Games as a source of motivation and inspiration

Lovely scenery, beautiful colours, awesomely designed characters, a well told story - of course all of that can be an inspiration to an artist, because well every frame of a game is artwork. But what I find far more fascinating is that games can recharge depleted mental energy. Games activate your brain by challenging your skills, your wits. You have to focus to get through them. So yes, they are and were a big influence for all of my art series (as you probably soon will see, when I’ll introduce my past artwork to you) but they were also sometimes what kept me motivated, what kept me going.

So without further ado here is the list of video games that I enjoyed the most and why:

Mario Sunshine and Super Mario N64: First 3D jump’n’runs that I played and tried to 100%. Though I loved Super Mario N64, I absolutely adored Mario Sunshine because of those absolutely cute characters and the totally lovely sceneries and music and that spray can! :D Cleaning the town of the graffiti was so much fun! And that is out of the mouth of the artist that participated in the Urban Art Festival in Düsseldorf three years ago ;)

Zelda - Ocarina of Times: This is THE Game that really got me into gaming. I’ve been playing on the Gameboy before and also a bit on the N64, but only games without a story, like Tetris, Mario Kart and similar stuff. Saved up for Zelda OoT for so long! Was totally worth it though, played through that game three times :)

Zelda - Windwaker: This is just the perfect game. Love the character design, the scenery, the music, the story. Want to play the HD version at some point in the future but I do not possess a Wii U right now.

Pikmin: Loved tossing those little creatures and hearing them squeak!

Pokémon Red: Well, I mentioned it in my first post - I had to have them all. Distinctly remember not accomplishing that though ^^ Still love the design of the creatures and especially their pixelated versions!

Twilight Princess: The darker tone of this game was so surprising but absolutely awesome. Really like the character of Midna and the design of the Twilight Realm.

Mario Party 2: This was so much fun, so many modes and boards you could play the game with friends. Similar to Mario Kart, but I really enjoyed the variety of the mini games here. There was this one game where you had to rotate the joystick super fast and for quite a while - I wonder if anyone else ever got blisters from that game because he or she wanted to win that badly :)

Realising that if I’d continue like this the post would get super super long. After my school years I was introduced to the vast world of PC games, so you can imagine that there are quite a few more games that inspired me :) So I am going to stop at this point which finishes the Nintendo section of my gaming experience up to this day - and if you are interested in more, I will continue this record of my favourite games in another post. So give me some feedback ;)

Also: What kind of Ninendo games did you love when you were a kid and what do you remember most about them?

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