Courne Supremacy

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 7^th 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.

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 7^th 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.

“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?