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American J. McGee, Spicy Horse
GTA3 is the game I gave away and re-purchased a total of three times. When it was in the house I found it almost impossible not to play it and it wasnt even about playing it, but about just cruising around the city and finding fun things to do. There was a comic feel to everything from how the pedestrians sounded when you ran them over to the handling of the vehicles that just kept me coming back for more. New additions to the franchise began to, like so many sequels to successful games do, take themselves too seriously. The fun went out of squishing people as they walked down the sidewalk.
Kudo Tsunoda, Corporate Vice President of Next Gen Experiences, Xbox
Picking a favorite game was probably the hardest part of writing this. I am lucky enough that I get to play a ton of games both as part of my life and as part of my job. My favorite tends to be whatever game I am currently addicted to the most that day. Currently I have been playing the heck out of Fable: The Journey. While this game will not be released until fall, I am lucky enough to have a copy in progress. But so much of the game is already there that I am hooked!
How you use your hands to conjure up magic will dramatically affect the combat. Each subtle change in what you do will change the impact of the magic you are using. No matter how much I play the game, I keep finding new things I did not know I could do. I was playing Fable: The Journey at home and was in a 4 hour stretch totally immersed in the experience. Having just had a new baby, my wife was very irritated that I had been playing games for so long and was not being more helpful around the house. She came and asked me to help her with some things and I got a bit frustrated. But I agreed I would stop playing after I got done with this one encounter. So in the most passive aggressive move ever, as I was casting magic in the game, I started yelling the commands of what I was doing so I could annoy her upstairs. So when I was casting a fireball spell, I was yelling FIREBALL!! as well.
As I was doing this, I started to realize that yelling my magic spell as I was casting it increased the power of my magic! The intensity of the magic actually reflected my emotions. My wife, who knows my immature behaviors well, came downstairs to ask me not to purposely try to annoy her. I innocently looked at her and explained that my yelling was not me being passive aggressive, but was an actual part of the gameplay. I was increasing the power of my magic so I could get done playing as fast as possible and be able to help her sooner. Thanks Fable: The Journey! Your adaptive and emergent controls got me out of trouble that Sunday.
Dan Teasdale and Jim Shea, Twisted Pixel
Dan Teasdale, Lead Designer: My favourite game is Super Mario World for the SNES. It's almost design perfection - great unlock pacing, level design, skill revelation, character control and more. Miyamoto's design was one of the things that made me want to be a designer when I grew up, and I feel like Super Mario World is the clearest model of his design bent.
Jim Shea, Game Programmer:Holy crap, I have to pick ONE? Well...I threw a dart at my list of favorites and hit Tie Fighter, which I think is pretty appropriate. Having worked on a Star Wars title myself, it's depressing how much "Star Wars + Game = Crap" these days, but at least I know that back in the day the name Lucasarts Entertainment represented excellence. Tie Fighter had so much to offer my 11 year old self and really was the beginning of my life-long obsessive compulsive completionist attitude towards games. Sure, it may have taken 20 minutes to shoot down that last Mon Calimari Cruiser in my pitiful Tie Interceptor, but it was worth it to hear that, "Superlative Job, Alpha 1. Secret Bonus Objectives Completed."
Danny Baranowsky, Composer (dannyBmusic.com)
Whenever anyone asks me what my favorite game is, I always have to answer Final Fantasy 7. It's not a rational, evidence-based conclusion, but it's simply the game that I have the most love for. I had insanely high expectations for it when I was a kid, and as far as my pre-teen self was aware, it exceeded every one of them.
The graphics blew my mind, the soundtrack made me cry, and the amount of stuff there was to do was insane, and the epic-before-the-word-epic-was-ruined story ensured that my after school hours were occupied for months to come. If I think real hard about it, it may not be the BEST game out there, but it's definitely the one that occupies that all-important, gooey, sentimental "top spot".
