Game Theory<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\u2731<\/p>\n
2012:<\/p>\n
SC3K:<\/strong> I remember getting Simcity 3000 for my birthday. I was terrible at it as a child- I’d spend hours terraforming the map into an unrealistic, geometrically perfect fakery with no trees and a perfectly straight river- and then build roads extensively around the edges of the map. I’d inevitably run into bankruptcy, the cost of maintaining the roads would kill me. And then I’d start over, doing the same thing.<\/p>\nI used to play Simcity 2000<\/strong> on our old Windows 3.1 computer. It came with the building editor, and I’d spend hours assembling a perfect (and on hindsight, terribly boring) city, with perfect orderly rows of identical buildings. (I did the same thing in Fifa 98 with all the player models. I gave every player my favourite face and hair, keeping only the skin and hair colour unchanged.)<\/p>\nFifa 98:<\/strong> I remember getting Singapore to win the World Cup. It was possible to turn off fouls so you could shove the goalkeeper while he had the ball, and then score with it. But I also managed to play quite well without the fouls. The indoor court was quite fun, too. Blur’s Song 2 remains anthemic. I remember playing Fifa 2000 too, on amateur mode it’s possible to simply dash forward all the way after kickoff and lob the ball over the keeper’s head when you’re right in front of him.<\/p>\nMichael Jackson’s Moonwalker.<\/strong> When I was younger, I’d only ever make it to the graveyard stage- one of the bosses was impossible to defeat without some degree of skill. I’d eventually complete the game. The 4th level with the caves was a total pain. I think I remember using pen and paper to try and figure out where I’d been and where I ought to go.<\/p>\nAfterburner<\/strong> was fun. I loved being able to do the 360 rotation, it felt great to take the enemy planes down, and the mothership that refueled you was so huge and badass.<\/p>\nGolden Axe 2<\/strong> was a good memory. I remember it only worked on the old controller with 3 buttons- for some reason it didn’t work on the 6 button one. I tried Golden Axe 3 on an emulator much later, and somehow it didn’t seem as beautiful as GA2. Possibly because I was too young to notice very much about the graphics.<\/p>\nBare Knuckle 3<\/strong> (aka Streets of Rage) was an old favourite. To this day I could probably do a good run on the hardest difficulty. Axel was always my favourite character, because of the specials with the sword and bat. I remember mimicking his moves when I was in Kindergarten. There’s a mission where you have to rescue a political figure- and for some reason me and my brother used to keep letting him die, because we liked the alternative ending better. I got really, really good at that game. I still remember the nuances of all the enemy characters, and most of the secrets. The music and enemy noises are still very fresh in my mind.<\/p>\nI played BK\/SOR 1 too, and I enjoyed it, even if the pace is a little slower.<\/p>\n
I remember playing Red Alert<\/strong> at my friend Keith’s place in Primary School- we’d go there before school started on days with the afternoon session, and on saturdays with supplementary classes. I’d tell my parents that the classes were earlier than they actually were, so that we could go and play. I remember that I really liked Tesla Coils. I got pretty far in the Allied missions- which was the only CD I had- but I don’t remember completing the entire game. Enemy subs were annoying. There’s a pretty fun spy mission. Tanya was a badass, but sometimes she’d die accidentally in stupid ways. Mission failed. The music was fantastic, and so were the cutscenes.<\/p>\nI think we also played Metal Slug at Keith’s place. We used to abuse the extra credits- when faced off against the second boss in Metal Slug 2 or X, we’d just throw all our bombs and die so that we’d get more bombs to use. I remember buying it myself at a pasar malam, and bringing friends home from Primary School to play it after we finished our group work. I remember ZW and JS used to play it with me.<\/p>\n
I first encountered Heroes Of Might and Magic 3<\/strong> at Ericko’s house, at his birthday party. He was from OEPS, too. We tried to play a game with many, many players- but it took really long and we never really got anywhere. But I was hooked with the interface and atmosphere, and I remember playing it at JS’s house, and then playing through the entire Single Player campaign years later- I think after my ‘A’ Levels.<\/p>\nSuper Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers<\/strong> was another fun one. I only ever used Ryu, Ken, Guile, Vega and I think Sagat. I remember my brother and I trying to get every single one of the endings for every single character. I think we did manage. I remmeber Ken’s shoulder being really broad in his outro. It was hard if not impossible to execute Zangief’s and T-Hawk’s 360 moves on a joypad.<\/p>\nSonic 3.<\/strong> I could still do a quick playthrough of the first two Acts if I played it today. Oddly, the second act is clearer in my mind- probably because I was stuck there for quite a while. But it was the underwater stage- Act 3- that was the real killer. Rarely, if ever, made it past that. I can’t remember much about the casino stage (except that Robotnik removes pieces of the floor at the end), and I totally can’t recall what comes afterwards. My memory is confused by my emulator experiences of playing Sonic & Knuckles.<\/p>\nOTHER GAMES-
\nPrince of Persia,
\nWolf 3D,
\nDuke Nukem,
\nBare Knuckle,
\nMetal Slug,
\nRed Alert,
\nDigimon Cards
\nMortal Kombat 3
\nTerranigma
\nFinal Fantasy and other playstation fun
\nFighting games- GGX2, Street Fighter 3S- arcades, w\/ JS, sticking to 1 character
\nTomb Raider 2
\nZelda
\nZork<\/p>\n
2025 substack draft:<\/p>\n
\n- gaming\n
\n- So, the trajectory of my substack so far has been, 1, searing bold ambitious vision, We Were Voyagers, 2, frustrated \u201caugh there\u2019s too many things\u201d, 3, \u201ci don\u2019t wanna!\u201d, and here we are. I still have a whole bunch of serious and important things that I want to write. But I don\u2019t want to write about serious and important things right now. I want to fuck around and have fun. What do I do when I want to have fun? I do notice that when I\u2019m tired, burnt out, feeling overwhelmed, etc, I tend to return to video games. I wouldn\u2019t really describe myself as a serious gamer \u2013 although I\u2019m very excited to get to drop the fact that I completed Doom (2016) on the hardest difficulty setting (Ultra-Violence), which is a somewhat Serious Gamer thing to do.<\/li>\n
- Anyway, so this post is \u201cVisa talks about gaming\u201d, which I\u2019ve done a few times before, but I\u2019ll do it again because I enjoy it. The earliest games I remember were the ones that my brothers were playing on their Sega console \u2013 Bare Knuckle (aka Streets of Rage \u2013 side-scrolling beat em up), some F1 racing game, some FIFA soccer game\u2026 Prince of Persia 2, Duke Nukem 3D was something I was quite obsessed about. Simcity 3000…<\/li>\n
- this is too boring and too slow, I should pick one particular game and go into that. simcity feels like the right one.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
2016: What\u2019s the first video game you ever played? I\u2019m not entirely sure. I recall watching my brothers play games on their Sega Megadrive. They played Street Fighter 2, and Bare Knuckle, and Fifa 95, and some Formula 1 racing games. I also remember Midnight Resistance, a Contra clone with… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23],"tags":[180,294],"class_list":["post-4783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-games","tag-memoirs-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5gxNz-games","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4783"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14708,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4783\/revisions\/14708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}