Given the theme of this website, it seemed fitting to base my first blog post on games - video games to be more specific. We had a PS2 console in our household in my early years and then WE had a PS4 later on - so I have had access to games for a long time. When I was thinking about how I should go about writing it, a 3 by 3 crossed my mind. Why? Thanks to all the time I spent listening to The Trash Taste podcast (shout out to DA BOOYYYYYYS). I also thought of video games because some of these games have genuinely shaped a part of my life and changed my perspective on a lot of things. So here goes:
I was always fascinated by why Persona 5 was so highly rated. It has perfect scores across all platforms, but from what I saw of the gameplay, it doesn't have the best graphics, and it was a turn-based game, so it wasn't like a fighter game where you are on the edge of your seat. Even when I played it, the story was pretty meh, a lot of it was text-based and grindy. I genuinely did not get it.
But I still put 120 hours in it. Because the world that it built is just so fun and stylistic and is like its own character. It genuinely was one of the reasons I understood how art, and how you portray a (somewhat simple) theme (here, rebellion), can change how you experience a story. How they stylize everyday life is something I genuinely try to implement in my life. Making mundane activities interesting is something this game has taught me or atleast made me aware about it. Like, this game makes the UI/UX, the city map elements, and the music so unique and interesting, and I have also tried to implement that in this website, my projects, and my daily activities. That has made everything more interesting and fun, and I am thankful to this game for it.
FIFA has been a constant in my life since I was 5. I remember playing it in my mom's lab with bhaiya, playing PES 12-14 on PS2, deleting my brother's career mode by mistake. And finally buying FIFA 18 for PS4 and now FIFA (FC(¬_¬)) 25 with da boys in my hostel. TWO FIFA championships for me, ZERO for them, RESPECT MAAAAAN, RESPECT
Game so good it deserves its own page
I have never played this game (UPDATE: I have now played it! But again, I have only seen most of the endings), but I watched every possible ending for this an unfilthy amount of times. Earlier I loved this because it was so meta (insert mind blown emoji for 16-year-old me). But every time I watch it, new layers come out and it starts commenting on itself, and at the end of the day, the narrator's wit and charm are so fun that I end up clicking on any new guy playing it on YouTube. I played Portal 2 recently and it's giving it close competition, might get replaced honestly, I am having a lot of fun with GLaDOS, my tsundere clanker queen.
UPDATE: I just completed Portal 2, lmao, while writing this. WHAT A BANGER GAME. Fahhhh bro, I genuinely want to put it in the list. It is like Stanley Parable, where the narrator is a tsundere queen (✧u✧), and it has the best puzzles I have seen anywhere. She sings for me at the end as well bro. What a banger week it has been with this feet disease. I was hooked on it. To cheat this list again, I will just leave you with the ending song playing if you click on me above. I need to complete Half-Life bro, Valve is too goated.
The game of my childhood and the game through which I experienced Dragon Ball originally, even before watching it. This is unironically the most fun I have had while beating the shit out of characters. I had shitloads of fun playing this with my brothers and lots of fights as well, because we started spamming moves and it would get annoying. It made the imaginations you have as a kid seeing Goku feel so real and cool, Dragon Ball is a very cool world with a lot of cool characters anyway, so this was like the best possible way to get introduced to it. I still see it sometimes (PLEASE WATCH DRAGON BALL ABRIDGED BRO, THAT IS THE FUNNIEST SHIT EVER). I want to buy Sparking Zero to experience this game to its full capabilities on modern consoles, but I can see nostalgia is a big part of why I love this so much, so I don't know whether the experience can be recreated.
I am kinda cheating on this, naming 2 games, but I honestly couldn't choose between them as both served a similar purpose for me at different stages of my life - very unique games with interesting mechanics that are so fun and rewarding to learn and play with DA BOYS. And I clowned on both games before actually falling in love with them. See, when you are 7, you don't know who the hell Tony Hawk is, and I was like ehhhh I don't want dis, give me Spider-Man (.·°՞(≧□≦)՞°·.). The store guy said to my bro "bhai bache to aese hi hote hain, nakhren maarte hain bahut, ek baar lejaake to dekho". That is why I know bullying and clowning on kids work, cause I was a dum dum. My dumb ass had also thought that car football was a dumb idea. Here I am in my 20s playing it every other day, shouting at the top of my lungs cause I scored an aerial. SO YEAHHHHHH, pick either, I just don't learn.
As you just read, this was THE game. The one I saw on YouTube that made me go, please 🙏 papaaa, I neeeed thisssss, our PS2 kinda Spider-Man-less, I wanna help it out. We essentially got the PS4 because I wanted to experience this. BRUH AND IT BEGINS WITH THE BEST OPENING IMAGINABLE, I still get goosebumps when I see that. You know I called 5-year-old me a dum dum last game. This game proved he was onto something. The neuron activation you get while swinging is as true then as it is now. This game is a 10/10 even if it was just swinging around the city. It is the only game I have 100 percented. Also the best Peter Parker (Brand New Day now, cause of Naruto/Sadie Sink bias, but still).
Fahhhh, saying anything about this would spoil its experience. Well, I can at least say that making my friends play it, and bhaiya soon, are top 2 experiences possible fr fr. Also a game I didn't think I would relate to when I first played it, but here we are, I guess (I am fine, no need to contact me).
I started playing this game at a time I was looking for my intern, which also meant looking for what I want to do. And as I was looking into that, I realised that most things I like/love to do have come from people I have liked/who inspired me to do them, and not from the things themselves per se. Like, say, football came from my bhaiya, and so did a lot of movies/games/anime, me wanting to make this site came from seeing cool websites made by games I love, and me wanting to get into Linux ricing came from a YouTuber I liked. And I came across this game. In principle it has no mechanics except to make choices, and it has as much text as you would put in a book. I have never willingly read so much text. But I was able to do that here, because every character here is so unique and fascinating, and emulates that feeling I have in my life where I want to learn more about them/their world because they seem so interesting. This in all its essence is a book with great voice acting where they kept talking about how this world had shaped them. OHH, and you yourself have 16 different personalities telling you to do different things. I haven't even talked about the plot of the game and how beautifully it portrays the journey of healing and how they have shown how different political views shape society. Genuinely tuff game
OKKKK, so I want to make one thing clear first. THIS IS NOT IN MY 3X3. I DO NOT ENDORSE THIS GAME. But I need to talk about it. Because I was also playing this during the time I was searching for an intern, and this in every sense is the antithesis of Disco Elysium. It is a game which is solely based on how cool the world is. And it is a very cool world. Disco Elysium, in contrast, is a town where nothing fancy is happening. Here there is a white hole station, time loops, a planet with a black hole as its core which has hanging cities, and a Quantum Moon which introduces very cool features. But after playing for like 10-12 hours I lost interest in it, which seemed very weird and ironic, because I am an astrophysics student. This shit is cool af, that is the reason I got into the field. But I soon lost the motivation to keep exploring it. It started to seem like a task that I had to put effort into rather than exploration. And that is why it is the antithesis of Disco Elysium. I got through so much text in Disco Elysium even though that is something I would have described as 'boring' earlier, while exploring a sinking sand planet, which sounds so cool, seemed like a chore to do. I was baffled by it. This genuinely made me come back to the realisation I had earlier, that I love these things because of the people involved in them and not because they were cool. I experienced a similar thing in The Last of Us (GO READ THAT BLOG). I am in astrophysics because I found extremely cool people in Krittika that I still love, I am getting into quizzing because I love the people there (even though I still don't get the activity ache se), I love football because of my bhaiya, and it was sustained because of the extremely cool people I got to see playing it in Bruno, Ronaldo, Keane, Beliiigham (I can keep on naming them). And this realisation has made me want to be this cool person, whom my younger self would look at and be like, bruh that guy is so cool, what is his story? I wanna be like him. It's paradoxical, but it still works. I just keep following the people younger me would say are so cool, cause, bruh, as you saw with the Spider-Man shit, he was onto something. MAYYYBE listen to your close family and friends as well. Ah, I don't like the fact that Outer Wilds has such a long paragraph, but it did help me learn a lot about myself, so it deserves at least that. DON'T PLAY IT THOUGH. Younger me would hate me if someone played this abomination because of me.
Some other games that were bangers but hit just a bit less than the ones mentioned above (EXCEPT OUTER WILDS):
1. Detroit: Become Human: how have there not been more games like this, bro. It is genuinely one of one. No other game like this exists (although that is probably true for a lot of games here). Absolute Cinema
2. Firewatch: I played this in ROME of all places. Pretty ironic that the game is about escapism and I played it in the best tourist spot in the world. It did what Disco Elysium did, but with 2 characters over a radio over a span of 5 hours. It was beautiful. The ending left a sour taste in my mouth, though. It depended on (without spoiling it) a backstory they told us in 5 minutes, and in the context of the story, that backstory spanned years and was worth more than the 5 hours I experienced in game, but to me those 5 hours weighed more, so it felt weird. Anyways, it was beautifully made and a treat to experience.
3. Mouthwashing: I wanted to have a horror game in the 3 by 3 given how many I have experienced, and this was my original choice. They made the most indie-looking game one of the most cinematic experiences I have had, so tuff.
4. Mole: Mouthwashing 2026. This took the Mouthwashing concept and built on it with more sci-fi and cool shit. But Doki Doki, with the experiences I had playing it with my friends, just edges it out.
5. SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain: Another couch co-op classic with my friends, though I guess 2K is also making good games nowadays.
6. Neva: A beautiful indie game I enjoyed at the end of my third semester. Chinmay and I randomly found it and fell in love with it.
7. Cuphead: Another game I play with my friends sometimes. The art style, with the unique bosses, makes it special.
8. Horizon Zero Dawn: My memory of this game has been ruined by the bad story and forced storyline gimmicks in the second game. Also, in hindsight, the dialogue was pretty jagged. It still stands as one of the most beautiful games I have ever played. The second game had great moments, but the story lets it down.
9. Uncharted 4: It would have been in there if I hadn't played The Last of Us. Naughty Dog is genuinely goated.
10. Dispatch: Dispatch October. Wow, it's been a year. It is hard to call it a game because it is essentially a series. We essentially have 2 choices we need to make, and they are also redundant to the plot. But it is so much fun. The weekly thing it did really shed light on how I should consume media. Because the weekly anticipation added so much to how I consumed it, and it made the 2 hours I played it every week that much more fun. I have become much more of a weekly watcher of things since then.
I am currently playing Half-Life 1 (Black Mesa, the fan-made edition), I also want to get into the Alan Wake games. I tried The Walking Dead, did not like it. It's like Dispatch but without it being fun, and just an inferior version of The Last of Us (you can't help but compare given the similar themes). I want to finish Expedition 33 next whenever Chinmay's laptop and I are free. Wow, this turned out to be long. But I guess when you are writing about how things have affected your life, it turns out to be a long and complex process. Games are so fun, man. I'll update this next year, I hope. A lot of great games coming out but not for the PS4 anymore 🥀. Time to upgrade? I can't imagine myself getting an Xbox, but that is the only good console on the market. The Steam Machine is not really widely available. Less SEEE. Stay tuff.