Posted February 04, 2016
I believe I am somewhat of an oddity among the gaming community.
I’ve been a gamer from a long time. One of my first true games (and still one of my top favorites to this day) was Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. I was for a very, very long time a pure PC-Gamer and I saw (and still see) playing video games akin with reading a book. I enjoyed the world the games were creating, the atmosphere they set, the characters you encountered in them and, first of all, the story they told.
I don’t know if I made myself understood, so I’ll tell you some of my favorite games (in no particular order) in hope they will draw the rest of the picture:
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
• Final Fantasy VII
• Max Payne 1 & 2
• The Legacy of Kain series (most of all Blood Omen, Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance)
• Anachronox
• The Monkey Island Series
• The Broken Sword Series
• Clive Barker’s Undying
• Sanitarium
• Deus Ex
• Uncharted (all 3 of them)
• Fallout (1 and 2 and I hated 3 – I felt it was The Elders Scrolls with guns and not true to the spirit of the original)
• The Blackwell Legacy
• Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2 but most of all Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark)
• Prince of Persia – The Sand of Time Trilogy
• The Book of Unwritten Tales
• The Wolf Among Us
• To The Moon
• The World Ends With You
• Gothic
There are games that I liked very much that don’t fall in the same category with the others (but are still among my favorites) like Diablo (especially Diablo 2) or Severance: Blade of Darkness (I’ve searched, without success, for a game like it for a very long time – until Demon Souls came out and my search was over).
I tried playing multiplayer games (Counter-Strike) or MOBA (DOTA 2) and found them boring: they had no story, the fight had no meaning and so I stopped. But then I discovered the Co-Op Campaign and, with my then-girlfriend and now-wife, had a copious amount of fun playing games. We liked Couch-Co-Ops the most (like X-Men 2: Age of Apocalipse or Justice League Heroes). Unfortunately good Couch-Co-Ops died almost entirely with the PS2-Era (with a few exceptions - Borderlands and Gears of War being the most known).
Relatively recent I found out that gamers refer to the type of player that I am as a “Single Player Purist”. Pretty accurate, but I feel pretty lonely. I tried following some forums but my sense of loneliness grew even worse: if a game didn’t have multiplayer it was not worth playing and to like a linear game was one of the greatest sins.
In a nutshell: I’m a single-player-purist (almost) that plays games first of all for the story they tell, likes linear games (the last I played was Shadow Warrior 2013 and for me was like a breath of fresh air) and who enjoys adventure games and a good Couch-Coop-Campaign.
Am I the only one?
I’ve been a gamer from a long time. One of my first true games (and still one of my top favorites to this day) was Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption. I was for a very, very long time a pure PC-Gamer and I saw (and still see) playing video games akin with reading a book. I enjoyed the world the games were creating, the atmosphere they set, the characters you encountered in them and, first of all, the story they told.
I don’t know if I made myself understood, so I’ll tell you some of my favorite games (in no particular order) in hope they will draw the rest of the picture:
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Redemption
• Final Fantasy VII
• Max Payne 1 & 2
• The Legacy of Kain series (most of all Blood Omen, Soul Reaver 2 and Defiance)
• Anachronox
• The Monkey Island Series
• The Broken Sword Series
• Clive Barker’s Undying
• Sanitarium
• Deus Ex
• Uncharted (all 3 of them)
• Fallout (1 and 2 and I hated 3 – I felt it was The Elders Scrolls with guns and not true to the spirit of the original)
• The Blackwell Legacy
• Neverwinter Nights (1 and 2 but most of all Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark)
• Prince of Persia – The Sand of Time Trilogy
• The Book of Unwritten Tales
• The Wolf Among Us
• To The Moon
• The World Ends With You
• Gothic
There are games that I liked very much that don’t fall in the same category with the others (but are still among my favorites) like Diablo (especially Diablo 2) or Severance: Blade of Darkness (I’ve searched, without success, for a game like it for a very long time – until Demon Souls came out and my search was over).
I tried playing multiplayer games (Counter-Strike) or MOBA (DOTA 2) and found them boring: they had no story, the fight had no meaning and so I stopped. But then I discovered the Co-Op Campaign and, with my then-girlfriend and now-wife, had a copious amount of fun playing games. We liked Couch-Co-Ops the most (like X-Men 2: Age of Apocalipse or Justice League Heroes). Unfortunately good Couch-Co-Ops died almost entirely with the PS2-Era (with a few exceptions - Borderlands and Gears of War being the most known).
Relatively recent I found out that gamers refer to the type of player that I am as a “Single Player Purist”. Pretty accurate, but I feel pretty lonely. I tried following some forums but my sense of loneliness grew even worse: if a game didn’t have multiplayer it was not worth playing and to like a linear game was one of the greatest sins.
In a nutshell: I’m a single-player-purist (almost) that plays games first of all for the story they tell, likes linear games (the last I played was Shadow Warrior 2013 and for me was like a breath of fresh air) and who enjoys adventure games and a good Couch-Coop-Campaign.
Am I the only one?
