My great-grandmother got me Age of Empires: Gold Edition for PC as a gift when I was about five or six. What a legendary, based, god-tier gift for a grandma to buy.

I was always too scared to play the actual campaigns and just stuck to the foraging ones. My little buff and tanned, blue-pants builder men would always get steam-rolled by some red iron age guy on a horse whenever I tried to get out of my comfort zone. Nothing spamming the words "Big Daddy", "Photon Man", or "E=MC2 Trooper" into the chat couldn't solve though.

The best part of this game was the Scenario Builder. Me and my friend enjoyed just filling the map with an obscene amount of units and making our own sound effects as the two digital armies marched in to their meat-grinder.

WOLOLOOOOOO

I really love the atmosphere and the moments that arise in this sp00ky game. Hiding in the safehouse during the night for the first few times with God-knows-what knocking on my doors and beckoning me outside was genuinely chilling. Eventually I became accustomed to the fact that whatever horror found it's way in I could pretty easily beat back with a 2x4 full of nails.

Granted, I never figured out how to get past the first area, and haven't played in the 2.5 years since then. But I've always been meaning to get back around to playing it.

I'm hard-pressed to call it a Masterpiece. But nothing comes quite close to the invigoration I've felt playing this game. Running for my life with an inventory full of precious junk, as bullets ricochet around me; or intense hand-to-hand combat with a spear-wielding naked man yelling racial slurs. The cozy safety of a campfire inside my 1x2 base where I'm almost certainly getting carbon-monoxide poisoning; or running through the rain and fog collecting wood and stone in an eerily quiet server while everyone else is offline.

I love how abhorrent, crazy, and untrustworthy people are in this game. It feels like a true Mad Max simulator.

I hadn't been able to play it for a few years, because the loading screens and performance issues got too much for my old PC. But I've played it again since building a new PC and I'm happy to see that it's still the same old game with a unique atmosphere, just with some cool new features, as far as I'm concerned.

Another game that 12 year old me played as a substitute while he was pissing his pants with excitement at the notion of playing the actual Spore game.

It was a DS game, y'know? They were all good in a way. Because I could play them under the covers, way past my bedtime, as much as I wanted. And building little 2D creatures and roaming around the levels, and wringing every last little bit of entertainment out of the game that my imagination could afford me, was enough.

I don't really remember anything that actually happened in the game though, no...

How could I not rate this as a masterpiece? It's a classic.

It was another one of these games that my parents happened to have on their PC when I was growing up. As a six year old I would just wander around this 90's-CGI pre-rendered island not knowing what the hell any of it was or what was going on, just clicking things and seeing what happened.

A few years ago I downloaded it on my phone and played it properly. I got pretty close to the end and then just never got around to finishing it. Perhaps this game will always remain: a MYSTery to me

I was gonna go for a milquetoast 4.5 star rating, but y'know what? I can't think of anything I don't like about this game. The configurable low-fi graphics, the soundtrack, the sound design, the setting, the tone-shifting, the over-the-topness, the sandbox of combos and ridiculous moves you can pull off, the fact that combat in this game feels like you're actually fighting for your life with millisecond precision and timing rather than playing a video game, and all under the fact that this game seems to have been made by a single man, make it legendary and inspirational in my book.

It certainly helped me work through some issues subconsciously after a bad break up last year too.

I have a distinct memory of my school mate, ca. 2008, whispering to me legend of a game where you could play as an entire species throughout every stage of it's evolution, eventually being able to free-roam throughout an entire galaxy and terraform planets, and everything!

This was the holy grail of games for me at the time. The one that I had been looking for. I can't remember why, but for a long time I was never able to play it myself. Probably because I had no money. But I didn't even get to go to that schoolmate's house to try it out! All I could do was watch gameplay longingly on YouTube.

One day, as the family was leaving my uncle's house where we had dinner, I laid eyes upon a copy of Spore: Galactic Edition sitting on the book shelf. I took it, and stared at it in my hands covetously, until my uncle decided to let me have it. I was one happy little brat.

I think it had a few issues running on our janky old Windows Vista family PC, but I eventually got it running through sheer will. A will to find any means necessary to play the games that I wanted to play.

The license key had already been used by my uncle, so I never got to experience the online features of the game, seeing creatures that other people had made and what not. But for whatever age I was back then, the game didn't actually end up being a disappointment for me. I enjoyed the style of it, especially the space stage. I played it through one and a half times, and then I was satisfied. Never to pick it up again.