Playstation
In 1995 I bought a projector with a 100" screen to my home cinema, elevated the armchair so that my vision was in the middle of the picture and hooked up the new Playstation with Wipeout. Flowing through the levels in a fast paced 3D racing game like that was just awesome! I already had the 3DO and Need for Speed, but Wipeout sure gave me a great impression.
The Playstation introduced me to the next step in fighting games, Tekken! After I'd been playing Virtua Fighter in the arcades I'd dreamed of a good 3D fighter at home. The first fighter I tested on the Playstation was "Battle Arena Toshinden". It looked quite nice but the game play did not live up to my NEO GEO favorite "Art of Fighting 2". Tekken on the other hand delivered great game play and that is what truly matters.
Tomb Raider was one of the first third-person 3D games. I found it really fascinating to be able to run around and explore with a character in a 3D world. What made it extra enjoyable to run around exploring was the wonderful control of the character, which was the main gameplay and based on Prince of Persia. It also added run & shoot, puzzles, item searching and a story with pre-rendered cutscenes. It was a one of a kind game that nowadays drowns in the crowd.
Resident Evil1 had fantastic visuals due to it's pre-rendered backgrounds combined with realtime 3D rendered characters. It combined puzzles with a bit of shooting action. The twitching of the movement and shooting was not very good as it was very basic and slow, but it suited the slow movement of the enemies pretty well so it was ok. What won me over was the exploration in it's movie like horror setting which made people jump in their chairs.
Final Fantasy VII was the first RPG that truly got my heart. The graphics was totally awesome and the story was so heavy that after a certain part, I had to take a break in order to cope with it. It was truly an epic story. After I played it through, it felt like I had died and left a beautiful world behind me. It left a craving for more which made me thoroughly go through lots of RPG's. In my search I found Xenogears which had an even more epic storyline than Final Fantasy VII and still stands as the heaviest story I've ever experienced.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was a beautiful sight. I had missed the time of Castlevania 2 on the NES. The other implementations had gone back to the style of the first one but once again they added to the sidescrolling hack'n slash. They gave it the exploration of Metroid and a touch of RPG leveling which was a great combination followed by many other games. The system of side scrolling non-linear exploration are nowadays referred to as "Metroidvania".
| Favorite Games | ||
| Name | Developer | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Kings Field | FromSoftware | 1994 |
| Wipeout | Psygnosis | 1995 |
| Tekken2 | Namco | 1995 |
| Tekken 23 | Namco | 1996 |
| Tekken 34 | Namco | 1998 |
| Tomb Raider | Core Design | 1996 |
| Soul Blade5 | Namco | 1997 |
| Resident Evil | Capcom Production Studio 4 | 1996 |
| Resident Evil 2 | Capcom Production Studio 4 | 1998 |
| Resident Evil 3 | Capcom Production Studio 4 | 1999 |
| Final Fantasy VII | Square | 1997 |
| Castlevania: Symphony of the Night | Konami Deutschland GmbH | 1997 |
| Micro Machines V3 | Codemasters | 1997 |
| Gran Turismo | Polyphony Digital | 1998 |
| Xenogears6 | Square | 1998 |
| MediEvil | SCE Studios Cambridge | 1998 |
| PaRappa the Rapper | NanaOn-Sha | 1998 |
| Metal Gear Solid | Konami | 1999 |
| Rayman 2: The Great Escape | Ubisoft | 1999 |
| Tony Hawk's Skateboarding | Activision | 1999 |
| Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 | Activision | 2000 |
| Chrono Cross | Square | 2000 |
