My Favorite Video Games (#35 to #31)
Continuing my top 43 favorite games of all time, and here’s #35…
35. Earthbound (SNES).
Okay I have to admit, I played this one on an emulator, but I was in college, I didn’t have my SNES with me, and I had some afternoons to kill, because who wants to do homework on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon? Unfortunately, I never got to finish Earthbound because the emulator crashed and I lost it all. Boo-hoo. It was a funny and entertaining game while I was playing it, and I’m sure even before and after I played it, it is still considered a funny and entertaining game. The combat system was menu-wading so there’s nothing in terms of the gameplay that I found mind blowing and different. I played Earthbound sometime after I played Final Fantasy 7, and I like that Earthbound didn’t take itself so seriously. Now, over the last few years I’ve come to see that most Final Fantasy games as the same thing redone over and over again and it’s boring and that boredom makes a game like Earthbound stand out. It isn’t set in a fantasy world; Earthbound is set in the suburbs and during modern times and has recognizable weapons like a “baseball bat.” You eat hamburgers to regain health. Just a change in motif, taking the mundane of life, adding a mix of sci-fantasy, and it was spades more interesting then Final Fantasy.
34. Sam and Max Hit the Road (PC).
As much as I am a proponent of the “old-skool” adventure gaming genre, I didn’t get to play many adventure games when I was a kid - there was the whole thing of my family being poor. I did get my hands on a few, the Journeyman Project, Leisure Suit Larry 1 (a cousin had it), the 7th Guest, Myst, and later on Monkey Island - there’s probably a couple of others but I don’t recall them. Sam and Max stood out above the rest for it’s wacky sense of humor and it’s use of a deranged little white rabbit. I honestly should pick up the Telltale episodic Sam and Max games, but like most episodic things, maybe it’s just better to wait for the box set and get the experience all at once.
33. Virtual Fighter 2 (Arcade).
I’m a kung-fu movie fan, although I never watched all the 70’s grindhouse chop-socky flicks. Virtual Fighter used real martial arts as their fighting styles and I enjoyed their emulation of Drunken Boxing. Oh, my favorite martial arts film: Drunken Master 2 (bet you couldn’t see that coming). It’s fun to play, but hard to master, and I never came close, but I had a blast stuffing quarters into the machine and getting my ass handed to me from the computer.
32. Battle Arena Toshinden (PS1).
We played this game to death on the Playstation. I believe this was even the first game we got for the first Playstation. Ellis was my favorite character. You can’t beat a pixie-dust girl that’ll cartwheel into you and then jab you to death with a pair of throwing daggers. Unless, you’re Duke, and you’re a tool and keep mashing buttons to have Duke flail his bastard sword around. I had a friend who played Duke everytime because of the cheap-ass advantage of having a long sword. I ended up being able to play Ellis really well, not that this knowledge led to any kind of arcade fighting greatness on my behalf. I suppose Sophia earns points in the tits-and-ass category of gaming S&M femdom as well. Oh, and am I alone in thinking that Eiji always screamed “Eat Chili!!” whenever he attacked?
31. Doom (PC).
I read all about how John Carmack came up with the revolutionary usage of BSP trees to partition 3D levels for fast rendering, and aside from being a fun game, I liked the game because of the technology. It was around the time of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom that I got into programming C++ and I learned the ins-and-outs of programming mode 13h and doing rudimentary 3D graphics and raycasting. I know the theory, but it took me years later to finally put some of that knowledge into practice - some homework assignments in my masters CS graphics class. I didn’t write a raycasting engine though, but rather a 3D polygonal rasterizer that could do fully texture mapped objects.
