Oblivion was not my first experience with the Elder Scrolls series. After hearing nothing but good things about its predecessor, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, I had picked up the Game of the Year Edition for the original Xbox. While I made several attempts at getting into the game, it never really clicked for me and I ended up not spending more than a handful of hours with it in total.

I enjoyed the music and lore, in addition to a few of the design aspects, but I found the overall experience to be a bit off-putting. The graphics weren't quite as good as I was expecting for the port of an award-winning PC game. Also, the mechanics left something to be desired, and I found the menus and quest system to be pretty confusing. It didn't take long for frustration to set in. After that, I felt very little motivation to play it. In short, I was pretty disappointed with my purchase.

I was almost ready to write the series off when I began to hear information about the next installment, Oblivion, that was due out soon on the Xbox 360. I happened to watch some development videos that had been included on an Official Xbox Magazine demo disc. The improvements they had made since Morrowind, as well as some of the new features they were adding to the game, actually looked pretty incredible.

When the game was released and I saw all the high review scores it was receiving, I started to consider giving the Elder Scrolls another shot. I couldn't forget how burned I had felt by Morrowind, though; and I wasn't keen on the thought of throwing away more money. So, I decided to give it a rental first, just to be sure.

When the first-person shooters first rose to prominence, they were almost entirely non-existent anywhere besides the PC. Console controllers at the time simply weren't equipped to handle movement and aiming together in any kind of intuitive way. That all changed with Rare's 1997 smash hit, GoldenEye 007.

Rare made expert use of the uniquely designed Nintendo 64 controller when implementing the control scheme for the game. They utilized the brand new controller features like the analog joystiq, yellow C buttons, and gun-like Z trigger for more natural-feeling movement and shooting than had been possible before. The brilliance of their control scheme was that it worked so well with Nintendo's oddball controller. A device design that had previously left many fans scratching their heads suddenly made (some) sense. It seemed almost as if Nintendo had designed the controller for GoldenEye, and not the other way around. What's more is that for the first time, a game developer had successfully created an acceptable way to enjoy the wildly popular first-person shooter genre on a home game console.

​While the first-person shooter control scheme may not have ultimately achieved perfection until 2001's Halo on the original Xbox, GoldenEye represented an absolutely crucial stepping stone along the path; basically, the only real stepping stone. The game opened up the world of first-person shooters to millions of people who only liked to play games on their television sets. The genius of this timeless classic cannot be overstated and the controls are only but one of the numerous reasons why.

Game Changers is a semi-regular column featuring games which have had a significant impact on me over the years. Games that were so incredibly stunning and awe-inspiring, they changed my conception of what a game could be at the time. Previously, I have written about Out Run, and Street Fighter Alpha 3.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the Wild West. Growing up, one of my favorite things to do (whenever I wasn't playing games or practicing spinning toy pop-guns like a gunslinger) was kick back and watch some great Westerns on TV. "Back to the Future, part III", "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr", "Tombstone", the legendary Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" trilogy ("A Fistful of Dollars", "For a Few Dollars More", and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly"), and of course, the John Wayne classics like "Rio Bravo", "El Dorado", and "True Grit" (to name more than a few). These films (and one show) are some of the finest examples the genre has to offer, and they are far from the only cinematic representations available.

When it comes to games, however, the options are much less prevalent. When I was young, there were really only two Western games that I found to be worthwhile: Sunset Riders and Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters. Both were multiplayer Arcade titles from Konami and they both were pretty exceptional. They also both came out in the early '90s and quickly received multiple home console ports.

I acquired them both (for my Sega Genesis and Sega CD, respectively) pretty much as soon as I found out they existed. I spent a lot of time playing them and they still remain two of my favorite games to this day. But the early '90s was a fairly long time ago, and gaming changed a good bit as the years marched on.

Tons of great new games came and went but almost none of them featured an Old West setting. The incredibly few that did were either not available on the platforms I owned or were just not very good. I started to think I might never play a great modern Western game. But finally in 2010, Rockstar released what may well be the greatest Wild West game of all time, Red Dead Redemption.

My first experience with the Street Fighter series came when I was still a bit young. It was Street Fighter II: Champion Edition on the Super Nintendo. The game had come out only a few months earlier and a buddy of mine had just gotten his hands on a copy. He invited me and another friend to a sleepover at his house, and the three of us stayed up all night playing it. We were all new to fighting games, so we spent hours passing the controllers around, taking turns obsessively battling it out in order to learn the basics and familiarize ourselves with the characters. It was quite a lot of fun.

Over the next several years, I kept playing different versions of Street Fighter II (Hyper, Arcade). Eventually, I picked up my very own copy of Super Street Fighter II (The New Challengers) for the Sega Genesis. I appreciated being able to play with some newer characters, particularly Dee Jay and Cammy. Even though I enjoyed spending a lot of time with all of the various iterations of Street Fighter II, I eventually grew weary of game's limitations and moved on to other, more interesting fighting games, such as Virtua Fighter 1 & 2, and SoulCalibur.

Then in December of 2000, my interest in Street Fighter was rekindled. I was home from college for the holidays and browsing around the local Media Play store for potential Christmas gifts. My brother and I had spent most of that summer playing the hell out of his new Sega Dreamcast so I decided to hit the games section to see if I could find any possibilities there. I happened across a marked-down copy of Street Fighter Alpha 3. Neither of us had ever owned a PlayStation or Saturn so we weren't very familiar with the Alpha series. I decided to take a gamble anyway.

When he unwrapped the gift on Christmas morning, I explained to him that I had picked it out because of our prior shared enthusiasm for my Genesis copy of Super Street Fighter II. He looked at it approvingly and agreed to give it a shot. Later that day, we fired it up and inadvertently ignited what would become a life-long passion for all things Street Fighter.

So, I downloaded Out Run onto my son's 2DS recently, and that got me thinking about games that have had a significant impact on myself over the years. Games that I just couldn't stop coming back to time and time again. Games that, for me, were so astounding and groundbreaking, so incredibly stunning and awe-inspiring that they redefined what I thought a game could or should be. I decided to start a column that pays tribute to just those sort of games. And what better title to start with than the one that not only inspired it, but perhaps had the biggest effect on me of all?