explains

Umineko - probably my single favorite piece of media. It's not perfect, but it's perfect for me, it hit all the right buttons and sold me completely on VNs and reignited my love of reading. Plus the OST owns.

I probably would be yet another person who only read the Ace Attorney series and stopped there without Umineko (and Remember11). And, well, since that didn't happen, VNs and reading became a big part of my life again.

Would recommend everyone try it and get through chapter 1. I bet a lot of people will get hooked like I did.

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ALttP - the first Nintendo game I really loved, and I think it was the first SNES game I played, or one of them anyways. Obviously, I'm still big into Nintendo games and games that make you explore and games that are challenging. ALttP was probably the first game that checked all those boxes. Plus I speedran it later so that was a thing.

Really, OoT should be here too, because I loved it just as much, a question about it is how I first really met puchie and got involved with speednerds.

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Starcraft - I played the crap out of Starcraft, and it led to my love of strategy games. Too bad RTS is dead genre, but I eventually branched out to 4X games like Civ, Endless, and recently HoMM3. These games own, and I probably wouldn't have tried this genre if I didn't have a friend who got me into Starcraft.

It also led to me devouring all the classiq Blizzard games: WC2, Diablo 2, great stuff

Plus, it led to me discovering the joys of modded games (custom games), WC3, eventually WoW, connecting to a bunch of college friends, and continuing the legacy of Bolt even after people started disappearing. I probably wouldn't be hanging out with Talon, Dave, or maybe Q still if I didn't end up playing WoW.

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Pokemon - I picked Gen 3 because that's when it stopped being "that thing literally every kid plays" and more of something that *I* really enjoy outside of any fad. It's also when I joined a silly little forum RPG called "Boltage's Pokemon RPG". If you've wondered why we call ourselves the Bolt crew, it's because me, Talon, and Q originally met there when I was like 12. Somehow, we've managed to keep in touch 15+ years later, partially because of our shared appreciation of a silly monster catching series that owns.

I'm still hoping they never remake gen 4, fingers crossed.