Best Games - Star Wars: Squadrons
If a VR experience can make you ill, maybe more of that experience can set you right again.
At least that was the hypothesis I was testing when I kept playing Star Wars: Squadrons well past the point where I was alternating hot and cold sweats, dry mouth, and motion induced dizziness. Piloting an X-Wing or Tie Fighter, even in smooth and languid dogfights turned my stomach. At first.
What would you do if you were suddenly attacked by several unknown guys?
Since I played Kung-Fu Master, I know what Thomas, the kung-fu master would do. He would punch and kick his way through a lot of unknown guys. Way more than several. It’s a full regiment of unknown guys. Way more guys than would ever fit in the Devil’s Temple.
Best Games - Wave Race 64
Some games just feel right.
There isn’t really much to Wave Race 64, when you get right down to it. The big, beautiful, 3D sequel to a simple Gameboy jet ski racing title. There aren’t really that many tracks. There are only a few riders and they aren’t very different from one another. There are stunt and time trial modes. You can play split screen multiplayer. On paper, a pretty uninspiring package for a racing game.
Best Games - Return of the Obra Dinn
It’s the sort of premise that could only come from an indie developer. At a larger development studio or publisher, Lucas Pope and Obra Dinn never make it past the first pitch meeting.
Best Games - Punch-Out!!
Punch-Out!! only exists because of a mistake.
By 1984 Nintendo had already released three Donkey Kong titles and one Mario Bros. game. I don’t know if you heard, but the Donkey Kong and Mario games did quite well. Well, most of them did. I don’t believe Stanley from Donkey Kong 3 is really a household name. I wonder how that one sold.
Best Games - In Death
There is no shortage of VR archery games. I think it’s the controllers. While there are many options that VR controllers present to developers, grasping, waving, punching, pointing, lifting, pushing, pulling, VR controllers usually translate to some sort of gun. Or, if you prefer a different sort of shooting, you can use one hand to aim a bow and the other to draw back a string. The hardware just sort of lends itself to that sort of gameplay.
VR is a strange beast. If you are into playing video games and you are looking for an immersive experience, you will probably want to try VR. There you will find the most immersive, transporting experiences. Games that will place you inside their world and press your own out to the margins. The best VR games make you feel like you are some place else.
There is something to envy about the early days of video games. Sure, they were operating with the most limited of resources and just getting graphics drawn to the screen was a herculean task, but they had some pretty wild options available to them. I don’t know if you could even make Kickman today. In 1981, anything could be a game. There were the obvious ideas. Sports, car racing, old west gun fights, but what about a game like Pac-Man. That sort of game comes out of clever tricks that developers came up with while playing with the hardware. No one carefully plans out Pac-Man. They stumble over it. If I had to guess, the designer of Kickman figured out a physics routine for bouncing a balloon around the screen and went from there. No one plots out the idea of a unicycle riding clown popping or stacking balloons using a pin on his head. I mean, there is no way to sell that idea. There is no obvious game there. It sounds crazy. Of course, Kickman is amazing. You play as a clown on a unicycle moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen and balloons fall down from columns at the top of the screen. The first level has you popping them with a pin on your hat? Maybe? I don’t know. The balloons pop, okay. The second level has you catching balloons and stacking them on your head. Once the stack is sufficiently tall, they will all pop one at a time. Of course, you could also catch a Pac-Man that will eat the balloons giving you bonus points. Eventually you catch Pac-Man ghosts as well, and those can only be eaten by a Pac-Man. If you just catch and pop balloons, why is the game called Kickman? Well, because of the kick button of course. If a balloon manages to slip past you, you have one chance to kick it back up and catch it. That can be tricky because running into balloons with your body sends them drifting out of kick range. Of course, that isn’t the only use for the kick. If there is a Pac-Man falling but you haven’t yet gathered enough balloons to make it worthwhile, just kick it back up to the top of the screen. It will fall again soon enough. There is a bonus stage where people throw balloons and explosives at you. Dodge the explosives, catch the balloons. Obviously. Kickman is a very simple game, but then again, so were most of the games from 1981. But Kickman is also a very satisfying game to play. The movement speed, especially using the original arcade trackball, the speed and duration of the kick, the floaty arc of the balloons. It all just feels so satisfying. It is not as well remembered as its cameo character, Pac-Man, but there is no doubt, Kickman is one of the Best Games.
Best Games - Double Dragon
Double Dragon is all about player expression. Before Double Dragon the variety of game character movements that you could expect might be a jump, maybe a shoot or punch action. Some games might even contain contextual action like climbing a ladder or interacting with part of the level. Never much more than that.
Best Games - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount
What’s the dumbest thing that you can think of to build a game around. Whatever it is, it might not be dumber than Porrasturvat.
Best Games - Devil’s Crush
There have been a lot of video pinball games. I’m talking video game simulations of traditional pinball here, not just pinball machines that incorporate some video elements. Most of the early ones were bad. Some of the new ones are quite good. 3D Pinball Space Cadet that came free on a lot of versions of windows is actually very good (but we will get to that one another time). But most of them have one tragic flaw in common. They are trying to be pinball.
The early days of video games were wild. One developer could come out with a game, and three to six months later another developer would come out with a blatant copy. They might slap on a different color palette, or change the music, but these games would be nearly identical.
Best Games - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
As a series, The Legend of Zelda rarely misses. You could start up just about any entry from the last forty years and have yourself a pretty good time. Some have aged better than others, but they are all top quality games worthy of their own entry here. But right now, I’m gonna focus on one.
The 1984 movie The Terminator opens on a hellish version of 2029. A blasted wasteland patrolled by killer robots bent on eradicating all human life from the planet. The Terminator : SkyNET lets you live there.
Best Games - Grand Theft Auto
If you made a pie chart of the entire video game industry, every property and title broken out into its own set of wedges, there would be a very slim few that would be instantly identifiable. Pokémon, Call of Duty, Minecraft, and, of course, Grand Theft Auto.
Best Games - The Operative: No One Lives Forever
Looking, and sounding, like the full color mod-styled version of Emma Peel, Kate Archer is the sort of protagonist that would be surprising and eye catching today. In the year 2000, she absolutely stood alone.
Best Games - Red Baron
Anyone who played arcade games in the 80s remembers Battlezone. Battlezone was that tank game made up of vector lines and blocky shapes. It was in first person, felt fully three dimensional, and it was unlike any other game in the arcade at the time.
Best Games - Full Throttle
The early to mid 90s, point and click adventure games were the hot genre. I mean, sure, there were lots of other types of games out there. Sports games were just ramping up and up. But point and click adventure games were really pushing the whole medium forward. If there was a new technology, point and click adventures had the budget to take advantage of it. CD-ROM, point and click adventure games. Broad color palettes, point and click adventure games. Full motion video, voice acting, character animation, dynamic soundtracks, digital recording. All point and click adventure games.
Best Games - Cannon Fodder
Do you know Jools and Jops. Do you know Stoo and RJ. If you do, it’s probably time for you to get some annual bloodwork done.
Best Games - Command & Conquer
In the mid to late 90s, if you were playing games on a PC you probably played some Real Time Strategy games.
They were the in thing. The fresh new genre. We had been playing action games, and role playing games, but the RTS genre was the first to be designed exclusively around a flashy new control device. The mouse.
Best Games - Armored Warriors / Powered Gear - Strategic Variant Armor Equipment
Capcom may not have invented the beat ‘em up genre, but you could probably argue that they perfected it.
Best Games - Final Fantasy
It might seem strange to list a game that isn’t even recognized as the best in its series among the best games, but that’s not really what I do here. This isn’t a ranking of games. This is a celebration.
Best Games - E.T. Phone Home!
If you have any interest in the history of video games, or just pop history of the last half century, you know about the E.T. video game. You might have heard that it is terrible. One of the worst games ever made. Well, it isn’t and it wasn’t, but I’m not even writing about that game.
Best Games - Golly! Ghost!
You have played lightgun shooting gallery games before, and you have played ticket redemption games, and you have played pinball games full of electromechanical toys. You just might not have played them all at once.
Best Games - Gunstar Heroes
Even before you press start on Gunstar Heroes, you know you are in for something special. There is a propulsive energy to the opening cinematic that sets the tone and the game keeps that same pace for the duration.
Best Games - Star Wars : Dark Forces
Before Rogue One or Andor, every Star Wars fan knew that it was former Imperial officer turned rebel mercenary, Kyle Katarn, who stole the Death Star plans. Most of those fans probably even remember exactly where the plans were hidden. In fact, those fans had done it themselves.
Best Games - Populous
Populous is a game where your primary method of interaction is to raise and lower the level of the ground one small patch at a time. Understandably, that might not sound very compelling, but when you play Populous hours disappear in a snap.
Best Games - PaRappa the Rapper
Hit buttons in time with the music. That’s the pitch. That’s PaRappa. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be fun. For a time, rhythm games were the biggest thing in the world. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and on and on. They still exist, of course. No real arcade would be complete without some sort of dance based rhythm game at this point. They aren’t as prominent as they once were, but it’s almost difficult to imagine the world before rhythm games. Back when the most rhythm adjacent game you could find was Simon.
Best Games - The Irritating Maze
The Irritating Maze is not a complex game. It is not a game that defines or extends a genre. You will not find a compelling narrative or ingenious mechanics here. The Irritating Maze is simple. But it’s the right kind of simple.
Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger
If you’re like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me.
Best Games - Asteroids
There is nothing quite like a game that lets you do battle with mans oldest foe. Rocks.
Big rocks, little rocks, medium sized rocks that split into two smaller rocks. Rocks and void. The way it started. The way it was always going to end.
Best Games - SubSpace
In 1997 you would be lucky to get two computers to talk with one another long enough to play a short game of quake.
It wasn’t impossible. Networked multiplayer games existed. Lots of people played them. I played them. But they weren’t exactly easy to get running. They weren’t exactly responsive. They weren’t exactly stable. The idea of running a single game that could accommodate over two hundred players on a single server, over a dial up modems, well that was sorcery.
Best Games - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo)
For the last twenty years the show GameCenter CX has played on Fuji TV One in Japan. It’s a comedy show where Shinya Arino attempts to play, and beat, old video games. Arino is an affable man, usually quick with a joke, who suffers the task of playing these games at the behest of the CX company, a company that gleefully promotes and demotes him based on his performance in the games, but one that he also appears to run. His assistants will show up to alternately help or torment him, whichever is funnier in the moment.
Best Games - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain)
By 1991 the last nails were already being driven into the coffin of the NES. The console wouldn’t actually be discontinued for years, and in its home market of Japan, a full decade. Games would continue to trickle out during those years (there are still games being made for the old Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System), but releasing a game for that machine in 1991 was just asking for it to be forgotten.
Best Games - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin
The Intellivision video game console started development in 1977. The state of consumer processors in 1977 wasn’t really geared toward high fidelity gaming experiences. A lot of arcade machines of the time were still black and white and the most common video game that the public was familiar with was Pong. Pong isn’t a bad game, but no one would describe it as deep or dynamic.
Best Games - Elevator Action Returns
Elevator Action is a classic arcade game from 1983, where you play as a spy infiltrating an office tower. Your mission involves ascending that tower to search for secret documents, and that will require the use of a lot of elevators. All the while, patrolling enemies will attempt to thwart your efforts. You have a few ways to fight them, but using the elevators against them is probably the most fun. It’s a great game. That’s not the game I’m writing about here.
Best Games - Dead Connection
The attract mode for Dead Connection opens with a screen that says Taito Film Presents. So far as I can tell there was never an official division of Taito called Taito Film. That fictional declaration helps to set the tone. This won’t be the usual arcade action fare. Aliens, zombies, monsters, you aren’t going to find any of those here. Dead Connection borrows from a lot of sources, not the least of which are the historical crime dramas Untouchables and the Godfather. Gesturing toward film makes sense. This is a game that oozes cinematic style. That is far from being the most interesting thing about Dead Connection.
Best Games - Silpheed
Silpheed wants to set a mood.
The game opens with a few lines from the end of Julius Caesar over a simulated star field.
“How many ages hence / Shall this our lofty scene be acted over / In states unborn and accents yet unknown”
Best Games - Area 51
Arcade light gun games are a tough one. I can write about them here, but unless you happen to have an arcade or a barcade near you, I don’t know that there is an easy way to play them. You could always play them using a mouse on an emulator, but I can’t recommend that. It feels pretty bad.
Best Games - Duke Nukem 3D
I’ll start this off by addressing the realities of time. Just trust that I will get around to why Duke Nukem 3D deserves to be on the list of best games, but we have a necessary detour to travel first.
Best Games - Half-Life
Half-Life isn’t a game. It’s a place. It’s somewhere you go for a while. You spend time there. Like going on vacation or travelling to an amusement park.
Best Games - Driver : You are the Wheelman
Driver is filthy. It looks filthy. It sounds filthy. The slap base, funk soundtrack is filthy. The 70s exploitation storyline is filthy.
Best Games - Final Fight
There were side scrolling beat ‘em up games before Final Fight. Capcom didn’t invent the genre. That honor should probably go to Technos and the Kunio-kun series. The Technos game Double Dragon may have even been the first game to truly nail walking right and punching. Those games are great too, and I will probably get to them at some point, but this write up is about Final Fight.
Best Games - Choplifter!
The best early 8-bit computer games did a lot with a little. They were written for computers built around MOS 6502 or Zilog Z80 processors. Moderately powerful chips at the time, but still absolutely dwarfed by the comparatively monstrous boards and chips in most arcade machines.
Best Games Albums - Geddon Dangerous by Doublegeddon
Normally this is the place for games, best games even. I’m just going to drop a link here. If you are going to read this, you should at least have a listen to one of the best albums of last year.
Best Games - Pitfall II : Lost Caverns
1984 was a weird year for video games in North America. Atari was the dominant player in the industry by an extremely wide margin, and they were absolutely failing. Arcades were still popular, but some of the shine was coming off. Games were changing, becoming more complex. The hobby wasn’t for everyone anymore. It was less accessible. Less inviting. Pong was a distant memory, and even Pac-Man had fallen out of fashion. Nintendo had already sold millions of Famicom consoles, and they hadn’t even released outside of Japan. Home computers had never been more popular. The industry was simultaneously dead, dying, or poised to become the most lucrative entertainment industry in the world, depending on who you asked.
Best Games - Warlords
Do you like pong? Yeah, that two player tennis type game that you play by twisting a knob.
Do you like Breakout? Yeah, that single player pong type game where you systematically smash a wall using a paddle and ball.
Best Games - Pang (or Pomping World or Buster Bros.)
The early 80s were a time of wild experimentation for computer and arcade games. Game ideas would come from clever bits of code that someone managed to write in their bedroom more often than any sort of high level concept. If someone figured out how to create a smooth scrolling background, they turned that into a game. Figured out how to make it look like you are travelling down a road or tunnel by cycling colors or scaling sprites? That’s a game idea. You can make a block or character jump when you press a button? Gotta make a game out of it.
Best Games - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo
The time between the creation of Tetris and someone wanting to play Tetris competitively, in head-to-head fashion, is probably nanoseconds. At first, players would have been able to play against each other’s scores. Who got the most lines, or who could reach a certain score in the shortest amount of time, or who could beat Alexey at his own game. When you are working with soviet era computers, I’m sure you took what you could get.
Best Games - Lode Runner
The first version of Lode Runner I ever played was on the Atari 800. Then I played it on a Commodore 64. And then on an Apple II. And then on a PC. I just played the Arcade version on a Steam Deck. And then again in a browser.
Best Games - Street Fighter Alpha for the Game Boy Color
This game has no business playing as well as it does on a Game Boy Color.
I bought a Game Boy Color in 2001. The Game Boy Advance had just come out and people were rightly more interested in the new handheld machine than the aging hardware of the Game Boy Color. I think I paid roughly $50 for it, and it came with a multi cart full of games. I remember playing a bit of Pokémon, a lot of Link’s Awakening, and more Street Fighter Alpha than I ever thought I would.
Best Games - Cameltry
Sometimes games get lost. Even great ones.
A singularly brilliant idea and design, a game that should have spawned endless sequels and copycats, just disappears.
Cameltry is one of those. A forgotten gem.
Best Games - Dig Dug
Pac-Man and Rally X have a lot to answer for. They spawned a genre so pervasive that, at one point, nearly all new arcade games were maze games. Not until fighting games would we see one genre so heavily over-represented in the industry.
Best Games - Bagman
1982 was a pivot point year for video games. Games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were still riding high. To any arcade operator or game seller, it would have seemed like video games were on an unstoppable upward trajectory. Arcades were making money. Atari and Coleco were raking it in with their home consoles. Even home computers, like the Commodore 64, were driving huge game sales.
Best Games - Karate Champ
Now hear me out. What if a game could be one of the best games ever made while being completely broken in very fundamental ways? What if a game could have innovative, even revolutionary, controls while being terrible to play? What if a game could represent a tectonic shift in what multiplayer games could be, while mostly coming down to random chance?
Best Games - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance
The resolution of the gameboy advance screen is 240 x 160. That isn’t a lot of space. In the english version, a single font character is about six pixels tall by four pixels wide. That is extremely efficient for a font, but it also means that you can’t put pages of text on the screen. There just isn’t enough room for all of it. That’s why the menu system for Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is amazing.
Best Games - Syndicate
Sometimes, one of these best games isn’t really a very good game. Sometimes it’s just the promise of the game. The thing it could be. What people imagine it to be.
Best Games - Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3)
Games are games and movies are movie and books are books. They all work themselves into you. They all occupy different pockets of memory. Just like a song will bring me back to some specific moment, recalling a passage in a book or a sequence in a movie will set my feet in the past. Games are usually a little different, though.
Best Games - Puzz Loop / Zuma
This is a tough one. I think Zuma is one of the best games of all time, but its core concept is also lifted from another game, Puzz Loop.
Best Games - Aliens TC Doom Mod
I realize this isn’t a game.
No. I’m not going to go that far. It is a game. It is a fully formed game. Not a wholly original work, but that’s not important, is it?.
Best Games - NHL 96
I don’t play a lot of sports games. I have definitely dabbled. The odd baseball or football game. Maybe a basketball game or two. Many car racing games. I have always preferred video games that were fantasies. Things I could never do in real life. I have a ball glove and a baseball. I don’t have a rocket pack or a sword. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to use it. Playing a game of catch wouldn’t get anyone to look twice, but I really couldn’t walk down my back path with a katana.
Best Games - Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat is a bait and switch.
I have talked about Mortal Kombat here a lot. I bring it up when referencing other fighting games. I mention it in passing when talking about controls or graphics or violence. Mortal Kombat is probably my second favourite fighting game series, second to Street Fighter. I love a round or three of Tekken or Samurai Shodown or Fatal Fury or Soulcalibur or Dark Stalkers or… you get it. I like fighting games. Mortal Kombat sits near the top of that list. I think I got into it for the same reasons that most people did, for the same reasons that most people think you would get into Mortal Kombat, but I keep playing games in the series for the same reasons that other fighting game fans do.
Best Games - SSX 3
The first SSX game was a banger right out of the gate. It could easily be in the running for a ‘best games’ write up. It had a solid but sort of complicated trick system. It felt fast and smooth. It looked and sounded great. It was fun to play. All good. I think though, the third entry in the series is really something special.
Best Games - Gunblade NY
Some games just fill their niche perfectly. Simple, concise. No extraneous bits.
Gunblade NY is built to a spec.
You want a shooting game. How about if you never have to stop shooting. You want an action game. Gunblade never lets up. You want a short game you can enjoy for a few moments in an arcade or bar. Gunblade is only minutes long. You want to play with a friend. The game expects that you will.
Best Games - Bushido Blade
One perfect stroke. Perfectly timed. Perfectly executed. That is what we are told wins a sword fight.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t ever plan on being in a sword fight. It seems dangerous. All ,like, sharp and whatnot. Stabby. I’ll be content with sword fights of the virtual kind.
Best Games - Trial Bike
Imagine that all of the controls for a game exist on two axes. Up, down, backward, forward. That’s it. That’s all. I mean, Pac-Man manages to operate on only two axes, so maybe it isn’t that difficult to imagine. Now, how many games can you think of that both only use two axes for input and sparked a decades spanning franchise. A franchise that remains successful to this day? It’s probably only Pac-Man and Trial Bike, or Trials, as the series would come to be known.
Best Games - Death Rally
This post is not really about a game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Death Rally is great. It’s as much fun now as it was when it launched as an Apogee published shareware title 25 years ago. This post is about first steps.
Best Games - The Outer Wilds
Movies are linear, plays are linear, songs are linear, books are linear. They can all contain stories told from start to middle to end. There are Choose Your Own Adventure books and even some Choose Your Own Adventure style video things, but they are all, at their core, linear. You can make choices that change the moment to moment story, but you can’t experience that story in a way other than the way the authors intended. You can try but it just won’t make any sense.
Best Games - Moto Racer
Moto Racer is a deeply unfair game. Every slight bend in the road could end your race. A mistimed button press could mean the difference between finishing first or last. Nailing every corner, every straightaway, every jump is absolutely required to win. That’s on the medium difficulty. Moto Racer demands perfection.
Best Games - Burnout Paradise
Does the idea of spinning donuts around the infield of a baseball stadium sound appealing? Would you like to launch a car off a ramp, sail an unreasonable distance, and nail a perfect 4 wheel landing losing no momentum? Would you like to nudge a supercar into a barrier and watch it crumple like foil knowing there would be no consequences or injuries? What if you could drive impossibly fast not only over the road, but through buildings, on train tracks, on park pathways, and more? Burnout Paradise has you covered.
Best Games - Police 911 - The Keisatsukan
This one is a bit of a bummer. Not because the game is bad. The title right there says Best Games, and this game is fantastic. No, it’s a bummer because Police 911 is almost impossible to play now.
Best Games - Batman: The Video Game
Look at this. Just look at it.
Okay. You seen that. Now look at this.
Best Games - Karateka
Fighting games are all about range and timing. You press the kick button of this side of the screen and a few milliseconds later your character has their leg extended reaching for the unguarded midsection of your opponent. Let that kick fly from too far a distance and the game’s hidden collision boxes strike nothing. Too close and your opponent can intercept with a shorter range, but slightly quicker attack of their own. Range and timing.
Best Games - Metal Gear Solid V
Imagine you are in a forest. It’s a pleasant day. You hear birds chirping in the treetops above you. Enough shade to be cool, enough sunlight to be warm. There is a shallow creek in your path that you would like to cross. What do you do?
Best Games - Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back
Action video games are all about feel. The feel of connection between your fingertips and flickering pools of light on a screen. Get that feel wrong and it won’t matter how clever your mechanics are or how inventive your puzzles or how engaging your story, no one will want to play it. Get that feel right and it won’t matter that every other aspect of the game comes up short.
Best Games - Trackmania
You could learn how to race a car. You could study every minuscule technical detail that makes one car perform better than another. You could master aerodynamics and the physics of rubber on asphalt. You could steel your will and steady your hand when contending with other vehicles and drivers traveling down the same track at high speed. You could simulate all of this in a racing game.
Best Games - Saints Row IV
Let’s get this straight right off the jump. Saints Row: The Third is the best game in the Saints Row series. Volition made two games that could be fairly summed up as Grand Theft Auto clones with toilet humor before reworking the 3rd into a self aware comedy that was as much parody as it was forward looking. Saints Row: The Third raised the bar for what an open world character driven game could be and stood out as a truly wonderful experience all it’s own.
Best Games - Dragon’s Lair
What if one of the best games is actually a very bad game. I mean that’s nonsense right? It can’t be both one of the best games and be bad right? It absolutely can if that game is Dragon’s Lair.
Best Games - Zork
Screen as a window
To an underground empire
vistas in your mind
Best Games - Chrono Trigger
During the heyday of the SNES, I was playing games on a PC. It’s not that I wasn’t interested in console games. I would enjoy them given the opportunity. I just rarely had access to any 8 or 16 bit console during the time they were popular. That meant the only games I ever really played on SNES or Genesis were bite sized, single sitting games. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, the first few stages of Super Mario World, NHL, that sort of thing. I didn’t even bother approaching RPGs. I mean, what would be the point? I could rent a system and some games for a weekend, but there is no way I would finish some 40 hour monstrosity in 2 days, and if I tried to rent it again the save would probably be overwritten. It wasn’t really a problem though. I had text adventures and D&D gold box games and Star Control 2. Those were meaty enough games for a 1 PC kid.
Best Games - Beat Saber
I used to go to the arcade a lot. As often as I could. The first ones I went to were filled with distinct and bizarre cabinets with games as fanciful as they were difficult. Every image on a screen had to be drawn there with only a handful of pixels and a tiny array of colors. Any sound was what could be generated by simple monophonic synths and tin can speakers. Every game was a unique and strange experience. Dreamlike. Those soon gave way to brighter, more colorful visuals that grew more defined and representative. Games with real music and voice samples. This time also birthed genres. There were racing games, scrolling shooters, and maze chase games. Some of the games were great, some not so great, but market forces that directed developers to work on the genres that would sell were already taking hold. So the arcades were filled with a lot of Pac-Man clones and Galaga clones. Still enough unique experiences were being made that an arcade goer could find something that suited them.
Best Games - Soulcalibur
Sure, it doesn’t have the banger of an intro cinematic that kicked off the previous game, Soul Edge, but Soulcalibur is an absolute masterpiece. Soulcalibur did more to elevate the fighting genre than any other game of it’s time.
Best Games - Worms 2
In the early 1970s, computers were wildly expensive machines that occupied entire rooms of universities and research centers. Students and scientists would have to book time on them to do their work, often accessing them remotely from terminals. They would have to master early high level programming languages and think in trigonometric functions. With such specialized training and access to rare and costly hardware, they did what anyone would have done. They made and played games.
Best Games - The Fighting Fantasy Book Series
You ever play a roguelike? A game where you have one run through a gauntlet of obstacles. When your character dies you go back to the start and try again, using what you learned on previous runs to get further and further each time. Imagine that, but a book.
Best Games - Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution DS
Sometimes constraints can drive the best designs. Necessity being the mother of invention or whatever. I am here today to argue that not only is Civ Rev on the Nintendo DS a good port of the game, I’m going to say that it is one of the best Civ games in the series.
Best Games - UNO
I don’t think I will get much into the rules of UNO. If you are reading this, you have probably played the game and you already have a pretty good idea how it works. You know that it is a card shedding game where you have to match the color or number of the last played card. You and the other players keep taking turns slapping down cards out of your own hand while trying to make everyone else hold onto as many cards as possible. If you win a round, the cards your opponents are holding count toward your point total. You know that you have to call out ‘UNO!’ when you have one card left. The game almost demands that you and every member of your family / friend group unearth their most ruthlessly nitpicking selves, ready to punish anyone who forgets to call out ‘UNO!’. You know that it is like a lot of other card games, but it is also strangely more accessible than most other card games. You have probably been beaten by an 8 year old.
Best Games - Forza Motorsport
I’m not really a car guy. A lot of my family are very mechanically inclined. They might even qualify as car guys. I grew up in a car guy town. So much so that a lot of the car guys were girls. Maybe a car folks town. I have paged through the autotrader. I know the difference between a hemi and rotary. I change my own oil and have done minor maintenance on every car I have ever driven. Still, I don’t consider myself a car guy.
Best Games - Pac-Man
There are a lot of games that I tend to shy away from when I write one of these. Games that are so universally loved, and commented on, that it’s difficult to find anything interesting to add. I could write a bunch of drivel about how the game plays, how it makes retreat an advantageous strategy, or how Pac-Man is the originator, and pinnacle, of the maze chase genre. Probably stuff you already know and probably stuff you don’t need to read again.
Best Games - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
The first video game, depending on who you ask, was probably a sports game. Either tennis or ping pong. Video games have been infatuated with simulations of real world sports since day one. Only one problem. That doesn’t work at all.
Best Games - Landmaker
A few years before developing Landmaker, Taito released Puzzle Bobble, one of the best action puzzle games ever made (which I, sort of, wrote about here). The shadow of Puzzle Bobble is immense. It’s hardly any wonder that Landmaker gets overlooked when people are compiling lists of the finest puzzle games of all time. Is it as criminally overlooked as Uo Poko or Puzz Loop? Probably not, but still Landmaker deserves a place in our collective memory.
Best Games - Marble Madness
Marble Madness is a game that probably shouldn’t exist. I mean, obviously it does. People made it. The odds are pretty good Mark Cerny and Bob Flanagan made it sometime before it’s release, in 1984. At least that is what history says. Even playing it today, it’s hard to imagine some form of time travel wasn’t involved.
Best Games - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - The opening credits
The exact second that video games became a lucrative artform, someone signed a movie tie in deal. Video games became a vehicle to advertise. Movies, TV shows, toys, candy, rock bands, clothing brands, and fast food restaurants all have video game tie ins. The overwhelming majority of them are terrible.
Best Games - Doom
Doom is probably in the top ten on lists of the most popular video games of all time. You don’t have to check, I already did and it is. That means that if you are reading this you have almost certainly heard of Doom. There is a fair to good chance you have played Doom. Quite a few of you have played a lot of Doom and you might have played it on a lot of different hardware using a variety of input devices. You might have played a modded version of Doom with new graphics and sounds stolen directly from your favourite franchises. You may have played Doom clones that felt so similar but so very different.
Best Games - Super Sprint
There should be no world in which spinning a steering wheel as hard as you can and then grabbing it into a dead stop allows you drive a race car. The front wheels on your average car can only pivot over a small range before they become useless for actually turning. At speed this is even more true. Your steering wheel is nothing like the wheel of some pirates galleon it can’t actually turn a full 360. There would be no point to it and it would do nothing to help you with control of the vehicle or feel for the road. Super Sprint requires that you spin that wheel and get good at it.
Best Games - Excitebike
When you use a clutch on a motorcycle or manual transmission vehicle you have to get a feel for it. A clutch is not a switch that engages or releases instantly. There is a smooth gradient to the motion. You can feel the clutch gradually connect to the rotation of the engine and transfer that power to your tires. There is a point where the friction is enough to provide some motivation for the vehicle to move, but not so much that the engine can’t keep up and stalls out. That point is a balance that you can feel.
Best Games - Missile Command
There are a lot of games that are tests of endurance. Most early video games had no victory state, no point at which you could say that you had beaten the game. You could play the game until you could not ,or did not want to continue. You could play until the game stopped working, or you ran out of money. Arcade owners were hoping for the last option. It was a competition between you and the game to see which one could last longer. Games with the design sense and basic play cycle of Missile Command were not uncommon. It was a product of the artform and arcade business as it was in 1980. It was also a product of the late stages of the cold war.
Best Games - Tetris
It won’t be news to anyone that Tetris is one of the best games ever created. Not just video games. Games. All games. Tetris is one of the best Games ever created. Tetris is that good. If the devices exits to play it, tetris will likely be played in much the same form as it is today well into the next century or further. Tetris will persist.
Tetris is as good a game as Poker.
Video games are a technology driven artform constantly chasing better, more vibrant visuals, sharper fuller audio, more intelligent and challenging adversaries. All of this progress demands new programs and techniques and new silicon for those programs to run on. Tetris, by contrast, is an experience driven work of art. To Tetris players the look and sound of the game doesn’t matter much at all. It only matters that it plays like Tetris.
Teris is as good a game as Auto Racing.
You can spectate a game of Tetris exactly once, and understand how the game is played. You can play Tetris exactly once and start to develop strategies to improve your next game. You can continue to improve at it, but Tetris can’t be beaten. It is a game that test your skill, no matter what level that skill happens to be.
Tetris is as good a game as Golf.
No matter what device you are currently reading this on, you could also use that device to play Tetris. That version of Tetris will play pretty well. There are definitely controls that people prefer, like joysticks or gamepads or different configurations and sizes of buttons, but even most touch screen versions of Tetris play just fine. It’s so good what you play it on almost doesn’t matter. Tetris is as good a game as Trivial Pursuit. There are a lot of different variations on the original game and you can choose to play most of them against the game or against another person. They are all slightly different experiences, but they share the same simple mechanics. No matter how you play it, no matter what version you play, Tetris is all about preparation. You have to prepare for the moment that the one piece you need is drawn randomly from the small group of available pieces. It’s about using what you know of the system to plan ahead, but being ready to improvise when you need to. Tetris is as good a game as Chess.
Tetris is as good a game as Soccer.
Tetris is as good a game as the 100 meter dash.
Tetris will outlive its creator. Tetris will outlive its creators generation. And the next generation. And the next. Tetris will outlive the memory of its creation. Tetris is one of the best games.
Best Games - River Raid
The first thing you notice about River Raid is how beautiful it looks. Symmetric fields of solid color in perfectly balanced palettes. Everything on screen is clear and crisp. The second thing you notice is how smooth everything moves. The Atari 2600 is well known for its low resolution and chunky movement, but River Raid feels fluidly analog at all times. Next you notice the sound. In a world of digital farts and squawks somehow only the most harmonious tones were selected from the white noise generator built into the Atari 2600. River Raid sounds intense, but never jarring. When you start to play the game, the ramp from simple shooting gallery to incredibly demanding is so smooth you won’t notice that the game is getting harder until you crash 3 times in span of a few seconds. Instantly you restart and try again, becoming incrementally better at the game with each attempt.
There is no end to River Raid. No point where the game informs you of your mastery. It grows more difficult until it over taxes either your skills or your stamina. You can’t beat it, you can only improve. It would be easy to suggest that this purity of design and presentation sprung from the limitations of the Atari 2600. Somehow I doubt that. Carol Shaw surpassed most of the perceived limitations of that simple computer in River Raid. She created a smooth, vibrant, aesthetically pleasing game on a system not really known for that sort of thing. The game explains itself while you play with no need for instructions or tutorials. It is abstract while being easily readable. River Raid could only exist as an interactive computer program. The engineering and the art only work when meshed together as one. It is a self contained wonderful thing polished to a high shine. River Raid isn’t a product of limitations. River Raid is proof that we never really saw what the Atari 2600 was capable of, or more to the point, what a brilliant creator could accomplish with those simple tools.
Best Games - Commander Keen
If you played games on a pc in the early 90s you had to be happy with slower experiences. Adventure games, puzzle games, strategy games and microsoft flight simulator. To be fair one of those is a pretty intense piece of software, but accurate flight sims aren’t the sort of thing that sells hardware to a lot of people. Not the sort of thing you can build a healthy market on. When you looked at the kind of games coming out on the Genesis and the SNES, the pc just wasn’t that thrilling. There were a lot of reasons to buy PCs, they just didn’t have much to do with games. Computers like the Amiga or the Commodore had a more or less unified set of hardware inside. If you were writing a game you could be sure that anyone that bought it would be able to run it on those machines. PCs came in a lot of flavours and some of them were barely able to manage a complicated spreadsheet. There were a few popular versions of DOS and the fledgling versions of windows would shake themselves apart as soon as any demands were put on them. If you wanted to play games there were a lot of options available, but you might skip the PC for any console.
Best Games - Guwange
Okay. First off, there is absolutely no way that I can talk about a game that is part of a splinter off a sub-genre of a genre without wading deep into the weeds. I’m going to toss out some titles and terms without defining them. If you read this hoping to find out what a shmup or STG is, you are in the wrong place. Also shmup is a stupid word and I won’t have it placed idly in my writing without mocking it. You have been warned.
If we were to draw a timeline of the vertically scrolling shooter game you would have to reach all the way back to Space Invaders. While not technically a scrolling shooter, due to the lack of scrolling, the core of the experience is there in Space Invaders. Moving and shooting while bullets rain down. You would step forward down that timeline to Galaga and Galaxian, still proto-scrolling shooters. Any sense of vertical movement in those games is superficial. Soon you would reach Xevious and 1942, both 100% vertically scrolling shooters. Maybe not the first, but very early versions of the form. You would snake your way through games like Tokio Scramble Formation and Varth, Turbo Force and Tiger Heli. The Sonic Wings series and Raiden series. All fine examples of a developing genre.
There are several branch points where the vertical scrolling shooter split into distinct flavours. The standard vertical shooter, the vertical run and gun shooter, and the bullet hell shooter are some enduring favorites. Some would say that it was Cave Interactive’s DonPachi or follow up DoDonPachi that solidified the branch of bullet hell or bullet curtain shooters, but they created a far more important game a few years later. Guwange was never as popular as many of the other shooters of it’s time since it didn’t see a wide release outside of Japan. Even so, there are a few things that Guwange did that make a game like Ikaruga possible.
Before Guwange, the gimmick of throwing an unreasonable barrage of bullets at the player was what defined a bullet hell game. Guwange is less about challenging your dexterity and more about changing how you focus. Broadening your perception and forcing yourself into a flow state is the only real way to play Guwange.
The beautiful, muted backdrop of a feudal Japan beset by demonic spirits provides the conceit for the game’s core mechanic. Each of the three player characters can summon a spirit that the player can control to float around the screen attacking enemies. When you tap on the fire button you shoot normally, but when you hold down the fire button the spirit is released and the original character is constrained to slow left and right movement only. The spirit moves very quickly and is immune to bullets. The end result of these two different modes is that the player must pay attention to two different areas of the screen simultaneously. The vulnerable and slow moving main character, and the damage dealing and fast moving spirit. Oh, and one last thing, the spirit can slow enemy bullets to create some breathing room for the main character so you can’t pay attention to only one of them. You will need to play both characters, simultaneously, to succeed.
Written down, that sounds like an impossible task. Playing two characters at once on a screen otherwise filled with enemy bullets. Not only can you do it, you quickly find yourself playing through sections of Guwange intuitively. Never really focusing on any single spot on the screen. This is the sort of revelation that makes a developer believe that something like Ikaruga is not only possible, but playable by actual humans with regular human eyes and brains. Guwange is the turning point from one type of somewhat shallow gameplay, to a whole other world of depth and intriguing mechanics.
Guwange is one of the best games, and if you can find it, you should play it.
Best Games - Wipeout
The swirly, nature inspired, art nouveau in the early 1900s gave way to the more architectural and defined art deco of the 1920s and 30s. The psychedelic designs of the 60s and 70s provided a framework for the more angular, dimensional design of the 80s and 90s. The design of Wipeout fed directly off of the increasingly digital, splashy, design in the early 90s but leapfrogged into the future. The graphic design of this hovercraft racing game from 1995, when most games were still trying to evoke some aspect of grunge rock or gangsta rap culture, laid out a visual language roadmap for the next 20 years.
Best Games - Gauntlet
Arcade games from the early 80’s are either so simple that the rules of play are apparent just by looking at the screen, or they are so abstract that it’s a puzzle just to decipher the controls. Gauntlet is a little of column A and a little of column B.
Best Games - Asteroids
Video game creators have been ripping and rehashing ideas from other games since the start of the medium.
If you combine the 2D physics sim of Space War with the overwhelming odds and impending doom of Space Invaders, you arrive at something like Asteroids. Even the accelerating heartbeat soundtrack and ufo klaxons echo the sound design of Space invaders. So many aspects of Asteroids are cribbed that it seems unlikely it would be noteworthy, but it’s the way the the game refines and reframes those core concepts that sets it apart.
Best Games - Lego
Best Books - The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin
When I started doing Best Games posts, it was in an effort to advocate for good things. There so very many folks who like nothing more than to hate on stuff and, in the sphere of video games, the bad review has, and continues to be, a source of joy for that crowd. Don’t get me wrong. I have enjoyed some bad reviews. One of my favorite reviews ever compares FMV submarine adventure game Silent Steel unfavorably to the small pleasures of playing with a dry roasted peanut. It wasn’t the hate that made me like that bit of writing. It was the humour and the subtly implied acceptance that reviewing video games is, at heart, a silly profession. Being funny, playfully funny, isn’t simple. It takes work, practice, and a true love of the subject matter you are lampooning. Hating on a bad game isn’t funny. It isn’t fun. Regardless of the quality of the game, people put time and effort into it. Someone loved that concept enough to make it real. Just hating it is lazy. When faced with the product of someone else’s creative work, hate is insufficient. At least try to be clever.
Best Games - Qix
There are very few games that are so distilled, so conceptually pure, that adding anything at all reduces them. They become less perfect. Less good. Qix is the concept of risk versus reward manifest in vivid geometric patterns and the angry humming cracks of high voltage. The goal of Qix is to corral lightning. A beautiful but chaotic creature, the Qix, dominates the playfield. Every aspect of its design and movement speaks danger. A thing to be avoided. The game then forces you to enter into the domain of the Qix by sending unshakable pursuers down the digital fences you create. Pause even slightly, and new harassers form behind you. You must always move forward. The game gives you one choice.
Best games - The Outfoxies
Wanna play a game?
Sure what you got for fighting games?
Fighting games. Let’s see. Street Fighter, more Street Fighter, Tekken, Mortal Kombat …
Best Games - The Oregon Trail
The phrase “you have died of dysentery” shouldn’t really spark fond nostalgia. The prospect of adhering to a grueling pace on meager rations shouldn’t elicit joy. There is narrow demographic for whom choosing to ford or float across a river while several of your family members suffered from measles and fever was the best part of the school day. Presented as educational fare, I think the only thing that anyone ever really learned from The Oregon Trail was to buy lots of bullets instead of food. Food you could hunt 100 pounds at a time while on the trail. Money was next to worthless west of the 100th meridian but life and death pivot on oxen and wagon axles. Finally, and without exception, all pioneers must float down the columbia river. These are the lessons taught by The Oregon Trail. This was the information that a generation or three retained, extracted from Apple II computers lodged at the backs of classrooms across north america. I played it again today. The Oregon Trail is still one of the best games.
Best Games - Centipede
I usually try to steer clear of the classics. Those games that are universally loved. Pillars of the art form. Games like Pac-Man, The Legend of Zelda, Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It’s not that they aren’t up there on the list with the best games. It’s just that those games, the classics, have been discussed so often and dissected so thoroughly that there isn’t a lot of mystery left to them. The whys and hows of their lasting quality is fairly well understood by folks who study games. If I’m going to write about the hundreds, maybe thousands, of games that can be held up as properly wonderful, I may as well choose some that deserve a little extra attention.
Centipede is an exception to the rule. Centipede is rightly credited as not only one of the best games of the 80’s but as one of the best videogames of all time. It’s fast, engaging, and beautiful. So why write about it? Why repeat what anyone who follows videogames has read many times before? There is a unique core to the design of Centipede that I don’t think gets talked or written about enough and it deserves praise.
Centipede is all about the player.
The usual factoids on the design of Centipede center around the choices of Dona Bailey, one of the first women programming arcade games during the formative years of the industry. The vibrant, shifting, pastel colour palette, and the fantastical garden setting are applauded. Centipede is noted for its universal appeal, attracting male and female players equally. Maybe the colors or the rollerball control play some part in the success of Centipede, but I think there is something much more fundamental at play here.
Centipede is all about the player.
Centipede is, like a lot of the games of its era, an evolution of Space Invaders. You sit at the bottom of the screen and shoot directly up at enemies cascading down. That is the challenge you must overcome. Here is the difference. In Space Invaders and most of the games like it when the enemies reach the bottom of the screen the game is over. You lose. There is a limited amount of time that you are able to play unless you actively assail the enemy. The enemies in Centipede can reach the bottom and they just turn around and start heading back up. Your player character has a limited band that it must stay in near the bottom of the screen but other than that your movement is unrestricted. You can move side to side, up and down, and even on smooth diagonals. Any way you can roll the ball controller, you can move. After it hits the bottom, the centipede will also stay in this band, moving back and forth and stepping up or down with each turn. You don’t have to shoot the centipede. You can dodge forever, never shooting, or you can choose to shoot the mushrooms scattered across the playfield. The game is very difficult and it becomes faster and more difficult as time wears on, but you don’t have to fight. You get to choose when and how you fight.
As you play, there are enemies that add new mushrooms to the screen but you can decide which ones you would like to shoot and remove or leave where they are. You can mold the random playfield to your advantage. You decide. Where most of the Space Invaders derivatives test your ability to dismantle orderly columns of enemies before time runs out, Centipede presents chaos and variability that you get to decide how to deal with. You can organize the chaos into manageable groups and lines, or you can let the chaos expand and deal with the oncoming assault on a case by case basis. You can also choose not to shoot, waiting for precisely selected moments to attack. Centipede is one of the best games of all time, but it has less to do with the color palette and more to do with how it treat the player. Playing Centipede, you get to choose what happens next.
Best Games : 1000 Miglia : Great 1000 Miles Rally and World Rally Championship
Design, at it’s best, solves problems. In the early 90s videogames had a lot of problems to solve, most of them technical. Drawing pixel to a screen quickly was tricky enough. Making those pixels look like anything more than digital mud was a rare success. Getting the images on screen to react to input in a satisfying way must have been some form of magic.
So, in the early 90s, when faced with the problem of creating an intense rally racing game based on an italian test of human and automotive endurance that had not been run in decades, what do you do?
The first thing you do is steal.
Drawing a three dimensional track was unattainable on the computer hardware available. The physics routines capable of simulating a convincing car had not been written. Color palettes were limited and animation was limited. Add to that the restrictions of the JAMMA hardware standard that allow game circuit boards to be swapped between similar cabinets, meaning that you might be playing a racing game with buttons and a joystick. Creating a game that evokes the feeling of intense, edge of control racing seems like a tough design problem.
Luckily a year previous, the game World Rally Championship was released by a competing studio. Maybe the makers of 1000 Miglia licensed the technology, or maybe they just plain old lifted every gameplay element of World Rally Championship. Whatever the case, they took an idea and ran with it. Both games solve the problem of presenting a slightly canted overhead view of a race by doing the opposite of what conventional wisdom would advise. Rather than pulling the view back to show more of the track, giving the player the opportunity to react to upcoming turns and obstacles, both of these games are very tightly focused on the car and the parts of the track immediately surrounding it. By pushing the view in rather than pulling back, the sense of speed and impending danger is intensified. Of course, restricting the players view of the track would be inexcusable in a racing game, if some other solution wasn’t presented. Both World Rally and 1000 Miglia will briefly flash curving arrows on the screen, like a rally co-driver shouting out upcoming turns and chicanes. Added to that, each leg of the race is only 60 seconds long. For one unblinking, white knuckle minute you have to pay precise attention to upcoming turns, and precisely navigate them, usually by sliding all over the place.
What World Rally started 1000 Miglia polishes to a high sheen. Where there were muddy indistinct graphics, they are replaced by sharp, colorful, representations of italian streets and roads where cartoon blurs and speed lines enhance your sense of movement. In place of a generic rally car, 1000 Miglia offers an array of classic supercars from the 1930 to the 1950s. The stock engine noises of World Rally are gone, and instead you will hear the whine and grind of old gearboxes with less than precise tolerances. These cars belch fire and roar from unmuffled exhaust pipes. There is no expectation of traction or modern vehicle handling. Every car in this lineup is a squirrely death box pushed past its limits. This is the sort of fantasy that video games excel at. Maybe the control and mechanics design problems were solved by World Rally, but it what 1000 Miglia that also solved the presentation and immersion problems. Excellent design, from the bottom to the top.
Best Games - World Heroes 2
Fighting games are intimidating. Four to six buttons, a dozen or more characters, different systems with split second windows of execution. The hardcore fighting game fan loves this stuff. Knowing how to do a launch a fireball or charge a flash kick is some sort of weird gamer secret handshake. As the years have gone on, each new game has catered to a ravenous audience that demands more secrets, more depth, greater complexity. World Heroes 2 is played with one joystick and Three buttons. Of those three buttons, you only really need to use two.
This is the part where I could be expected to write about how approachable this game is. How, in a sea of complicated and intimidating fighting games, this one game is a great on ramp for someone trying to learn how to play fighting games. World Heroes 2 is not that game. It is as dense, nuanced and complex as any other fighting game, but it does all that with two buttons, and the occasional press of a third. World Heroes 2 holds its own in play style and mechanics against the Street Fighters, the Fatal Furies, the Samurai Showdowns, and the Mortal Kombats, but you only need to use two buttons. Not four, not five, not six. Two. Not only that, but World Heroes 2 introduced or refined mechanics not seen in most other fighting games. Throw reversals that predate Dead or Alive. A timed parry that came before Street Fighter 3. A deathmatch mode that has players competing in a tug of war type battle, sharing a single life bar between them. So far as I know, a feature exclusive to World Heroes 2.
If World Heroes 2 is just as complicated and impenetrable as other fighting games, then what’s the big deal about it only using two buttons? World Heroes 2 cuts straight to the heart of fighting games. Fighting games are all about timing, spacing, and finding, or forcing, openings in your opponent’s guard. World Heroes 2 drops the finger gymnastics required by most fighting games, and focuses firmly on the real meat of the genre. Playing World Heroes 2 will make you better at fighting games. With the notable exception of DiveKick, I don’t know of any fighting game that is better focused and more aware of what it is. In it’s simplicity, hides the depth of a truly incredible game. One of the best games.
When I started creating this Best Games series, I really just wanted to advocate for good things. I wanted to celebrate joy and the hard work people put into creating these strange digital toys. So, with that in mind, here is another Best Game. A small break from whatever stuff you are thinking about today.
Best Games - One Must Fall 2097
The early 90s were the era of the fighting game. Entire arcades could be filled with nothing but fighting game machines and they would still draw a crowd. It was not uncommon to see multiple versions of the same game, stood beside each other with a line queued up in front of each. Street Fighter 2 was the undisputed champion amongst fighting games, but Mortal Kombat was a strong contender. With it’s large digitized characters and outlandish violence, Mortal Kombat was designed to catch people’s attention. It was brash and blunt in a way that most games at the time just weren’t. Most games that lean heavily on a flashy gimmick tend to have very little depth. There usually isn’t a real game there. Mortal Kombat was a notable exception to that rule. Mortal Kombat was a solid, nuanced fighting game. Great artists steal, right?
One Must Fall 2097 apes Mortal Kombat in all the ways that matter. The pace of the game. The snappy back and forth sparring paired with movement that feels deliberately languid. A less twitchy game than Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat could be slightly more tactical. It rewards patience and timing over aggression. One Must Fall borrows, or steals, all of these elements. It also shamelessly lifts many animations and moves from the celebrated arcade game. It does all that and replaces the gimmick of violence and digitized humans with giant cg rendered fighting robots. A solid gimmick. That could have been it. The developers of One Must Fall could have settled for making a sturdy Mortal Kombat clone, and it would have sold well. This was the early 90s after all, and fighting games on any platform would sell. One Must Fall 2097 was released on the pc in 1994, at a time when pc gaming was just starting to get exciting. Doom was installed on more computers than windows, and internet access was on the rise. One Must Fall was the right game at the right time. Popularity is great, but this is why One Must Fall gets on my best games list. They could have done a straight clone of Mortal Kombat, but they didn’t. They built a game that plays to the strengths of the pc, rather than copying a game that was designed to digest quarters at a phenomenal rate. One Must Fall includes a deep robot customization system, and a campaign that could take hours to play, rather than the 20 or som minutes of an arcade machine. There were a surprising large roster of playable robots, and an equal array of human pilots, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. This mean that the total number of pilot / robot combinations is somewhere around 100, which is bonkers for a fighting game. Variety, play time, customization, these are the things that pc games excel at compared to their arcade counterparts. That is why One Must Fall was great. They took an established genre, with well defined boundaries and conventions, and then changed them all to best fit the pc platform. It was risky and strange and not the type of thing that an established company like Capcom or Midway would have done, at least not at that time. The game also uses a very simplified control system for a fighting game. 2 buttons, tapped rather than rolled inputs for specials. This might be thought of as a dumbing down, but One Must Fall is just as satisfying to play as its arcade cousins. Just as fast, just as tactical, just as fun.
The soundtracks for Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat are good, but they were made to be heard in a noisy arcade, so there are a lot of small musical stings and baselines, but that’s the height of it. The soundtrack for One Must Fall was made to be heard in your quiet home, on your pc speakers. It rocks. Fantastic era standard techno music plays behind every metallic clang and dense thud. This isn’t arcade sounds at home, this is sound designed for, and around the pc gaming experience. In other words, sound you can listen to for a long time without it ever becoming repetative or grating. It might have started as a clone, but One Must Fall 2097 rose above its origins to become one of the best games.
Best Games - Might and Magic Clash of Heroes
During the reign of the nintendo DS a cavalcade of excellent games poured out of development studios and onto that small, two screened console. Many of them were overlooked, or had one or two weeks of notoriety before the next release from Level-5 or Capcom or Nintendo themselves launched, completely eclipsing any smaller releases.
Best Games – Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath
Games that try to do too many things are usually failures. It’s the kitchen sink approach. The developers try to put a little of everything into the game and the whole thing collapses under the weight. Of course, there are times when that approach succeeds spectacularly.
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is a third person action platformer, a first person shooter, a stealth action game, and a character adventure game. That is a list of way too many things. There is no way this game should work. Each of those elements are handled well, but not polished to the level of a game dedicated to any single one of those genres. If you put that list before a room of game designers, they would unconsciously start crossing off items before they realized what their hands were doing. Putting all of those requirements together in one place is a terrible idea. Still, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is on my list as one of the best games.
Imagine that there was a much loved animated series from your childhood. It combined a western backdrop with a Jim Henson-esque attitude to weirdness and subtle humour. Some years later, a game studio got hold of that license, and set out to make an homage to all the things you loved about that old series. All the characters, all the locations, all the inside jokes. Not only did they make that game, they did right by the material, and they did right by your nostalgia. Nothing less than a kitchen sink approach to game design would have worked. There was just too much material to cover.
Of course that show never existed. The stranger isn’t an old beloved character. He exists only in the context of this one game, but he, and the world he occupies, feels like it springs straight from your fond memories.
There were other Oddworld games before Stranger’s Wrath, and while they are all beautifully designed, and equally eccentric, they don’t share they same sense of being part of a much larger world. Stranger’s Wrath feels like a story started and finished during the second act of a much longer series.
Stranger’s Wrath was first released on the original XBOX. Some of the textures and models are showing signs of age. I would say, that in terms of design, it still ranks up there as one of the more visually amazing games to ever be released. There isn’t a density of detail on display, in fact some areas are so desolate and barren, that the feeling of loneliness is suffocating. As you play through the game, you realize that the loneliness is intentional. It is as much a choice as the lush and vibrant setting you eventually pass through.
The environment is an equal participant in this story. Just like it was in the source material. You remember that old show. You know, from when you were growing up. Yeah that one, with the magical creatures, and the old west, and the dark undertones. The one that is an allegory for growing up and the search for personal identity, while still being a solid adventure story full of silly humour and asides to the audience. Yeah, that one.
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, one of the best games.
Best Games - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
There was never any chance that text adventures would last. Not in any real way. There are a lot of people who still dabble in the genre, and a few techno hipsters that would swear up and down that text based games are more pure than games with graphics, or some such nonsense.
Best Games - Smash TV
Did you know that The Godfather wasn’t the first gangster movie? There were a lot of them. Like really, a lot. All sorts. Funny ones, scary ones, true ones, boring ones. All the types of gangster movie. The Godfather is still one of the best. “How can that be?” you might ask. How could there be so many of the same type of movie, and one of them is somehow better than almost all of the others. Except Goodfellas. Goodfellas is better.
Best Games - Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings 2
Cyborg, ninja, baby, or dolphin. These are the sort jet fighter pilots you can choose from in Aero Fighters 2(Sonic Wings 2 in Japan). At the end of the game you fight a space baboon and maybe a ghost.
Best Games - Star Trek : 25th Anniversary and Star Trek : Judgement Rites
There is a theory floating around that the music you listen to during your mid to late teens will shape your musical taste for the rest of your life. Some pattern of rhythms and tones gets etched directly into the topography of your brain, and any new music that fits that imprint will be much more appealing. If that’s true, and if it applies to media other than music, I have a Star Trek shaped valley in my brain.
Best Games - Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move / Puzzle De Pon / etc.
The match three bubble shooters have gone by many names and many numerals, but “Balls” is of course the common shorthand adopted by most players. Accepting how pervasive and ever present the genre has become, it is conceivable that we will reach a day when all games will be, at least partly, Balls.
Best Games - Virtua Fighter
If you walked into an arcade in the early 90’s you would have seen a solid wall of cabinets all containing one game, Street Fighter 2. There might even have been many different versions of Street Fighter 2. Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior, the game that kicked off a new era in fighting games. Street Fighter 2: Champion Edition let you play as the boss characters from the first version and introduced mirror matches that let two players fight as palette swapped copies of the same character. Street Fighter 2 Turbo: Hyper Fighting sped up the game, added new character moves, and rebalanced the whole shebang for better competitive play. Street Fighter 2: Rainbow Edition was a hacked bootleg of one of the previous games that could have any number of tweaks and twists that made the fighting flat out goofy and unpredictable. There may have even been Super Street Fighter 2, a game with new characters, completely redone graphics and sound, and new sets of moves for the entire roster. It wouldn’t even be uncommon for there to be a couple copies of each game. Not only could there be a solid dozen cabinets all sporting Street Fighter 2, but odds were good that they would all be in use. That was an arcade in the early 90’s. All hadoukens, all the time.
Best Games Worst Game - Sonic Shuffle When I started writing these best games bits, I said that I wouldn’t try to do any snarky takedowns of awful games. While being clever and humorous might be difficult, hating on things is easy and not interesting. Pretending to hate things to prove your ‘cred’ is one of the more terrible aspects of human nature, so I made a conscious effort to avoid doing that. That said, there is some value in defining the bounds of the scale. Sonic Shuffle is the worst game I have ever played.
Best Games - Deus Ex
The first time I tried to play Deus Ex, I played it like a shooter. Running from place to place, trying to clear out all the enemies. I thought it was bland, clunky, overly difficult, and directionless. I put it down.
Best Games - Waku Waku 7
Waku Waku 7 walks a fine line. Everything about the game is a send up of the fighting genre. Still it manages to be a competent fighter. The characters are thoroughly ridiculous, but not more so than the rosters they are making fun of. The settings and story are knowingly composed entirely of anime tropes.This game would be easy to dismiss if it weren’t so surefooted in making fun of itself and all of it’s genre baggage.
Best Games - Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Imagine there was a game made up almost entirely of minigames. Strike one. The minigames are repeated a bewildering number of times. Strike two. The bulk of the remaining part of the game is uneventfully sailing across open ocean. Strike three. For a game called Pirates! you very rarely get to wear a captain’s hat or an eyepatch. Strike four.
Best Games - Penguin Kun Wars Two tiny, adorable animals face each other grimly across an empty ping pong table. On both sides sit a lineup of brightly coloured balls. These are your weapons. When the whistle blows, the opponents will make a frenzied dash to whip the balls at other side of the table. All balls are in play. If a ball ends up on your side, you can pick it up and send it hurtling back. If one of the animals is struck with a ball, any ball, they will be dazed for a few seconds. If a dazed animal is hit again, the knockdown is extended. When the round timer runs out, and the final buzzer sounds, the player who has managed to end up with the fewest balls on their side, wins. Occasionally an iridescent slinky undulates across the table. That slinky is a dick.
Best Games - Aztec
Movement Mode
W- walk, R- run, J- jump, S- stop, C- climb, A- turn Left, D- turn Right, G- crawl(once), P- place and light explosive, T- take, O- opens box or digs in trash pile, L- looks in box, Z- inventory, F- goes into fight mode Control S- toggles main sound on/off
Best Games - Unreal Tournament
Launching at the tail end of 1999, Unreal Tournament became the first in the series to focus exclusively on multiplayer combat. Building on the success and popularity of its predecessors multiplayer mode, this entry in the series opted to make it’s single player experience a progression of, tutorial like, battles against AI bots. Defeating waves of bots while mastering the game’s unique arsenal of weapons was meant to lead the player into the real meat of the game, competition against real human opponents.
Best Games - Descent
At one point 3d graphics were so whiz-bang new that a game could be based entirely around the ability to move in all directions. Soak that in for a second. Moving forward, back, left, right, up, down, and rotating around an axis was so novel that a very successful game used that as it’s selling point.
Best Games - Miner 2049er
I have never finished Miner 2049er. Even now, when emulation, level select codes, and other digital wankery, would make completing the last level of this game trivial, I still haven’t finished it. I don’t think that I want to.
Best Games - Twinkle Star Sprites
A bullet hell shooter hard as granite and a flop sweat inducing competitive puzzle game. Dress it up in childish, horrifically cute anime. Color schemes that can be best described as garish and audio like an elementary school squealing contest. Absolutely nothing about Twinkle Star Sprites should work. It is a Japanese arcade grab bag of bad ideas.
Best Games - Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition
When Street Fighter 2 came out I had no knowledge of the original. If I had seen the original Street Fighter at an arcade or a travelling fair or a convenience store, it made no impression on me. I did see it long after it’s release in a restaurant in some small town in Manitoba. I remember it only because it was one of the deluxe cabinets with enormous analog pad contraptions rather than the 6 button layout most people have come to expect from Street Fighter games. The journey that brought that cabinet from Japan to small family restaurant in Canada must have been epic. One of the player 2 pads looked as though someone had been forcefully depressing it with a jackknife. I tried to play it and either I didn’t know what I was doing or the kick pad on player one didn’t work at all. Both cases seem likely. Also the game was terrible. This is the only machine of it’s kind that I have ever come across, and by all accounts mine was not a unique experience.
Best Games - Caverns of Khafka (for Atari computers)
Caverns of Khafka feels like a game that could shake apart at any moment. Is it possible to glitch your character clean through the floor of the level and crash the game? Probably. Can you get your character up into the scoreboard area of the screen and run around on top of the numbers? Absolutely. It seems like maybe this game shouldn’t work at all. It seems like the game was slapped together with very little thought.
Best Games - The Last Starfighter
I used to play a ton of games on an Atari 800 computer. I’m fairly certain that only a few of the games were legally purchased. I’m certain of that, because the most of the games had labels hand written on generic floppy disks in marker. Legit manufacturers tend to use printed labels and usually limit the games to one per disk.
Best Games - Black Tiger
There was a carousel of arcade machines that rolled through the 7-Eleven just down the street from my high school. A regular noon hour activity was to head down to the ‘sev’ and get in line early enough to take your shot at one of the machines. The games would get changed out every few weeks, unless it was a particularly lucrative game like Street Fighter 2 : Champion Edition. That cabinet sat in the same spot for so long, a crime scene forensics team could probably still detect its presence.
Best Games - DoDonPachi
speeding wings of light
screaming flurry of bullets
stillness equals death
Best Games - Battlezone
It’s the late 1960s. Saturn, Titan, Vostok, and Proton rockets have been launching from both sides of the cold war. The official word is that they have been carrying probes, satellites, astronauts, and cosmonauts. These are science focused spacecraft. The mission is exploration and the betterment of mankind. lies.
Best Games - Last Blade and Last Blade 2
There are many beautiful games. Some are beautiful to look at. Some sound beautiful. Some are beautiful standing still, and some are beautiful in motion. A few games play beautifully. A very small handful of games are beautiful from every angle, in every measurable aspect.
Best Games - Artillery
Artillery is one of the most basic physics equations given new form as a game. Artillery is one of the oldest computer games and new games based on the model of Artillery are released at a metronomic rate. Scorched Earth, Gunbound, Worms, Angry Birds. They are all descendants of Artillery.
Best Games - Shogo Mobile Armour Division
Let’s get this out of the way. Shogo is sort of broken. It is empty, ugly, and glitchy. Sure, it is 15 years old, but it looked pretty poor at the time too. The plot is confusing and largely unnecessary. Movement is floaty, and combat is loose and chaotic. Shogo is also incredibly fun.
Best Games - Pengo
When I was a kid I would go over to a friends house to play games on his Commodore vic20. I would arrive under the pretext that we were going to play street hockey. Most of the time we actually would play street hockey, because hey, street hockey is fun. The entire time we were playing there was a tune playing in the back of my mind. It was popcorn, and it goes like this.
Best Games - Beyond Castle Wolfenstein
Everyone played that 3D shooter. You probably had a shareware disc or a disc with a handwritten label that said Wolf 3D. The one where you ran, gun outstretched, through squared off tunnels shooting nazis all the way. Wolfenstein 3D was great wasn’t it. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein isn’t that game.
Best Games - Robotron 2084
Robotron starts at 780kmp/h and then presses down on the accelerator. Some games give people seizures. Robotron gives you epilepsy first and then gives you seizures. If you already had epilepsy, boom, now you have double epilepsy. Robotron destroys the tendons in your left wrist and then offers you a second joystick for your right. Berserk has 7 robots on the screen. Robotron has 47000, and they ride jet skis. Geometry Wars has lots of graphical style. Robotron uses a colour pallette only fully visible to birds. PAC-MAN has a glitchy kill screen. The kill screen in Robotron is a prison shank swiping at you from the coin return. Dark Souls is hard. Robotron is calculus written in diamonds. The Last of Us has a dark, heartbreaking story. Robotron makes you the protector of the last human family, then forces you watch as it kills them in 7 seconds. Robotron kills you 3 seconds after that. Also, it took your money. The audio for Robotron was recorded with a 2 string bass, played by a nail gun.
Best Games - Wing Commander
Don’t bother going back. You can’t. Time has eroded this game.
Wing Commander a cultural relic that pushed technology, and craftsmanship forward. It plowed, and then paved new roads for future creators. This game created new verbs.
Best Games - Alpha Centauri
I used to keep my copy of Alpha Centauri stowed safely in the bottom drawer of an end table, deep in the back, nestled under old papers and envelopes. This was for my own protection. Now it sits in the bottom of a box, stored under the stairs in the basement. This is also for my protection. Alpha Centauri is almost guaranteed to make me sick.
Best Games - Megamania
- through deep black empty
- drifting between stars and void
- space dice tumble down
Best Games - Bubble Bobble
Now, if you don’t think this song is the greatest song ever, I will fight you. That’s no lie. - Ron Burgundy Unless someone can prove otherwise, I think that the music for bubble Bobble may just be the happiest music ever written.
Best Games - Trio the Punch - never forget me
Some people go a long way for a joke. The makers of Trio the Punch went a long, long way for a joke that only they would get. Then they packed that joke up in an arcade cabinet. People could pay to play that joke and almost no one would find it funny. Trio the Punch is the Andy Kaufman of arcade games.
Best Games - Toy Pop
Step right up and try your hand. A true test of skill. This contest is not for the weak hearted or soft minded among you fine folks. What on outward presentation may seem to be a mere child’s toy, actually hides a challenge of such intense cranial agility and digital subtlety, that it can cause strong men to weep and women to swoon. You sir. Yes you. You appear hearty. I measure you to be of ample will and temerity. Of course I could be mistaken. Am I? Tell me folks, does this gentleman seem of sufficient fortitude to you? Can he weather a true examination of his mental and physical faculty? Step right up and try your hand at Toy Pop.
Best Games - Enchanter
remembered in twine.
Best Games - Star Control 2
We sit, perched forward, on wooden kitchen chairs. Moonlight slips between the vertical blinds behind us. Paired with the phosphor glow of my 15 inch monitor, it is just enough light to read by. Shawn has two maps of laid out in front of him. One is printed in bright, rich colour on glossy poster paper. The other is assembled from smaller black and white photocopies, scotch taped across the seams. Side by side, they span a good 3 or 4 feet of dining room table.
Best Games - Encounter!
I played Encounter on an Atari 800 computer. I played it a lot. It would be 10 years before Id software would recapture,with Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, the fluid control, speed and heart pounding tension of Encounter.
Best Games - Joust
rhythmic flap of wings
one press to cheat gravity
van art in motion
Best Games - Puzzle Uo Poko I’ll just get this out of the way right off the top.
Best Games - Magical Drop 3
Every colour is sharp and vibrant. Staccato notes sing over a bouncing march. It sounds like joy. You play.
Your moves are quick and precise. The tones rise with each consecutive match. 1. 2. 3. Your pace drops as you search for your next move. 1 quarter second to late. You miss. Not quick enough. You rearrange the board, making single matches looking, again, for an opening to line up a new combo. You see two reds beside three blues. Above them is a layer of green. You pull down a solitary red from the far side of the board and dash quickly back under the pair.