“I made a list of my top forty games,” Kiyoshi told Kea and me while we were sitting down for lunch one afternoon. He rattled the games off his list and in response Kea and I named games that we would put in our lists. Kiyoshi later expanded his list to encompass fifty games, and the two of us puzzled over the deep philosophical quandary: what are my top fifty games? Kea did her list and you can see it on her blog. Here’s Kiyoshi’s.
I started out by writing down the games I remembered the most, and if I remembered it, then it must have been (somewhat) fun. The hardest part of building this list was figuring out where each of these games went in the list. I’m not sure how my friends put their lists together, but it made me ask the additional question: what makes a game fun to me?
All the games on my list are “fun.” Because I felt it was fun. And, sure I could just “feel” that one game was more fun than another, but I’m more of a rational guy, and if I’m going to answer a question I need to know as close as I can why I decided such-and-such a game was #34 instead of #33. So I came up with some loose numbers (on a scale of 1-to-5 how much fun was it), and I enumerated a bunch of statements that best describe the types of games I enjoy, and here they are:
- Did the game allow me to be creative and use it like a virtual toy?
- Did the game let me play with my friends?
- Was the game easy to get into?
- Was the gameplay interesting?
- Was the game artistic in that it had a compelling story, interesting atmosphere, or just quirky?
- Was the game put together well? I admit I like some games just for the technology.
- Was the game different and new to me?
- The ever-present nostalgia factor.
Despite all this, in the end, some of the placement still was just from feel. So I think I have a pretty good idea as to what my favorite games were and why, and to that end, I present to you the 43 games that are my most favorite. That’s right, not fifty, not forty, not even a nice round number, just 43 games. For the more obscure games I’ve included some Wikipedia links and of course there are pictures.
43. Milon’s Secret Castle (NES)
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milon’s_Secret_Castle
I bought this game on a whim when I was a kid. It turned out to be the worst thing I could have ever purchased. I didn’t know about reading reviews or asking friends, I just saw that it was something completely fucking different than what all my friends were playing, and if that were the case, then it was good enough. I hated the game the first time through – I died immediately and nothing made much sense, and I shoved it away. So much for being different, but then every time we brought out the NES from storage I’d plug the game in and play it through and every time I got better at it and it was actually a decent and fun game – if only on the low end of that spectrum of decency and fun. Milon’s Secret Castle is a basic platformer. We actually never knew what the story was, but concluded that you were some dude standing in front of a castle who can shoot magical bubbles, and now you’d better do something about it. Whatever it was, that you were supposed to do.
42. Silent Hill (PS1).
This is one of those games I enjoyed vicariously through my brother. He played it; I watched it. It was a game that came out in the PS1 era in the midst of the survival horror explosion of games, thanks to Resident Evil. I appreciate this game mainly because of my enjoyment of metaphysical or “wacky-as-shit” movies and television series (I was really big into Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain at the time). My favorite part had to be when we entered the hospital in the light world and explored all three floors. My brother stepped back into the elevator to leave and we didn’t know what to do next. “Hey, there’s a fourth floor,” I told him. “No there isn’t,” he retorted, but looking at the elevator panel, he realized there was, and what a trip that was. My favorite ending to Silent Hill is still the worst ending – the one where Harry dies in the jeep. It elevated all of the player’s actions and the demons you fought to a symbolic level.
41. Dead or Alive 2: Hardcore (PS2).
This was the first game I bought with the PS2. I figured it would have some longevity since it was a fighting game that we could just pop in and play over and over. I should say something about the fighting system, but let’s face it the fighting was laughably stupid and insipid. I enjoyed this game because of the tits-and-ass factor, the unlockable titillating costumes, and setting the age to 99 and watching the Euler integrator bounce those water-balloony jubblies up and down like they were free floating in microgravity. Lei-Fang is still my favorite. Too bad the Dead or Alive movie totally fucked her up, but then the Dead or Alive movie was a utter piece of shit. Still, how did you get the ugliest looking Chinese girl to play her? For shame Microsoft. You can’t even do that right?
40. Space War (PC).
Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar
I didn’t play the original one on the oscilloscope. I got this game when I was on a 2400bps modem and using Prodigy. Do you remember Prodigy? I belonged to the programming forums. Some clever guys created a BASIC program to convert binary to hexadecimal, and Space War was one of the executables that they dumped into forum posts as pages of hex gibberish. I copied them all down, hand merged them all together in a DOS BASIC editor and ran a hex2bin decoder and played myself some Space War. I’m a Star Trek nerd so I got a kick out of diverting my auxiliary power to the shields and hyperjumping out of the way of a torpedo blast.
39. Mega Man 3 (NES).
So there’s this nifty cheat code that you could do with this game by using the second controller. I used to use a pair of barbeque tongs and clamped down the necessary button on the second controller so I could cheat my way through the game. I enjoyed doing that a lot, other than that, I remember the great music and that it was a wonderfully put together game.
38. Tradewars 2002 (PC).
Wikipedia Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradewars_2002
This was a BBS ASCII art game. It was like an MMO for me because you played it with other BBS members. I used to cruise around on various local BBSes and played games like Barney Splat, Baron Realms, and Tradewars 2002, my favorite of them all – not that I didn’t get a kick out of decapitating Barney and then horrifically murdering Baby Bob and the rest of the schoolyard gang, but that’s another story for another time. Tradewars put you in the chair of a merchant spaceship and represented the world in all its colorful ASCII art and text-adventure awesomeness. You went from port to port haggling with buyers and sellers to turn a profit and build yourself a small empire. Since these BBSes were short lived it was difficult to ever really become the Don of the Tradewars universe. Plus a faced a great deal of ownage when pitted to the top dogs at the game. Still it never spoiled my fun.
37. Grand Theft Auto 2 (PC).
Download it for free here: http://www.rockstargames.com/classics/
I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I was a huge GTA fan before it became main stream. I didn’t need Jack Thompson to tell me the blatantly obvious, and guess what Jack, I was fucking underage when I played this game. Where were you then to think about the children? Sure there wasn’t hot coffee, but you could take a car and mow down the occasional conga-line of Hare-Krishna’s and Elvises. Kea says this makes me a bad person, but then I also got the award for crushing 50,000 people consecutively with a car; I enjoyed the prolonged high speed police chases; and of course, I had fun piling a shit-ton of cars in front of the L-train and watching the simulation mindlessly ram into the pileup. The electro-gun was great too just to be able to arch it across derelict cars to fry pedestrians who were already attempting to flee your murderous rampage. All the things you can’t do in real life you could do here. Good times. Good times. The 3D GTAs…they’re nice looking alright, the mayhem just as good, but I didn’t put them on my list, because this is the mother of them all. Oh, plus there are no conga-lines of Hare-Krishna’s in the 3D ones. What’s up with that? You’ll put humping in but no conga-lines?
36. Nintendogs (NDS).
Who doesn’t love cute puppies? I saw this game at Iwata-san’s Nintendo keynote address at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. You used a stylus to interact with a virtual puppy. You could train them to run obstacle courses, throw Frisbees, take them out on walks, and treat them as if they were your own pets. I thought it was unique and innovative and I still do. I just wish Nintendo did more with it. I never owned a pet so that was something rather special to have a little cyber-pup. For the first month of owning the game I had my DS to experiment with how far Nintendo went with the simulation. The end result: not that far. I haven’t fed my Welsh Corgi, aptly named Ein, or my Labador Retriever named Bristol in about two years. Luckily, digital dogs don’t die and go to heaven, but there is a way to reset the game, and I hear it’s sad. So I just don’t play it anymore.
That’s #43 to #36. Tomorrow, or whenever #35 to #30. Can you feel the excitement?
Tags: favorite games, top 50 games
