Skyrim
The fifth game in the Elder Scrolls series Skyrim, recently turned 11 years old earlier this month. For many of gamers in the 18-30 range, Skyrim holds a very special place in our hearts. I know for me personally it was my first Bethesda game and my first RPG that I ever played. I can vividly remember as a 12-year-old kid the first time I completed that long and drawn-out intro at Helgen and finally stepped out into that vast open world. The Complete lack of restrictions and freedom offered to the player at that moment is one of my favorite feelings I have ever felt in the history of video games. I can remember instantly wondering off the beaten path, ignoring all story, and immediately jumping into a cave dungeon to explore and figure out combat. All this reminiscing aside, Skyrim is a game that the gaming team here on Twitch both hold near and dear to our hearts. For both of us Skyrim is among the most played games of our entire lives with each of us pouring hundreds of hours into exploring and slashing our way through that vast open world. What made Skyrim special to the both of us is that for the very first time while playing a video game I felt like I had entered another world. There were entire new cultures, customs, ways to keep time, places to visit. To this day Skyrim is still one of the most immersive games in existence as very few games have ever had a world so fleshed out and filled with content to explore. To give an example I have played and beaten Skyrim multiple times, put hundreds of hours into the game, and explored relentlessly. But if I wanted to, I could load up Skyrim right now start walking in a random direction and eventually probably quickly find a new dungeon or event that I have never encountered in all my time playing up until now. This is what makes Skyrim so special to the both of us, that sense of exploring and encountering the unknown the game has captured perfectly. This is not the say that the game is perfect, even though we are viewing it through the most nostalgic of nostalgia goggles we can admit it is not perfect. The combat can be repetitive and there are still many, many bugs all throughout the game 11 years later (Bethesda). All this being said despite its flaws, we love Skyrim. Throughout the good times and bad through all our lives, Skyrim has always been an excellent distraction to completely dive into and forget the worries of your current life. The role-playing aspect may be cringey, but life is cringe, WE are all cringe. Sometimes we just must realize that enjoying things is better than not enjoying things and not every aspect of life needs to be thought about critically. In this way we can still play, love and enjoy Skyrim to this day.
NCAA Football 14
The untimely Death of the NCAA sport video games series will always hold trauma for a center percentage of gamers. The NCAA basketball and football video game series were around for many years dating back to the beginning of this century. A mainstay in any dorm our house in the south especially, The NCAA football video game was quite literary life for many of us growing up throughout our childhood. And Especially as a child of Alabama, most of you may know but we have no major professional sports teams here in the state of Alabama. No NFL or NBA teams so as a kid, the only representation I could find in any sports game was through the NCAA video game series. I can remember creating 15-20 yearlong dynasties in the coaching mode. Taking a team like Toledo or Vanderbilt from nothing and building them up slowly over time to make them national contenders used to take up countless hours of my time. But where I invested most of my time was in the Road to Glory mode. This mode allowed you to create your own individual player them send them through high school football and 4 years of college. You could make Quarterbacks, Linebackers, receivers, or whatever you wanted to play and be that on whatever team you wanted (if you were good enough for them to offer you a scholarship). I think I probably created over a hundred different characters and sent them to all sorts of different types of schools throughout my life. I can remember spending so many uncountable hours grinding away at this mode making new characters, winning Heismans, and losing national championships because my team choked at the end. Unfortunately, most of know about the tragic end that unfortunate came to the Ncaa sports video game series. Because of a lawsuit involving Ed Obannon, who was an ex-basketball player in college. Back in the day NIL was not a thing so college players weren’t allowed to make money off their name, image, or likeness. So, rightly so, Obannon had a problem with NCAA putting generic but basically exact replicas into the games of players who received no compensation from the actual video game itself. It was due to this reason that the lawsuit was filed and eventually the both the basketball and football versions of the NCAA videogames were discontinued. This is what makes NCAA 14 specifically so special, it was the last game made in 2013 before the ban. However, this story has a happy ending, the NCAA Football video game is not dead. 8 years after the series was killed EA announced that they are reviving the game and compensating players using the new NIL system. This means my childhood, for the first time in 8 years, is finally back. Starting in Summer of 2023 there will be a new NCAA Football videogame that will be released on next generation consoles.
