My Favourite Video Game: Take It Or Leave It
My Favourite Video Game is a guest feature from bands and artists where we set them a simple task… tell us about your favourite video game. In this feature all four members of punk rock band, Take It Or Leave It, accept the challenge.
Devon: If I HAD to pick only one, deserted island style, it’d probably be Okami. The narrative is compelling and the world is large and varied. A great mix of humor and tension, the pacing never shoves you along, and it lets you explore at your own pace. Plus the absolutely stunning art style makes wandering around a serene, meditative experience. Also, you play as a wolf FFS. Come on! (Honorable mentions go to Disco Elysium, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Metal Gear Solid, and Omori…seriously play Omori, it’s incredible, you will cry).
Craig: I like Dead Island, it’s a really good game. I also like the spinoff Dead Island Riptide but not so much Dead Island 2 because it became a totally different game. It made the game more cartoonish and forced multi-player unnecessarily. Honorable mentions include the Assassins Creed franchise and Super Mario World for the SNES. If I’m going RPG/strategy, I’m going with Shining Force for Sega Genesis. That was a fun game with lots of secrets to unlock. I would play it in Jr High for hours. Not so much the sequel to that one either for the same reasons, it made a cartoonish game even more so.
Nick: Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the SNES. I have so many fond memories of playing that game as a kid. It might have been the first game I completed 100% of it. All the suits, swords, hearts and magic. At the time, it was just such a groundbreaking game, battling through this huge world (both light and dark), so many dungeons, so many bosses. I still remember all the music and boss battles. Just a perfect 10. I have to give honorable mentions to Super Mario World, Mega Man 3 and X, Street Fighter II Turbo, Metal Gear Solid, Twisted Metal 2, Resident Evil 1 and 2, Goldeneye, Final Fantasy 7 and X, Diablo 2 and Warframe.
Mario: Picking one game is super tough. Right now I’ve been playing a lot of Valheim, a viking survival game on PC, as well as the Insomniac Spider-Man series since they’ve been released on Steam. But my all time favorite would have to be Sonic Adventure 2. I must’ve put thousands of hours into City Escape, snowboarding down the paved hills of San Francisco. Crush 40, the band who did the soundtrack, is definitely a major influence on my style of music as well. It’s one of those game soundtracks that I will still regularly put on. I even just went diving into my closet and found THREE copies of the disc as well as my memory card with my name written in gel pen, so it must be old. If I wasn’t playing that, I was probably replaying Fable or Kingdom Hearts, so those would probably round out my top 3.
Bonus Question (as per Mario): Which system had the best controller?
Devon: PS5 controller for me. Haptic triggers all day and I grew up on PlayStation. I’m an unashamed Sony-Cronie.
Craig: PlayStation 1. It was ergonomic and simple. D-pad, four buttons, L, R, select and start. Sega Genesis’ advanced controller had the six for Street Fighter 2 and that just made things complicated. The 16 bit console Jaguar came with a very complex controller for its time. That’s probably why it failed so miserably.
Nick: I think the PS2 controller was perfection.
Mario: GameCube is the goat (thanks Sonic) but my Xbox One controllers are rising up my list.
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