I had been through four consoles and five jobs before most of the games in the notes had come out.
My top five were virtually chiselled on stone tablets by comparison :)
- Star Fox 64, for sure
- Half Life was a very big deal for me. Couldn't finish it when I was 8 because it was too scary, and it felt absolutely amazing coming back at 15 and blowing through it.
- Turok 2 seeds of evil. Didn't play it outside of using the cheats. It was basically a gore Sim for me.
- LoZ series was a very big deal.
- Much later, Armored Core 4 and 4A would make me obsessed with good mech gameplay.
Man, it's hard stratifying games you care about, especially when you have a massive log of them that all impacted you in one way or another. There were a bunch of free Linux games that I have very fond memories of too, like Nexuiz, OpenArena, Abuse, etc. Also a bunch of weird niche games and demos, like One Must Fall and Food Fight and Fur Fighters. It's an impossible task, honestly.