Discussion Your best friend's gaming tastes and how they impacted yours.

[King_Dodongo]

Hi fellas, today I was inspired and came up with a great idea for a thread. (or so I think)
Just the other day I was reflecting on what my friends' gaming tastes varied from mine and how they helped me to spice up my libraries in the long run. I will mention just the ones I remember the most. I am very grateful as I'm usually very Nintendo centric and wouldn't have checked half of the games listed if not for him.


His favorite games/franchises/companies:
Persona/Atlus - Even if haven't played the Persona games myself (I appreciate them and would love to have them on a Nintendo system for once. Yeah yeah, I could simply go for P4G on steam, but where's the fun in that?), he made me realizde that Atlus would gel with me, so I have played many titles such as Devil survivor and TMS. Cant wait for SMTV!
Valkyria Chronicles - Played a bit of the demo on his PS3 and he then went to play the full game and I was floored by the fresh idea. He gifted me the steam version and some time after I bought the deluxe edition of VC4 (the one with the pretty tank!)
Monster Hunter - He convinced me to try MH4 after having a rough time with Tri's demo. Now it is one of my favorite franchises (easily no1 from Capcom) and cant wait for Sunbreak to play as a team once again.
Vanillaware - One time I went to his house, he was playing that lovely intro from Odin Sphere an got enchanted. Of course, as soon as Muramasa was avaliable here I got the game!
Silent Hill - He owned the first two and both games are classics. At the time I had REmake and RE4 so I didnt have a thing to envy lol, but the variety was welcome.

Other games I knew about because of him:

Shadow of the Colossus - amazing game and a work of art. Nuff said.
Team Buddies - really original concept and fun. Marred by hardware limitations IMO.
Bust a groove 2 - I usually dont enjoy dancing games but man what an incredible concept. Strike is my main btw.
Neptunia franchise - weird games I must admit.
Resonance of fate - clever conceptm should have been more of those instead of 3 FF13 games lol.
Favorite Final Fantasy - 9 and I recently got to try it and it is wonderful as I expected. Where 7 failed hard to entertain me, 9 captivated from the very beginning. Hopefully whoever is in charge doesnt screw up the animated series.


What say you, famifriends? (can be an IRL or from the internet)

 

[Mr_No_U]

I didn't have a Genesis until well after that gen had ended, but I played a ton of Sega games at my friend's house growing up. Sonic 1 & 2, Shinobi III, Comix Zone, etc.

Another friend got me into PC gaming by letting me play Prehistorik and Doom on his PC before I ever owned one.

 

[GamerJM]

We had fairly similar tastes that we discovered independently of each other (which is weird because we became friends when we were like, eight, and by that time both of us already had a pretty good idea of what kinds of games we liked), but with one major exception. I'm a big JRPG guy, and he's a big WRPG guy. Both of us got more into RPGs when we got older so that led us to having more divergent gaming tastes.

There are a couple of games he got me into though. He loved Fable (the original one) on PC, and II didn't come to PC. My friend is a Nintendo/PC only guy, so I bought II, partially because he sold me on the series being good and also partially so he could play it at my house. I ended up really liking Fable II, though.

The other is Team Fortress 2, which he played a lot of in high school and talked about enough to get me to play TF2 more than just once (which is probably what I would have done otherwise, I bought the Orange Box for Portal/HL2 originally). I didn't have a PC good enough to run modern games at the time, so I played the version on the 360 through the Orange Box. So we never played together, but whenever he'd come over to my house, we'd pass the controller between rounds and show each other different strategies. And whenever I went over to his house, I got to see what the much more supported PC version looked like.

This is all my childhood best friend. My best friend now plays video games, but we don't talk about specific games that much since we talk more about anime/politics/queer shit. I'm also knowledgeable enough about games now that I'm not sure if my friend would be able to get me into anything I didn't already know about, especially since I play more games than fae.

 

[Mr. Tiddles]

I stay far away from popular first person shooter multiplayer games because my friends always buy em, play em, tell me to get em and then I do and they we play for 2 hours before they move on to the next game.

Every time.

 

[King_Dodongo]

The one thing that I forgot to mention was that while he already knew about many of my favorite franchises, he showed new appreciation for them after playing them once again. We both knew that the best Oracle game is Seasons.

 

[ermitron2]

I usually don't play FPS and most of my friends know that, but still one of then reccommended me last year Sniper Elite 3. "just turn off real bullet ballistics and have a blast" and boy he was right. Best 10 bucks I've spent on a FPS

 

[Raytro]

I used to have a best friend in elementary school. When we were in middle school, he introduced me to Gears of War and Call of Duty: Black Ops. It was fascinating to me because it really wasn't the kind of games I was into at the time.
Call of Duty: Black Ops online with my friends was one of the best time of my life. It was so fun yet so frustrating ahah. And Gears of War ended being one of my favorite IP and maybe my favorite Microsoft IP. Really enjoyed every games from the series I think.

 

[Seven]

All of my friends were Playstation/XBOX fans while I was a Nintendo/handheld fan so they didn't really influence me all that much. They did get a laugh when they were telling me to purchase a PS2 to play FFXII and I said that I would just wait till it comes to a handheld, but in the end my patience won that battle.

 

[chocolate_supra]

My best friend introduced me to Mario 3 and the gold-cartridge brilliance of Zelda 1. Normally that'd be a "'nuff said," but after years passed with our gaming tastes mostly aligned (Zelda, Sonic, etc) a big one hit: Shenmue. Our mutual hype over that game is one of the reasons I still love it. I heavily associate that game with him, because I think it was the first time my love for a "non-mainstream" game was shared by someone else. He even surprised me by showing up to school one Halloween dressed as Ryo Hazuki (complete with the cheek bandage)!

And years later when I visited him after he moved to Japan, it felt like I had already been there. That game did such a good job of replicating certain parts and.. I guess a "feel" of that part of Japan that I actually felt a weird familiarity walking through his neighborhood. It was like we had a trial run of exploring Japan together thanks to that game, and then years later we got to do it for real.

He doesn't play games much anymore, but the franchises he and I used to play as kids and teens are still mostly my favorites.
Also I'm really hoping Suzuki can make Shenmue IV