Arcade Sushi Asks is our newest feature, where we ask writers, editors, celebrity personalities, directors, rock stars and anyone else we can buy off to answer important video game questions. Each Arcade Sushi Asks feature will have answers from new and interesting people, and we're kicking things off with a bang.

We scoured the internet and grabbed a bunch of different personalities to answer this important question. We've got online celebrity personality Nathan Barnatt (you may know him by his video game character Keith Apicary). Looper and Breaking Bad episodes director Rian Johnson. Writer of Zombieland and G.I. Joe:Retaliation, Rhett Reese. A few Arcade Sushi and ComicsAlliance writers, and a personal video from AFI frontman Davey Havok!

For our opening feature, we asked them this:

"What was your favorite video game as a kid and why?"

  • Davey Havok

    AFI Lead Vocalist
  • Nathan Barnatt

    Actor/Comedian

    "My favorite game was Streets of Rage 2. I played it most days after school for about a year. I had never played such a tough, fast and intense game. The music was fast and cool, and the characters had so much aggression and attitude. I loved anything that came out for Genesis, but when Streets of Rage 2 came out it literally kicked the crap out of every other game. I mean, in my opinion, you know, the guy who knows everything."

  • Caleb Goellner

    ComicsAlliance Senior Editor

    "A few months after completing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in 1998, I went searching for my next all-consuming video game fix. I was getting super into Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z at the time, but was limited to the baffling DB NES game localization, Dragon Power, and Dragon Ball Z: Final Bout. That's when I discovered that DB creator Akira Toriyama had done all the character designs for Square Enix's Dragon Quest games and Chrono Trigger. I tried out Chrono Trigger first with no real knowledge of the game and with no real experience playing Japanese RPGs. It was a revelation. The game had everything: Fun character designs, rich environments, an epic (actually epic), sci-fi storyline, beautiful music, exciting turn-based gameplay, save features that weren't rage-inducing, and dozens of meaningful alternate endings. Imagine going through your whole life without knowing about pizza and then having, like, 200 of them delivered to your door. That's how awesome it was to discover this game and play through it again and again for months unlocking all it had to offer. Over the years adult life has gotten in the way of replaying the game's many re-issues, playing all the way through its sequel Chrono Cross, or even completing many similar RPGs. In a way, though, I'm kind of glad. My initial Chrono Trigger experience gets to live on in my mind as a period of crystalized stoke-edness that that sticks with me to this day."

  • Rhett Reese

    Screenwriter (Zombieland, G.I. Joe: Retaliation)/Author

    "My favorite video game from childhood, bar none, was Wizardry, developed by Sir-Tech for the Apple computer. It was the first of its kind, a role-playing dungeon crawl, and it acted like the key to a locked door on my imagination. Suddenly, the adventure didn't end when I turned off the machine. My characters were saved and lived on. They explored and fought and improved with each sitting. Thus began all too much sitting."

  • Chris Sims

    ComicsAlliance Contributor

    "My favorite game as a kid was unquestionably Capcom's DuckTales platformer for the NES. I loved the show as a kid (and I still love those Carl Barks comics that inspired it), and when I was in 4th grade, I hinted to my mom that I wanted it for Christmas with all the subtlety of… well, of a nine year-old asking for a video game for Christmas. I think drawing a loving recreation of the box art in for my "What I Want For Christmas" art project in school was the high point of me asking for anything, ever.The thing is, it's probably the only game up until Saints Row The Third that actually lived up to every bit of my expectations. The imaginative levels, the crisp gameplay,the fact that there was an alternate ending unlocked by getting secret treasures, which completely blew my mind as a kid, and the music… oh, the music. I can still listen to that Moon Theme on a loop. And I do, way more often than I might admit."

  • Graham Hartmann

    Loudwire Senior Writer

    "In elementary school, my best friends and I would plan entire weekends around the most innovative and bad-ass console on the face of the Earth: the Nintendo 64. "Grab a 2-liter bottle of Coke, bike over to my house and bring your see-through purple controller … you know, the one with the joystick that actually still stands upright." The game of choice was 'GoldenEye 007,' and after a few dust-clearing exhales into the business end of the cartridge, a fourth-grade sleepover would promptly turn into an all-night bloodbath. DK Mode mixed with Paintball Mode while frantically searching for a level's solitary Golden Gun? Absolutely. Slappers Only in the License to Kill scenario? Of course. Blasting a rocket against a wall to kill an opponent as well as yourself? You're damn right! And I STILL got the Marksmanship Award! My friends and I did it all … except for playing as Oddjob. That's cheating."

  • John Martin

    Arcade Sushi Contributor

    "Star Ocean the Second Story was my favorite around the time I was 13-14. It was my first real Japanese RPG experience and it prompted me to explore different titles in the genre. I remember amassing my party of up to eight members and really growing attached to each character and their stories. And the battles? Whew. All I have to say is "Indalecio."

  • Angelo D'Argenio

    Arcade Sushi Contributor

    "Super Mario RPG was my favorite game as a kid, because it was my first exposure to the console RPG genre. It was the perfect gateway game to the genre, combining the Mario characters I knew with these foreign concepts like turn-based battles and HP. I loved how much you could exploit the system and I eventually used the infinite XP death trick to create a save file that had Mario starting the game at a ludicrously overpowered level. I continued playing Super Mario RPG well into the next generation of consoles, and to this day, I’d still rather play it than Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or Skryim."

  • Rian Johnson

    Director (Looper, Breaking Bad)

    "The original Tron upright arcade console. The golden fleece of the Cherry Creek Mall arcade. The older kids would monopolize it by lining their quarters up on the top placard, so even today when I see one sitting neglected in the corner of a car wash office my first reaction is a heart-clenching "it's open!"

  • Chris Urie

    Arcade Sushi Contributor

    "Even though it is just about a tie between Super Mario RPG and Ocarina of Time, I'm going to have to go with Zelda. It was one game that I feel captured something special, something more than the rest. It showed me the mythic possibilities of a video game and reminds me of the power of a simple story well told."

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