Is the Game Over?

Preferences and priorities in life keep changing all the time. It's crazy to think what matters the most to us right in this moment, may become a distant memory in the future. Such is life and time, ever-evolving and constantly changing.

I'm not a philosopher, just stating a fact that I only realized after experience. I'm no Socrates who could whip up some high-level philosophy on a mere whim.

Rather, I jumped on this train of thought while watching my child playing Minecraft. He's crazy about this game. This is not the only one, he has a list.

I was thinking, would it matter to him after a few years or he'll find no pleasure in it? Maybe he would still be a gaming guy, but might move on to newer games.

I'm not ignoring the fact that humans can get bored. I'm talking about a scenario in which one is not bored but rather drifts away to other things with life, unconsciously. Years later, when you get nostalgic and try to relive the memories, you are shocked to find out that you no longer feel the same pleasure as recorded in your brain/memories.

That sweet memory is now tarnished.

Perhaps, I chose a stronger word, but certainly something turns off inside you. Initially, I thought it was the memory that ruins, but I realized that memories stay sweet forever - you only (finally and truly) come to terms with the change in your preferences.

Duh! I do feel like Socrates now. I didn't mean to but I guess my half sleepy head is doing it for me.

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Interestingly, I caught another train while watching Minecraft. I was mentally teleported to my childhood, thinking about games that I loved playing back then. At that time, we used to play physical or board games more but this trend of digital games was also emerging while we were growing up.

I was going to write about my favourite digital or PC games in the 90s and early 2000s. Instead, I got lost in complex thoughts. If you are not feeling bored, I will do a quick round-up of 5 games that I can recall at the moment because I don't want to procrastinate it to another post.

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Driver 2
It's not my favourite but it's the first ever digital game I played so it deserves to be on the list, right? Was I eight?

I can recall a car racing track in the forest, made of all kinds of greens around and dirt underneath, moving up and down the flora. The second your vehicle skids, a huge frog awaits, with its sticky tongue outside, ready to devour you the whole.

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Need for Speed 2
There are countless versions of this infamous car racing game but I always kept coming back to this one. It was clean and simple.

My love for a Red Ferrari was born with this game. Sometimes, I used to switch to a Black Jaguar, but the control, speed and smoothness of that Ferrari had no match.

It was like a therapy, racing around those smooth urban roads. What therapy an 8 year old could possibly need? But I hope you are getting what I'm implying.

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Mortal Kombat 4
Never been a fan of Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat version 4 was the fighting game made for me. It was the Fatalities, advanced killing maneuvers that required hitting a foot-long combination of keys simultaneously, that got me hooked to this game. It was the only thing I was better at than my little brother.

I mostly chose Radien for tough matches and loved summoning that killer thunderstorm by viciously hitting around 10 keys in a single heartbeat.

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Hercules
If you are an old reader, you should probably know, I'm into Fiction that includes a love for mythological characters. What better place to find out a ton of such characters than in one game of Hercules - Hydra, Medusa, Cyclops, Centaur, Minotaur, and many more?

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Metal Slug
I used to have cool-kid feels while playing this game. It was not 3D either but the constant need to shoot, kill, and survive was so thrilling and the heavy machine guns and a swarm of enemies didn't allow me to blink an eye.

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While I played these simpler games for years, with time my sibling left my league and got crazy about GTA Vice City, Prince of Persia, Devil May Cry, Call of Duty, Counter Strike and the likes of it.

It turned out, I didn't have interest in high simulations. Perhaps, I didn't have good control on three dimensional moves and got into the comfort of up, down, right, left, and a - s - d for powers and maneuvers.

My brother still plays advanced games on a PS, so does his wife. Here I am, years later, wanting to relive the memory of using a thunderstorm fatality of Radien, killing those deadly locks of Medusa, and having a breezy Ferrari ride.

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I will be obliged, if anyone can share tried and tested MAC compatible download links for any of these games. The woman wants to play and find out what excites her and what doesn't. Are these games really over for her or she's over these, 20 years later?

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P.S. Where do we post gaming stuff?

P.P.S. I no longer have these games and I couldn't find free images on the Internet. So, I had to prompt AI to generate images based on my memory and of course the online database.

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