Decided to go a bit sentimental here and try to list games that have made a lasting impact in some way.
Top Row: PC Games: I had access to a 286~486 as the sole source of digital entertainment for a long time. It still took until 2000 for me to be able to play Myst at home instead of elsewhere. With those hardware limitations in mind, plenty of Roguelikes, dungeon crawlers and other low-res perversions abounded. I still can't recall how I stumbled upon Princess Maker 2 but I was already desperately hunting for anything Japan Enough at the time that it could've been anything.
I have of course played the canon of Good Adventure Games but it was The Neverhood's astounding art direction and almost complete absence of words that excited me the most. Too bad ol' Doug never grew up afterward.
Second Row: Various Perversions: RTS games are for perverts but Westwood were the developers who truly understood and embraced it. Nobody wants three full games of Jimmy Raynor moping about his psychic bug girlfriend gone bad. They want to order 300 troops to the front lines then laugh as a single grenadier in the rear wipes them all out. They want to do it to thumping Industrial tunes. They want multiplayer games that end in 10 minutes tops.
There's other stuff that could go in these slots but I allocated two for SRW since they renewed both an interest in Cool Japan junk and were one of the most consistently great series of games out there. There's a non-zero chance the series has actually ended with 30's release and Terada's departure from Bamco but y'know there's like 70 of these things you can go back and explore.
Third Row: Fighting Games Are Too Much Of My Life: Or are they... not enough? SF2 made me want to play these things even as the cool kids pivoted to Tekken. Guilty Gear struck me right as I was digging through my father's Black Sabbath vinyls. Melty Blood and SCWU represent my fascinations with both the best and worst of doujin game development and ABK's my full circle shift away from airdashers back to just pushing ground buttons good. It also counts as an Outfoxies tribute.
Fourth Row: Arcade: Doom is an Arcade game in emotional terms.
There's plenty of better maze games and single screen platformers but Rod-Land's the one with the Amiga port I played as a child so that's what gets the rep. Metal Slug's release was a formative moment in realising just how damn gorgeous in-game artwork can be. I've ordered the games by year of release but my love for Taito's funny fish games came much later in life than the rest. If you asked me my favourite hori shmup ten years ago I'd have probably said Gradius.
Fifth Row: Words Games: Everybody when young has an RPG which hits them like a truck. Everything involving our hero Alys Brangwyn mad a massive impact at the time and for reasons that I think I finished processing a couple of years ago.
Sakura Taisen's a weird one since I only played the game with the English translation last year but it felt like something that's always been in my life. Scouring magazines in the late 90s, saving desktop wallpapers as they appeared. Madly picking up the PS2/Wii release of 5 despite the cast feeling... wrong. It's just the sort of robot pervert nonsense I've been chasing since I watched all of Yamato one sleepy Sunday morning as a 7 year old.
Tsukihime helped me through a long, painful recovery from spinal surgery and I will defend Kohaku with my life, even if she doesn't just kill women. She murders them.
Obviously Disco Elysium's a game that deserves more than pithy line or two but it's here as much to bookend a degree of radicalisation that probably began when I played Symphonia. That's a title with reams of ambition and I think layers of the narrative get obfuscated by reductive claims about it being a "zomg racism... bad?" type game. It's not, really. Its racist elements are a part of the same exploitative institution that treats societies as puppets, people as food and food as a tool of forced scarcity. Lloyd Irving's a complete idiot but even a fool can see that the problems with society are founded on a lie. There was always enough for everyone. There always will be. The rich have to build their towers and their institutions and fund their wars because anything less makes it easy to see the truth that was always there.
I don't like the new voice for Cuno.
