9 Games to Know Me
Part of the User Manual Series where I give some brief overviews of the media, experiences, thoughts that help make me...me. Released hourly on my 32nd birthday.
Pokémon Heartgold
I vividly remember playing Pokémon Blue in the back of the car at night while driving home from my aunt's house. I would have to lift the Game Boy up to the window and play whenever a streetlamp lit up the screen enough to see what I was doing. It is probably my earliest gaming memory, but I was a little bit young at the time to really get the full experience of the game. HeartGold came to me at the perfect time when I was old enough to fully attack the wealth of content that the game provided and also have my younger brother sharing the experience.
HeartGold is the love letter to Gen 1 and 2. It's gorgeous, filled with content and is so well suited to the Nintendo DS. Pokémon in general has been such a constant in my life and HeartGold still stands strong in my eyes from Game Freaks releases. Today, between rom hacks and modern releases, there are so many options for where to start with Pokémon and none of them are necessarily wrong. This one just holds a very special place for me.
Resident Evil 4 (Wii Edition)
I first saw RE4 at a birthday party. A couple of kids were playing it on the gamecube and I had no idea what it was. It was only years later I picked it up on the Wii that I realized that this was that game I had seen in the corner of the room.
Nowadays I'm well versed in the world of Resident Evil - particularly RE4. Across all the various versions, I still think that the motion controls just add so much to the experience in this instance. It's a unique scenario as these games force you to plant your feet before shooting which lends itself so well to using the Wii mote to aim.
RE4 really is a montage of fantastic action horror scenarios and it's always a thrill to play through again and again. In recent years, the ReMake ended up being one of my most anticipated releases in a long time.
That white cover art also goes very hard.
Knights of the Old Republic
I had this old, chunky white desktop in my bedroom. I remember using it for MSN messenger...and to play Knights of the Old Republic. A whole system with access to years worth of PC games for the first time in my life and I only remember playing one game.
Maybe as an older player I enjoy the subversion of Star Wars that KOTOR II provides more but the original KOTOR is such quintessential Star Wars. It managed to set up a whole new era that has somehow managed to live beyond Disney's culling of the Legends canon.
It's a shame that we'll probably never get that remake but this is still well worth revisiting today. It also set the standard for Mass Effect.
Oblivion
Halo 3, Gears of War and Assassins Creed were the games that I got with my Xbox 360 from my parents for Christmas. It was one of those black Elite consoles, before all the revisions came in. I'm still very fond of the design but that console had to be sent off for repairs so many times.
I had a bit of Christmas money to spend from aunts and uncles and ended up picking up The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I think one of the trends from this period where I was slowly getting more serious about games was that I managed to pick up some of the biggest games of the era without really knowing anything about them.
The game opens with such a sweeping score, immediately pulling me in. Patrick Stewart lends his fantastic voice to the emperor, and the game starts you right in the action. After the tutorial section when you finally get let loose into Cyrodiil is an incredible moment - the game map promising a level of expansiveness that I had never seen before.
I found the game had a kind of emergent roleplaying aspect to it. Once I started my subsequent playthroughs I always built up this headcanon and chose which questlines to do in what order based on that. Starting as a poor prison escapee trying to make money with the thieves and fighters guilds before searching for some level of praise in the arena. Dejected, to the Realm of Madness I go before returning to redeem myself becoming a Knight of the Nine and Hero of Tamriel.
It's really a game that fueled my interest in D&D as well. That kind of character creation and dreaming of backstories. The roleplaying elements of talking to NPCs and maximising your stats. It had a massive impact on me - and I loved it so much that it made it hard to love Skyrim when it came out, such a high bar they had set!
Mass Effect
I remember being in the Square, Tallaght around 2008. It must have been a GAME or a Gamestop that I was browsing. I had traded in a couple of games and I had picked out a couple of new things. I was doing the math in my head and I remember seeing I was short €2 to add one more to the pile. I text my mom and popped out to grab some change from her waiting in the car.
I genuinely have no clue what else I bought that day. The random extra game was one that I had never heard of before - Mass Effect.
Mass Effect has such a rich world full of great characters. The first game doesn't play amazingly well (although the legendary collection makes it arguably the best of the trilogy to play) but the level of confidence that Bioware had in this world from the word go is extraordinary. Drew Karpyshyn wrote some of the best Star Wars books and his work here is stellar.
I even have Shepard's helmet tattooed on my arm now.
"It would be easy for a single ship to get lost up there, wouldn't it? To find someplace very far away, where you could live the rest of your life in peace, and happiness."
Metal Gear Solid 4
I loved my Playstation 2. Unfortunately, I was too young to have the kind of money needed to buy a Playstation 3 early on. €700? Crazy.
My 360 was well loved but it had to be sent in for repair several times because of the red ring of death. One particular time, I was sick with chicken pox so I was desperate for a distraction from the itching. My uncle's girlfriend at the time very kindly lent me her PS3 with a pile of games to keep me busy. It was a revelation.
Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction, Resistance: Fall of Man...and Metal Gear Solid 4. MGS4 is a crazy game with ridiculous amounts of exposition, very little opportunities to play and the record for the longest cutscene of all time. It was so cinematic and I really loved all the little touches that went into the design of the world.
It's so corny but it is still my favourite game in the series. I am also delighted that it is being freed from PS3 exclusivity after all these years. This game was the reason why I ended up getting a PS3 and was the gateway to even more amazing games like Uncharted, Heavy Rain and Infamous.
Persona 4 Golden
P4G came to me in the summer that led up to starting university. A game about going to a new place and meeting new friends, connecting with people. It was perfect really and the connection that the Investigation Team have made me really want to dive right into the college experience.
It's the reason why I joined the Ultimate Frisbee team, the games society, the Pokémon society. It's the reason why I ended up on the committee for the university's anime convention. It really has had a massive impact on my approach to life in general.
The music, the style, the cast...It's all incredible here. Persona 5 might be bigger and more exciting to play but there's something very special at the heart of Persona 4 that has stuck with me for a decade now.
"It's not what you have or what you can do... Just being born, living your life... before you know it, you are already special to someone."
Destiny 2
The tower became a bit of a refuge for me in the wake of a bad break-up. I had always been in and out of Destiny but this sudden shift in my personal life gave me the nudge to look for a group that would really let me experience everything that Destiny had to offer.
Thousands of hours went into this. From that first Vault of Glass run all the way to the week I'm writing this running pantheon. I've made good friends here, had some crazy moments and always come back to the game.
It's also the game that made me really embrace the fashion. I love playing dress up in Destiny. There's so much variety here.
I also think it's the game that has most consistently carried through my life. The warlock I created in the 2014 beta is the same one I play today. They are a special character to me.
Animal Crossing New Horizons
This is the Covid game, isn't it? The thing is though; it went a bit beyond that for me. I don't think I'd be saying that Pokopia is one of my favourite games of 2026 without it.
Animal Crossing came out at such an opportune time for Nintendo. For the first time in 5 years I had an abundance of free time due to my job closing down for the pandemic. Working in a school at the time, it was clear that I was going to have a LOT of free time on my hands.
New Horizons didn't really appeal to me from the offset. It was only after seeing my partner at the time play it and seeing how it absolutely rocketed in popularity online that I decided to take a chance on it.
Every patch of dirt on Inaba, my Island, was eventually filled. I was obsessed with custom designs and building all sorts of amazing sections on my island. It had a Starbucks, a football pitch, a wrestling stadium and a bunch of beautiful trails. It was such a great way to occupy the time and I think it helped me keep my sanity (for a chunk) of the pandemic.
