Since I was introduced to Pac-Man before I had even learned to type, video games have been a huge part of my life where most things have been tried. In the early years I only played on Nintendo’s consoles with their most iconic characters to look beyond the kid-friendly during my teenage years. Xbox, Playstation and PC took over and today I try to vary my choice of format and type of game as much as possible. Something that will probably be reflected when I now list my six most played games. Ever.
Pokémon Crystal (Game Boy Color)
As I told you in the article about my first game console, I played copious amounts of Pokémon on my Gameboy Color as a kid. I remember unwrapping the purple, transparent cassette from the game box when I was only about five years old. It was so delicious and went so well with my purple transparent Gameboy Color. From previously only playing Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow, Crystal was so damn cool. With some new animations, it wasn’t as stiff as before and with all the new Pokémon, this turned into something completely different from what I had previously experienced (perhaps the demands weren’t so great at that age). Totodile was an obvious choice as a starter pokemon but over time I started the adventure over many times and I also fell hard for Cyndaquill and, in time, Chikorita. Pokémon Crystal was with me everywhere. When shopping for new fall clothes, when we were going on vacation, or when we were visiting grandma (and fell down her stairs twice because I couldn’t take my eyes off the game). I don’t even dare to imagine how many hours I’ve spent with Pokemon Crystal but I’m guessing a couple of hundred hours. Do I regret it? Absolutely not.
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Dead by Daylight (Playstation 4, Playstation 5, PC)
In 2017, Jonas Mäki contacted me and asked if I could test Dead by Daylight, which had just been released on console. I had never heard of the game before but I agreed to try it out and write a few lines about what I thought of the game. Never ever could I have imagined then that I would still be playing it today. Every single year since I started playing it, that game has topped the lists of my most played games. At launch it had many flaws and compared to today it was in a sense a completely different game with extremely little content. There were only seven assassins to play as, the maps were extremely few and the graphics were almost embarrassing. Today, the number of killers has been increased to a whopping 30, many of whom are iconic horror figures. Michael Myers (Halloween), Sadako (Ringu), Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street), Albert Wesker (Resident Evil) and Pinhead (Hellraiser) are just a few of the many characters to play as that make Dead by Daylight a incredible epic horror game that revolutionized the subgenre. Never before have we seen so many guest characters from movies and games in one game. Today, Dead by Daylight is packed with content and since 2020, the game has received continuous updates that improved the graphics and animations, preventing the game from looking very old. Almost every day I play Dead by Daylight. It might be a quarter of an hour or it might be a couple of hours. I just can’t get enough of it.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (PC)
I first came into contact with Counter-Strike when I started hanging out at the leisure center as a twelve-year-old. At the time, Counter-Strike 1.6 was played on the recreation yard’s computers and I found it so brutally boring. I therefore much rather played Halo 3 or Guitar Hero III on the Xbox 360 which was also there. In 2012, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was released and I didn’t even want to try it, but the following year my older friends moved to different cities to study further and they had quite recently acquired CS:GO. In order to somehow keep up with them, I bought that game even though I didn’t think it looked very fun. Today, almost ten years later, I have played CS:GO for 1216 hours. After my friends broke up, it became a routine to play at least one game together every night for several years. After that they moved on but now I loved the game and instead started playing it together with other friends. Now in recent years, on the other hand, there has been less CS:GO, but I will never be able to forget those years when CS was played every day and made us stick together, even though we now lived so far apart. Thanks for that, Valve.
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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)
I have never played any other game in the Elder Scrolls series. But Skyrim came at the right time and in 2011 all my friends were talking about Skyrim. I also. In the summer of that year, I had bought my first gaming computer and I was more than ready to discover Skyrim for the first time. Never before had I looked forward to a game launch so much and of course I had reserved a copy. Today, I get really warm inside when I think back to the first time you sat on that wagon on the way to the execution. I’ve experienced it so many times that I’ve restarted the adventure more times than I can count, and it’s always been a joy to revisit it. The only exception is when I reviewed the PSVR version which was torture-like. Otherwise, I love Skyrim and the hundreds of hours I’ve spent with the game.
Super Smash Bros. Melee (Nintendo Gamecube)
Super Smash Bros 64 was one of the few games my brother and I had for the Nintendo 64. But then when he bought the Nintendo Gamecube and we discovered Super Smash Bros. Melee I was completely paralyzed by it. Twenty… Twenty… Twenty-five characters?! Was it even legal to have this many characters to choose from when the previous game only had a maximum of twelve? Melee was such a huge upgrade over 64 that it almost always felt like there was something more to do in it. Because when it wasn’t there anymore, I deleted the save file and started over. Not to mention the absurdly many matches I played against my friends to see who really was the best player.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (Playstation 4, PC)
Months before the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, I had never touched the previous two games and I wanted to remedy that in order to decide whether to give the third a chance. After doing so, the answer was an obvious yes. But I never imagined that this would instantly become one of my favorite games of all time. I did every little thing I could do in the game and I fell head over heels for the card game Gwent. Although I had an urgent mission, there was always time to settle down with a stranger to play a game. And I went out of my way to romance Triss Merigold. Until I listened to all the audiobooks and realized I had been an idiot for treating Yennefer so badly. I simply had to start all over again and do everything for my dearest. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was a perfect game in so many ways and sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to feel the same way about a game again that I once felt about Witcher 3.
