

Lastly, we must have some honorable mentions! They are: Animal Crossing (the first console game I really loved–it tends to get boring/repetitive pretty fast, but it still has a special place in my heart) Mario Kart: Double Dash (mainly by virtue of time spent playing it, honestly), Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Wario World, Cooking Mama (Gameboy DS version), Oregon Trail II (man did I used to be so impressed by those graphics…), and Virgil Reality (a science-themed video game complete with a goofy protagonist who sang silly songs about science, a couple of which I can still sing most of to this day).

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We’ve gotten our hands on a few shiny-looking games we’ve been eyeing, like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Shadows of Mordor (which I’ve been dying to play since the second I heard about it), but so far, we’ve actually been spending most of our game-playing time on the free games we’ve downloaded.

Again and again, I’ve found myself extremely pleasantly surprised by these games. My experience with free video games is limited mostly to the demos that came with PC games I had as a kid, or at best, halfway-decent mobile games I’ve run across. However, times have thankfully changed, and to my delight, we’ve found that there are all kinds of free games out there for the Xbox One that are just as good as the ones we’ve paid cold, hard cash for.

I’ll be talking about at least one more of these games in the coming weeks, but today, I want to focus on the one we most recently added to our collection — Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

The moment I saw this game on the list, I knew we had to download it. When I was in high school, my brother, two of our good friends, and I played the first iteration of this game — The Secret of Monkey Island. To this day, playing that game is honestly one of my favorite memories from teenagerhood; it was worth the price of admission just for the sheer amount of inside jokes it generated. The game was originally released for PC in 1990, and was later remastered a couple of times (the version we played was probably one of those). It comes straight out of the glory days of 32-bit gaming, and was an adventure/logic/point-and-click game.

The mechanics were deceptively simple–you played as Guybrush Threepwood (which is clearly best name ever), a young would-be pirate trying to save his lady love from the evil undead pirate captain LeChuck. You navigate through various Caribbean-esque islands, completing quests and picking up clues along the way.

To choose what to do next, you move your cursor around the screen to interact with objects — typically, you have the option to look at them, push or pull them, open or close them, or pick them up. You can then either keep them, use them, combine them with other items, or give them to someone, depending on what the game allows for the particular item. Through interacting with objects, you eventually get the characters around you to do what you need them to do, or find ways to travel to where you need to go. You can also interact with most of the people (and often animals) that populate the game in order to accomplish your tasks. And more often than not, the characters around you will have funny — or surprising — reactions.

To complete the various tasks needed to eventually make your way to the final confrontation with LeChuck, you’ll have to use all your puzzle-solving skills (and a fair bit of guesswork). The challenges can primarily be beaten through witty reasoning, but much of the time, they require you to think like Guybrush would — namely, according to an extremely offbeat and unexpected form of…”logic.” Many of the solutions aren’t what you’d expect at first. Often, actions that you would never think would work end up being the key to solving a puzzle and moving forward, and things that seem like they should be obvious end up having little to no effect other than making Guybrush say a silly one-liner.

Satisfyingly, Monkey Island 2 is every bit as quirky, goofy, mind-bending, and fourth-wall-breaking as the original. Its aesthetic and gameplay style are also wonderfully reminiscent of the first game. When Peder and I started playing this game, I dared to hope that it would gratify my desire to relive playing the original, while still offering plenty of new adventures and a more polished gameplaying experience. To my delight, this hope was fulfilled every bit as well as I could wish!

One of the great things about this game is that it’s a really fun one to play collaboratively. It may only allow for one player to control the game at a time, but since there are so many puzzles along the way, many of which force you to think well outside of the box to solve, having a friend or three beside you to help think of what to do next or what series of steps might be needed to complete the next challenge can be really handy — and can keep you from getting hopelessly stuck. However, it’ll still be plenty tricky — I remember getting stuck plenty of times while playing the original game, even though there were always several of us working together, and Peder and I have already had to look up a couple of hints while playing the new one. But because the difficulty (and goofiness) level is so high, playing this game with friends ends up making for a well-balanced, well-paced gaming experience.

Monkey Island 2 is a great game for those who, like me, loved the original installment, but it’s also a fun choice for just about any type of gamer, from young to old, experienced player or newbie. It’s a good one for serious gamers who want something lighthearted, or casual gamers who want something with a good balance of challenge and fun. I’ll admit that I’m extremely biased toward this game no matter what, but for me, it’s been spot-on from the beginning, and I can’t recommend it highly enough!

Have you played The Secret of Monkey Island or Monkey Island 2? Would you give this one a try? What great free games have you found for your favorite console?

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