Hello! The name’s Nikolas, and after years of honing my carefully crafted and perfected skill set of ‘having opinions on games,’ I’ve been brought on these wonderfully talented train tracks as one of your newest conductors. As such, my master plan to spread my agendas across the world of games grows ever more realized.
Born, raised, and currently still in Nebraska (one of the big cities, at least), I’ve spent the last half decade or so learning basically any skills or studies that interest me: as I am a person who likes games, you can probably predict the list being along the lines of programming, modelling, texturing, drawing, rendering, rigging, animating, designing, playtesting, writing, analysis, all that good stuff. Hopefully to actually make and finish a game. It’ll happen. I’ve got that gumption in me, I’ve heard. I’ve also studied probably a college minor’s worth of anthropology, which you can blame on playing Danganronpa V3 during high school.
My history with games is not a glamorous one: I only learned what they even were after watching a video called ‘Super Homer 64’ – which was, as you may be able to guess, just Super Mario 64 gameplay with Homer Simpsons lines edited on top – when I was a 5 year old using YouTube without any supervision. After that, until I was in late high school, I was basically one of those kids online with a Mario icon that called themselves SuperMarioSuperMan1234. I was like that until I watched a couple videos making fun of XC2, thought it’d be funny to laugh at in an all cutscenes compilation, and somehow it’s now my favorite game of all time and now I actively seek out games I cannot imagine myself ever normally playing if left to my own devices. Oops!
As a result, however, the games I find myself playing, much less liking, are… wildly inconsistent. I generally find myself consistently attached to platformers, tactics RPGs, and visual novels (including the ones you’d get looked at weirdly for admitting you’ve ever touched), and I hold special places in my heart for Kingdom Hearts, Steamworld, Crash Bandicoot, Star Ocean, and Xenoblade Chronicles. I must also confess I will buy games solely because I think it’d be funny if I owned them. Car Quest isn’t gonna play itself.
So why games? Well, the way I see it, a game tells a story about its creator more than it does itself. Games are massive, sprawling, extensive in what they demand of their creators, and being able to make something that huge, being able to dedicate as much of one’s soul as you can and distill it into an art form as extreme and challenging as a game, is something I find beautiful, and I want to use that – the ability to understand people through their stories – to understand the world just a little bit better, even if on first blush they may seem goofy or stupid or… bad, if you’ll excuse the poor language.
I’m very excited to be a part of this group of famed opinion-holders and to have been granted the privilege of contributing to the team. I’m especially excited to subject the team to listening to all of my indiscriminate ramblings before I put them on here.
