I'm in a sharing mood so I figured I'd take a post or two to talk about some games that I feel count as "get to know me" games. These aren't necessarily my favorite games, and they're certainly not the games I'm best at. But all of them are games that live in my brain and that I come back to play, no matter how long ago they came out. And I'd like to highlight a few of them.
Cryptark
I remember hearing about this game on a podcast and deciding to try it out, and it hit way harder than I expected it to. I'm glad Alien Trap finally got Gunhead out, but like a lot of games that shifted from 2D to 3D in the sequel, it's hard to capture the energy of the original thing.
Climb into an armored space suit and enter a flotilla of ancient alien ships. Your job: board wrecks crawling with active biomechanical security systems and shut them down so the salvage teams can clean up behind you. It's a series of fast-paced zero-g brawls in a race against the clock for better pay.
It's fast and frantic, with an industrial techno soundtrack you can stomp your feet to. Once in a while I'll have an idle thought about this game and immediately feel the need to sink another 10 hours into it.
Fun fact: I didn't realize Jerma did voice acting for this game until last year.
Highfleet
My library is filled with roguelikes that I've played hours of and never beaten, and this is one of them. That hasn't stopped me from trying another run every few months.
Highfleet is a blend of dogfighting and strategy. Your task, as the last remaining fleet of the Romani Empire, is to fly across the desert to the city of Gerat to capture something of critical importance to the rebel nobles of the Gathering. Make allies along the way, plot your course around strike groups and tactical fleets with enough firepower to flatten cities, and get into dogfights with wonderfully detailed flying boxes powered by pressured methane.
It's a game that has a LOT going on. There is a tactical layer where you navigate your fleet, and an encounter system where you fly single ships in 2D dogfights. There's also a lunar lander minigame to dock your ships in the cities of the desert of Gerat, and that's before we get into all the hidden information in the game. Nothing is purely decorative- if there's a dial, or a switch, or a meter on the UI, it serves a purpose. It's aesthetically rich and has a ton of depth.
I may be too hasty for my own good on the strategic layer, but I can make a Lightning interceptor fly circles that'll make you dizzy.
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Sometimes, after a long day at work, all you want to do is knock off, crack open a drink, and pretend to do a different demanding job for 3 hours. Maybe that's just me. Euro Truck Simulator's continued success says otherwise.
Not a whole lot to say here- It's Euro Truck Sim. It's a game about buying a truck, and driving that truck across sweeping virtual landscapes. It's very pretty and lets you indulge in the romantic image of long-haul trucking without having to confront how stressful that job actually is. And that's kind of okay. You do technically "manage" a company, but that's a fancy way of saying "you can give a truck to another virtual driver and have a magic passive income stream". At the end of the day it's just about hooking up a trailer to your truck and driving it from one place to another. I find it relaxing.
Midway through the pandemic I splurge-purchased a racing wheel, and without a doubt, ETS2 is the game that's given me the most use from that wheel.
House of the Dying Sun
House of the Dying Sun is a space dogfighting game. The background is laid out in the opening text crawl, set to a tolling bell: "The emperor is dead, The royal guard has been scattered, and a false king sits upon the throne. Execute the emperor's final edict: hunt the traitor lords and bring ruin to their people."
House of the Dying Sun is a game about playing the bad guys. It's a series of assassination missions against nobles who betrayed the empire, in which you take control of royal guard interceptors sent to take out their fleets. It's an incredibly nihilistic story that is dressed up in an incredibly compelling aesthetic package. Audio mixing reminiscent of Homeworld, a mix of pomp and grit that calls Dune to mind, fonts that feel like they were taken from the covers of 70's sci-fi novels, and the whole thing is set to a soundtrack of driving taiko drums and ambient synths.
Like Highfleet, it kind of has a lot going on. It's a well-executed dogfighting game, with one shining highlight being the "drift" button. Pressing it cuts your engines and lets your fighter drift along the path of its momentum while rotating the ship freely. You start with a single interceptor, but build up a small squadron. After a while you unlock destroyers that you can order to support you on increasingly difficult missions. There's a tactical map where you can view the battlefield and the ships in it like a 3D diorama, and even jump between interceptors. That's diagetic, by the way, you're a third party possessing interceptor pilots to lead these missions. In each mission there is a ticking clock before a traitor flagship and its escorts arrive, and until you have reached literally the final mission of the game, they will always outgun you.
This may sound like a lot to juggle but it's all in service of an incredibly tight dogfighting challenge. Missions last anywhere from 2 to 4 minutes, max. I don't speedrun games, but at my best, I could complete the entire game in 3-4 hours. It's a knife's-edge experience that very few other games have managed to capture, save maybe Cryptark. It's very much a game about mastery and repetition.
Dance like a blade through overwhelming firepower, strike fast, and vanish in the blink of an eye. I still play through the campaign at least once or twice a year.