A Peg Life Supplemental, Part 2
It's finally here. The resolution everyone was anticipating. I've finally finished the last twenty-five entries on my list of 50 Favourite Video Games and I pass it on to you, dear readers. All nine thousand words of it. Now you'll all have something to read when you get bored at work. Enjoy.
25) Super Star Wars (Honorable Mention: Super Empire Strikes Back, Super Return of the Jedi)
According to some people the Super Star Wars series is among the most difficult games on the SNES and some of the levels could be considered among the most difficult of all time. I don't know if I could agree with that. I remember playing through all three games with my cousin Jason and beating them. They weren't exactly a cakewalk, but still not excruciatingly frustrating or anything. The level in Super Star Wars where you have to make your way up the outside of the sandcrawler was generally pretty frustrating because you could get to the top and fall off and have to work your way back again, sometimes right from the beginning. The graphics were improved in the second two games and you could use the force when you played as Luke (after Yoda trained you that is) and they added that most physically impossible of video games feats, the double jump. Seriously, what's with the double jump? I can understand it if the character has a jet pack or rocket boots or just plain magic, but if they don't what are they pushing off of? Air? For the most egregious example of kind of gravity defiance check out the movie Final Fantasy: Advent Children. I believe the filmmakers' motto during the production was "Newtonian physics be damned."
24) Starcraft
Starcraft was simultaneously the high and low point of real time strategy games for me. I thought it was a great game, but I lost interest in RTS games when I realized how much better a large number of people were than I was. Playing online became an increasingly disheartening experience as Zerg rush after Zerg rush decimated my every attempt to amass a viable fighting force. Maybe I'm just a poor military strategist. Fuck it. I'm content to leave Starcraft to the South Koreans. It's practically the national sport there. Hmm. Maybe the problem isn't my strategy. Maybe I just don't have Seoul. Get it? Seoul, cause it sounds like soul. God, I'm hilarious! Wait, where are you going? Come on, that was gold. Fine, go. Who needs you? Philistines.
23) Unreal Tournament
This was a popular game during the early days of the Warsaw House. Yes, those were heady times. A glorious age of networked computers and media piracy. Before BitTorrent the go to place for downloading movies and games was Kazaa. Before $50 DVD burners there was DivX encoding and CD burning. I still have stacks of CDs with .avi movies burned to them. Most of them were downloaded from the internet, but we used to get a lot of coupons for Jumbo Video (which, on a side note, is apparently closing down) so we would rent DVDs, rip them to the computer, and burn them to CD. Steve even started using the handle Dexter DivX. How fucking geeky is that? But hey, we were young and independent and nothing could stop us. We had also started smoking pot and for the first few months any time we shared beer with Steve we were supplying alcohol to a minor. 634 was a veritable den of iniquity. Also of awesomeness. Suck it copyright and drug laws.
22) Harvest Moon
It seems a bit surprising how good farming simulation games are. Of course, I'm only speaking from the experience of two but still, who'd have thought that even two video games where you run a farm would be good? Apparently the actual cartridge for Harvest Moon is "notoriously rare." Thanks to the miracles of emulation I never had to deal with that. This game isn't nearly as concerned with economics and realism as SimFarm, but it is a lot more fun. You actually control a specific character and the point is to build up your little farm from nothing, make some scratch, get married, and have kids. And for the pruriently minded, no, the latter goals are not explicitly depicted. This is a kid's game. There was one thing that always bugged me about the gameplay. It had to do with raising crops. First you have to till the soil into 3x3 plots. Then you plant your seeds and water them. So far so good. The problem comes later on after the plants sprout. When the plants are seeds you can walk over them and water all nine squares in the field's plot. Once the graphics change from a flat ground tile to a growing plant tile they become impassable so you can only water the outer eight plants. This frustrated the hell out of me because I was invariably missing out on 11% of my potential harvest. That's more than ten percent! Fuck!
21) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Easily one of the greatest games on the Super Nintendo, and if you don't believe that it means you haven't played it. True, there are several SNES games higher up on this list but you'll note that I said "one of" before "the greatest." Its greatness stems from one thing. Not the graphics. Not the story. Not the gameplay. The fact that when you repeatedly attack a chicken outdoors a swarm of them fly in from offscreen to defend their fellow poultry. If it wasn't for that fact the game would have flopped and the entire Zelda series would have died with it. Think about that the next time you're playing Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker or Twilight Princess. If it hadn't been for a chicken and a few dozen of her buddies those games wouldn't even exist. Wouldn't it be awesome if they made a Legend of Zelda movie and Link was played by Brendan Fraser? Then there would be two movies where we starred as a character named Link. What was the first, you ask? Apparently we're forgetting a little gem called Encino Man. You really need to take a deep breath and seriously reconsider whether your life is on the path you want it to be on if you could overlook any film in Pauly Shore's oeuvre. I think you should go home, maybe light a few candles, get comfortable, and watch Son in Law and In the Army Now. Let the Weez show you the way.
20) Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Here's yet another game with a protagonist named Stone. Actually, as a character Serious Sam is one of the least original you could hope to come across. He's basically Duke Nukem without the self proclaimed gargantuan levels of virility. Nevertheless the game built around him is just about the most fun you can possibly have in a first person shooter. Eschewing the realistic-yet-scrotum-squeezingly-lame two weapon carrying capacity popularized by games like Halo, Sam is able to carry several weapons as big or bigger than himself (such as a minigun, flamethrower, huge chainsaw, and giant cannon) all at the same time. Such a massive arsenal is necessary given the extraordinary number of enemies to be burnt, blasted, and blown to bloody bits. The levels are enormous and populated by seemingly endless stampedes of skeletal horse-demon-things and headless suicide bombers that, despite having no mouth, are able to scream as the charge recklessly towards you, becoming louder and louder until they finally explode in your face. Not that dying is of particular concern since you have infinite lives to respawn and continue the slaughter.
19) Full Throttle (Honorable Mention: The Dig)
These were among the first games that I played to really show the cinematic potential of video games. In fact, when the first teaser trailers for Armageddon came out showing a space shuttle mission to an asteroid headed for earth I thought they had made a live action version of The Dig, which starts with a space shuttle mission to stop an asteroid headed for earth but then it turns out the asteroid is actually a kind of alien space ship that transports the crew to an abandoned alien planet from which they have to find a way to return. Then I went and saw the movie and it turned out to be Armageddon. The greatness of Full Throttle and The Dig really comes from their cinematic qualities. The gameplay isn't particularly exciting. Based on the LucasArts SCUMM engine, they are both point-and-click, puzzle driven adventure games. The writing and the animation though (coupled with fully recorded voice acting featuring Mark Hamill and Maurice LaMarche in Full Throttle and Robert Patrick in The Dig), are superb and make the games very much like interactive animated films.
18) Soul Calibur II
Each version of Soul Calibur II (GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox) got one character unique to the system. The GameCube version got Link (from Legend of Zelda, not Encino Man) which was pretty cool. He had moves using classic items like the bow and arrow and bombs. The Xbox version got Spawn which would have been a lot cooler if he had his cape as a weapon. Instead he is entirely capeless and for some reason gets a battleaxe (okay, technically the axe is his cape but shut up). The PS2 got shafted though. The idea of Soul Calibur was, like Bushido Blade, supposed to revolve around armed combat. Every character gets their own weapon and they're all questing for a sword called Soul Edge, whether to destroy it or use it for their own ends. So who do they get to face off against all the other sword/axe/staff/nunchaku/energy beam wielding warriors? Fucking Heihachi from Tekken. And what mighty armament does he carry into battle? His fucking hands. That is nine kinds of lame. Fortunately the rest of the game is not. This would be my favourite fighting game of all time if it was not for...
17) Mortal Kombat II (Honorable Mention: Mortal Kombat 1 & 3, Deadly Alliance, Deception, Armageddon)
While Street Fighter II was clearly the game responsible for increasing the popularity of fighting games, Mortal Kombat played a much greater role in increasing the awesomeness of fighting games. This entry is really for whole MK series, but the second iteration was the pinnacle when considered in its contemporaneous context. I quite enjoy the 3D games that came out for the fifth generation consoles as well. Deception was arguably the best of these, although Armageddon had a must larger cast of fighters (and possibly the largest cast of any fighting game). Mortal Kombat I and II had the advantage of greater novelty, however. Blood! Carnage! Tearing opponents' hearts out! Ripping off people's heads with the spinal cord still attached! It was all so new back then. Who knew that, after the furor they caused, fatalities would become so ubiquitous today? Answer: anyone with a memory longer than five minutes. Just like the music of Elvis and N.W.A., the writing of Voltaire and de Sade, the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus of Nazareth, people realized that a few video games portraying some over the top violence, which had already been present in films for decades, would not destroy society and reduce humanity to feral beasts raping and murdering across the land in a globe spanning blood orgy.
16) Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
This was the first ever game I owned that was specifically mine. I had Bart's House of Weirdness before this one, but that game belonged more to the family than just me. Eye of the Beholder was given to me by my uncle Jimmy in what must have been '91 or '92. When I first played it I didn't understand some of the Dungeons & Dragons rules on which the game is based. When creating your characters at the beginning you can modify their stats to whatever you want. When I saw that increasing the Dexterity attribute caused the stat labeled "Armor Class" to drop, I naturally (being younger than 10 years old) assumed that this was a bad thing. A higher number for Armor Class has to be better, right? WRONG! You stupid fucking piece of shit retard! God, kids are so dumb. So anyways, the first few parties I created were full of the clumsiest adventurers ever, which is probably why they got the shit kicked out of them by wolves. Trying to maximize my advantages (like creating a party of four half-elven fighter/mage/clerics) and inadvertently stacking the deck against myself was only one of the reasons it took me years to beat this game. The first major obstacle has become the stuff of legend. Among me and my cousin Jason, that is. In the Catacombs, Level 2 (Wait, should I mention that the game takes place in a large temple called Darkmoon? Probably) you start encountering skeleton warriors. Anyone familiar with (i.e. has actually played) Dungeons & Dragons will recognize that skeleton warriors are tough motherfuckers. They're resistant to magic and take reduced damage from all but bludgeoning weapons. Towards the end of the level there is a large room. When you open the door to this room all that is apparent is a pile of treasure lying on the floor. What lies out of sight from the doorway (and only reveals itself once you actually enter the room) is one of the tougher battles in the game: the Big Bunch of Skeleton Warriors. The best strategy that my nine year old mind could come up with was to pull a Leonidas and make the doorway my Thermopylae. This may work fine (sort of) for a few thousand Greeks against a couple million Persians, but for a half dozen mid-level adventurers against a couple dozen skeleton warriors and their priest masters, not so much. I was convinced that the only thing that would give me the knowledge and power to defeat these monstrosities, abominations in the eyes of the sun god Lathander, was the vaunted Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon Official Clue Book (advertised in the back of the game's manual). In the end all I needed to do was run away and head upstairs to the previous level where the enemies would not follow and I could rest, regain spells, and heal myself. I managed to figure this out on my own but by that time I had already ordered the Clue Book. In the end it was for the best because in all likelihood I would not have beaten the game without it. I did beat it though. Dran Draggore, the final boss who appears periodically throughout the game to mock you in the usual manner of villains, only took me one attempt. Also, turns out he's a dragon. Uh, spoiler alert.
15) Ultima VI: The False Prophet (Honorable Mention: Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire)
The Ultima series was one of the great RPG series on the PC and this game in particular made some significant advancements such as VGA graphics and use of a mouse. Impressive, I know. Many of the newer sandbox style RPGs owe as much to games like this as they do to ones like Grand Theft Auto III. While the game world isn't quite as a massive as, say, Elder Scrolls but it still provides an abundance of side quests and non-compulsory areas to explore. The volume of material that can be uncovered in this game helps its replay value immensely. I certainly appreciated this because for a long time it was one a relatively few video games that I had. It got to the point where I decided to try a speed run of the game, not to beat the game in the shortest amount of real time but the shortest length of in-game time. Beating the game eventually requires you to construct a hot air balloon so you can fly over a mountain pass to reach the final area. In addition to the mountains there is also a magic barrier between two statues that you have to pass through. However, if the wind is blowing from the southwest your hot air balloon will actually fly around one of the statues, bypassing the magic barrier. I don't know if this was a glitch in the game but by exploiting it I was able to complete the game in just four days of in-game time. After the normal end sequence a message came up with an instruction to "report thy feat to Lord British at Origin Systems." It didn't provide any details as to how to do this so I didn't do anything and nothing ever came of it. Recently I discovered the website speeddemosarchive.org which archives videos of speed runs on various games, many of which are on this list. They don't have one for Ultima VI though and after searching the internet I have not been able to find any record of a fastest completion time for the game, which makes me wonder if maybe I achieved something marginally significant.
14) Max Payne (Honorable Mention: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne)
Max Payne was hella fun and had a superb story. When I was in London (yes, I've mentioned what I'm about to write previously in a Voice of London mailing, but I'm going to write it again because some people may not have read it and it's relevant) I went to the Science Museum where I saw Charles Babbage's preserved brain. My zombie companion wanted to eat it despite my protests that it would almost certainly taste sour and gross after soaking in formaldehyde for 135 years. You know zombies, though. Once they get fixated on something you might as well be talking to a corpse. When he started banging on the display case the security guards came and escorted him out. He just kept moaning, "Braaaaaiinsss... braaaaaaaiiiiinsssss..." and trying to lunge towards the glass. One of the security guards was holding him by the arm and when he tried to pull away the whole thing, right up to the shoulder, came off in the guard's hand. They eventually got him outside and he shambled away north on Exhibition Road towards Hyde Park but the whole sordid affair was terribly embarrassing. Then I went up to the exhibit they had on video games and saw Max Payne's famous leather jacket and Hawaiian shirt costume.
13) Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
I've started playing this game upwards of half a dozen times. For various reasons I've never been able to finish it. Apparently only 25,000 copies were released in the U.S. so it's rare to find the actual cartridge. I always played it emulated on my computer (like many of the SNES games on this list) and on more than one occasion the save file got corrupted thus losing my game. On my latest attempt I managed to get farther than I ever had before but then my computer crashed in the middle of a level. Shit like that makes me abandon games for a long time. When I was playing through Chrono Trigger I got killed on my first attempt on the last boss which made me stop playing the game for almost a year. One day I realized I hadn't beaten the game yet so I loaded it up and killed Lavos on the first go. Damn. That's two sentences I won't be able to use for my entry on Chrono Trigger. Oh well, I'll probably just go and make up some stupid shit about how I got so into the game's concept that I built my own time machine and went travelling around through history and met James Woods on his way back from the 1920s where he was doing research for the movie Chaplin. Fuck. Now I gotta come up with something else.
12) Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
This is one hell of an addicting game. I tend to be skeptical of role playing games based on settings without an established mythology, particularly in the fantasy genre, because the settings more often than not turn out to be fucking lame. It's also much more interesting to take on the role of a character in a world that is familiar and can be explored in more detail. However, if the gameplay is strong it can mitigate the lameness or unfamiliarity of the setting enough to result in an overall great game or even in some cases to establish a setting that is worth exploring in future games. I've played many hours of Elder Scrolls IV and after becoming familiar with the world I can still say it's lame. It's a pretty generic sword and sorcery type of place. The game play is terrific though. There is such a huge variety of side quests and areas to explore that you could spend ages playing without ever getting to the main story quest. That's not to say the game is without its flaws. There are two major ones that I take issue with. The first has to do with the fact that all dialogue in the game is recorded by actors. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that there are only half a dozen different voices used. I don't mean there are half a dozen actors doing multiple voices for different characters; I mean that every person you encounter has one of six voices. The exception to this is a handful of characters that are part of the main plot for whom they got well known actors such as Sean Bean (famous for playing Boromir from Lord of the Rings), Terence Stamp (famous for playing General Zod from Superman II), and Patrick Stewart (famous for being fucking Patrick Stewart). For the amount of time you spend talking to characters who aren't these three people they should have saved the money casting famous actors and hired a bunch of voice actors who can do more than one voice. As it is, the entire continent of Tamriel sounds like it was descended from an inbred ancestry that resulted in severely limited vocal timbre for its progeny. My second peeve with the game doesn't become relevant until much later in the game. It relates to a more general issue I have with some RPGs. As you progress through any given role playing game one of the primary motivations (besides furthering the plot) is the prospect of advancement and improvement. This applies both to the characters themselves and the equipment they use. In a game like Oblivion, where you can conceivably play for hundreds of hours and still have stuff to do, it's hard to keep a steady slope on the advancement curve. My character is currently at level 31, which is approaching the level cap for the game, but my main complaint is that I longer find equipment that's any better than the equipment I had five levels ago. That's a long time given how slowly I level up at this point. Alright, I think I've filled enough space with thoroughly unentertaining rambling about a game that maybe three people who read this will care about. This entry doesn't deserve to be as long as the Darkmoon one.
11) Diablo (Honorable Mention: Diablo II)
Blizzard Entertainment has got to be one of the most consistently great video game developers ever. Probably the only other company that tops them would be BioWare, but I'll get into that in later entries seeing as how they're involved in about a third of my top ten. Back to what's really important. Satan! Mephistopheles himself is the primary reason for the success of this game. In an interview conducted with the Dark Lord in late 1999 his Most Unholiness described his demonic influence on Diablo and its subsequent critical reception.
"To be perfectly honest--which is a bit of a stretch for me, being the Great Deceiver and all--I was pretty heavily involved in the project right from the beginning," Beelzebub stated. "Now I don't want to discount the work that the guys at Blizzard did. They really put together a great game with intuitive mechanics and great replay value. I never was very good with all that computer stuff. I still send messages to my cacodaemons carved in the flesh of unbelievers, so I'm all for credit where credit is due. But in terms of the content I obviously provided a lot of the inspiration. Even when the designers weren't performing blood sacrifices to commune with my Unholy Spirit I would often send one of my imps or other minions to give them tips on the look and feel of my realms.
"Verisimilitude was very important to me," he added.
Lucifer's touch did not extend only to the production, however. The Lord of the Underworld's most direct intervention into the mortal plane on behalf of Diablo came during the voting for the 1996 Game of the Year Award.
"Oh yeah, that was definitely my doing. There were some strong contenders that year. Civilization II was an early favourite. Duke Nukem [3D] could have taken it, but they decided to make the opponents aliens instead of the fiendish denizens of Hell that catapulted Doom to widespread popularity. Quake came closer to what I was hoping for in a shooter but still, the enemies are more Lovecraftian than Satanic. In the end I had to back the game that got my Infernal visage out there with the most accuracy. Sometimes if you want a game done right you have to do it yourself, you know?"
10) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (Honorable Mention: THPS 1 and 4)
If this list wasn't text only, for this entry I'd just play La Marseillaise on an infinite loop. That might be a little obscure for some people though. It's a reference to the third level of the game that takes place in Marseilles and the (theoretically) infinite combo line that you can do there. Back in the summer of 2002 (Joe knows where I'm going with this) the residents of the Warsaw House spent their days gasping for breath and moving as little as possible in the excruciating heat. It was a horrible, painful summer full of angst and unemployment. It was also full of Flight Simulator and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Joe spent many, many hours flying around the world in real time. I still have the list of all the places he flew to. Brad and I spent not quite as many but still a lot of hours trying to execute a single combo around the Marseilles level. This same summer was when CUIF Radio really took off. It would be some time yet before the station reached its peak of popularity with the Friday Night Frenzy but these were the glory days when it was not uncommon to hear Sloan followed by Wesley Willis then somebody shouting in German to segue into Olivia Tremor Control and capping it off with a brief monologue about a vampire war in Prague. Maybe it's time CUIF Radio was resurrected.
9) Perfect Dark (Honorable Mention: Goldeneye)
This is the only game on the Nintendo 64 that made this list. Of course, that's not counting Mario Kart 64's honorable mention and any games that had versions on the N64 (for example, Starcraft and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2). At any rate, if there is any N64 game that deserves to be on a list of best/greatest/favourite video games it's this one. Goldeneye showed that first person shooters were viable on consoles, even capable of greatness, and Perfect Dark improved on it (Perfect Dark's superiority can be expressed in one word: Farsight). Sure, there had been FPS games on the Super Nintendo but they were weak ports of PC games. With the introduction of analog controllers that could (to some extent) emulate the precision of a mouse, first person shooters could reasonably be played on a console platform. Goldeneye had much to recommend it and, having come out first, is probably more beloved by gamers, but Perfect Dark is the game that I played most so it holds more memories for me. In the summer of 2000 my family moved from The Pas to Killarney. My dad actually moved down earlier in the spring to start work while my mother, sister and I remained to finish the school year. When the school year ended and my mom and sister went down to Killarney I stayed in The Pas at Steve Smith's for a couple of weeks before inevitably following. Much of those two weeks was spent playing Perfect Dark. We rented it from the local video store under my account and decided, because I wasn't going to be living there anymore, that we would just keep the game for the whole time I was there. Why should I care about late fees if I'm never going to be renting there again? But the best laid plans of mice and teenage boys go oft awry. Later the next year I was hanging out with Joe and Tim Banman at Joe's place in Killarney and received a phone call. It was my mom. She had gone to The Pas for the weekend or something and for some ridiculous reason tried to rent a movie on our old account. Even more ridiculously, she paid the late fees and made me reimburse her. Moms. Am I right?
8) X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse (Honorable Mention: X-Men Legends & Marvel: Ultimate Alliance)
X-Men Legends was a contributing factor to the failure of my second attempt at going through university. Well, that's not exactly accurate. It was more of an enabling factor. I had already lost interest in school and was skipping classes; the game just gave me something to do all day instead of writing an exam. The day in question was, after making up my mind not to go to school, pretty awesome. While it may not work out too well in the long run, recapturing a whole day from prior obligations (read abandoning responsibilities) is immensely liberating. With the freedom to do nothing you are free to do anything. On this day the anything that was decided upon was playing hours and hours of X-Men Legends and smoking copious amounts of marijuana. As I recall, it was Keith, Danny and I that were living in Warsaw at the time. Or maybe it was Danny, Trevor and I, and Keith was living at Other Warsaw. Doesn't really matter. The point is that for about sixteen straight hours there was constantly somebody playing the game. One of the hallmarks of a great game is the ability to play it for hours on end without ever getting tired of it. X-Men Legends definitely had this quality. So did X-Men Legends II. I've written most of this entry on the first game in the series because it had a more (but only barely) interesting story to go with it. The second game really is superior though. The replay value is fantastic because you can play through the game more than once with the same team of characters and continue to level up and get more powerful. Then you can mix the team up and play through with a bunch of other characters and level them up. Also, there's Iron Man.
7) Fallout 2 (Honorable Mention: Fallout, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel)
Now I'm not certain about anything I'm about to say or have said or might say or think about, but I could swear that years ago before the first Fallout game came out I saw, on a demo disc from PC World magazine or something like that, a video preview for a game that looked just like Fallout [would later come to look like] but was described as a computer adaptation of the pen-and-paper RPG G.U.R.P.S. published by Steve Jackson Games. I'm more certain now of what I just said after having looked up Fallout on Wikipedia, where it says that it was intended to use the G.U.R.P.S. system but after the deal fell through Black Isle developed their own system. In light of this corroborating evidence I am forced to conclude that I've been excited about the Fallout universe since quite early in its development. I'm a pretty big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, retro-futurism, and Art Deco design. Being a fan of this style I was disappointed with the poor execution of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (despite admiring the visuals), and I would very much like to play BioShock which uses a similar aesthetic. The Fallout series blended these production elements into a grandly realized world of radiated mutants, nomadic raiders, giant scorpions and rats, and chock full of the kind of esoteric sci-fi references that made Futurama so great. The latter were even more present in the second game which, besides the improved graphics and expanded story, is the primary reason it’s occupying the slot rather than the first game. I think my favourite is a random encounter that you can find while travelling through the wasteland where you come across the splattered corpse of a whale and a broken bowl of petunias. Bethesda Softworks, who is developing Fallout 3 and was previously responsible for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, has said that they will be putting less emphasis on this type of referential humour but I'm still looking forward to it immensely.
6) Chrono Trigger (Honorable Mention: Chrono Cross)
Yeah, yeah, greatest game on the Super Nintendo, one of the best RPGs of all time, blah, blah, blah. It's a game that involves time travel. Do you really need to know more than that? Actually, this reminds me of the time I built my own time machine and went travelling around through history and met James Woods on his way back from the 1920s where he-- Oh, goddammit. Okay, gotta write about something else. Um... Uhhh... Hmm... One time I... Um... Shit.
Stephen Hawking has posited that the lack of time travelers from the future being here already and taking our jobs is an argument against the existence of time travel. It doesn't prove the impossibility of time travel though, as it's possible that a time travel technology could be invented in the future that allows travel to the past but only to points after the technology was developed. Another thoroughly unscientific and improbable explanation for the present's lack of time travelers that is entirely dependent on the acceptance of an extremely dubious premise is that time travelers from the future have come to the present but they are from so far into the future that evolutionary changes have rendered them unrecognizable as humans. Specifically, aliens and UFOs are actually human time travelers from the far distant future. This idea came to me years ago during a more credulous phase of my life after I read about the concept of neoteny. This can be described as the tendency for species to develop traits present in juveniles that are retained into maturity. In other words, the descriptions of aliens as having large, hairless heads, big eyes, and small nose and mouth are the result of neotenous evolutionary developments causing them to resemble infants or fetuses. But don't take my word for it. I'm the kind of guy who has the time to play enough video games to make a list of his fifty favourites rather than get an education or "accomplish things."
5) Civilization
"In the beginning the earth was without form and void..." I don't know how many times I've seen those words grace the bottom of my computer screen. Also the rest of the intro sequence, but I forget how it goes. I always played as either the Russians or the Romans in this game because if I didn't they were always the ones that ended up kicking my ass. I don't think I've played Civilization in the last ten years though, so maybe I'd be better at it today. Most of the time I played it when I was younger I would use despotism as my system of government. I didn't know how to utilize all the different features and manage my civilization properly so switching to communism or monarchism usually resulted in my populations revolting. Still, even under my despotic rule with the military enforcing order in the cities I was able to develop the technologies necessary for space flight and colonize Alpha Centauri. Although most of the colonists probably volunteered to escape six thousand years of martial law. Ingrates. Don't they know I need my huge palace to store the vast quantities of non-operational, diamond studded, gold helicopters that they toil in my factories to produce? I'm pretty sure no one important noticed that time that I allowed one of my cities to be invaded and occupied by a hostile force before retaking the city in order to eliminate part of the population. They were all malcontents anyway. You can tell because they dress in black and carry protest signs. Good riddance, I say. Damn hippies.
4) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Honorable Mention: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords)
When it comes to movies, sequels are almost invariably inferior to their predecessors. There are, of course, exceptions to this: The Empire Strikes Back, X-Men 2, The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2, Aliens, Spider-Man 2, Return of the King, Toy Story 2, Evil Dead 2, Star Trek II, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Bourne Ultimatum. There are probably more, but I've already made my point with more examples than necessary. That point, to reiterate, is that movie sequels usually suck. The reverse is true about video games, however. Video games are perhaps more dependent on technical achievement than films are, and thus when the sequel to a game is developed it can take advantage of advancements in technology and the clarity of hindsight to create superior graphics and visual realism, as well as correct design flaws and improve gameplay. Sequels in film also take advantage of new technologies that allow for more spectacular visual sequences, but a film’s success hinges much more strongly on other factors, particularly the script. A movie can look fantastic but if the plot, dialogue, and character development are lame then the best special effects won't be able to save them (see the Matrix sequels, X-men 3, Alien Resurrection, Attack of the Clones). While I can truthfully say that The Sith Lords was superior in terms of graphics and gameplay, even the developers will admit that they were rushed to finish the game for a Christmas release and so the improvements don't help keep the game from feeling incomplete. The ending especially was a bit of a letdown. That's not to say it wasn't still a great game though. It's just that the first game was damn near perfect and so gets to take the official spot on the list. When I wrote earlier about how I enjoy RPGs that allow me to explore an established and familiar world in more detail, Knights of the Old Republic is what I was talking about. The game is so immersive with its seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics that it feels like you're really walking around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
3) Final Fantasy X (Honorable Mention: Final Fantasy IV, VI & VII)
This one could have gone to any of the games mentioned but in the end I think I had the most fun playing Final Fantasy X. So much fun in fact that one day I spent 24 straight hours playing it. I'm pretty sure it was the longest single session of video gaming I've ever played. Of course I took short breaks to make something to eat and go to the bathroom but besides those few brief interruptions I played continuously from when I got up in the morning to when I was too exhausted to stay up any longer the next. I find role playing games addicting like that. Also, I had taken the summer off and I had nothing else important to do. That was the summer that Danny, Stephen Harfield and I took mushrooms and wandered barefoot through suburban St. Vital for five hours in the middle of the night. We roamed through residential construction sites, climbing over the heavy machinery, and even found our way into one of the half finished houses. We knew the whole time that society was going to be so mad. Towards the end of our psychedelically fuelled peregrination we stopped at a convenience store where Harfield purchased a National Post. Upon our return home we made spaghetti and watched The Colour of Money. I discovered Sudoku for the first time in the aforementioned newspaper and spent a couple of hours completing it as I came down. Apparently I didn't get much sleep that summer.
2) Rock Band (Honorable Mention: Guitar Hero II)
For sheer unadulterated fun, Rock Band could just be the greatest game in existence. If this list were based solely on replayability it would easily take the number one spot. I have little doubt that I will be playing Rock Band and its sequels, spinoffs, expansions or other iterations for many, many years to come. I will tire of the game only to the extent that I tire of the songs that can be played on it, and this is assuaged by the fact that new songs and content are continuously being released, making the old new again. I never learned to play a musical instrument in real life (something I wish I had done) but Rock Band simulates the experience (with a much shallower learning curve) closely enough to soothe any regret over the myopic ambitions of my childhood. There are most definitely improvements that can be made in future versions, such as being able to play the Band World Tour mode solo or at least online and being able to change the leader of bands in this mode, but I still can't praise this game highly enough. I love it. If anybody ever wants to play, just give me a call. As long as I'm home I'll be down for it.
1) Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (Honorable Mention: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II)
It should come as little surprise that the number one game on this list is a role playing game. It should also come as little surprise that it is a Dungeons & Dragons game. I've always been a fan of fantasy fiction and in my teenage years I became nigh obsessed with the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper RPG. Not so obsessed that I was into LARPing and couldn't tell the difference between the game and reality; that's a myth perpetuated by fear mongering religious fanatics (or at least an example of extreme psychosis that any idiot who was playing with such a person would notice). However, I was obsessed enough to name the email address that I still use to this day after my first D&D character, Kaydyn Lighthand. I played him up from first level all the way to tenth before he made a bad decision playing with a Deck of Many Things and decided to sacrifice himself by being teleported into a city of evil Red Wizards and activating a powerfully destructive artifact. Well, technically he was teleported above the city to circumvent an anti-teleportation field protecting the city and rode the artifact down a la Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. It's kind of a strange, sad coincidence that I'm writing about Dungeons & Dragons today because Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the game, died this morning as a result of heart problems. Despite the fact that I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons for a number of years, and Gygax was not directly involved in development of the game for even longer, there is no question that he had a significant impact on an important period in my life through the kind of games to which he had dedicated his life. He also made a great guest appearance on Futurama as himself. In the end, though, he wasn't able to make his last saving throw and shuffled off this mortal coil, perhaps to play Dungeons & Dragons for the next quadrillion years. Nobody leads such epic lives as are present in fiction and though literature can allow a vicarious experience of the fantastical adventures of its characters, role playing games (video game RPGs included but especially so with the more imagination intensive tabletop games like D&D) bring the experience so much closer that the memories can be like a second existence. I miss the unrestrained nerdiness of my youth. I haven't really changed so much since then, but few if any of my friends nowadays would be the least bit interested in sitting down with a bunch of dice and books to imagine themselves as a party of adventurers in some imaginary realm. Maybe I need to get some new friends. You hear that, you bastards? You're all jerks and I'm not going to be your friend anymore unless you set aside the time to play Dungeons & Dragons with me. And maybe the occasional Call of Cthulhu session. What's that? I don't need to abandon the friends I have to make new ones I can game with? Oh well, I stand by it.
The Also-rans
I could, if I felt so inclined, include a pretty comprehensive list of every video game I've ever played here but I've already mentioned a good chunk of them in the main list. Still, there are a few games that didn't make the top fifty (or their respective honorable mentions) that deserve some recognition either because they are good but didn't have enough of an impact on me to call them a favourite, or conversely because they had an impact on me but aren't very good. I'm just going to list a bunch of games and then I'll say a few words on ones about which I have something to say. A few words is likely going to end up being another couple thousand but you know what I mean.
Battle Chess
Lemmings
Lethal Enforcers
Arkanoid (Breakout)
Super Double Dragon
Traffic Department 2192
Parasite Eve
Super Mario Bros. 3
Shadow of the Colossus
WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth
Donkey Kong Country 2
Minesweeper
Phantasmagoria
Pokémon Blue/Red
Paperboy 2
Mafia
007 Nightfire
Neverwinter Nights
4-D Boxing
Ancients
Jill of the Jungle
Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy!
Epic Pinball
Number Munchers
Knights of the Round
Toobin'
World Class Leader Board
I'd also like to talk about Rise of the Triad a bit because I didn't get around to it when it was an honorable mention for the Duke Nukem entry. Back in grade seven when I was living in Roblin and attending Goose Lake High we used to install networkable games on the computers in the computer lab and play them at lunchtime. Whether or not we got away with this depended heavily on what teacher had supervising duties. When we could get away with LAN gaming at school Rise of the Triad was often the game of choice. It was one of the most advanced first person shooters of the time and it had a wide array of tremendously fun weapons including the "drunk missile," which was a rocket launcher that fired five heat seeking missiles at a time in random directions, a magical baseball bat, and Dog Mode, which turned you into a dog whose bark killed everything in sight. Everyone had their own login for the DOS based network and my password was finkerbucklinglittleshnoizlewankers. I'm proud to say that no one ever cracked it. Cause we all know what the demand for twelve year olds' school network passwords was like back in '95.
Traffic Department 2192 was a shareware game that I bought, as was Ancients, Jill of the Jungle, and Epic Pinball. I think Commander Keen was too, for that matter. I used to think it was cool because at the beginning you could choose between a "mature" version of the game's script and an edited version. Of course I picked the unedited version. Being an adolescent male I thought the writing was great. Recently, I downloaded and played through the full version of the game and realized that the writing was actually clichéd and repetitive and, well, kind of adolescent. An interesting fact about the game is that its soundtrack includes a composition by Owen Pallett, who did the orchestral and string arrangements for both Arcade Fire albums and, as Final Fantasy, won the first Polaris Music Prize.
Remember when Super Mario Bros. 3 was debuted in The Wizard? Have I already mentioned The Wizard in the course of this list? Seems like I should have. Anyway, remember how awesome The Wizard was? Remember how hot I think Jenny Lewis is? Anyone who was watching the Super Bowl at Danny's place this year does. And yes, it does have to do with the fact that I have a thing for redheads. Also, the fact that she's hot.
Pokémon seems like a strange game for me to like but the gameplay mechanics are actually quite similar to great console RPGs like Final Fantasy. Despite there being dozens of incarnations I am fully satisfied with having played the first game. Once you've played one you've basically played them all. I was also influenced to give the game a chance after seeing the episode of the television series entitled Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden and finding it unintentionally hilarious. Maybe seeing that didn't influence me to play the game, but it definitely cemented my decision to select Bulbasaur as my starting Pokémon.
I don't think I ever got around to finishing Mafia. It was a pretty good game though. Basically Grand Theft Auto in the '30s but slightly more realistic. There is one part in the game that is next to impossibly difficult. The story is that the organized crime family that you work for is fixing an auto race but their driver is injured or sick or something so you have to replace him. In other words, the objective (which is not optional) that needs to be completed to progress is to win a car race. That's all well and good, except that if you go into a turn too fast your car will flip, you will die, and you have to start over from the beginning. And there are multiple laps. And it is really easy to flip. And if you've made it through every lap without flipping over and dying you probably haven't gone fast enough to beat the other racers. Fortunately if you are playing the game on a PC you can download a save file from immediately after the race and not have to deal with it at all. Yes. That is what I did.
Phantasmagoria has the most disks of any game I have ever played, and possibly the most of any video game, with seven.
What? You're surprised at the paragraph break here? That's all I had to say about. And besides, this thing is getting fucking long and I want to send it out. But before I do that I can't neglect to bring up SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth. I've never been a big fan of wrestling games, and only ever intermittently a fan of wrestling period. This game, though, almost made the list strictly on the basis of the inside jokes that emerged from the created characters based on my circle of friends from Killarney. It's enough for me just to mention it because the only people who will understand why it's funny will know what I'm talking about.
When I sent out the first part of this list I got a reply from my dad wondering if I would be including Toobin' in this second installment. If this counts, then yes. Otherwise, no. Toobin' was originally an arcade game but I first played it on one of those rare occasions (I think there were a total of two) when my parents acquiesced and rented a Nintendo. You control a guy sitting in an inner tube and float down various rivers--the Colorado, the Nile, the Amazon--avoiding obstacles until you get to the whirlpool at the end that takes you to the next level. I have it emulated on my Xbox now, but my memories of playing the game are better than the game itself. Something that my dad reminded me of that I forgot to consider when making this list was the Coleco Adam that we used to have when I lived in Wawanesa. The Adam was a computer system that connected to a television to use as a display and ran software off of cassette tapes rather than floppy disks. It had 64 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor. There are pictures of it on Wikipedia but I remember it--along with so many other things from my childhood--being so much bigger. We had a Buck Rogers game (called Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom if said Wikipedia entry is any indication) that I played a lot. According to my dad we also had a game based on the comic strip B.C. but I have no memory of this. I do remember a game when you could move a turtle around the screen and draw things though. My best friend at the time, Ashley Cline, also had this game and I was envious because she had a colour TV to use as a monitor while I just had a 13" black and white. There's a verse in the Somaphore song Reunion that goes "In twenty years I'll probably remember the time / You climbed up on the table and tried to fly / So convinced those paper wings would carry you / If you flapped hard enough it would all come true." The person that climbed on the table with paper wings taped to their arms and leapt off flapping was me. Beside me on that table was the Coleco Adam.
Tony Hawkins looks like he hit the tree, Jim
25) Super Star Wars (Honorable Mention: Super Empire Strikes Back, Super Return of the Jedi)
According to some people the Super Star Wars series is among the most difficult games on the SNES and some of the levels could be considered among the most difficult of all time. I don't know if I could agree with that. I remember playing through all three games with my cousin Jason and beating them. They weren't exactly a cakewalk, but still not excruciatingly frustrating or anything. The level in Super Star Wars where you have to make your way up the outside of the sandcrawler was generally pretty frustrating because you could get to the top and fall off and have to work your way back again, sometimes right from the beginning. The graphics were improved in the second two games and you could use the force when you played as Luke (after Yoda trained you that is) and they added that most physically impossible of video games feats, the double jump. Seriously, what's with the double jump? I can understand it if the character has a jet pack or rocket boots or just plain magic, but if they don't what are they pushing off of? Air? For the most egregious example of kind of gravity defiance check out the movie Final Fantasy: Advent Children. I believe the filmmakers' motto during the production was "Newtonian physics be damned."
24) Starcraft
Starcraft was simultaneously the high and low point of real time strategy games for me. I thought it was a great game, but I lost interest in RTS games when I realized how much better a large number of people were than I was. Playing online became an increasingly disheartening experience as Zerg rush after Zerg rush decimated my every attempt to amass a viable fighting force. Maybe I'm just a poor military strategist. Fuck it. I'm content to leave Starcraft to the South Koreans. It's practically the national sport there. Hmm. Maybe the problem isn't my strategy. Maybe I just don't have Seoul. Get it? Seoul, cause it sounds like soul. God, I'm hilarious! Wait, where are you going? Come on, that was gold. Fine, go. Who needs you? Philistines.
23) Unreal Tournament
This was a popular game during the early days of the Warsaw House. Yes, those were heady times. A glorious age of networked computers and media piracy. Before BitTorrent the go to place for downloading movies and games was Kazaa. Before $50 DVD burners there was DivX encoding and CD burning. I still have stacks of CDs with .avi movies burned to them. Most of them were downloaded from the internet, but we used to get a lot of coupons for Jumbo Video (which, on a side note, is apparently closing down) so we would rent DVDs, rip them to the computer, and burn them to CD. Steve even started using the handle Dexter DivX. How fucking geeky is that? But hey, we were young and independent and nothing could stop us. We had also started smoking pot and for the first few months any time we shared beer with Steve we were supplying alcohol to a minor. 634 was a veritable den of iniquity. Also of awesomeness. Suck it copyright and drug laws.
22) Harvest Moon
It seems a bit surprising how good farming simulation games are. Of course, I'm only speaking from the experience of two but still, who'd have thought that even two video games where you run a farm would be good? Apparently the actual cartridge for Harvest Moon is "notoriously rare." Thanks to the miracles of emulation I never had to deal with that. This game isn't nearly as concerned with economics and realism as SimFarm, but it is a lot more fun. You actually control a specific character and the point is to build up your little farm from nothing, make some scratch, get married, and have kids. And for the pruriently minded, no, the latter goals are not explicitly depicted. This is a kid's game. There was one thing that always bugged me about the gameplay. It had to do with raising crops. First you have to till the soil into 3x3 plots. Then you plant your seeds and water them. So far so good. The problem comes later on after the plants sprout. When the plants are seeds you can walk over them and water all nine squares in the field's plot. Once the graphics change from a flat ground tile to a growing plant tile they become impassable so you can only water the outer eight plants. This frustrated the hell out of me because I was invariably missing out on 11% of my potential harvest. That's more than ten percent! Fuck!
21) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
Easily one of the greatest games on the Super Nintendo, and if you don't believe that it means you haven't played it. True, there are several SNES games higher up on this list but you'll note that I said "one of" before "the greatest." Its greatness stems from one thing. Not the graphics. Not the story. Not the gameplay. The fact that when you repeatedly attack a chicken outdoors a swarm of them fly in from offscreen to defend their fellow poultry. If it wasn't for that fact the game would have flopped and the entire Zelda series would have died with it. Think about that the next time you're playing Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker or Twilight Princess. If it hadn't been for a chicken and a few dozen of her buddies those games wouldn't even exist. Wouldn't it be awesome if they made a Legend of Zelda movie and Link was played by Brendan Fraser? Then there would be two movies where we starred as a character named Link. What was the first, you ask? Apparently we're forgetting a little gem called Encino Man. You really need to take a deep breath and seriously reconsider whether your life is on the path you want it to be on if you could overlook any film in Pauly Shore's oeuvre. I think you should go home, maybe light a few candles, get comfortable, and watch Son in Law and In the Army Now. Let the Weez show you the way.
20) Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
Here's yet another game with a protagonist named Stone. Actually, as a character Serious Sam is one of the least original you could hope to come across. He's basically Duke Nukem without the self proclaimed gargantuan levels of virility. Nevertheless the game built around him is just about the most fun you can possibly have in a first person shooter. Eschewing the realistic-yet-scrotum-squeezingly-lame two weapon carrying capacity popularized by games like Halo, Sam is able to carry several weapons as big or bigger than himself (such as a minigun, flamethrower, huge chainsaw, and giant cannon) all at the same time. Such a massive arsenal is necessary given the extraordinary number of enemies to be burnt, blasted, and blown to bloody bits. The levels are enormous and populated by seemingly endless stampedes of skeletal horse-demon-things and headless suicide bombers that, despite having no mouth, are able to scream as the charge recklessly towards you, becoming louder and louder until they finally explode in your face. Not that dying is of particular concern since you have infinite lives to respawn and continue the slaughter.
19) Full Throttle (Honorable Mention: The Dig)
These were among the first games that I played to really show the cinematic potential of video games. In fact, when the first teaser trailers for Armageddon came out showing a space shuttle mission to an asteroid headed for earth I thought they had made a live action version of The Dig, which starts with a space shuttle mission to stop an asteroid headed for earth but then it turns out the asteroid is actually a kind of alien space ship that transports the crew to an abandoned alien planet from which they have to find a way to return. Then I went and saw the movie and it turned out to be Armageddon. The greatness of Full Throttle and The Dig really comes from their cinematic qualities. The gameplay isn't particularly exciting. Based on the LucasArts SCUMM engine, they are both point-and-click, puzzle driven adventure games. The writing and the animation though (coupled with fully recorded voice acting featuring Mark Hamill and Maurice LaMarche in Full Throttle and Robert Patrick in The Dig), are superb and make the games very much like interactive animated films.
18) Soul Calibur II
Each version of Soul Calibur II (GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox) got one character unique to the system. The GameCube version got Link (from Legend of Zelda, not Encino Man) which was pretty cool. He had moves using classic items like the bow and arrow and bombs. The Xbox version got Spawn which would have been a lot cooler if he had his cape as a weapon. Instead he is entirely capeless and for some reason gets a battleaxe (okay, technically the axe is his cape but shut up). The PS2 got shafted though. The idea of Soul Calibur was, like Bushido Blade, supposed to revolve around armed combat. Every character gets their own weapon and they're all questing for a sword called Soul Edge, whether to destroy it or use it for their own ends. So who do they get to face off against all the other sword/axe/staff/nunchaku/energy beam wielding warriors? Fucking Heihachi from Tekken. And what mighty armament does he carry into battle? His fucking hands. That is nine kinds of lame. Fortunately the rest of the game is not. This would be my favourite fighting game of all time if it was not for...
17) Mortal Kombat II (Honorable Mention: Mortal Kombat 1 & 3, Deadly Alliance, Deception, Armageddon)
While Street Fighter II was clearly the game responsible for increasing the popularity of fighting games, Mortal Kombat played a much greater role in increasing the awesomeness of fighting games. This entry is really for whole MK series, but the second iteration was the pinnacle when considered in its contemporaneous context. I quite enjoy the 3D games that came out for the fifth generation consoles as well. Deception was arguably the best of these, although Armageddon had a must larger cast of fighters (and possibly the largest cast of any fighting game). Mortal Kombat I and II had the advantage of greater novelty, however. Blood! Carnage! Tearing opponents' hearts out! Ripping off people's heads with the spinal cord still attached! It was all so new back then. Who knew that, after the furor they caused, fatalities would become so ubiquitous today? Answer: anyone with a memory longer than five minutes. Just like the music of Elvis and N.W.A., the writing of Voltaire and de Sade, the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus of Nazareth, people realized that a few video games portraying some over the top violence, which had already been present in films for decades, would not destroy society and reduce humanity to feral beasts raping and murdering across the land in a globe spanning blood orgy.
16) Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon
This was the first ever game I owned that was specifically mine. I had Bart's House of Weirdness before this one, but that game belonged more to the family than just me. Eye of the Beholder was given to me by my uncle Jimmy in what must have been '91 or '92. When I first played it I didn't understand some of the Dungeons & Dragons rules on which the game is based. When creating your characters at the beginning you can modify their stats to whatever you want. When I saw that increasing the Dexterity attribute caused the stat labeled "Armor Class" to drop, I naturally (being younger than 10 years old) assumed that this was a bad thing. A higher number for Armor Class has to be better, right? WRONG! You stupid fucking piece of shit retard! God, kids are so dumb. So anyways, the first few parties I created were full of the clumsiest adventurers ever, which is probably why they got the shit kicked out of them by wolves. Trying to maximize my advantages (like creating a party of four half-elven fighter/mage/clerics) and inadvertently stacking the deck against myself was only one of the reasons it took me years to beat this game. The first major obstacle has become the stuff of legend. Among me and my cousin Jason, that is. In the Catacombs, Level 2 (Wait, should I mention that the game takes place in a large temple called Darkmoon? Probably) you start encountering skeleton warriors. Anyone familiar with (i.e. has actually played) Dungeons & Dragons will recognize that skeleton warriors are tough motherfuckers. They're resistant to magic and take reduced damage from all but bludgeoning weapons. Towards the end of the level there is a large room. When you open the door to this room all that is apparent is a pile of treasure lying on the floor. What lies out of sight from the doorway (and only reveals itself once you actually enter the room) is one of the tougher battles in the game: the Big Bunch of Skeleton Warriors. The best strategy that my nine year old mind could come up with was to pull a Leonidas and make the doorway my Thermopylae. This may work fine (sort of) for a few thousand Greeks against a couple million Persians, but for a half dozen mid-level adventurers against a couple dozen skeleton warriors and their priest masters, not so much. I was convinced that the only thing that would give me the knowledge and power to defeat these monstrosities, abominations in the eyes of the sun god Lathander, was the vaunted Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon Official Clue Book (advertised in the back of the game's manual). In the end all I needed to do was run away and head upstairs to the previous level where the enemies would not follow and I could rest, regain spells, and heal myself. I managed to figure this out on my own but by that time I had already ordered the Clue Book. In the end it was for the best because in all likelihood I would not have beaten the game without it. I did beat it though. Dran Draggore, the final boss who appears periodically throughout the game to mock you in the usual manner of villains, only took me one attempt. Also, turns out he's a dragon. Uh, spoiler alert.
15) Ultima VI: The False Prophet (Honorable Mention: Worlds of Ultima: The Savage Empire)
The Ultima series was one of the great RPG series on the PC and this game in particular made some significant advancements such as VGA graphics and use of a mouse. Impressive, I know. Many of the newer sandbox style RPGs owe as much to games like this as they do to ones like Grand Theft Auto III. While the game world isn't quite as a massive as, say, Elder Scrolls but it still provides an abundance of side quests and non-compulsory areas to explore. The volume of material that can be uncovered in this game helps its replay value immensely. I certainly appreciated this because for a long time it was one a relatively few video games that I had. It got to the point where I decided to try a speed run of the game, not to beat the game in the shortest amount of real time but the shortest length of in-game time. Beating the game eventually requires you to construct a hot air balloon so you can fly over a mountain pass to reach the final area. In addition to the mountains there is also a magic barrier between two statues that you have to pass through. However, if the wind is blowing from the southwest your hot air balloon will actually fly around one of the statues, bypassing the magic barrier. I don't know if this was a glitch in the game but by exploiting it I was able to complete the game in just four days of in-game time. After the normal end sequence a message came up with an instruction to "report thy feat to Lord British at Origin Systems." It didn't provide any details as to how to do this so I didn't do anything and nothing ever came of it. Recently I discovered the website speeddemosarchive.org which archives videos of speed runs on various games, many of which are on this list. They don't have one for Ultima VI though and after searching the internet I have not been able to find any record of a fastest completion time for the game, which makes me wonder if maybe I achieved something marginally significant.
14) Max Payne (Honorable Mention: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne)
Max Payne was hella fun and had a superb story. When I was in London (yes, I've mentioned what I'm about to write previously in a Voice of London mailing, but I'm going to write it again because some people may not have read it and it's relevant) I went to the Science Museum where I saw Charles Babbage's preserved brain. My zombie companion wanted to eat it despite my protests that it would almost certainly taste sour and gross after soaking in formaldehyde for 135 years. You know zombies, though. Once they get fixated on something you might as well be talking to a corpse. When he started banging on the display case the security guards came and escorted him out. He just kept moaning, "Braaaaaiinsss... braaaaaaaiiiiinsssss..." and trying to lunge towards the glass. One of the security guards was holding him by the arm and when he tried to pull away the whole thing, right up to the shoulder, came off in the guard's hand. They eventually got him outside and he shambled away north on Exhibition Road towards Hyde Park but the whole sordid affair was terribly embarrassing. Then I went up to the exhibit they had on video games and saw Max Payne's famous leather jacket and Hawaiian shirt costume.
13) Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen
I've started playing this game upwards of half a dozen times. For various reasons I've never been able to finish it. Apparently only 25,000 copies were released in the U.S. so it's rare to find the actual cartridge. I always played it emulated on my computer (like many of the SNES games on this list) and on more than one occasion the save file got corrupted thus losing my game. On my latest attempt I managed to get farther than I ever had before but then my computer crashed in the middle of a level. Shit like that makes me abandon games for a long time. When I was playing through Chrono Trigger I got killed on my first attempt on the last boss which made me stop playing the game for almost a year. One day I realized I hadn't beaten the game yet so I loaded it up and killed Lavos on the first go. Damn. That's two sentences I won't be able to use for my entry on Chrono Trigger. Oh well, I'll probably just go and make up some stupid shit about how I got so into the game's concept that I built my own time machine and went travelling around through history and met James Woods on his way back from the 1920s where he was doing research for the movie Chaplin. Fuck. Now I gotta come up with something else.
12) Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
This is one hell of an addicting game. I tend to be skeptical of role playing games based on settings without an established mythology, particularly in the fantasy genre, because the settings more often than not turn out to be fucking lame. It's also much more interesting to take on the role of a character in a world that is familiar and can be explored in more detail. However, if the gameplay is strong it can mitigate the lameness or unfamiliarity of the setting enough to result in an overall great game or even in some cases to establish a setting that is worth exploring in future games. I've played many hours of Elder Scrolls IV and after becoming familiar with the world I can still say it's lame. It's a pretty generic sword and sorcery type of place. The game play is terrific though. There is such a huge variety of side quests and areas to explore that you could spend ages playing without ever getting to the main story quest. That's not to say the game is without its flaws. There are two major ones that I take issue with. The first has to do with the fact that all dialogue in the game is recorded by actors. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself. The problem is that there are only half a dozen different voices used. I don't mean there are half a dozen actors doing multiple voices for different characters; I mean that every person you encounter has one of six voices. The exception to this is a handful of characters that are part of the main plot for whom they got well known actors such as Sean Bean (famous for playing Boromir from Lord of the Rings), Terence Stamp (famous for playing General Zod from Superman II), and Patrick Stewart (famous for being fucking Patrick Stewart). For the amount of time you spend talking to characters who aren't these three people they should have saved the money casting famous actors and hired a bunch of voice actors who can do more than one voice. As it is, the entire continent of Tamriel sounds like it was descended from an inbred ancestry that resulted in severely limited vocal timbre for its progeny. My second peeve with the game doesn't become relevant until much later in the game. It relates to a more general issue I have with some RPGs. As you progress through any given role playing game one of the primary motivations (besides furthering the plot) is the prospect of advancement and improvement. This applies both to the characters themselves and the equipment they use. In a game like Oblivion, where you can conceivably play for hundreds of hours and still have stuff to do, it's hard to keep a steady slope on the advancement curve. My character is currently at level 31, which is approaching the level cap for the game, but my main complaint is that I longer find equipment that's any better than the equipment I had five levels ago. That's a long time given how slowly I level up at this point. Alright, I think I've filled enough space with thoroughly unentertaining rambling about a game that maybe three people who read this will care about. This entry doesn't deserve to be as long as the Darkmoon one.
11) Diablo (Honorable Mention: Diablo II)
Blizzard Entertainment has got to be one of the most consistently great video game developers ever. Probably the only other company that tops them would be BioWare, but I'll get into that in later entries seeing as how they're involved in about a third of my top ten. Back to what's really important. Satan! Mephistopheles himself is the primary reason for the success of this game. In an interview conducted with the Dark Lord in late 1999 his Most Unholiness described his demonic influence on Diablo and its subsequent critical reception.
"To be perfectly honest--which is a bit of a stretch for me, being the Great Deceiver and all--I was pretty heavily involved in the project right from the beginning," Beelzebub stated. "Now I don't want to discount the work that the guys at Blizzard did. They really put together a great game with intuitive mechanics and great replay value. I never was very good with all that computer stuff. I still send messages to my cacodaemons carved in the flesh of unbelievers, so I'm all for credit where credit is due. But in terms of the content I obviously provided a lot of the inspiration. Even when the designers weren't performing blood sacrifices to commune with my Unholy Spirit I would often send one of my imps or other minions to give them tips on the look and feel of my realms.
"Verisimilitude was very important to me," he added.
Lucifer's touch did not extend only to the production, however. The Lord of the Underworld's most direct intervention into the mortal plane on behalf of Diablo came during the voting for the 1996 Game of the Year Award.
"Oh yeah, that was definitely my doing. There were some strong contenders that year. Civilization II was an early favourite. Duke Nukem [3D] could have taken it, but they decided to make the opponents aliens instead of the fiendish denizens of Hell that catapulted Doom to widespread popularity. Quake came closer to what I was hoping for in a shooter but still, the enemies are more Lovecraftian than Satanic. In the end I had to back the game that got my Infernal visage out there with the most accuracy. Sometimes if you want a game done right you have to do it yourself, you know?"
10) Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 (Honorable Mention: THPS 1 and 4)
If this list wasn't text only, for this entry I'd just play La Marseillaise on an infinite loop. That might be a little obscure for some people though. It's a reference to the third level of the game that takes place in Marseilles and the (theoretically) infinite combo line that you can do there. Back in the summer of 2002 (Joe knows where I'm going with this) the residents of the Warsaw House spent their days gasping for breath and moving as little as possible in the excruciating heat. It was a horrible, painful summer full of angst and unemployment. It was also full of Flight Simulator and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. Joe spent many, many hours flying around the world in real time. I still have the list of all the places he flew to. Brad and I spent not quite as many but still a lot of hours trying to execute a single combo around the Marseilles level. This same summer was when CUIF Radio really took off. It would be some time yet before the station reached its peak of popularity with the Friday Night Frenzy but these were the glory days when it was not uncommon to hear Sloan followed by Wesley Willis then somebody shouting in German to segue into Olivia Tremor Control and capping it off with a brief monologue about a vampire war in Prague. Maybe it's time CUIF Radio was resurrected.
9) Perfect Dark (Honorable Mention: Goldeneye)
This is the only game on the Nintendo 64 that made this list. Of course, that's not counting Mario Kart 64's honorable mention and any games that had versions on the N64 (for example, Starcraft and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2). At any rate, if there is any N64 game that deserves to be on a list of best/greatest/favourite video games it's this one. Goldeneye showed that first person shooters were viable on consoles, even capable of greatness, and Perfect Dark improved on it (Perfect Dark's superiority can be expressed in one word: Farsight). Sure, there had been FPS games on the Super Nintendo but they were weak ports of PC games. With the introduction of analog controllers that could (to some extent) emulate the precision of a mouse, first person shooters could reasonably be played on a console platform. Goldeneye had much to recommend it and, having come out first, is probably more beloved by gamers, but Perfect Dark is the game that I played most so it holds more memories for me. In the summer of 2000 my family moved from The Pas to Killarney. My dad actually moved down earlier in the spring to start work while my mother, sister and I remained to finish the school year. When the school year ended and my mom and sister went down to Killarney I stayed in The Pas at Steve Smith's for a couple of weeks before inevitably following. Much of those two weeks was spent playing Perfect Dark. We rented it from the local video store under my account and decided, because I wasn't going to be living there anymore, that we would just keep the game for the whole time I was there. Why should I care about late fees if I'm never going to be renting there again? But the best laid plans of mice and teenage boys go oft awry. Later the next year I was hanging out with Joe and Tim Banman at Joe's place in Killarney and received a phone call. It was my mom. She had gone to The Pas for the weekend or something and for some ridiculous reason tried to rent a movie on our old account. Even more ridiculously, she paid the late fees and made me reimburse her. Moms. Am I right?
8) X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse (Honorable Mention: X-Men Legends & Marvel: Ultimate Alliance)
X-Men Legends was a contributing factor to the failure of my second attempt at going through university. Well, that's not exactly accurate. It was more of an enabling factor. I had already lost interest in school and was skipping classes; the game just gave me something to do all day instead of writing an exam. The day in question was, after making up my mind not to go to school, pretty awesome. While it may not work out too well in the long run, recapturing a whole day from prior obligations (read abandoning responsibilities) is immensely liberating. With the freedom to do nothing you are free to do anything. On this day the anything that was decided upon was playing hours and hours of X-Men Legends and smoking copious amounts of marijuana. As I recall, it was Keith, Danny and I that were living in Warsaw at the time. Or maybe it was Danny, Trevor and I, and Keith was living at Other Warsaw. Doesn't really matter. The point is that for about sixteen straight hours there was constantly somebody playing the game. One of the hallmarks of a great game is the ability to play it for hours on end without ever getting tired of it. X-Men Legends definitely had this quality. So did X-Men Legends II. I've written most of this entry on the first game in the series because it had a more (but only barely) interesting story to go with it. The second game really is superior though. The replay value is fantastic because you can play through the game more than once with the same team of characters and continue to level up and get more powerful. Then you can mix the team up and play through with a bunch of other characters and level them up. Also, there's Iron Man.
7) Fallout 2 (Honorable Mention: Fallout, Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel)
Now I'm not certain about anything I'm about to say or have said or might say or think about, but I could swear that years ago before the first Fallout game came out I saw, on a demo disc from PC World magazine or something like that, a video preview for a game that looked just like Fallout [would later come to look like] but was described as a computer adaptation of the pen-and-paper RPG G.U.R.P.S. published by Steve Jackson Games. I'm more certain now of what I just said after having looked up Fallout on Wikipedia, where it says that it was intended to use the G.U.R.P.S. system but after the deal fell through Black Isle developed their own system. In light of this corroborating evidence I am forced to conclude that I've been excited about the Fallout universe since quite early in its development. I'm a pretty big fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, retro-futurism, and Art Deco design. Being a fan of this style I was disappointed with the poor execution of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (despite admiring the visuals), and I would very much like to play BioShock which uses a similar aesthetic. The Fallout series blended these production elements into a grandly realized world of radiated mutants, nomadic raiders, giant scorpions and rats, and chock full of the kind of esoteric sci-fi references that made Futurama so great. The latter were even more present in the second game which, besides the improved graphics and expanded story, is the primary reason it’s occupying the slot rather than the first game. I think my favourite is a random encounter that you can find while travelling through the wasteland where you come across the splattered corpse of a whale and a broken bowl of petunias. Bethesda Softworks, who is developing Fallout 3 and was previously responsible for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, has said that they will be putting less emphasis on this type of referential humour but I'm still looking forward to it immensely.
6) Chrono Trigger (Honorable Mention: Chrono Cross)
Yeah, yeah, greatest game on the Super Nintendo, one of the best RPGs of all time, blah, blah, blah. It's a game that involves time travel. Do you really need to know more than that? Actually, this reminds me of the time I built my own time machine and went travelling around through history and met James Woods on his way back from the 1920s where he-- Oh, goddammit. Okay, gotta write about something else. Um... Uhhh... Hmm... One time I... Um... Shit.
Stephen Hawking has posited that the lack of time travelers from the future being here already and taking our jobs is an argument against the existence of time travel. It doesn't prove the impossibility of time travel though, as it's possible that a time travel technology could be invented in the future that allows travel to the past but only to points after the technology was developed. Another thoroughly unscientific and improbable explanation for the present's lack of time travelers that is entirely dependent on the acceptance of an extremely dubious premise is that time travelers from the future have come to the present but they are from so far into the future that evolutionary changes have rendered them unrecognizable as humans. Specifically, aliens and UFOs are actually human time travelers from the far distant future. This idea came to me years ago during a more credulous phase of my life after I read about the concept of neoteny. This can be described as the tendency for species to develop traits present in juveniles that are retained into maturity. In other words, the descriptions of aliens as having large, hairless heads, big eyes, and small nose and mouth are the result of neotenous evolutionary developments causing them to resemble infants or fetuses. But don't take my word for it. I'm the kind of guy who has the time to play enough video games to make a list of his fifty favourites rather than get an education or "accomplish things."
5) Civilization
"In the beginning the earth was without form and void..." I don't know how many times I've seen those words grace the bottom of my computer screen. Also the rest of the intro sequence, but I forget how it goes. I always played as either the Russians or the Romans in this game because if I didn't they were always the ones that ended up kicking my ass. I don't think I've played Civilization in the last ten years though, so maybe I'd be better at it today. Most of the time I played it when I was younger I would use despotism as my system of government. I didn't know how to utilize all the different features and manage my civilization properly so switching to communism or monarchism usually resulted in my populations revolting. Still, even under my despotic rule with the military enforcing order in the cities I was able to develop the technologies necessary for space flight and colonize Alpha Centauri. Although most of the colonists probably volunteered to escape six thousand years of martial law. Ingrates. Don't they know I need my huge palace to store the vast quantities of non-operational, diamond studded, gold helicopters that they toil in my factories to produce? I'm pretty sure no one important noticed that time that I allowed one of my cities to be invaded and occupied by a hostile force before retaking the city in order to eliminate part of the population. They were all malcontents anyway. You can tell because they dress in black and carry protest signs. Good riddance, I say. Damn hippies.
4) Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Honorable Mention: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords)
When it comes to movies, sequels are almost invariably inferior to their predecessors. There are, of course, exceptions to this: The Empire Strikes Back, X-Men 2, The Godfather Part II, Terminator 2, Aliens, Spider-Man 2, Return of the King, Toy Story 2, Evil Dead 2, Star Trek II, Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Bourne Ultimatum. There are probably more, but I've already made my point with more examples than necessary. That point, to reiterate, is that movie sequels usually suck. The reverse is true about video games, however. Video games are perhaps more dependent on technical achievement than films are, and thus when the sequel to a game is developed it can take advantage of advancements in technology and the clarity of hindsight to create superior graphics and visual realism, as well as correct design flaws and improve gameplay. Sequels in film also take advantage of new technologies that allow for more spectacular visual sequences, but a film’s success hinges much more strongly on other factors, particularly the script. A movie can look fantastic but if the plot, dialogue, and character development are lame then the best special effects won't be able to save them (see the Matrix sequels, X-men 3, Alien Resurrection, Attack of the Clones). While I can truthfully say that The Sith Lords was superior in terms of graphics and gameplay, even the developers will admit that they were rushed to finish the game for a Christmas release and so the improvements don't help keep the game from feeling incomplete. The ending especially was a bit of a letdown. That's not to say it wasn't still a great game though. It's just that the first game was damn near perfect and so gets to take the official spot on the list. When I wrote earlier about how I enjoy RPGs that allow me to explore an established and familiar world in more detail, Knights of the Old Republic is what I was talking about. The game is so immersive with its seamless transitions between gameplay and cinematics that it feels like you're really walking around a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
3) Final Fantasy X (Honorable Mention: Final Fantasy IV, VI & VII)
This one could have gone to any of the games mentioned but in the end I think I had the most fun playing Final Fantasy X. So much fun in fact that one day I spent 24 straight hours playing it. I'm pretty sure it was the longest single session of video gaming I've ever played. Of course I took short breaks to make something to eat and go to the bathroom but besides those few brief interruptions I played continuously from when I got up in the morning to when I was too exhausted to stay up any longer the next. I find role playing games addicting like that. Also, I had taken the summer off and I had nothing else important to do. That was the summer that Danny, Stephen Harfield and I took mushrooms and wandered barefoot through suburban St. Vital for five hours in the middle of the night. We roamed through residential construction sites, climbing over the heavy machinery, and even found our way into one of the half finished houses. We knew the whole time that society was going to be so mad. Towards the end of our psychedelically fuelled peregrination we stopped at a convenience store where Harfield purchased a National Post. Upon our return home we made spaghetti and watched The Colour of Money. I discovered Sudoku for the first time in the aforementioned newspaper and spent a couple of hours completing it as I came down. Apparently I didn't get much sleep that summer.
2) Rock Band (Honorable Mention: Guitar Hero II)
For sheer unadulterated fun, Rock Band could just be the greatest game in existence. If this list were based solely on replayability it would easily take the number one spot. I have little doubt that I will be playing Rock Band and its sequels, spinoffs, expansions or other iterations for many, many years to come. I will tire of the game only to the extent that I tire of the songs that can be played on it, and this is assuaged by the fact that new songs and content are continuously being released, making the old new again. I never learned to play a musical instrument in real life (something I wish I had done) but Rock Band simulates the experience (with a much shallower learning curve) closely enough to soothe any regret over the myopic ambitions of my childhood. There are most definitely improvements that can be made in future versions, such as being able to play the Band World Tour mode solo or at least online and being able to change the leader of bands in this mode, but I still can't praise this game highly enough. I love it. If anybody ever wants to play, just give me a call. As long as I'm home I'll be down for it.
1) Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (Honorable Mention: Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II)
It should come as little surprise that the number one game on this list is a role playing game. It should also come as little surprise that it is a Dungeons & Dragons game. I've always been a fan of fantasy fiction and in my teenage years I became nigh obsessed with the Dungeons & Dragons pen-and-paper RPG. Not so obsessed that I was into LARPing and couldn't tell the difference between the game and reality; that's a myth perpetuated by fear mongering religious fanatics (or at least an example of extreme psychosis that any idiot who was playing with such a person would notice). However, I was obsessed enough to name the email address that I still use to this day after my first D&D character, Kaydyn Lighthand. I played him up from first level all the way to tenth before he made a bad decision playing with a Deck of Many Things and decided to sacrifice himself by being teleported into a city of evil Red Wizards and activating a powerfully destructive artifact. Well, technically he was teleported above the city to circumvent an anti-teleportation field protecting the city and rode the artifact down a la Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove. It's kind of a strange, sad coincidence that I'm writing about Dungeons & Dragons today because Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of the game, died this morning as a result of heart problems. Despite the fact that I haven't played Dungeons & Dragons for a number of years, and Gygax was not directly involved in development of the game for even longer, there is no question that he had a significant impact on an important period in my life through the kind of games to which he had dedicated his life. He also made a great guest appearance on Futurama as himself. In the end, though, he wasn't able to make his last saving throw and shuffled off this mortal coil, perhaps to play Dungeons & Dragons for the next quadrillion years. Nobody leads such epic lives as are present in fiction and though literature can allow a vicarious experience of the fantastical adventures of its characters, role playing games (video game RPGs included but especially so with the more imagination intensive tabletop games like D&D) bring the experience so much closer that the memories can be like a second existence. I miss the unrestrained nerdiness of my youth. I haven't really changed so much since then, but few if any of my friends nowadays would be the least bit interested in sitting down with a bunch of dice and books to imagine themselves as a party of adventurers in some imaginary realm. Maybe I need to get some new friends. You hear that, you bastards? You're all jerks and I'm not going to be your friend anymore unless you set aside the time to play Dungeons & Dragons with me. And maybe the occasional Call of Cthulhu session. What's that? I don't need to abandon the friends I have to make new ones I can game with? Oh well, I stand by it.
The Also-rans
I could, if I felt so inclined, include a pretty comprehensive list of every video game I've ever played here but I've already mentioned a good chunk of them in the main list. Still, there are a few games that didn't make the top fifty (or their respective honorable mentions) that deserve some recognition either because they are good but didn't have enough of an impact on me to call them a favourite, or conversely because they had an impact on me but aren't very good. I'm just going to list a bunch of games and then I'll say a few words on ones about which I have something to say. A few words is likely going to end up being another couple thousand but you know what I mean.
Battle Chess
Lemmings
Lethal Enforcers
Arkanoid (Breakout)
Super Double Dragon
Traffic Department 2192
Parasite Eve
Super Mario Bros. 3
Shadow of the Colossus
WWE SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth
Donkey Kong Country 2
Minesweeper
Phantasmagoria
Pokémon Blue/Red
Paperboy 2
Mafia
007 Nightfire
Neverwinter Nights
4-D Boxing
Ancients
Jill of the Jungle
Commander Keen in Goodbye Galaxy!
Epic Pinball
Number Munchers
Knights of the Round
Toobin'
World Class Leader Board
I'd also like to talk about Rise of the Triad a bit because I didn't get around to it when it was an honorable mention for the Duke Nukem entry. Back in grade seven when I was living in Roblin and attending Goose Lake High we used to install networkable games on the computers in the computer lab and play them at lunchtime. Whether or not we got away with this depended heavily on what teacher had supervising duties. When we could get away with LAN gaming at school Rise of the Triad was often the game of choice. It was one of the most advanced first person shooters of the time and it had a wide array of tremendously fun weapons including the "drunk missile," which was a rocket launcher that fired five heat seeking missiles at a time in random directions, a magical baseball bat, and Dog Mode, which turned you into a dog whose bark killed everything in sight. Everyone had their own login for the DOS based network and my password was finkerbucklinglittleshnoizlewankers. I'm proud to say that no one ever cracked it. Cause we all know what the demand for twelve year olds' school network passwords was like back in '95.
Traffic Department 2192 was a shareware game that I bought, as was Ancients, Jill of the Jungle, and Epic Pinball. I think Commander Keen was too, for that matter. I used to think it was cool because at the beginning you could choose between a "mature" version of the game's script and an edited version. Of course I picked the unedited version. Being an adolescent male I thought the writing was great. Recently, I downloaded and played through the full version of the game and realized that the writing was actually clichéd and repetitive and, well, kind of adolescent. An interesting fact about the game is that its soundtrack includes a composition by Owen Pallett, who did the orchestral and string arrangements for both Arcade Fire albums and, as Final Fantasy, won the first Polaris Music Prize.
Remember when Super Mario Bros. 3 was debuted in The Wizard? Have I already mentioned The Wizard in the course of this list? Seems like I should have. Anyway, remember how awesome The Wizard was? Remember how hot I think Jenny Lewis is? Anyone who was watching the Super Bowl at Danny's place this year does. And yes, it does have to do with the fact that I have a thing for redheads. Also, the fact that she's hot.
Pokémon seems like a strange game for me to like but the gameplay mechanics are actually quite similar to great console RPGs like Final Fantasy. Despite there being dozens of incarnations I am fully satisfied with having played the first game. Once you've played one you've basically played them all. I was also influenced to give the game a chance after seeing the episode of the television series entitled Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden and finding it unintentionally hilarious. Maybe seeing that didn't influence me to play the game, but it definitely cemented my decision to select Bulbasaur as my starting Pokémon.
I don't think I ever got around to finishing Mafia. It was a pretty good game though. Basically Grand Theft Auto in the '30s but slightly more realistic. There is one part in the game that is next to impossibly difficult. The story is that the organized crime family that you work for is fixing an auto race but their driver is injured or sick or something so you have to replace him. In other words, the objective (which is not optional) that needs to be completed to progress is to win a car race. That's all well and good, except that if you go into a turn too fast your car will flip, you will die, and you have to start over from the beginning. And there are multiple laps. And it is really easy to flip. And if you've made it through every lap without flipping over and dying you probably haven't gone fast enough to beat the other racers. Fortunately if you are playing the game on a PC you can download a save file from immediately after the race and not have to deal with it at all. Yes. That is what I did.
Phantasmagoria has the most disks of any game I have ever played, and possibly the most of any video game, with seven.
What? You're surprised at the paragraph break here? That's all I had to say about. And besides, this thing is getting fucking long and I want to send it out. But before I do that I can't neglect to bring up SmackDown! Shut Your Mouth. I've never been a big fan of wrestling games, and only ever intermittently a fan of wrestling period. This game, though, almost made the list strictly on the basis of the inside jokes that emerged from the created characters based on my circle of friends from Killarney. It's enough for me just to mention it because the only people who will understand why it's funny will know what I'm talking about.
When I sent out the first part of this list I got a reply from my dad wondering if I would be including Toobin' in this second installment. If this counts, then yes. Otherwise, no. Toobin' was originally an arcade game but I first played it on one of those rare occasions (I think there were a total of two) when my parents acquiesced and rented a Nintendo. You control a guy sitting in an inner tube and float down various rivers--the Colorado, the Nile, the Amazon--avoiding obstacles until you get to the whirlpool at the end that takes you to the next level. I have it emulated on my Xbox now, but my memories of playing the game are better than the game itself. Something that my dad reminded me of that I forgot to consider when making this list was the Coleco Adam that we used to have when I lived in Wawanesa. The Adam was a computer system that connected to a television to use as a display and ran software off of cassette tapes rather than floppy disks. It had 64 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor. There are pictures of it on Wikipedia but I remember it--along with so many other things from my childhood--being so much bigger. We had a Buck Rogers game (called Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom if said Wikipedia entry is any indication) that I played a lot. According to my dad we also had a game based on the comic strip B.C. but I have no memory of this. I do remember a game when you could move a turtle around the screen and draw things though. My best friend at the time, Ashley Cline, also had this game and I was envious because she had a colour TV to use as a monitor while I just had a 13" black and white. There's a verse in the Somaphore song Reunion that goes "In twenty years I'll probably remember the time / You climbed up on the table and tried to fly / So convinced those paper wings would carry you / If you flapped hard enough it would all come true." The person that climbed on the table with paper wings taped to their arms and leapt off flapping was me. Beside me on that table was the Coleco Adam.
Tony Hawkins looks like he hit the tree, Jim
posted by Ad Hawk at
5:09 a.m.
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