My 5 favorite games/moments, in no particular order:

- "Zanac" for NES. When my parents finally gifted a NES for my 10th birthday, my uncle gave me some weird game that surely came from a discount rack. I never heard of it, couldn't understand it, it was brutally hard... so I hated it. A couple years later I was a bored, better plater, so I tried it again... and it clicked. Still not easy, but I began to understand the patterns and the reactive A.I. - yes, this game had an "AI" (as any could have existed then) and once I got to unlock this game's secrets, it became awesome. FINALLY BEATING THE DAMN THING still ranks as one of my favorite gamer career achievements. This is STILL one of my go-to keepers that keeps my NES dusted off. SO MANY great sound effects!

(Fun facts about Zanac: its sequel is better known, in the US anyway as "Guardian Legend" (also an awesome game). And it also has a weird "debug/cheat mode" whereby if you raise the NES cartridge while the system is on, then push it back down just as the system starts to reset, you can unlock all kinds of cheats and tests. This trick takes some practice for the timing. It was published in EGM back in the day and I thought it was a scam until it finally worked.)

- SNES Super Mario Kart. I'm OG MK all the way, my brother and I played and played and played that game until we broke the code along with the controllers. For a real challenge, try to play such that every character finishes a cup with at least 1 point! To really see the extent to which the CPU TURBO FUCKING CHEATS, place a peel or shell in front of a yellow bounce tile to trick the CPU characters into jumping over the obstacle - into the hole - and watch insanity follow as it cheats for catchup. A well-placed obstacle will trick multiple CPU drivers and then all bets are off - for that lap, anyway.

- PC Diablo II - fond memories of LAN parties, and to this day the only PC game my wife ever got sucked into.

- GameCube, Cel Damage - a simplistic but underrated game. Looney Tunes meets Carmageddon. My kids and siblings and I *STILL* keep this around because of the insanity; put it on a booming sound system and the sound effects just add to the delightfully chaotic mayhem. 3 or 4 player Flag Rally against ramped-up CPU with all weapons unlocked is about as close as you can have a pinball-style "WTF?!?! Just?!? HAPPENED???! BWAHAHALOL!" experience with a video game. (my favorite character occasionally goes on a full-on censored profanity rant for good measure).

- NES Metroid - first game I truly got completely and imaginatively sucked into. It was desolate and creepy and challenging, the heart-pounding escape at the end, and then the hero turns out to be a girl?!?! *11yo headasplode*