Last time I talked about my childhood and the games I’m most nostalgic about. We left off circa 2005 when the XBox 360 and Wii were announced.

Never had I been more excited for a game than Super Smash Bros: Brawl and Halo 3. Unlike a lot of the current games that are being thrown into circulation, they really held up to the hype. Halo 3 to this day definitely still has my favorite campaign in any first-person shooter. And as far as Brawl goes, we somehow managed to melt the original disc we had. I still have no idea how that even happened, but man, we played that game so much.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I started getting to the age where I started trying really hard. Now that I knew how games work, I could practice a lot and be the best, too. (As a tangent I won’t get into now, I was also completely narcissistic until sometime during high school). Halo 3 was also the first game that I played online. (I was around ten or eleven at the time. No I didn’t have a mic.) These games I played on the 360 were the generally the first installments of games I really got into (Halo being the exception). I played a ton of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, Guitar Hero 3 and its later games, Call of Duty (Modern Warfare 2 was definitely the best one), Assassin’s Creed, Bioshock (the first game I beat on Hard mode the first time through), Left 4 Dead, etc. This is the point where I’m not simply old enough to remember these games, but I am starting to understand and play them well.

On the Wii, we played Super Smash Bros: Brawl the most, as I said, but I played Wii Sports a lot. Tennis most of all, which I did so much my skill was literally off the charts (in the game). I also played Mario Kart: Wii a bunch. I played it so much, in fact, that I got three stars on every grand prix (meaning first place on every single course), and then proceeded to beat half of the “expert” ghosts, which were designed to be difficult. I did a review in which I compared that game to the new one, Mario Kart 8. I liked the old one better. I also played Super Mario Galaxy and beat my first Zelda game, Twilight Princess. Mostly, though I played Brawl. I’m that guy that plays Marth a lot. Sorry.

As far as PC gaming goes, it didn’t really catch on for me yet. I played some old browser games like Neopets (you can still find my profile page at “kollin5”), Adventure Quest, and a few other websites with questionable trustworthiness. Later, I was introduced to World of Warcraft. I remember running around Loch Modan with a level twenty-ish night elf hunter auto-attacking creatures with a vendor bought sword. Don’t judge me I was like eight. But having a very limited number of computers (basically one), the introduction of WoW to us made the sibling war of who got to play and for how long got so bad that at one point we were only allowed on for an hour at a time and we had a schedule printed out that told us what time slot we had that day. Seriously. Those were dark times.

(As a side note, my brother and I also played some other RPGs with a friend after we stopped playing WoW for a while. We went through at least three, probably playing each for about a month or so. Also Minecraft fits in here somewhere. Probably around 2011 or so. Guild Wars 2 was also a big one for a while.)

It continued like that for a while. For several years we played games until the next one came out. Halo: ODST and later Halo: Reach, all the Assassin’s Creed games, and when Elder Scrolls: Skyrim came out that was another huge time sink. In general, though, we stayed where we were at for a few years. That is, until League of Legends came along.

I’ve probably played about two thousand games of League. Each game being an average of about thirty minutes or so, that equals quite a bit of hours. The funny thing about that is that it probably doesn’t hold a candle to my current playtime of Warcraft, but we played it with varying frequency for several years. I even have about five different League t-shirts. During the last five years I’ve also put a lot of time into Diablo 3, Terraria, Destiny, Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and some other things that escape my mind.

These days, I don’t have a whole lot of free time. But if I did, I would be playing more Warcraft and Overwatch.