Ten Games
/ July 10, 2026
Ten Games To Know Me
A while back, I remember a trend going around Mastodon to make a list of “Ten Games To Know Me”. It ended up being a really interesting exercise for me to think about, so I’ve taken my previous list, made a couple of swaps, and given it more words than it previously had. These aren’t “my favorite games” or “the games I think are The Best” - they’re ten games that mean something to me.
Mass Effect
This will always be one of the big ones for me - even beyond a list of video games, Mass Effect is a story and a world that have stuck with me. I’ve done several playthroughs, read a bunch of lore, watched multiple blind Let’s Plays, browsed fanworks, all that. I made a papercraft model of a Carnifex pistol that I got signed by Jennifer Hale, and I wore a pair of N7 cufflinks when I got married. It’s also one of the few pieces of media where I have strong opinions about possible character relationships (there’s no Shepard without Vakarian, and it’s as simple as that).
On this list, Mass Effect is one of the least focused on actual gameplay for my selection. The gameplay is certainly fine, but it’s definitely not what I’m here for. I want to experience the story of Commander Shepard, her crew, and the Normandy.
Does Mass Effect have a future? I don’t know. Andromeda was a fun game - its movement and gunplay were miles better than the original trilogy, for that matter. But the characters and the world weren’t there. I still hold out some hope for whatever is upcoming, but given the state of the games industry and BioWare’s recent performance - perhaps it’s best we just stick with what we had.
Path of Exile
I joined the Path of Exile closed beta when I was in college, shortly before the open beta started. This was a real “no-life” game for me - I spent hours and hours trying out builds, rolling new characters, even participating in some of the race leagues. I love the complexity of the overlapping systems for skills, supports, gear, stats - it really feels like you’ve “broken” something when a build clicks together.
My PoE playing habits have shifted significantly over the years, and I’ve found myself getting a bit sad over it. After racking up thousands of hours between 2012 and 2021, I’ve played maybe 2 or 3 leagues since then, and a similarly small amount of PoE2. It’s interesting how strongly I tie my memories of PoE with the stage of life I was in - it was the perfect game for when I could come home, sit down at my PC, and just game for a few hours.
Transistor
Supergiant Games have an incredible catalog and pretty much every game they’ve made could be put on this list. The amount of polish they put into each of their games makes each of them a special experience. I vividly remember reaching the ending of Bastion at about 2AM in my college dorm room with the lights out and my roommate asleep - I needed a minute or two to just take it in.
I had to pick just one for the sake of this list, though, and I think it has to be Transistor. I really love the “focused” atmosphere of the Supergiant games that rely almost entirely on Logan Cunningham and Ashley Barrett for audio, and Transistor is the perfect demonstration of their pairing. The aesthetic of Cloudbank and the story they built in a fairly short time is so memorable, and the real-time-with-planned-turns battle system is super satisfying to optimize.
Transistor also has my favorite soundtrack of any Supergiant game. At our wedding, my wife and I played a piano-four-hands arrangement of Paper Boats together, and that will always be a beautiful memory for me.
Crypt of the NecroDancer
NecroDancer is probably one of the least-well-known games on this list but it’s very high on my personal favorites. Rhythm games are awesome and dungeon-crawling roguelikes are awesome, though I will admit that it is not at all obvious that a rhythm-roguelike would be any good at all. Turns out it’s a game I can pour hundreds of hours into. The soundtracks are so fun to listen to - yes, soundtracks plural - I like pretty much all of the soundtracks offered.
NecroDancer also might be the game that I feel like I’ve reached the highest relative skill at. There are a few games that I’d call myself “good” at, but they’re often games that other people are much much better at, and so it’s easy to look at my own level as not all that impressive in comparison. I have a few NecroDancer achievements that I’m genuinely proud of, though - I’ve cleared an all-zones run for all three of the “Challenge characters” (Aria, Monk, and Bolt), and I’ve gotten my Cadence speedrun times to somewhere between Top 200 and Top 300, depending on patches and DLC releases.
Super Smash Bros: Melee
Sports fans will say that soccer is “the beautiful game” - I think in competitive gaming, that’s Melee.
I love watching eSports - starting from watching Starcraft II live from Korea before I even owned the game, through Dota 2, Counter-Strike, and a couple of others. But Melee has something special about it - all the way from playing with friends and family when it originally came out. I love the way that you can express yourself via gameplay, even beyond just the character choice. The movement options, the fluiditiy of it all - it mamkes for an experience that’s both a blast to play and so fun to watch.
It’s also incredible how the modern Melee game came out of the original Nintendo party game - and I think it’s critical that the party game is also very fun! Could a better competitive experience be designed from the ground up? Absolutely. Would Sakurai do it? Never in a million years. It’s really special that we got the Melee that we did, and it’s not going anywhere.
Spec Ops: The Line
Spec Ops was something completely unique and I don’t think we’ll ever see it happen again. Amidst a wave of same-y, overly-patriotic cover shooters, Spec Ops started off as… another overly-patriotic cover shoooter. But the game that it becomes is something that comes out of nowhere - a deconstruction and critique of the very concept of the genre, pulling the player along as a complicit participant in the horrors that the game then makes you examine. I genuinely don’t know if the situation will ever arise again for something like this to happen - between the industry trends and the state of the world at the time, it’s a setup that would be hard to replicate.
Blue Prince
What an unexpected masterpiece. What I signed up for was a fun room-drafting board-game-y puzzle, and what I got was one of the deepest icebergs I’ve had the pleasure of cataloging the full dimensions of. This game is now square at the top of my list for “Just play this game, don’t look up anything about it” - and then a few days later, you have sheets of graph paper with notes scrawled all over them covering your desk and you’re raving like a lunatic about “TOR LOR ETT”.
Blue Prince is another game that I’ve really enjoyed watching other people play, too - particular shoutouts to Cracking the Cryptic for being so good at puzzles and also so bad at video games, and to Day9 for declaring he would be playing without taking notes, getting heckled in chat for it, then demonstrating how he doesn’t need the notes by rattling off the depictions, numbers, and in-room positions of all seven angels in the Chapel.
Satisfactory
Of course I like factory games, I write software for a living.
For some reason, Factorio has never quite clicked with me completely, but Satisfactory sure has. I’ve done a couple of “end to end” playthroughs as the various patches have released, plus a super fun multiplayer playthrough. I’m currently working on an “endgame” world where I’m trying to build even bigger and actually style my buildings - and I think the styling options are one thing that’s really kept bringing me back to this particular factory.
I haven’t even dipped my toes into the new world-option settings - I don’t know how much I want to futz with the recipe multipliers on production machines (I think Coffee Stain did a really good job balancing everything as-is in the vanilla game), but I definitely plan on playing a Space Elevator multiplier run - maybe even a x100.
Opus Magnum
Of course I like Zachlikes, I write software for a living.
This is another game that is really standing in for its developer’s entire catalog - Zachlikes (and ones from Zachtronics in particular) are so directly up my alley that I’ll pretty much pick up everything they put out. It’s super hard to pick an actual favorite if I want to put just one on this list - SHENZHEN I/O was probably my other choice here (one of the “drag and drop” games, one of the “type actual assembly” games). Opus Magnum got the nod just for the overall level of polish and the extra satisfaction of being able to watch your device operate with all of its moving arms.
Opus Magnum did also give me one of my other “proudest gaming achievements” - I have the iron-on patch and certificate showing that I was one of the first 1000 players worldwide to complete the main campaign.
Also, there’s solitaire. We can’t forget the solitaire.
Chrono Trigger
If this list needs one traditional “Greatest Game Of All Time” candidate, this is my pick. I’m not a JRPG fanatic - I’ll play some here and there but they’re not my first choice. Despite that, going all the way back to the first time I played Chrono Trigger (a ROM and the SNES9X emulator running on a hand-me-down PC), there’s always been something special about it. The characters are all fun and interesting, the soundtrack is an all-time great, the aesthetic of the world is beautiful - it’s just a game that ends up being much greater than the sum of its parts, and those parts are already incredible. The “Campfire Scene” is an image that I keep coming back to as a real touchstone.
Honorable Mention - Magic: The Gathering
Magic isn’t enough of a “video game” to get on this list proper (Arena notwithstanding), but it’s probably had more influence over my life than almost any other game. I started playing Magic casually with my brother and some friends while in high school, but we never really took it seriously. Then the company I started working at had a Magic sealed league running during lunch breaks - I tried it out again and I was hooked.
Magic’s design is an all-time great - as much as subsequent collectible card games have tried to improve things, I really do think that Richard Garfield and the Magic R&D team have gotten it pretty much exactly right. The color pie provides a great structure to build a multi-faceted game on, and Limited gameplay means that there will always be more Magic to play.
Outside of the Magic, there’s also The Gathering. I’ve met some of my best friends playing Magic, and found some of the most welcoming communities I’ve ever been a part of. Working on the Gladiator format has created some of my favorite online memories over the last few years and I will always be grateful for those experiences.