My brother passed me this link with some Youtube videos of Japanese doing what they do best…drawing anime. I’m sure they do other things really well too, such as things that don’t involve drawing anime, but despite that, this link is focused on the drawing of said anime, and not the other things Japanese people may or may not be perfectly good at.
Success! I upgraded WordPress to version 2.2. Why? It said that there were new toys to play with such as populating the sidebar with a calendar and rearranging things here and there. So in other words, I did it, because I can. You know, this list, is more of a list-in-constant-progress. There are many games that I’ve played that I probably don’t remember because my brain is slowly turning into swiss cheese. Diablo is an example of a game that I enjoyed but didn’t add to my list. I won’t go and amend the 43, but suffice to say, Diablo is now the 44th. I could try and apply the metrics I used to ascertain positions for the other 43 games, but to shove this in the middle now that the list is “finished” would throw things off. Needless to say, if I’m just remember it now, it must not have been too terribly a fond memory. This one literally comes out of the dregs of my memory, surfaced by discussions of video games in-between lambasting Michael Bay’s latest epic explode-a-thon, the Transformers.
20. Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES).
This was my first and still my favorite Zelda experience. In the NES days I’d venture over to friends houses and we’d play Zelda. I believe it was one of the things that spurred my absolute need of a Nintendo Entertainment System. My dad procured the Power Set, or whatever it was called — it was the NES with the light gun and the power pad. It wouldn’t be until I got my hands on the SNES and its incarnation of Zelda that I would be properly taken by the game. I enjoyed the light and dark world storyline and I like the simplistic but vibrant sprite work of the game. So much so, I had drawn up plans to make a clone (and parody) of Zelda using Visual BASIC. With my lack of coding skills and technology, that never went anywhere, and maybe that was for the best.
19. Dance Dance Revolution (PS1).
A game that involves physical movement? Preposterous! But fun and addictive. It hurt so much to play, and you were always tired and sweaty, but goddammit, it was fun. I remember we tried to play this in our house. It was dangerous to the infrastructure of the building. We played on the ground floor, using a friend’s Playstation. He was aptly nicknamed “Disco Stu” and another friend called him “The Mandroid of Liberty” — I don’t remember how or why, but it’s true. He crafted within the confines of his backpack what we came to know briefly as the “Mobile DDR Unit.” It was lugged from house to house. We set it up at our house one afternoon and began to enjoy the dancing. With every jump we made there was the fear that the first floor of our house, braced by termite-chewed support beams, would collapse under the weight of our DDR fanaticism. We had to stop. Eventually my brother was able to play solo in his room, but the house was hardly equipped to handle DDR — a flaw, I suppose, in the architect’s design of his shoddy, lower-middle class, cookie cutter houses. So, we always played this at a friend’s house. I had once considered this for an exercise regime, but that never manifested beyond buying a Red Octane DDR mat. Amazing how the thought of exercise attached to anything, even something enjoyable, isn’t enough to actually get you to create an exercise regime. Another offshoot I loved about this game was the site DDRFreak. If not DDR’ing, we enjoyed the videos of other people with more capable feet (”I’m the Duke O’ Dance!”) hamming it up on the fiberglass pad using everything from drunken boxing skills to tangoing for two.
18. Ico (PS2).
Beautiful game and definitely very atmospheric and reminds me a great deal of all the Grimm fairytales that I love so much. Every angle looks like something out of a painting. This game, to me, defined the very reason why I wanted a PS2, next to Metal Gear Solid 2’s cinematics which teased us for two years. I first played a demo of this game on a disc that we obtained through some means of advertisement or another, and later on I went and got this game at the bargain bin for $15 bucks. A steal. I liked the concept of being a boy with horns helping a blind, ethereal girl around the castle, not that this is some bizarre fantasy I want to LARP, but it’s a pretty neat fairy tale story. The puzzles were fun, the visuals were epic, and the emotional attachment between yourself and Yorda was very real (okay, to me).
17. Rez (Dreamcast).
My friends at USC were big into Rez. I had never heard of it because I didn’t own a Dreamcast which was the system it premiered on. The game is a rail shooter that matches beats with your shots to create music as you fly through these trippy cyberworlds that represented the innards of computer networks. “Fear is the Mind Killer,” baby. It’s a short game — something else I like, and it made me go out of the way to get a Dreamcast so I could own it and trip out every now and then in the privacy of my own home. Like the Legend of Zelda, this game got my fingers coding again. This time, of course, I was doing an internship at Electronic Arts, we had Dyadin under our belt, and then half of Cloud, and that summer I took our base engine, which we called Bushido, and wrote code to handle procedurally building Catmull-Rom splines and to allow a camera to ride along it. With a couple more steps I could have had a decent rail shooter. Finding someone with musical inclination — I’m a terrible musician despite my last name — could probably bring me even closer to Rez. Heck maybe I should have even found a way to dissect the beats from a MP3 or OGG and procedurally generate shooter levels. Now with the Wiimote and GlovePIE that would definitely make for a more interesting game. Uh, anyway, I digress… If you’re thinking of getting this game, the Dreamcast version is much better than the PS2 one unless you for various reasons would like to get the trance vibrator brick.
16. Myst (PC).
The killer app for the CD-ROM. I begged and wanted a new computer to play this game, well no, I begged and wanted a new computer so I could program mode 13h and do SVGA VESA 2.0 linear framebuffer coding, anything was an upgrade from EGA. Well, I got it, and I couldn’t have been happier. The family got an NEC Pentium 90 Mhz with a CD-ROM drive and I played this and the 7th Guest. I enjoyed this one a lot more. One aspect of Myst that I really liked was that they included a small, empty journal with the game. Talk about making you feel more like an archaeologist trying to put the pieces of this forgotten and deserted island back together. I thought this was an interesting low-tech meets high-tech way to let you interact with a game. Sure other games have you write down information to solve puzzles, or to write down shit so you can go to gamefaqs and look it up and cheat your way through, but the journal included with Myst just felt right. It made sense.
http://ishi.blog2.fc2.com/blog-entry-199.html
This game’s pretty sweet, you’re like spiderman. And nobody can do what a spiderman can do.
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.
The saga continues starting with #30…
30. Meteos (NDS).
A great DS puzzle game. I was pretty quick with the stylus so it made for some intense multiplayer battles. Like Tetris, I welcome the any and all challengers to Meteos. I enjoyed forming the various meteos and launching them, and learned how to proficiently keep huge stacks of Meteos in the air and ready to launch into space. Plus the name Meteos always made me think “Meaty-Os” and who doesn’t like a cereal that’s primarily made of meat?
29. Mark Kart DS (NDS).
A simple and fun racing game. I remember the old SNES game very well and the Mode 7 sprite rotating they used for the game made me disoriented to the point of wanting to throw up. I remember being pretty much laid up and disoriented but still wanting to play Mario Kart for hours. I endured it. For the love of the game. Mario Kart DS is nostalgic without the car motion sickness.
28. Simcity (SNES).
Do you remember Dr. Wright? Yeah, he’s the guy with the Hilter mustache and green hair that’s supposed to be a parody of Will Wright. I don’t think this game needs any introduction: you play a mayor and layout commercial, industrial, and residential blocks and build a thriving city. Then you level the shit out of it with every natural disaster known to man. I spent afternoons as a kid building up my perfect cities. Simcity 2000 was a nice game on the PC, and it was lovely to see the spruced up graphics but I don’t recall it as fondly as this Super Nintendo version. I’m glad this game is coming out for the DS and getting rave reviews. You can bet I’ll be there and maybe it’ll breathe new life into my DS and elevate it from the confines of a gloriously expensive alarm clock into a full fledged portable gaming machine again.
27. Garry’s Mod (PC).
Garry’s Mod is a Half-Life 2 modification. This is basically a sandbox. You’re given a set of physics tools such as a physics manipulator gun to carry and throw things around, a magnum that can be used to place a camera, an iron-crossbow that serves to tie two things together with ropes, and another weapon that welds objects together, and a shotgun that shoots out and connects rocket boosters and tires to things, and once simulated can make shit fly around like bonkers. Sounds crazy? You have access to all of the HL2 and Counterstrike assets and you can spawn them and build whatever the hell you please using those tools and the assets making the game the ultimate in the do-it-yourself, virtual toy sandbox. Garry even added the ability to do Lua scripting for the really ambitious in a later version - he was charging money at that point, and I decided that I didn’t have to have it since I’m not that ambitious to become a source engine hacker. People have used Garry’s Mod to make virtual comics by posing HL2 characters, they’ve invented Rube Goldberg contraptions, and even little games, and giant walking Colossi that can launch huge pieces of shit with DIY catapults.
26. Typing of the Dead (PC).
You can find it on Home of the Underdogs. I suggest you go there and pick this one up, since it’s free. It mixes survival horror zombie killing with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. When my dad got our first computer, a 386 SX 25 Mhz beast, all I had was Solitaire and Mavis Beacon. I actually enjoyed the typing lessons and it panned out as I was the fasted typist in the 7th Grade. Number one, every time. I was the guy to beat. This is the twitch game for me since it combines my speed at typing with hurting the undead.
