My Favorite Video Games (#15 to #11)
15. Max Payne/Max Payne 2 (PC).
The comic book presentation, the over-the-top monologues, the slow motion bullet time, and Max Payne’s forever constipated face of agony make this game great. You could tell the actors were having fun when reading the cheesy, noir dialogue. How could you forget Max sneering that his kung fu was strong, like a ninja as he headed in for the battle with the final boss. This guy was Jack Bauer before Jack Bauer and he left a higher body count in one level than Jack Bauer leaves in an hour of 24. The second Max Payne added physics and motion blurring, which are both welcome additions to the non-stop mayhem. My best memory of this game is watching Sin City, realizing it was Max Payne 2, and going home and having my own Sin City shootout. The only thing missing: an army of hookers dressed in lingerie shooting dual uzis, but I guess we can’t have it all. Yes, we could; I could mod this game, but honestly, all the effort…
14. Front Mission 3 (PS1).
Front Mission 3 let you customize mechs and fight turn-based battles. I suppose it’s like Final Fantasy Tactics, but with mechs and a Tom Clancy-esque political drama. But don’t take my word for it, read the indepth wikipedia article and enlighten yourself to all the varied and sundry facets of the game’s political drama. Each part of your mech was interchangeable — arms, legs, the body, the weapons, the color of your machine, all fair game for change. It determined the HP of each individual component. There was some strategy to the turn-based fighting, how you oriented yourself from other enemies, and how you’d take them on with your team of walking robots. The story was also a colorful political drama which is a huge plus to me and kept me going through the game. I didn’t make much use of the virtual Internet, but I liked that the creators fleshed out the world with that kind of richness and depth. On a side note…we used to call the lead character of the game, Kazuki, the Last Angry Man. If you ever saw his face in the game it usually looked like he was ready to fire out a major doodie.
13. Chrono Trigger (SNES).
Of all the menu wading, stat building RPGs, this was my favorite. The graphics were crisp, the music beautiful, and the story was fun, but come on, who doesn’t love a good time travel story? My favorite music is still from the Kingdom of Zeal and second to that the theme for the Castle of Guardia. The double and triple attacks were fun to pull off and being able to see the enemies on the screen instead of having random battles was a nice trade up — why go back? The multiple endings were fun as well, especially the one with the developers, and also when you started over you weren’t a n00b hacking and slashing at level 1 but rather you were whatever level you left off at — well at least you had that option anyhow. Oh by the way, Chrono Cross, it’s a sequel to Chrono Trigger, but it’s nowhere as good, and the ending of Cross, well, let’s say it’s best summed up in three pages of text, because that’s literally how they presented it to you. Oh, and Lynx is your father. There, I ruined the ending for you. Now you won’t face to face the travesty that is Chrono Cross.
12. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (PS2).
Parkour is the word that comes to mind when I think of why I love Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The game’s all about smooth motion and free running across walls and pouncing over giant gorges. The combat system was simple – hit the win button and press directional buttons to do all kinds of Buffy the Vampire flips, tumbles, and sand-snatching stabs. This is another game, like Bully, that I felt was exceptionally well produced. The Prince animated well (with 700 different animation sequences he damn well better!), the combat system was fun, and climbing over everything felt fluid and exciting, but that makes sense coming from the French, they also invented Free Running. The one bit I didn’t like: the fight in the elevator. I forget what the girl’s name was, but she should have found a crack and stayed there. It took me a dozen tries before I overcame that obstacle only to face an anti-climatic boss fight with the Vikar leading to what I felt was a crappy ending. Much as I love time travel stories, reset button endings just leave me empty. So you’re telling me that everything I just did…never happened anyway? Excellent. Of, and if Chrono Trigger ended with a “reset button” finale, I don’t recall it, you don’t need to trouble yourself by reminding me of it, and that’s all for the better. What I can’t remember, only helps to make this a better thing.
11. Halo (Xbox).
The best description for this game I ever heard came from a CNBC documentary on the video game industry, and it goes a little something like this: “your Robocop on Larry Niven’s Ringworld, with the space marines from Aliens, fighting the Predator and a ton of zombies.” That gets a “Fuck Yeah!” Right there. Much as I loved the solo missions, it was really the face-to-face multiplayer. This is one of the first gaming experiences I’ve had where a bunch of guys got together in the same room and played together. That above all else was the power of this game. I had two sets of Halo friends. The first set of friends were my brother’s friends back at home in Downingtown. They played Halo for real and for keeps. Admittedly it wasn’t fun playing with them because of their seriousness to the matter of Halo dominance. Some of the legendary status players actually challenged us to a game of “Helm’s Deep” in Sidewinder that ended with someone grabbing the Ethernet switcher and ripping all the network connections out between the four Xboxes we had there. And you wonder why people murder each other over that goddamn console. Still, it was amazingly fun having 12 people in the same room, 4 Xboxes, and playing Rage Against the Machine’s “Fuck the Police” to a five minute game of King of the Hill with shotguns. Believe it or not, I actually had a deep and interesting conversation over an incredibly long game of one-on-one deathmatch in Hang’em High at around 4 in the morning at one of these get-togethers. My other set of friends is my group in Los Angeles. We made games together; we played games together. When we worked on our first magnum opus, Dyadin, we widdled away late nights playing Halo. It was a great way to vent frustrations that we had with one another. We were more on the level with one another in terms of skill, and even the best of us could be taken down with a well placed pistol snipe from across the level. Not to mention, these guys were much more light-hearted and we laughed ourselves stupid when we weren’t hurling curses through the air.
And there you go…we’re on to the final 10 games of this list, my 10 most favorite games of all time, until at some point in the future someone makes a game better than the games which I thought were the best and usurps the place of one of the top ten. Will Spore be one of those games? Or Bioshock? Who knows, not even I know!
