My Favorite Video Games (#25 to #21)
25. Animal Crossing DS (NDS).
I thought Sam and Max was the height of demonification hilarity (come on, who gets that joke), but the writers behind Animal Crossing DS are absolute genius. You want non-sequitur and off the wall ramblings, get this game. You won’t believe what the animals will say, and then being able to add in the most fowl and creative-reach-around-the-curse-word-filter phrases just ups the ante of hilarity. The turnip market’s only fun if you have many people to play with such as where I work, and I made my millions and paid off that ‘coon bastard, Tom Nook. He’ll never put me in debt again until I get the next Animal Crossing for the Wii. Admittedly, aside from your neighbors’ wacky talkback, there’s not much else to the game and it was a fairly shallow experience, but the promise of day to day life in a rural, happy, isolated community without a worry in the world, now that’s appealing. I wasn’t a huge fan of fishing, but I did it for Blathers. I also dug up the purported skulls of dinosaurs and sold them to the owl — no doubt, these so called “fossils” were probably apart of some bone racket that Blathers and Tom were running behind the scenes. Being the only person in town that ever bought anything at Nook’s store, I can only surmise that he was involved in various illegal activities to make up the loss for buying the most extravagant junk to “sell.”
24. Sudoku (NDS, came with Brain Age).
It’s a 9 x 9 grid puzzle game where you try and get the numbers 1-9 in each column, row, and within a 3×3 grid of boxes. It uses some deductive reasoning skills to figure the puzzle out. Sure you can buy a book and do it in there, but it’s just more convenient to have the computer do the housekeeping letting you focus on the game and righting your mistakes. Plus, I got a special edition of Brain Age because I went to the Nintendo Keynote at GDC 2006. They were really keen on pimping the game out to everyone to jumpstart American interest in the Japanese phenomena.
23. Bully (PS2).
I remember watching the commercials and deciding that I needed this game. It was something different — it didn’t have to do with characters that were gangsters or burly military men knee-deep in the dead. You played a delinquent sent off to Bullworth Academy, a private school. You beat up the alpha kids, helped the downtrodden, made kissy-face with the girls, and got to cause all kinds of mayhem that you might only see if you lived in a fraternity or watched Animal House over and over. Its fun to live vicariously through the game and do all those things you didn’t manage to pull off in high school — I was a goodie-goodie after all. This is one of the few modern games that has kept me enthralled for more than 20 hours, and on top of that, Bully feels like a really complete game. There’s nothing that feels missing, there’s no system that feels tacked on, and everything runs without a hitch. Kudos to Rockstar for taking the time to iron out the issues and making a stellar, enjoyable game.
22. Unreal Tournament 2004 Instagib Deathmatch (PC).
You like clicking heads? This is the best way to do it. Instagib is a mode of UT2k4 where you get a one-shot kill plasma gun that’ll pop the motherfucking head off of anyone it shoots. It’s gratifying to watch a geyser of blood erupt from the newly vaporized head of an opponent. Playing Instagib on the Morpheus-3 map was excellent fun because of the low gravity. It was a Matrix-style space ballet with the occasional across screen head popping snipe. Mentally, I equated the experience of playing Instagib with a type of zen meditation. You kept still, breathed normal whilst running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off, and calmly and stealthily flick your wrist at the furthest moving clump of pixels and clicked the trigger. It’s satisfying hear “double kill,” “triple kill,” “running riot!”
21. Burnout 3: Takedown/Burnout Revenge (PS2).
Who doesn’t like driving on the wrong side of the road? Or slamming cars out of the way? Or crashbreaking and devastating the entire roadway with your twisted metallic carcass careening across the highway in bullet time? This game offers all of those. I remember the first two games I had a great concept but poor execution. I would call Burnout 3: Takedown my favorite, but Striker is an annoying-as-shit announcer and you always had to sit through that goddamn tutorial movie everytime you started the game from scratch (and I restarted a few times). Burnout Revenge tones that shit down but it dials up the bloom and brownness which I’m not a fan of, but I’ll take Revenge over Takedown. Too me they’re essentially the same game even if one is filtered through a fine film of poop.
