It was 2009, I was 14, and I had just gotten an Xbox 360 of my own on Christmas the previous year after constantly using my brother's after school while he was at work. Having my own Xbox wasn't just liberating, but was also the first time I felt current with gaming.
However, this newfound independence made me realize I wasn't just going to borrow my brother's games forever, which I had gotten used to with my Gamecube beforehand, causing me to miss out on so many iconic games that I had only ever briefly experienced through him. This prompted me to seek out games from the previous generation that were starting to be phased out like Mario, Zelda, Resident Evil, Halo, Splinter Cell, Max Payne, GTA and so on.
For the most part, my childhood favorites have pretty much remained my favorites for all my life. But around this time, my brother and I were looking for games to play co-operatively on separate televisions via Xbox Live. It's still crazy for me to think that the first time I played Halo 3 was in split screen, which feels like forever ago. We had just started playing the Rainbow Six Vegas games right before I got my 360, so we first transitioned to Xbox Live with Rainbow Six Vegas 2, and were greatly anticipating the release of Saint's Row 2 and Resident Evil 5, and then eventually tried out other co-op games like Kane and Lynch and Army of TWO. But I still remember the summer of '09 for how much we got into Gears of War.
Despite this, my tastes in games were still pretty limited and I'd often put new games down for the shallowest reasons like its art style or setting which I initially did with Gears of War. Anything that I wasn't immediately familiar with was something I was gonna have a hard time giving a chance. Games that I love today like Assassin's Creed, Dead Space, Borderlands, Metal Gear Solid, and even the hack and slash genre which I first experienced with Bayonetta thanks to the recommendation of an old friend on this forum. Hell, there was even a point when I was once gonna write off Batman: Arkham Asylum because of its artstyle as well, and I was already a lifelong Batman fan.
I was so worn down by being wrong so many times in the past about these games that when I first laid eyes on Red Dead Redemption, a game I was never anticipating because of its "boring" western setting, something clicked in me. I didn't immediately hate it. In fact, the more I saw it, the more I started to understand the vision and now it's not just one of my favorite series in gaming, but my favorite stories also.
