I started playing Minecraft in 2013-07-02, well I think started slightly before that but this is as far back I can trace. It was popular back then, my cousins were playing it, so I played with them, on iPad. I remember my first giant dirt shack built in creative, I didn't even know what dirt meant, just that I chose a block that looks cool and built a big house, and then I put things in it, and then I built random shit around, and a roller coaster, and that world got laggy so I moved on to another.
There was a survival world, before caves were a thing on Pocket Edition so there was only strip-mining, and world was small and iron was a rare resource, so what I did was just strip mine with stone pickaxes, saving my iron such that when I eventually find diamonds I could mine them. Eventually I think an update added cheats, child me thought it would be cool to switch to creative to give me tons of diamond blocks (remember that diamonds were extremely rare here, I didn't even have diamond tools after hours of mining), so I did that and quickly got bored of that world, and felt extremely guilty.
So I made a creative world, now that an update meant the world is infinite, I made a superflat world and built a street on it, with my house, and then police stations, fire stations, stores, all sorts of stuff, I think I built how I imagined a university would look like, while in reality it is basically a primary school, cuz that was all that I knew. Eventually my dad changed the password for the iPad for exam seasons, as he usually does, but problem with this time is that he forgot the password, and the iPad had to be factory reset, which means my worlds are all gone.
Somewhere around 2014 I convinced him to buy me Minecraft on Windows. It was so influential to me, I started learning English extremely fast through playing Minecraft in English, went from bottom of my class to top of my class with little to no effort. Watched a lot of English Minecraft YouTubers content, Stampy, DanTDM, and PopularMMOs. I don't have the password to my account, in fact I kept confusing "password" and "passport", so when I asked my dad for passport cuz I want to log in and change my skin he gets all confused. Watching DanTDM and PopularMMOs made me want to try mods, but I couldn't for my life figure out how to install mods. So for the first 2 years I was an Alex skin playing vanilla Minecraft. I remember when my friend told me that I can use a command block to summon Dr Trayaurus.
Joined Hypixel in 2015, loved Skywars even though I was so bad at it. Started watching Technoblade around 2016, and tried to do YouTube for a summer as JimTMK (Jim the Minecraft King), name influenced by DanTDM, videos inspired by Technoblade, as in unedited Skywars commentary, even though I would just lose 3 games while talking broken English in a heavy accent in a 10-year-old boy voice with a cheap microphone, and then end recording and upload directly. Eventually summer ended and I stopped, and I also changed my name to SuperNoobCraft, to make my opponents in Skywars think I am a noob and underestimate me. To this day quite a lot of my friends, especially the ones that have played Minecraft with me, still call me "Noob".
Kept playing Hypixel and watching Techno, loved Bedwars, would play with my friends after school. I remember being such a Minecraft defender in 2018 when everyone thinks Minecraft is an old unpopular children's game and we're too old for that (they were PUBG mobile players), I was proudly proclaiming my love for Minecraft, and I watched Techno every time he uploads. Asked my friend who had a credit card to help me buy VIP, then VIP+, then MVP+.
2019 was insane, Techno blew up, Hypixel blew up with Skyblock, I got addicted to Skyblock, 2020 and Covid made the addiction worse, but those were good times. NoobSMP started its first season in 2020, because the fact that Techno was playing modern versions (through SMP-Earth I guess) made me want to do that too (I've been stuck on 1.8.9 since 1.9 released), and the fact that everyone was stuck home meant that we could actually play together quite often. This was when I started "recruiting" and "sponsoring" people to play Minecraft to grow the SMP. Tried YouTubing for one more video in 2023 after I got semi-well-known through Viprah's video, but adding the subtitles took me 2 weeks of editing after school while I still had to do my homework and study and sleep at 9pm so I decided it wasn't maintainable long term.
Minecraft will forever hold a special place in my heart, Technoblade might be one of my biggest influences growing up, I remember crying so much the night "So Long Nerds" came out. I don't think I have the need to explain what makes it special. It's Minecraft, if you know you know. All I can really say is that even if I don't play it as much as I used to, it will always be part of me. It is the birthplace of SuperNoobCraft, and it has earned its rightful spot on top of this list.
Pokémon Run and Bun might honestly be the most romantic game of all time. Huh? Romantic? Yes. I don't know man. I like to larp that I have played it as a nuzlocke, when in reality I have never had a proper run past Roxanne. I did play through the game a few times though in varying rulesets. Random encounters, reset on fights until I beat them deathless. Or sandbox, i.e. infinite scales. Or literally playing it sort of like a regular Pokémon game, choose my encounters (still 1 per route), infinite scales, and I try to solve every fight deathless with as few risks as possible.
Even if I am not good enough to properly beat this game, technically my furthest of these kinds of runs stopped at Juan's gym due to burn out, it is still an amazing game. Every fight is designed such that you always have to craft the perfect team to beat it, well unless it is Flannery but Flannery split is enough of a slog we deserved this. The few runs that I did, I remember spending hours every day obsessing over the calc. And each playthrough would be months at a time due to the sheer length of the game. You can still find proof of my first run through the game on YouTube where I recorded myself beating the first 6 gym leaders deathless. During that period I was supposed to be on Study Leave for my DSE exam, yet I spent all my time playing Pokémon.
Why do I call this game romantic? Well to me romantic is just me saying that it is an epic adventure, where you develop lifelong friendships, where you walk the hard path not because you have to but because you want to see what lies beyond. pChal's video captures this better than I ever could. I remember waking up midnight to catch his Elite 4 stream, watching him get Frozen and steer and ultimately win. But honestly, what kind of game can you have a companion for months to go through insane gauntlets with you, to always clutch up, reaching every new level cap with you, that's Run and Bun to me. That's why I say it is romantic. The stories you can tell from this game, man, the stories. I even did a poster about fighting a gauntlet in Juan's gym for an HKU project, as an analysis of cognitive processes. That was some of the most fun I've ever had doing homework.
Maybe there are some RPG or actually story focused games out there that tells a better story. Maybe there are competitive games that via the competitive scene offer you a personal journey nothing can replace. But to me, Run and Bun is the game that tells the best story about the player themself, not in a 4th wall breaking Deltarune way, but literally, this is the player's journey with their Pokémon. This is what the Pokémon anime tries to convey while their easy ass base games could never replicate. This is Celeste on a whole other level.
Onto the actual gameplay, it's fucking Pokémon what do you want from me. pChal describes it quite well in my opinion, it's unique in the way that it is a puzzle game where you cannot look up a solution online because everyone has different pieces. Again, regular Pokémon games can do that too but they are piss easy so who cares. That feeling when you are staring at your box and your calculator and the spreadsheet for 8 hours, feeling absolutely hopeless, thinking there is no solution (because that's very much a possibility), to finally find a line that might work, to executing that line taking 2 minutes to click each move cuz you're so fucking scared, that feeling, that adrenaline, there is nothing out there that comes close.
I also want to take this chance to ramble about how cool some specific designs this game has. Intentional or not, stuff like the double Emergency Exit berry bug, or the complex setup that allows you to potentially steal the leftovers on Tate and Liza, these makes normally forgotten Pokémon like Golisopod and Kecleon really shine. The economy is well designed, the scales when played with standard hardcore nuzlocke rules are actually usually just enough for you to get by, the limited level-cap breaking rare candies for more economy and resource management, so fucking cool. I also really like how the AI is designed such that it is mostly predictable but definitely contains random checks. As well as the enemy team designs, encounters, scale economy, everything is extremely well balanced, which is so difficult for a solo project that is this long within a genre that has such high variance. Even from a game designer perspective this game rocks.
Yeah, I love Run and Bun, I have never beaten the game, I have never got past Roxanne in a hardcore nuzlocke. Does that make me a larper? Maybe, but I don't really care.
At first I only had 4 games on the Wii: SMBWii, MKWii, Wii Sports Resort, and Mario Party 8. Then my dad went and got my Wii modded by one of those shady stores, came with a USB full of games. I played the hell out of SMBWii, MKWii, Mario Party 9, Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Mario Sports Mix, basically any game that had Mario in it that I had access to. Some years later, still only having a Wii when the Switch was almost out, I discover a game on the Wii called Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where Mario can fight Pokémon Trainer. I think I watched a set of M2k vs ESAM at Smash Con and was so attracted to the game I had to try it out. My dad went back to the shady stores, got a new USB with tons of random games in it, including many duplicates from the last USB, but most importantly there is Brawl.
I got very hooked, just playing on the Wiimote, playing subspace, the usual. But eventually I discovered that there is an even cooler game, Melee, and by this point I have learned how to do Wii modding on my own (I was like 12, thinking back it was very impressive). So I installed Nintendont and booted up Melee, but even with a newly bought Gamecube Controller knockoff, movement felt very terrible, I was not used to the lack of a buffer system and the L-cancelling. And living in Hong Kong with no competitive scene, and no friends or siblings to play with, it felt really terrible grinding against Level 9 CPUs who despite how bad I am at the game, is still infinitely worse than me.
That's when I came across Project+, with much stronger CPUs, all the Brawl characters playable, and options for input assist (buffering) and auto L-cancel, I was in love. I spent hours playing during the pandemic, just grinding against CPUs, trying to do wavedashes without much thought and getting punished by it, getting very intimidated when the Fox CPU multishines on me. I think coming from Brawl and as a kid who loved to play broken stuff, I used Meta Knight at first, but I quickly noticed how nerfed he is and it just does not feel as fun anymore, so I think my first main in P+ was Squirtle? I remember thinking to myself, finally I like a character well enough and am engaged enough with the gameplay (unlike base Brawl) that I was remembering what exactly each Aerial attack of Squirtle did. Which sounds like nothing yes but I have a vivid memory of being proud of that so let me have that.
Eventually I started spending more and more time on the computer and less on the Wii plugged into the TV. I played a lot more Super Smash Flash 2 during this era, but when I got an upgrade to my computer (I was previously using 9-years-old hardware) I could finally run Dolphin on it and play P+ on my desktop. And after months of playing SSF2 on keyboard, I find myself moving smoothly like never before, I was able to do wavedashes and ledgedashes much easier, do Aerials easier, I have always been a keyboard person more than a controller person from the years of Minecraft, so it clicked and by this point I have been following the Melee scene after watching the Emplemon Hungrybox video, so I tried out the Melee top tiers that I see and I could actually sort of feel like I am playing Melee with Fox, Marth, Sheik, Falco, and Puff. Even now I still often get the urge to boot up P+ and play a few matches against Level 9 CPUs, absolutely amazing game.
Every time I try to make a favorite games of all time list, Super Smash Flash 2 is always suspect tested. I always want to put it in my top 5, and then I see it next to Project+ and think they occupy too much of the same kind of game, it's like I kind of don't want 2/5 of my list to just be Smash. And since I think P+ is usually the "better" game I might end up leaving SSF2 off the list, but to do this is unfair, so here it is.
It's hard not to make comparisons to P+, or even other Smash games in general. Honestly SSF2 might be the most fun I have had playing Smash. There are obviously things I miss from P+, SSF2 with directional airdodge might just be my favorite game of all time, but there are a lot of things that SSF2 does that ends up fitting my tastes better. As mentioned in the P+ essay, I am a keyboard player. Even though I can play P+ with keyboard now, I always feel like controls aren't as tight over there. Here in SSF2, the controls are built for keyboard, everything works the way you'd expect them to.
I remember discovering SSF2 when scrolling Twitter on my parents' bed. It was exam season, probably January, and I was like this looks so amazing, pixel art Smash is what I need, and I was like please remember this exists when exam season is done and I can play games on my computer again. Of course I remembered, and that year every day after school I would be playing SSF2, on the way to school I would be thinking about "wave-landing" using Yoshi's double jump, or imagining myself comboing using Falco on Yoshi's Story. I begged every one of my friend to play it, some did try once, but none continued. But at this point I was used to fighting CPUs in Smash. At some point SSF2 was right next to the Minecraft launcher pinned on my task bar. That's how often I played it.
Around this time I watched the EmpLemon Hungrybox video, and fell in love with Jigglypuff, so logically I played Jigglypuff on SSF2, and oh my god Puff feels so good here, air movement was so smooth using keyboard, landing rests was so much easier than on P+, fun times. I think I considered maining like half the cast at some point, cuz all of them were so fun. Then based on the pool of characters I liked playing, I tried to analyze every match-up and choose the best character against each character, I made a whole .txt that I still have.
SSF2 Jigglypuff and SSF2 Peach might be my favorite Smash characters, turnip combos are so fun with Peach on SSF2, I never figured out how to do item combos on Ultimate or Brawl or Melee, but here I am actually able to regrab turnips consistently and extend combos. Aside from those 2, I also really enjoy using Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Yoshi, Wario, Waluigi, DK, Sheik, Pichu, Meta Knight, Fox, Falco, Samus, Falcon, Marth, Ryu, and Black Mage, probably some more that I don't remember myself liking currently but used to like, but you get the idea.
I also had SSF2 loaded on my USB. During ICT class in high school, my teacher would lock the computers via a network program so we have to pay attention, so I remember unplugging the LAN cable at the back of the PC to pull it offline, then loading SSF2 via USB to play during class. I was still paying attention and answering questions and correcting my teacher as usual, but just that I am able to have fun while he talked about boring stuff. Very fun.
SSF2 gave me a lot of happy memories, and it deserves its place on here.
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