Well, given that it’s Thanksgiving, I figured I should do a quick tribute post. Given that this is a gaming blog, this will all be about things I’m thankful for in regards to gaming. Rest assured, there are many other things I’m thankful for, this simply isn’t the place to share the ones that aren’t related to gaming. Also, I’ll likely miss a lot involving gaming too, so don’t sweat it, this is just for fun anyway.  So, with that said, here we go.

I’m thankful that Nintendo released the NES back in the day, since it helped begin the flow of video games to the masses.

I’m thankful Nintendo and Sega both had such successful flagship series, as they constantly pushed each other to do better in order to gain more customers. This resulted in better games for all of us, regardless of which side we took in the console wars.

I’m thankful the majority of people have come to realize that D&D and other roleplaying games are not evil, and that people were just scared of what they didn’t understand without bothering to find out what was really going on… you know, people rolling dice and pretending to be elves in their parents’ basements instead of the assumed unspeakable evils.

I’m thankful I still have lots of friends to game with, as well as just talk about gaming with sometimes. Makes for good conversation when we run out of other things to talk about too.

I’m thankful Sega released the Dreamcast… many of my favorite games to this day were released on it. At least they went out with a bang.

I’m thankful the internet is here to help us learn so much about gaming, both video games and tabletop games. It makes it a lot easier to catch up on a new game with everyone else in video game communities, as well as come up with ideas for use in tabletop rpgs. There are, of course, many other benefits as well.

I’m thankful Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario RPG, the tag team of games that got me involved in rpgs. Without them, it would have taken me way longer to learn of this awesome genre. It helps that those two games were also amazingly fun.

I’m thankful that there are still companies working to keep old-school games alive in this era when a large majority of people seems to want dark, gritty environments and only FPS games or RPGs. Don’t get me wrong, I love RPGs, and even enjoy an occasional FPS, but I really love platformers, platform shooters, and fighting games too. I also like games that don’t always have to be dark and gritty, though it’s certainly not bad all the time, or in all games.

I’m thankful a group of college friends introduced me to Mage and the rest of World of Darkness, among many other games, as it has really opened up my eyes to other styles of roleplaying games aside from D&D. Don’t get me wrong, I still love D&D and will continue to play it, but it’s nice to know other systems and to have the right tools for different kinds of campaigns.

And I think that will do it for now.