Best_Games on Eturnip.com

722 - Star Wars: Squadrons

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I pushed past the discomfort, because the game was so engaging and compelling. There are plenty of space combat games, even some Star Wars ones, but Squadrons was the first game that made me feel like I was actually in an X-Wing.

I did tap out pretty quickly that first time, but the feeling of sitting in a Tie Interceptor’s ball cockpit or looking down the nose of a Y-Wing was just too cool. Motion sick or not, that was a feeling I had to come back to.

So I did. Over and over again. I finished the campaign, and even played a few online matches. By the time I was nearing the end of the game’s main story, I was deliberately pulling off intense turns and rolls through floating wreckage. I was scraping the deck of massive Star Destroyers. I would look for places to weave in and around asteroids and capital ships, flipping over so I could get the canopy of my ship uncomfortably close to disaster.

Other than feeling excited and a little light headed, I never felt sick again. I pushed past it.

If the game were even half as good as it is, I doubt that I would have risked the motion sickness. There have been a small number of games and experiences in VR that would make me feel ill, and I would usually drop them pretty quickly. There was just no reason to make myself feel bad.

Star Wars Squadrons feels that good to play. It is so much fun that I turned the motion sickness knob until I broke it off.

I suppose you can also play it on a screen, but why would you want to do that. If you can feel like you sitting in one of the Star Wars fighters, why wouldn’t you?

Star Wars: Squadrons, at least in VR, is certainly one of the Best Games.

718 - Kung-Fu Master

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A KUNG-FU MASTER, THOMAS AND

SILVIA WERE SUDDENLY ATTACKED

BY SEVERAL UNKNOWN GUYS.

Now that I read that again, maybe Thomas isn't the kung-fu master. It might be that the kung-fu master is a completely different person in that list. Or even more interesting, Thomas and Sylvia might, collectively, be a singular kung-fu master. A sort of Dragon Ball fusion dance situation.

No. It’s just awkwardly written. Thomas is the master of kung-fu.

Thomas is also Jackie Chan.

Well that was the plan, anyway.

Kung-Fu Master (also titled Spartan X in Japan) was intended as an adaptation of the 1984 Sammo Hung/Jackie Chan action comedy Wheels on Meals (Food Truck in Chinese) (also titled Spartan X in Japan).

At some point during development the game deviated pretty wildly from the movie. For games, that’s a good thing.

As Thomas, you march either left or right punching and kicking every unknown guy that comes close. Most of the guys will try to grab hold of you in some sort of rugby scrum until you get so tired you fall off the world. A few of them will throw knives at you. A few of the guys are actually snakes that leap out of baskets. And then you get to the bosses.

There is a guy (unknown, it has to be assumed) who hits you with a stick, a guy who throws a boomerang, a big guy, a wizard (maybe?), and another kung-fu master named X. X, it seems, is the one known guy.

All of this might seem like standard fare. Of course, in 1984, it wasn’t. The one-two shot of Kung-Fu Master and Karateka kicked off the long history of characters walking in one direction while punching and kicking. The Beat-em-up or belt scroller starts here. And it already has all the features in place.

Health bars, different high and low punches and kicks, end of level bosses. The only thing Kung-Fu Master is really missing is the ability to block. You do have to dodge knives though, so that’s something. Spartan X is even cited as one of the inspirations for Super Mario Bros. continuous scrolling.

A Jackie Chan licensed game spin off that really didn’t happen and a blue sky attitude made for one of the longest lasting genres in video games. Not only that, but Kung-Fu Master is still a fun game to play.

Kung-Fu Master is simply one of the Best Games.

709 - Wave Race 64

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

At the time, nothing felt like Wave Race 64. Even today, very few games feel as good as Wave Race 64.

You could sit someone down with Wave Race 64 and if they only have a passing familiarity with a game controller, they will be up an racing in a few minutes. The game just feels right.

It’s the water. Before 3D capable consoles and PCs, there was really no way to simulate a fluid, even in a rudimentary way. Sure you could have sprites slide around and be subject to momentum and gravity and any number of physics sims, but simulating movement on water in three dimensions was simply impossible. Then Nintendo nailed it first time out.

The way you tilt the stick to adjust your riders position in the water feels so natural there is almost no need for the simple tutorial included in Wave Race 64. Sure, it’s nice to know that you can do tricks like flips and hand-stands, but just steering your jet ski, but sliding your water craft around slalom buoys is a snap.

Wave Race 64 probably doesn’t stand out when it comes to other racing games. It’s not as complete or demanding as a Gran Turismo or even a Mario Kart. It’s own sequel Wave Race: Blue Storm is a much more complete package. Still, no game before, and shockingly few since, have just felt right the way that Wave Race 64 feels right.

Certainly one of the Best Games.

702 - Return of the Obra Dinn

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In Return of the Obra Dinn, you play as an early 19th century insurance investigator.

That description would have already lost half the room at Ubisoft.

You are tasked with figuring out what happened to a ghost ship that has recently washed ashore. Lost for years, the Obra Dinn is full of unimaginable secrets.

Maybe a producer or two finds this pitch interesting. They are quickly shouted down by someone in the room citing marketing metrics. Boats don’t appeal to a core demo.

As this investigator, you will use a supernatural stopwatch that lets you witness the exact moment of a persons death.

That seems like an amazing hook. Might be enough to raise a few eyebrows.

The visual aesthetic is stippled monochrome. The modern 3D equivalent of a 1985 Apple Macintosh.

And with that all the air leaves the room.

It probably goes without saying that Return of the Obra Dinn did extremely well both critically and commercially. After all, I am putting it on this list of Best Games. Pretty easy guess that it’s a good game.

It is a truly exceptional game, but it’s one that I really don’t see getting made if it wasn’t primarily created by one person. Or at least a very small number of people. The cascade of risk aversion once the team exceeds more than a few people would pretty much negate the chances of ever greenlighting a slow paced logical deduction game set on a boat in the early 1800s.

It would, but it shouldn’t.

All of the things that would make Obra Dinn unpalatable to an old guard publisher are all the things that they should be running toward.

A high concept premise wrapped around solid, even traditional, gameplay. A unique visual flare that usually doesn’t hamper the gameplay (though, from time to time it does make accurately reading what is going on a bit more difficult than it should). Good, but not overly showy, sound design.

It’s just a good, satisfying puzzle/deduction game. It’s fairly well priced. It isn’t overly long. A large publisher could bankroll several of these types of games from small indie studios every year. One or two of them would have the same success as Return of the Obra Dinn. A tidy profit every time.

But a tidy profit isn’t good enough. That’s why they don’t regularly make games as good as Return of the Obra Dinn.

It took a single developer, working without compromise, or sanding the edges off of their vision to create Return of the Obra Dinn. But that’s not because Lucas Pope is some sort of genius auteur. It’s just that he had to work within the limits of his own fears and limitations. He didn’t have to bow to the fears of a room of other people who believe they are being paid to say no.

Return of the Obra Dinn could only have been an indie game. It is also, undeniably, one of the Best Games.

699 - Punch-Out!!

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In any event, Nintendo had purchased more monitors than they needed, and rather than have them sit in a warehouse waiting for a game that would sell as well as the first Donkey Kong, they decided to try something radical.

Why not make a game that needed two monitors?

They could sell these advanced cabinets for a bit more and clear out old inventory. At two birds one stone… or one cabinet two monitors, type situation. After all, this sort of tactic had worked out for them a few years earlier when they had a bunch of Radar Scope cabinets that weren’t selling and rather than take a hit on them, they filled them full of Donkey Kong boards and sold an absolute boatload of them. Couldn’t hurt to try it again.

They took a swipe at making a racing game, but processors at the time were just not up to the task of drawing fast racing action across two screens. Genyo Takeda ultimately decided on a boxing game, where the bottom screen contained the action and the top screen contained the clock, fighter banners, score, and stamina bars. All information you might only need once or twice a match and can easily be gathered in a glance.

The characters and action on the bottom screen were big and bold in a way that you didn’t see in games back then. Large cartoony boxers designed by Shigeru Miyamoto filled the screen and a green wireframe representation of your fighter faced them down. Add digitized speech and sound clips, and you had one of the more eye catching arcade cabinets of it’s time.

In the arcade, Punch-Out!! did fine. Not Donkey Kong sales, but fine.

When they significantly downgraded the game for a port to the single screen, much lower powered, NES, that’s when it really took off.

At first it launched as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, but it was later rereleased simply as Punch Out!! when the license for Mike Tyson’s name and likeness ran out. The man’s many legal and abuse issues probably helped convince Nintendo it was better to part ways. A cartoon version of Piston Honda or Soda Popinski might be slightly off-putting cultural stereotypes, but they were never going to assault their spouses, so that was probably a good business decision.

The NES version of Punch-Out!! plays very similarly to the arcade game. It isn’t really a game about boxing. It’s a sort of rhythm, pattern recognition game, where you have to watch for specific openings and tells and then punch, dodge, or block accordingly. When people say that From Soft took a page out of the Punch-Out!! book for their boss fights, they aren’t wrong. Dark Souls has sort of a freeform Punch-Out!! thing going for it.

Maybe you could have designed a real simulation of boxing on the NES. Maybe that would have been possible. But I doubt it. The gameplay of Punch-Out!! on the other hand, has absolutely stood the test of time. You could pick up and play Punch-Out!!, especially the NES version, right now and the gameplay would challenge and surprise you. You would have a pretty easy time with the first few fights, and then the next batch would give you trouble. But you would learn them. You would get better, and learn to anticipate each fighters set of attacks.

You would have fun playing the game.

Punch-Out!! went on to have sequels and reimaginings. Each one of them is compelling and fun, but anytime someone talks about Punch-Out!! it’s that NES version that they are likely talking about.

Maybe someone would have come up with a game like Punch-Out!! on their own, with no external pressures. But that’s not the world we live in. We live in the world where, because Nintendo over-ordered a certain monitor, they needed a way to justify putting two of them in one cabinet. Punch-Out!! is the end result of that pressure. And it is absolutely one of the Best Games.

694 - In Death

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The first couple of times I played In Death were frustrating. The archery was very precise and you couldn’t really lob shots off and hope for the best. There is a shield block and parry mechanic that requires pretty bang on timing. The movement mechanics are strange and can really throw you for a loop.

I played it a couple more times, and everything started to make sense. Started to feel right. The secret is that In Death doesn’t really play like a most regular video games. It is a VR game through and through. In Death is intensely physical. Just not in the same ways as a lot of other VR games.

Since In Death is a VR game, you can easily stand in one spot and rotate around or take a step or two in any direction. But that’s not really how you move around in this game. In Death has a teleport mechanic where any spot where you toss a shard, you will instantly travel to. You can toss that shard casually or try to throw it a long distance, but how well you can throw and how precisely you can land the shard determines where you will go. Moving around is a trainable skill and it feels great once you get it.

Not only that, but you have an arrow with the shard already on it. Load up that arrow and fire it to teleport yourself anywhere you can shoot an arrow. Which is pretty far away, as it turns out.

There are, of course, enemies to shoot with your bow and array of different arrows, but just standing still and launching arrows isn’t what this game is about.

In Death is a roguelike, so failing a run means that you loose all items and progress to that point. There are unlockable abilities and options that can make subsequent runs easier, but this is a game where you really don’t want to rush in and die.

Trying to keep the run going means you need to take full advantage of those movement abilities. You will be firing arrows to teleport yourself up onto rooftops and odd balconies. You will toss the shard behind you to give you some distance from attackers. You will look for spots in the level where you can get the best angle on enemies while making sure that they can’t get behind you. So, rather than a very physical game like Beat Saber where you wave your arms around, In Death is more about you mastering the physicality of a virtual space.

This is the sort of game that you really couldn’t do properly without VR. The movement mechanics would feel hopelessly restrictive in a regular FPS game, but here they feel natural.

Getting the drop on a bunch of crusades era knights and peppering them with arrows only to teleport behind them when they turn to rush you at the end of a hallways is a magical ‘super ninja’ type experience.

It’s a strange game, a difficult game to play for a lot of reasons, and one that I don’t think many people got a chance to play, but for me it’s one of the Best Games.

684 - Moss

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

But that’s usually where they end.

You might feel like you are in a different place, inside a particular games world. The sense of immersion can make playing a game more active. Standing and using your whole body can boost your heart rate and trigger feelings that you just won’t get from playing a game on a screen. Some games can even give you a pretty good workout.

There is an active element to video games that hits differently than watching passive entertainment. There is all the drama on screen, of course, but there is also this sense that you still exist. You are part of this piece of entertainment. Probably the most important part. The player is not the audience of a video game. You are the motivation. The impulse. You make the game go. Press Start is an imperative of the medium.

VR games take this to an extreme. Not only are you, as the player, the driving force for a video game experience, in VR you are literally the center of the world. When you put on a headset and sync up controllers, you become the focal point of whatever world you are entering. In a very real sense, the world revolves around you.

Most VR games take that as a given, and then fully fail to acknowledge it. It is the very rare game that engages you so fully that you forget that you are standing in an empty space with a set of heavy screens strapped to your head and speakers over your ears. Extreme immersion is possible, but there is an extremely steep hill to climb before you get there.

Moss, at its core, is a capacity action game. An adventure game with a main character that you direct with control sticks and button inputs. You make Quill, a small mouse adventurer, run around levels, jump up ledges, and battle enemies. The same sort of things that you have done in countless character action platformer games. Think Mario, Spyro, Sonic, Ratchet and Clank. If you have played any video games you have been here before.

Moss could have been a game that was only ever played on a regular screen. It could have been like any other character action game. Beautiful to look at with a fun diorama aesthetic and snappy intuitive control. Probably not a standout in the genre, but certainly a solid entry.

Moss is a VR game.

Moss puts you in the game. Not you, as in you control a character as a player. You. The embodied you. You exist in the same space as the action that Quill is engaging in. You can see yourself reflected in pond water and you can interact with the world directly. Sure, you appear as a masked god-like figure in the world, but it is you. And Quill can see you too.

Instantly this changes how you play this game. Moss is not a game where you control a character. Moss is a partnership. You and Quill are in this together. You move objects and platforms around so that she can more easily reach them. You stun enemies so that she can dispatch them. You interact with puzzles so that she can pass through locked doors and evade traps. Quill will wave at you and communicate with your through gestures and sign language. You can give each other a high five.

Through this simple change of context, Quill becomes real. The world becomes real. Because you are real.

Rather than putting you in control as the master of this world, in Moss you become part of the world. You are welcomed into it, and you get to share it. Climbing the hill to create immersion becomes effortless. This isn’t a world made for you, this is a world that you can step into. That you want to step into.

Quill is one of the best game protagonists that far too few players have gotten the chance to meet, but that doesn’t stop Moss from being one of the Best Games.

680 - Kickman

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

676 - Double Dragon

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By comparison, Double Dragon blows the interaction doors wide open.

In a lot of ways Double Dragon hasn’t aged as well as some other games. It is plagued with terrible slowdown. Some of the jumps are designed to steal your quarters. Once you really learn the combat, you can get away with using only a few moves for most of the game.

Of course, when the game came out in 1988 (1987 in Japan) no one was thinking about any of that. No one had ever seen anything like Double Dragon, so it was easy to forgive its faults.

It is true that the only thing you do in Double Dragon is beat up gang members. But maybe that isn’t a problem. As the player, you have more say in the way that you beat all of these gang members than in any game before. Sure, you can punch and kick, but you also have combos, and grab moves, and jump kicks and attacks that aimed in front or behind you. You can change up the timing of your button presses to alter how certain attacks play out. Not only that, but you can move around the levels with amazing freedom. Your only influence on the game is to fight, but Double Dragon sure dos give you a lot of control over where and how you fight.

Double Dragon isn’t the first game to have hand to hand combat, or even hand to hand combat move sets beyond the one or two buttons available on your standard arcade cabinet. In fact, Double Dragon itself is the spiritual sequel to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (adapted and released as Renegade in the west), a game with incredibly dynamic hand to hand combat.

The real advances of Double Dragon were in making all of that combat variety and player expression accessible and enjoyable. Aside from a few of the quarter stealing jumps and unavoidable hits, Double Dragon is just pleasant to play.

There have been so many belt scroll beat-em up games. Challenges where you walk a character from the left to the right punching and kicking every thug that crosses your path. A great many of them are objectively better games than Double Dragon. More refined. More accomplished. But without Double Dragon, it’s tough to say if those would exist.

Double Dragon took a nascent genre and catapulted it countless steps forward. The developers at Technos got so many things right, maybe not the first time but certainly the second.

Double Dragon is still very fun to play today. It is certainly one of the Best Games.

670 - Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Porrasturvat, known in English as Stair Dismount, is a game about falling down a flight of stairs. A weird crash dummy looking character stand atop an unreasonably long flight of stairs. With the mouse, you control a motion vector that will push the character in whatever direction, with whatever force, that you want. That will start the character tumbling down the steps.

Every impact is recorded and the more damage the character receives, the higher the points.

You win by falling. With style.

That’s really all there is to the game. There is no progression. No alternate characters. Nothing that you can do to interact with it past that initial push. It shouldn’t work, but Porrasturvat is extremely addicting.

Maybe it’s the slapstick comedy of watching someone flail head over heels down some stairs. Maybe it’s the fact that it is only a representation of a person and can’t actually be hurt. Maybe it’s the rapid replay time. You can play a round and have the character back up at the top of the stairs and ready for mor in a few seconds.

Maybe it’s just that, in 2002, no one had really seen anything like that before. It wouldn’t be long before game characters would be comedically rag-dolling all over most games, but at the time it was fairly novel.

The early 2000s were a time of real experimentation in games and on the internet. Strange new ideas popped up every few weeks. People were really throwing it at the wall, or down the stairs, to see what sticks.

Porrasturvat might not be one of the biggest games, but it is one of the Best Games.

666 - Devil’s Crush

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I really enjoy pinball. I find a lot of the machines around the early to mid 90s really enjoyable to play. They have the right balance of challenge and exploration. Learning how the games work and then attempting to optimize shots until you can achieve decent scores is pretty fun.

Until very recently, computers couldn’t simulate the physics involved in actual pinball accurately enough for video pinball games to feel real. Most of the history of video pinball is filled with slightly interesting toys that tried to approximate pinball. Like a racing sim, it’s nothing like sitting in a real car but you might get a fun sense of speed out of it.

As soon as simulating fairly accurate physics became attainable, game developers spent a lot of time recreating those old games from the 90s, but didn’t really explore what video pinball could be.

Devil’s Crush, like Alien Crush before it, doesn’t really care how pinball works in the real world. This is video pinball, baby. Your real world rules don’t apply here.

Devil’s Crush is a playfield about eight miles long with zones and warps that transport you to the nether realms of pinball. You might put the ball in one hole only to have it come out into a boss fight against a whirling nightmare of bones. You might hit a target enough times that it transforms into some sort of reptilian ghoul. Strange creatures wander the playfield and redirect the ball every time they are hit by it.

It’s a whole lot of something.

But it isn’t pinball. It’s something else entirely.

I think a lot of times when video game developers try to adapt something from the real world into the digital, card games, board games, sports, they really do their best to preserve that original experience. The lesson of Devil’s Crush is — Don’t.

Video games are untethered to the real world in a way that other games could only dream of. They don’t need to be a simulation of a real thing. They can be weird and wild. They can be a pinball game that plays very little like pinball.

Devil’s Crush is a pinball game that doesn’t play like a pinball game. And that makes it one of the Best Games.

663 - Mr. Do!

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The real wild part was, usually this wasn’t even an attempt to rip off someone else’s idea. They were just trying to make a game, any game, and trying to copy one that already existed was a good way to learn how to do that. This is the exact sort of thing that a school would have you do so you could learn the ropes. This is exactly what ninety percent of tutorials would have you do.

Releasing these games for commercial sale was just a consequence of there not being many developers, or rules about the copyright of games at the time.

Most of the time these games were exactly what I said before, copies. But every now and then a game would come along that wasn’t exactly a copy, but a riff on a common theme. Sometimes these games would even be better than the original.

Introducing, Mr. Do!

Mr. Do! Could easily be seen as just a Dig Dug clone. You crawl around in something that seems like it might be dirt just like Dig Dug. If you remove the support of heavy things they will fall down squishing anything below them. That’s straight out of Dig Dug. There are weird monsters chasing you, just like Dig Dug. Seems pretty open and shut, right? They went and cloned Dig Dug. Sure, except Mr. Do! plays nothing like Dig Dug.

Dig Dug is a puzzle action game where you can play fairly casually, if you manage the monsters. If you get caught by the monsters, you probably didn’t manage them well enough. You learn for next time and you do better.

Mr. Do! is a straight up action maze game where you create the maze. It’s what an arcade developer would come up with if you showed them a recording of Dig Dug and then placed them in a clean room to recreate it from scratch. You can see what they were going for, but it is so far removed from the original that it barely resembles it.

The object of the game is to collect every cherry on a level, not to destroy the monsters. Mr. Do, the character, has a long range superball to attack enemies with, but it bounces around, so it’s tricky to use and as soon as you throw it you are defenseless. If apples only fall one tile, they won’t break and you can push them over cliffs onto the monsters like you were defending a medieval castle.

Mr. Do! is not only a very different game from Dig Dug, it is a much more complex game. There are so many things to keep track of and manage, but after a few quick rounds you will start to figure it out. You will start to look for paths. You will always want to collect each group of eight cherries in one unbroken streak to get the collection bonus and listen to the music chime higher and higher.

Making anything is an iterative process. No video game sprang from nothing. Each game was, and continues to be, an iteration on what came before. Often, the next version of an idea will be better, more refined, than the previous one. In 1982 that process was happening at a breakneck pace. Dig Dug came out earlier the same year as Mr. Do!, yet Mr. Do! is packed with so much more.

The real kicker is, Dig Dug is not a bad game. Actually, it’s quite good. It’s just not as good as Mr. Do!. One of the Best Games.

658 - The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A Link Between Worlds is, more or less, the sequel to A Link to the Past. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was a magnificent feat of game design, but it came out on the Super Nintendo in 1991. A Link Between Worlds came out on the 3DS in 2013. So it’s maybe less of a sequel and more of a reimagining. A remake that doesn’t try to recreate the beats of its predecessor, but does try to recreate the same feelings. It succeeds at that, and so much more.

I didn’t play A Link to the Past in 1991. I had computers, and played pc games. I definitely played a little of Link to the Past, but it wasn’t until years and years later that I actually got into the game properly on emulators (and later still on real hardware). I didn’t really have the nostalgia that A Link Between Worlds expected to play on. That didn’t matter at all.

I think that A Link Between Worlds could easily be someone’s first Zelda game. But I also think that any game in the series could probably be someone’s first Zelda game. They will provide that nostalgic feeling, manifested from nothing, for every player, no matter their experience with the series. They are games that sort of feel like they have always been there, and, in a way, I suppose they have.

Creating that feeling, that this is a game that has always existed, and will always exist, is exactly what makes A Link Between Worlds feels special. There are so many novel concepts and game mechanics spread all over A Link Between Worlds, but it all feels so recognizable. So woven into the fabric of the medium. A Link Between Worlds is what video games aspire to be. Joyful and engaging, and experiential. It’s an adventure that you live through, just the same way that you have before. Just the same way that you will again, the next time you choose to pick up the controller or the console.

I could write about all the of the individual parts that make A Link Between Worlds so excellent, the graphics, the sounds, individual mechanics, but I think that would be missing the point. The game is an experience, and you can’t really atomize an experience. You just live it.

A Link Between Worlds is one of the Best Games.

654 - The Terminator : SkyNET

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

First person shooters were really only a few years old by the time that SkyNET came out. Wolfenstein 3D came out in 1992 and SkyNET came out in 1996, the same year as Quake. That’s not a lot of time to go from the origin of a genre to fully 3D game engines.

While Quake might have been the more advanced 3D engine at the time, The Terminator : SkyNET was the game that truly nailed the first person 3D controls. You know, the important part. It wasn’t quite using wasd yet, but you could set up a pretty competent control scheme in the standard options menu. For quite a while quake would have players modifying text files to set up mouse and keyboard controls.

As soon as you wrap your head around the first person 3D controls, or modify them to your liking, you suddenly feel immersed in the world of The Terminator. It is bleak and eerie and hostile right from the very first location. You will learn to fear the sound of hunter-killer robot servo-motors since the robots seem to be able to hide virtually everywhere in the post apocalyptic rubble.

It’s unsurprising that developer Bethesda and Todd Howard in particular, would go on to be know for creating living, breathing fantasy worlds for you to play in. By comparison SkyNET is extremely linear, but it does everything it can with its early 3D engine, to feel like a real place. You move around in it like it’s a real place. It reacts to your actions like it’s a real place. It’s primitive, and your interactions are limited, but everything feels solid and connected in a way that wouldn’t happen for again for a few years.

If Quake was the best expression of the first person 3D action game, The Terminator games, Future Shock and SkyNET, were the industries first forays into the world of immersive sims and roll playing. It only gave you one roll to play, but SkyNET felt real in the way that the Elder Scrolls series would later go on to perfect.

I fired up SkyNET just a few nights ago. After changing the keyboard to a more comfortable wasd, I fell right into it again. The game holds up and feels challenging and immediate in a way that almost nothing from its era did. It is, after all, one of the Best Games

648 - Grand Theft Auto

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Modern Grand Theft Auto is an enormous blockbuster juggernaut absolutely stuffed with ways to dick around in a comically violent world. They are massive, sprawling things with massive, sprawling budgets. The only part of that description that doesn’t fit with the first entry in the series, is the budget.

Before GTA3 turned the entire franchise into a 3D, third person, narrative adventure, it was a top down crime playground.

It’s sort of amazing, going back to the original, how much of the series is already built out in that first entry. GTA is probably the most realized, living world available in a game at that time. The city (Liberty City, San Andreas, or Vice City) is just moving and living at all time. The streets are filled with traffic, the sidewalks are full of people. Emergency vehicles, taxies, and busses go about their business. And all of it is a sandbox waiting for you to create havoc.

That’s the thing that makes GTA fun. Havoc.

Yes, of course, there are missions that you need to complete to advance in the game, and yes, most of them require you to play things safe. You will need to drive safely, or get from place to place without drawing too much attention to yourself. But all of those are thin barriers set up around the things you really want to do in the game. Drive fast, crash cars, fire guns, wreck things, hurt people, etc. etc. etc. You can cut loose at any moment, but you won’t because that tension is also fun. Knowing that you can do anything at any moment, but choosing to play the game “by the rules” is very entertaining. You aren’t forced to play GTA in any specific way, but you are frequently asked. How you play is entirely up to you.

Most of the time when I played GTA, I would just cause as much chaos as possible and see how long it took the increasing police presence to stop me. Much the same way that people play the later entries in the series. When I got tired of that, I would play through the missions and progress the story. That is also the way people tend to play the later entries in the series.

More than the living open world, more than the over the top crime story, that is the success of GTA as a bit of game design. Allowing you to do anything you want at any time, but offering the player voluntary constraints on that type of play that you can dip in and out of at will, is a very sticky way to build a game.

Knowing what will be fun, and then letting players decide for themselves how to engage with that fun is what makes Grand Theft Auto one of the Best Games.

644 - No One Lives Forever

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

No One Lives Forever, is a great bit of tongue-in-cheek 60s spy fiction in a game genre that desperately needed some levity at that time. The game industry’s tendency to head straight toward grim military shooters was in full effect in the early 2000s, just not at Monolith. Even when they eventually did a military shooter, it was with a character driven horror twist. To this day, No One Lives Forever remains a pretty special game.

Graphically, it holds up very well for a Twenty-Five year old game. The stylization is subtle, but helps the game look better than it’s age. Similar to what a company like Arkane does with their characters, Monolith is creating caricatures that look just real enough that they mesh with their environment.

Gameplay-wise, NOLF is a pretty standard first person shooter. As secret agent Kate Archer you sneak around the lairs of evil masterminds taking out henchmen as you go. Unlike most shooter games, NOLF is riddled with quippy dialogue and knowing asides to the sexist attitudes of 60s spy fiction. It’s smart, it’s funny, it’s full of set pieces and dynamic action. Above all, it just feels great to play.

Monolith has appeared on this list of Best Games before, and I think they will likely show up again. They just made games a little different than most other studios. They had a better sense of pacing. They understood when to take control and when to leave it up to the player. NOLF isn’t a bombastic, over the top, experience. It’s subtle and restrained. That’s something extremely surprising from a game released in 2000. Honestly, it might be surprising in a game released today. A game doesn’t have to do everything, or be dozens of hours long. It can just be what it needs to be. Fun.

In a perfect world we would be reading announcements of a new NOLF game in development. Instead, the IP license for the game is stuck in legal quagmire where several companies literally don’t know if they own it or not, and Monolith, the original developer has been shuttered in an objectively stupid move by Warner Bros.

So that means there are shockingly few ways to find and play No One Lives Forever, but if you can, you probably should. It remains one of the Best Games.

640 - Red Baron

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Well, unlike any other game except of Red Baron.

Battlezone was a ploddingly slow experience, where the tension you felt was mostly because you could see the shots coming but you just weren’t able to grind yourself out of the way in time.

Red Baron, on the other hand, can be blindingly fast.

In Red Baron, you take control of a WWI biplane firing inaccurate machine guns at other biplanes, zeppelins, gun turrets, and other targets. The action can be extremely frantic. You often have to dodge and weave around bullets coming at you from multiple attackers, all while not crashing into oncoming mountain ranges.

Red Baron is the sort of game that shouldn’t have existed in 1981. It moves too fast. It’s too sharp and fluid. It actually feels real. Not like a simulation or anything, but when you move the joystick, your biplane responds like you want it to. When you fire your machine gun, bullets spray in a wild, but tight, pattern. You don’t exactly have to lead targets, but you can see that bullets drift away from your heading. These are all things that wouldn’t really happen in flight simulator games for years.

Yes, it’s a simple game. Yes, after you have played it for a few minutes, you will have seen everything the game has to offer. There are no special stages or boss enemies. But, just because it’s a short game, doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game. You could say the same about PAC-MAN, and that game is great.

I found Red Baron in an arcade well after its prime. Not many people played it, but I put many quarters into that machine. It captured a very core felling of high speed 3 dimensional movement that I don’t think I experienced again until I played Quake, or Terminator Future Shock. On the other side of that screen was a real place, and I was moving through it.

Maybe if Battlezone had been a little faster or a little more nimble, I would be singing its praises, but no. I’m here for Red Baron, one of the Best Games.

635 - Full Throttle

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Let’s not forget, putting story in games. That’s all on adventure games… well, text adventure games first, of course, but point and click adventures picked up that flag and ran with it well into the early 2000s.

One thing that adventure games of that era didn’t usually do, was innovate on gameplay. For an awfully long time those types of games were called graphical adventure games, because they were text adventure games with a slight drizzle of graphics on the top half of the screen. They had a text parser and everything. You had to type in directions for the your character to walk north or west or climb up the stairs. I honestly think that is one of the reasons why almost everyone under 50 can type now. They had to learn so that they could play Kings Quest.

Eventually, the mouse became the de facto method of interacting with images on a screen, and you could just click on the verbs and nouns rather than keying them in. More of a lateral move than any real innovation.

In the very early 90s, a few games in the, now, point and click adventure genre, removed the words entirely and switched to an entirely icon based interface. There were icons for all of the major interactions that a player could attempt. Walk to a place, look at a thing, interact with or pick up that thing, talk to a person, etc.

While that did make the games more inviting, and quicker to navigate for experienced players, they also created a bit of thematic distance for the player. Sure, you can click on a thing, but will the hand icon pick up that thing, move that thing, or do some other action that you weren’t intending. Also, are computer icons, laid out in a line on the top or bottom of the screen, really appropriate for a swords and sorcery medieval world? All those icons meant that you were playing a game, and if you were looking to be immersed in a world, well here is your constant reminder that you are looking through a glass window on your computer screen.

I don’t know if Full Throttle was the first game to create a fully themed, pop up, interface. One with the absolute minimum of options needed to interact with the world. It might not have been the first, but it was easily the most successful.

In Full Throttle you control biker gang leader, Ben. Ben can talk to people and look at things, but otherwise he can really only grab, punch, or kick. That’s who he is. That’s how he deals with the world. He punches and kicks it.

When you aren’t punching or kicking, the interface just goes away, and suddenly you are watching a fairly funny animated movie.

The entire world of Full Throttle is sort of a “what if Mad Max, but kind of nice, and only a little devastated”. And the way you interact with the game reflects that. You punch and kicks things, but in a comic violence sort of way. Ben is sort of loveable, when you get to know him. Most of his rage is directed at kicking in doors.

Every point and click adventure game after Full Throttle adopted some form of context sensitive interface. A floating radial menu, or a system that tries to be clever and infers what the player might want in any given situation. It’s a system that can still be found in point and click adventure games 20 years later.

Maybe it’s time for a new innovation, or maybe it still works. Either way, Full Throttle is still a great game. I would even say, it’s one of the Best Games.

630 - Cannon Fodder

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

When I wrote the last one of these about Command and Conquer, I went on about the RTS being a genre defined by a control scheme. The use of the mouse as an input device sparked a few genres, or modified existing ones, like the text adventure morphing into the point and click adventure. There were mouse input games on the Macintosh and Amiga in the mid 80s, but the idea of real time strategy games being born not from anything the computer could do, but from the interface device attached to it, stuck with me.

Cannon Fodder is a game that evolved in parallel with rts games like Dune II and Warcraft. That isn’t exactly surprising since the same people who made it, British Amiga developers Sensible Software released a realtime strategy game, Mega-Lo-Mania, several months before Dune II came out. The mouse came with the Amiga and using it to control little digital minions just seemed the obvious choice. Maybe Lemmings is to blame for that.

Cannon Fodder is real time, and you use the mouse to point and click places you want squads of characters to move on a map, but it is in no way a strategy game. Cannon Fodder is a straight up action game.

You guide a group of soldiers around a map spraying machine gun fire and hurling grenades at anything that moves. Eventually you can even split the group into multiple squads. If some of your squad dies, Jools and Jops for instance, you get reinforced with the seemingly endless line of conscripts standing out front of the rapidly growing cemetery. Cannon Fodder wears its dark satire proudly. The screen between missions carries an Us and Them scoreboard. This is a parody of war.

Even though your men don’t always pathfind very accurately, control still feels breezy and quick. Popping out of cover to fire off a few shots is not only possible, but required. Aiming is required.

The game is ultimately pretty simple and doesn’t have the depth of anything in the RTS genre, but that is no great crime. It’s fun, and that is really what most of us want out of a game, isn’t it?

Cannon Fodder is one of the best games.

626 - Command & Conquer

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It’s almost impossible to imagine now, but for quite a long time computers didn’t use mice. You had a keyboard, you might have had a joystick or even a gamepad, but mice weren’t really that common. In the late 80’s or early 90’s you would be more likely to see a tape drive or midi keyboard hooked up to a computer than a mouse.

Sure, Macintosh computers came equipped with mice since the mid 80s, but who used a Mac. Or, more to the point, who played games on a Mac. The Apple II series of computers had been spoken in the same breath as the Commodore 64 when it came to finding a place to play a particular game, but for whatever reason, the Mac never enjoyed that same level of devotion. The Mac did do one thing though. It got everyone who came into contact with it used to using a mouse.

Amiga users from back in the day, I see you. You can sit down.

The adoption of mouse input to PCs was a slow trickle and until around 1992 or 1993 you couldn’t reasonably expect a computer to be sold with a mouse. It would likely be an additional purchase. And if you had to go out and buy a mouse for a computer that was running a text only interface like DOS, what would you use that for? Spreadsheets? Nope. People buy extra computer hardware to play games.

There might be some precedent for RTS games before Herzog Zwei, an action strategy game for the Sega Genesis and a handful of Japanese computers, but in the west the game that people most associated with real-time strategy was Dune II developed by Westwood.

Dune II was the direct follow up to a point and click adventure game (that included a smattering of strategy). It was a profound shift, not just for the series but for PC games.

There had been a lot of strategy games on PC. CIV and Sim City were huge hits. They put demand on your planning and execution, but they never really put any demand on your reflexes. The shift with Dune II is that here was a game that forced you to plan and strategize while reacting at high speed to the action on screen. There were games that did this with a controller, like Herzog Zwei, but to be really fast and accurate in a strategy game required a mouse.

Dune II was a great game, but it had nothing on Westwood’s follow up RTS title, Command & Conquer.

Command & Conquer took everything that made Dune II revolutionary, and refined it. Honed it. Made it genre defining. Well, genre defining if we ignore that Warcraft pulled off a similar feat a few months earlier. Not nearly as well as Command & Conquer, though honestly.

Command & Conquer did something that not even much later RTS games could pull off. It was an RTS Game with a story. The single player missions were interesting, challenging, and you actually wanted to play though each one to see what would happen next. The live action actors on virtual sets knew the assignment all of the acting is cheesy, while actually being quite good. Not so bad it’s good. For real good, in a self aware sort of way.

In the alternate history of the world of Command & Conquer, the forces of the GDI do battle with the Brotherhood of NOD over control of a substance called Tiberium. A simple enough premise. The games eventually veer into time travel, dimensional travel, invading aliens, and on and on. It’s silly, but also a great excuse to click your mouse. I’m sure that at least a few mice didn’t make it all the way through the Command & Conquer campaign.

The single player game was amazing and revolutionary and all those things, but the game also came packed with a second disc that you could lend to a friend to play lan or networked multiplayer. This is fully in the time of dial up BBSs and no real internet. Even over a dial up modem it worked remarkably well.

So, because a mouse existed for DOS PCs before graphical interfaces were common, we have Command & Conquer. I spun up the remaster, as well as the original version and played a few missions just the other day. Command & Conquer is still one of the Best Games.

622 - Armored Warriors

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

From around 1985 until the late 90s, you could walk into any arcade and be reasonably sure that there would be a wall of beat ‘em up machines. Until Street Fighter 2 and the rise of versus fighting games, the beat ‘em up was king. It’s not hard to understand why either. They were fun, easy to figure out, and they all let you take on the challenge with a friend. They also ate quarters at a pretty reliable rate. That made them a hit with players and arcade operators.

I’m fairly certain that the heads of game dev studios would have loved it if they could churn out a game where you march a character from the left to the right punching and kicking other characters the entire way. Once you have the template it would be easy to just make tons of these games, right?

Of course not. Game development isn’t like that. Never has been, never will be. There is always some new problem. Some technical or artistic challenge. And frankly, that’s why people make games in the first place. Not because they are an easy way to make money, but because they are a difficult artistic challenge.

In 1989 Capcom created the game Final Fight. It was as close to a perfect beat ‘em up as existed at the time. It was fast, fun, varied (by the standards of the time), and vibrant. They could probably have made another Final Fight game every year for the next decade and they still would have made tons of cash. Never innovating. Never advancing. Never trying anything new.

Of course, Capcom employed game developers, so you know that was never an option. In fact, there wouldn’t even be a Final Fight 2 until four years later, and it came out on a console and not in arcades, where the genre flourished. Capcom wasn’t about playing it safe with sequels.

This has all been lead up. Setting the stage.

In 1993 Capcom introduced a brand new arcade system, the CP System II. It would go on to become one of the most successful arcade systems of all time, outliving its successor, the CPSIII, by years. When they launched the board, Capcom did what any game developer would do, they put it to the test.

In 1994, they launched Armored Warriors, a mecha centered beat ‘em up. Armored Warriors remains one of the most dynamic and innovative games of the move left to right punching things genre. It is a true showcase of what this new arcade system could do. Large, vivid, sprites. Fast action. In game storytelling with pop outs of talking heads. The star of the show, though, is the modular mech system.

Every player selectable mech comes with a stock array of short and long range combat tools and movement options. Some of them move faster or hit harder or jump higher. But just because that is the default, that doesn’t mean you have to play that way.

Each mech has three interchangeable components. One Arm, a movement base, and a long range weapon. Swapping any of these out with parts stolen from shattered enemies will change how your mech moves and plays. You can switch from walking to hovering, opt for a drill arm over a laser, pick up a machine gun or a missile rack. It all means that the way you start playing a stage won’t be the way you end it.

There are even enhancement module team up moves where you can combine with the other players to execute a devastating attack.

As far as beat ’em up games go, Armored Warriors is spectacularly deep. For every button press and joystick movement, there are a huge variety of potential effects. The game is tough. You will need to use all those tools, or spend a lot of quarters.

About a year later, Capcom took a lot of the sprites, and the build your own mech mechanics and created Cyberbots: Full Metal Madness, a spin off versus fighting game. I will probably get to writing about Cyberbots one day, since it also deservers to be on this list, but for now, I’ll wrap up talking about Armored Warriors.

Capcom took a popular, but flagging, genre and added all sorts of complexity to it. The result is one of the Best Games

618 - Final Fantasy

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Computer (and for this example I am counting game consoles as computers) role playing games have changed a lot over nearly four decades. From simple games with simple graphics, to complex games also with simple graphics, to majestically rendered multi part fully voiced and scored monstrosities that take months for the average player to complete.

There are any number of games that one could point to as the original instigator of the genre. Ultima, Dragon Quest, Wizardry, Dragonstomper, maybe even Rogue. They are all potentially the starting point for someone. More likely though, it’s the fusion of ideas and game systems from so many early games that makes the RPG genre what it is today.

And all of that brings us to Final Fantasy. It is all at once a fusion of the games that came before it, and the jumping off point for so many other games. In some ways, it is a simplification and streamlining of the RPG genre. In others, it is a very complex combination of systems that can create some early emergent gameplay.

Final Fantasy is a game that shouldn’t really be fun. Most of what you will be doing is navigating menus. A task that doesn’t exactly scream ‘fun’. But that abstraction fades away as you get into more difficult fights. You aren’t stepping through menus, you are strategizing intense combat. You are weighing using limited magic and items against sword swings and even running away. Can you defeat this mob of creatures before they take out your White Mage? Can your Fighter absorb one more hit, or is it time to spend a turn drinking a health potion.

There is no ticking clock. No time pressure to contend with. But each selection has consequences. It is a system that still works, and almost 40 years on, the original Final Fantasy is still fun.

Like I said at the top, Final Fantasy isn’t even the best game in the series. Later entries tell vibrant stories and vary up the mechanics with novel sequences. It’s not the best, but everything is here. It plays well. The adventure pulls you in. Every button press has to be carefully considered. Every victory feels earned. Every victory feels exciting.

No modern RPG could get away with being so spare and raw as Final Fantasy, but the foundation is there and the foundation is solid. Final Fantasy is one of the best games.

615 - E.T. Phone Home!

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Actually, I will write about that game for a moment. I think it’s important. For context.

In 1982 Howard Scott Warshaw was given just over a month to design and create an E.T. video game for the atari 2600 so that it could be ready and in stores for Christmas of that year. The results were not great.

I don’t even hate that game as much as most people seem to. It plays fine, but it really could have used a round or two of testing, and maybe the opinions of some more developers, before being packaged into a cartridge and being sent out to die. The game is not as awful as everyone says it is, but having one person work on a brand new game for a month never was, or will be, enough people or time to create a good game.

Fortunately, the team working on the E.T. game for Atari’s line of 8-bit computers had slightly more time and slightly more people. Unfortunately, not that many Atari computers were out in the world. If people were going to buy an E.T. game to play at home, it was going to be the one on the 2600 console. And that really is a shame.

Launching only a few months later, E.T. Phone Home! Is, in sharp contrast, a very good game.

The objective of E.T. Phone Home! is what you might expect. As Elliott, you run around your suburban neighborhood and surrounding woods, collecting pieces of trash that E.T. will assemble into his long range phone. Umbrellas, coils of wire, forks, that sort of thing.

On easier levels you only have to collect a few of them. As you crank up the difficulty, you have to collect more parts and only certain colors will work. You can’t just substitute a red wire when E.T. needs the black one. I can tell you from personal experience, that makes the game much more difficult when you are playing it on a black and white TV as your monitor.

As Elliott, you have to avoid scientists and agents who will follow you and steal any parts you are carrying. You can run and hide around houses and trees, but it can be tricky to evade all of the people following you. You can also use your telepathic link to find out what parts E.T. still needs and what color they are, but that wastes some of your most precious resource, time.

Like in the movie, E.T. can’t live for very long on earth. His health is tracked by a few flowers. As you play each flower will wither and die. You can replenish a flower or two by collecting phone parts quickly, but there is no way to fully outrun the clock. E.T. is dying and the only way to save him is to get him back to his ship.

When you finally assemble the phone E.T. shows up on screen and speaks. A rare thing on 8-bit computers. He says his line, phones home, and now it’s a race to get to the ship before it leaves earth forever.

As E.T. you run your way through the houses and woods, get to the ship and win.

That’s it. That’s the whole game. It’s simple, but solid. Beating it on the hardest difficulty is truly challenging. It moves well, and the whole game only requires one joystick and one button. In a sea of actually terrible licensed games, of which the Atari 2600 E.T. game is not even the worst, E.T. Phone Home! stands out. It would be a good game even without the movie tie in.

I have included a couple of links here for further reading about this game, because I think that it’s well worth your time.

https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-et-phone-home_1881.html

https://www.atari-computermuseum.de/rx8030.htm

Maybe it’s only nostalgia talking, but I played both the Atari 2600 E.T. and this one back in the 80s, and again just last night. E.T. Phone Home! is actually a good game, and it still plays very well.

I meant to only test it out to jog my memory, but I found myself playing it all the way through multiple times. It was properly enjoyable. Maybe even one of the Best Games.

610 - Golly! Ghost!

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Golly! Ghost! Is a strange animal. As far as the gameplay goes, it is very simple. It’s a precise and responsive, but fairly average shooting gallery. A wide variety of ghosts pop out of different spots on the playfield and your job is to zap them with your legally distinct ghost catching gun. It’s so average and basic that there is only one level. Only one background. And there is a very good reason for that.

Where most video games would have pixel painted and animated artwork for their backgrounds, Golly! Ghost! has a real dollhouse-like diorama back there. With a door, fridge, chest, and even a toilet seat that fling open to spew out ghosts.

The game uses the Pepper’s ghost effect to project both the ghosts (rendered conventionally on a screen) and the diorama background into the same space. The result is actually pretty convincing. Lots of little animated special effects flicker and sparkle at the edges of objects, but the objects themselves are real. It looks amazing.

Of course, looks help, but if the game isn’t fun no one will want to play it more than a couple of times. I said earlier that it’s a fairly average shooting gallery. So why would average gameplay be noteworthy? Well, Golly! Ghost! isn’t like most video games. It isn’t intended to be a thrill ride of ramping challenge. As a game, Golly! Ghost! has more in common with skeeball than House of the Dead. It’s a game that you play multiple times just to slightly improve your scores and consistency. And, like skeeball, the game will reward your high scores with tickets you can redeem at the arcade shop for an eraser or whatever.

If you plunked Golly! Ghost! between a hoop shot and a beanbag toss, maybe people would be likely to play it. Unfortunately it looks a lot more like a conventional light gun games and tends to get lumped in with those, and, like I have said twice now, it’s only an average light gun game. But it is a stellar ticket redemption game.

So yeah, Golly! Ghost! might be a strange one, but it’s still one of the Best Games.

606 - Gunstar Heroes

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Gunstar Heroes is a run, shoot, jump, kick, slide, fly, roll dice, and throw action game released for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in 1993. The waning days of the 16-bit era. The Sony PlayStation was about a year away, and many development studios were neck deep in learning the new 3D game technology, but developers who had been working with 2D sprites and FM synth were at the height of their power. Gunstar heroes probably couldn’t have been made any earlier or later.

Up until this point, there had been countless run sideways and shoot games released both for home consoles and in arcades. At first glance, Gunstar Heroes appears to be just another one of those. And it is. Sort of.

All of the verbs I listed above are for real. You really will find yourself using a very robust jump kick mechanic in this shooting game. You really will opt to close some distance so you can execute a hip toss on an enemy rather than hanging back and using your weapons. You really will fly, and you really will roll dice. Gunstar Heroes is relentlessly inventive. There are new fun ways to play every few minutes. At one point, the entire game changes to a space shooter for a while.

The modular weapon system offers no fewer than ten different ways to annihilate your enemies. Mixing a homing with a fire weapon, or an electric blast with a rapid fire make for extremely satisfying action. And there are no duds in this list. Every single combination feels, looks, and sounds great.

If you said that Gunstar Heroes does nothing new, nothing truly novel, you would be right. Anything that happens here can probably be found in another game. Likely many other games. But, no other games do it all. No other games successfully maintain the same breakneck pace while still feeling cohesive and consistent.

Treasure developed a lot of fantastic games in their time, but Gunstar Heroes might be their strongest showing. It is, after all, one of the best games.

602 - Star Wars : Dark Forces

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Doom clones were thick on the ground by the time Dark Forces came out. It had been two years since the original Doom had come out and several other first person shooters quickly followed. Some used the Doom engine, while others used custom engines like Build or the Jedi Engine developed for Dark Forces, but the intent behind all of them was similar. Capture the fast action and first person excitement found in Doom.

Most of those Doom clones were just that. Clones. Soulless, inferior copies. When you play Dark Forces, you notice instantly that this game is more than a clone. Dark Forces is doing something different.

The Star Wars license, the iconic designs and unmistakable sounds, I will admit, help Dark Forces to stand out from the crowd. But that is all surface. As a game, Dark forces just feels different.

It’s the way the spaces are constructed. Buildings and environments that make sense. Rooms that join other rooms, not because the game designers thought that could make for an interesting maze to walk through, but because they wanted it to feel like an actual building. A place where people would work… well not so much people, a place where Imperial officers and stormtroopers would work. So, blue-grey rooms filled with red and blue lights and tall walkways with no guard rails. You know, Empire type stuff. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that these levels feel realistic, but they do feel authentic.

Doom itself is mostly filled with levels that only exist to put you in a variety of combat situations. Other than playing them repeatedly, there is nothing inherent to the levels that makes them memorable. Dark Forces includes many areas where there isn’t much combat, but that only burns those maps deeper into your memory. That authenticity makes them memorable.

There was a point in games where creating memorable and recognizable worlds became as important as the moment to moment action you experienced in them. Slow paced adventure games took the lead in this regard, but it took a while for that design style to filter down into action games. Even as late as 1995, Dark Forces was a pioneer. Now, even the most simple of games would feel incomplete if it didn’t exist in a recognizable and detailed world.

Again, I think that the Star Wars license gave Dark Forces a leg up in creating a sense of place and recognizable, memorable, levels. But that design direction wasn’t guaranteed. The developers of Dark Forces could very easily have coasted on that license and churned out a bog standard Doom Clone. It still would have sold. Instead, they opted to head down the path that would eventually lead to games like Half-Life and the Dark Forces own sequels, the Jedi Knight series of games. Games where the world is memorable and the adventure is interesting and varied. It isn’t enough to move around clicking your mouse, you need to engage with the world and its inhabitants.

Dark Forces could have been a simple copy, a mod of Doom, and it would probably have held a place in the history of games. Instead, it elevated a genre, and secured its place as one of the Best Games

598 - Populous

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

While there might be an argument to be made that there are a couple of simulations that might count as the first ‘God Game’, I don’t know if there are any contenders for the first truly enjoyable ‘God Game”. Populous is it.

Before Populous there was no ‘God Game’ genre. A game where you don’t directly control the tiny characters running around on screen, but instead, you control the world they inhabit. Changing the land to direct outcomes. Using natural disasters as weapons. Reinforcing your followers’ zealotry, making them more formidable and destructive when they tangle with an opposing god’s followers.

And that’s the magic of Populous. While you are consistently told that your followers are good and the opposing followers are evil, when you survey the world this other god’s followers largely resemble your own. They build the same homes and structures. They operate by the same rules. They are a palette swapped version of your own people. So that means you must destroy them.

You probably won’t be more than a few levels into Populous when it occurs to you. Am I the baddie? Is there anything that truly makes my people different from the ‘Evil’ populous. Did they do something to deserve the volcanoes, earthquakes, and floods you send their way?

Of course, that’s a question the game will never answer. If they are left uncontested, the other god’s people will surely eradicate your own. So there is no sense equivocating. An uncaring world has set you in opposition, so you must fight. Or tip the balance in favour of your own people so that they can fight.

Certainly, the structure of how the game is played, with very clear and simple icons as an interface, might make it compelling. Especially for people in 1989, accustomed to much more arcane and impenetrable game interfaces. But I think it’s simpler than that.

Populous, like a lot of other Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux designed games, the morality of Populous is grey at best. There is something inherently exciting about being a tiny bit evil. Synthetically dark hearted. Populous is a game that understand that the very notion of an all powerful god that favors one people over another comes from a very bad place in human nature, and then makes light of it. After all, these are just a bunch of goofy little pixel people, right? When you destroyed a thriving village with an earthquake just so it would be easier for your devoted knights could more easily walk in and slaughter the survivors, that was all in the name of good, right? It’s just a bit of digital fun.

If you can play all 500 levels of Populous and come away with a positive outlook on the way people have conducted themselves religiously over the past several thousand years, I would be very surprised.

On the upside, you would probably have had a lot of fun.

Populous is, absolutely, one of the Best Games.

593 - PaRappa the Rapper

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I’m not sure if the core gameplay of PaRappa the Rapper would have worked if it had been as lean as many DDR games. Had the presentation of the game been as spare.

At its core, Parappa is a timeline with timing marks on it. An icon travels along the timeline and when it is over certain segments, it prompts you to press a button. That’s it. That’s the game. When the icon reaches a certain point on the timeline, a timeline that corresponds with the beat of the music, you press a preselected button. You can play around with other buttons at different points on the timeline, but the game really only requires you to press a button at that one particular moment.

All of the things that videogames are known for, freedom of movement, improvisation, variable interactivity, those aren’t required in PaRappa. Just press the button when you are asked to and the game will be satisfied. Now, you can improvise, and you can play with the beat outside of the required hits, and the game will reward you for that, but you don’t need to. You can just hit the beats, and you will progress.

If you aren’t familiar with rhythm games, I can imagine that this description doesn’t sound very fun. You’re right. It shouldn’t be. But it is.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, playing music is fun. In some ways, a game like PaRappa turns the PlayStation controller into a musical instrument. When you hit a button the game will make a corresponding sound and it is up to you then to make those sounds rhythmic. The game is asking you to do the fun part.

There is another aspect of PaRappa the Rapper that I should probably touch on. It’s the part that most commentary on the game would probably get to first. PaRappa is completely unhinged.

The game plays out in a series of animated skits populated by a cast of paper thin characters. Each skit concluding with a song for you to play along with.

The skits typically involve the title character, PaRappa the Rapper, rapping along to some sort of skill building life event. Learning Karate, taking a driving test, learning to bake. It’s all very simple and silly, but every aspect of the game is painted with levels of bizarre and surreal. Character dialog is often nonsensical. Line deliveries are spectacularly odd. Considered motivations are usually nonexistent. In PaRappa’s world things happen simply because things happen. You just have to go with the flow, and, as you are constantly reminded, you ‘gotta believe’.

The packaging of this very simple gameplay loop is lively and odd and perfectly charming. If rhythm games needed a kickstart, PaRappa was designed to deliver.

Now, decades later, PaRappa doesn’t really compete with the Rock Bands and Guitar Heros of the world, but it is still a very special game. As goofy as it is challenging and without a doubt, one of the best games.

590 - The Irritating Maze

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Irritating maze is the most pure sort of game there is. A test of skill.

When you start you get to choose from a wide selection of playable characters. Either Man or Lady. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the game plays identically no matter who you choose.

After that, you guide the tip of a metal rod through an electrified maze filled with hazards. That’s it. That’s the game. Guide what amounts to a round cursor through a maze. Don’t touch the walls. Then do it again. Then again. Win.

But you probably won’t win. The Irritating Maze might be simple in concept and design, but it is ridiculously hard to play. There are only three levels, but just making it halfway through the second one is an accomplishment. Some of the hazards are truly devious. Parts of the maze move, there are rapidly moving wheels, and at one point the game traps you in a small box, and then moves the box around. Sinister.

Released to arcades by SNK in 1997 without much fanfare and based on a mid 90s Japanese variety show segment that very few people in North America and Europe would have been familiar with, it’s no wonder that The Irritating Maze is not a very well known game. Maybe you will just have to trust me then, that this game is so perfectly executed that it’s amazing it didn’t spawn a wave of copycats and sequels.

The Irritating Maze is one of the few Neo Geo arcade games of the time to be built into a special cabinet. It used a trackball controller and sported an air cannon that would blast air in the players face when they collided with one of the walls. I suppose that incorporating a metal trackball that would actually shock the player would have been a lawyer’s nightmare, so they went with the air cannon. Probably a safer choice. Still, the game starts with a warning that any person who is pregnant or has a heart condition should not play The Irritating Maze.

Maybe they should have put that on the cabinet in bright glowing letters. We would probably be playing The Irritating Maze 15 today if they had.

There is a place in this world for wild dynamic systems based games and vast arrays of player verbs, but sometimes, sometimes, you just want to move carefully through a maze.

That makes The Irritating Maze one of the Best Games.

585 - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The similarities between Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are maybe what you might call legally actionable. Both games play very similarly. Circles that march down from the top of the screen and you as the player have the ability to grab one, or a similar group of those circles, pull them down to the bottom, move them to a new column and fire them back up to the top. If you make certain combinations of circles touch at the top, they will clear, or in the case of Money Puzzle Exchanger, they will be replaced by a circle of a different value.

That’s the biggest difference here. In Magical Drop, making a line of three or more of the same color bubble will cause those bubbles, and any other similarly colored bubble touching them, to pop. In Money Puzzle Exchanger those circles represent coins and matching, say, five coins with a one on them will convert them all into a single coin with a value of five. Two fives make a ten, five tens makes a fifty, two fifties makes a hundred, and five hundreds makes a five hundred. Match two five hundreds and they will disappear, clearing them from the board permanently.

While that all sounds sort of straight forward, imagine trying to make several matching patterns like that at high speed. Magical Drop can be difficult, but matching colors is trivial compared to that.

On the surface, the gameplay of these two games might seem extremely similar, so similar that Data East may have sued Face over it, the experience of playing Money Puzzle Exchanger is very different from Magical Drop. There is so much more strategy and planning involved. The action is not as fast paced, but maybe even more hectic. More mentally stressful. In a good way.
For a moment I thought that Money Puzzle Exchanger might have the wackier cast of fun characters, but they both post up a good showing in that department.

So, Money Puzzle Exchanger is a lot like Magical Drop. And that’s great. But it also plays differently, and maybe is a bit more difficult. And that’s also great.

It’s a lot like one of the other best games, but I don’t think that’s disqualifying. Money Puzzle Exchanger is different enough that I think it stands on its own as one of the best games.

582 - Asteroids

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Asteroids may have started as a way to create a single player Space War experience but it ended up as so much more.
Asteroids may be the first real test of endurance for a video game. Several games had unending waves of enemies. Space Invaders is all about unending waves of enemies. But Space Invaders offers the player a shield to hide behind. Reprieve from the continuous assault of descending invaders. A moment to blink. Asteroids never lets up. There is always another rock to destroy or be destroyed by.

Asteroids, while initially less challenging than something like Space Invaders, quickly ramps to test your perception and reflexes. The rocks drift smoother than any other game at the time. Your ship reacts with a realistic momentum and inertia. If you let it get away from you just trying to drive the ship will kill you faster than any rock out there.

Occasionally a saucer will zip across the screen taking pot shots at you, but that doesn’t matter, your real nemesis is the rocks. All of the rocks.

It’s Asteroids, you fight rocks, it’s one of the best games.

577 - SubSpace

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Higher speed connections to the internet were available, but they were either extremely expensive or only in specific locales. Wherever you happened to be, that is where high speed internet probably wasn’t. It was all a little too big an ask just to play a multiplayer game. If you wanted to do that you would pack up your pc and move it to where you could hook up a LAN. With a bunch of other people. Maybe even a party. A LAN party.

Now, if I want to play a game with any number of other people I can turn on one of the many devices within arms reach that will let me do that. Including this IPad I am typing on right now.

What if there were some sorcery that let you do that in 1997? What if there was at least one game where you could join in and play with an absolutely staggering amount of people.

SubSpace is all at once close to a decade ahead of its time while also being a throwback to the very early days of video games.
SubSpace is multiplayer Asteroids. Actually, it might be more accurate to say that SubSpace is massively multiplayer Spacewar!.
Spacewar! is a head to head space combat game from the early 60’s. You control a spaceship in pitched combat against another spaceship. There is gravity, inertia, explosions, a star you can slingshot your ship around. It’s actually pretty impressive. And it is likely the first ever video game.

SubSpace is that, but if two hundred other people were also playing and there are missions and team and sometimes you would join up with a bunch of random people from anywhere in the world to play some spaceship soccer.
It felt like it shouldn’t work, but it did. It was amazing.

Unfortunately, being amazing doesn’t always mean commercial success. Subspace didn’t sell well enough to keep the servers running for very long. And like far too many online games, that would have been the end of it. With no server, the game had nothing to call in to, no place in the world to call home.

But SubSpace was amazing, and a lot of people knew that. These people did what people who love something amazing do. They made it their own.

Today on Steam you can play SubSpace Continuum. It is a aground up recreation of SubSpace. I don’t know if there are people playing it now, but I think it might be worth your while to try. Get a group of two hundred or so people together. Go fly tiny 2D spaceships around 2D mazes and shoot at each other. It’s fun. It’s one of the Best Games.

574 - Retro Game Challenge (GameCenter CX: Arino no Chosenjo)

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Between games, Arino and his crew tour around Japan interviewing legendary figures in the video game industry, and, more often than not, playing games with them.

The entire show is built on good natured enjoyment, and an honest love of video games.

When indieszero set out to make a game based on GameCenter CX, the only way to do the show justice would be to build into it that same love. So that is exactly what they did.

Since GameCenter CX isn’t really a known commodity outside of Japan, the English title of the game was changed to Retro Game Remix, but the content of the game is largely the same.

In Retro Game Challenge, you play as a young kid in the 80s, playing with your neighbor on what looks to be a Nintendo Famicom.

A low poly version of Arino will issue you challenges, much like he deals with during the show, and you must complete them by playing a series of fictional video games.

It would do a disservice to the games included, to call them minigames. The games are often more fully featured than a lot of early Famicom games. They are often ridiculously authentic. If a player weren’t familiar with the real games that these fictional facsimiles are referencing, they could fairly easily be confused for real games from the mid to late 80s.

The games are good too. They look good. They sound good. They play good. They are good. They aren’t just good enough for a minigame collection. They are legitimately enjoyable sans the game master Arino framing device, and arbitrary challenges.

Indieszero made games within a game, but they made them so well, many of them could have stood on their own, wrapped in a plastic cartridge and jammed into a Nintendo console.

The love for gaming doesn’t end with the high quality of the fictional games. Each game comes with a period perfect manual that you can flip through for background and tips on how to best play each game.

The manuals are beautifully designed and pitch perfect. There is a deep love that went into the fake packaging of these fake games. They feel real, because they are real.

The last threads of the nostalgia tapestry making up Retro Game Challenge, is the magazines. Every once in a while a magazine will be added to your shelf, and you can take it down and read it. The magazines are filled with poorly, but authentically, written reviews, hints, and articles about the games you are, and will be, playing. The magazines provide a sense of place. A connection to the time that these fictional games occupy.

Retro Game Challenge loves games just as much as the show it’s based on, and that love makes it one of the best games.

571 - Shatterhand (Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain)

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

At the tail end of a console’s life there are usually only two kinds of games that get released. Weird licensed games and games that started development way earlier but took a long time to reach release. Either way, the results are not usually stellar.

Shatterhand is sort of an outlier. It originated as a licensed game based on a Japanese action show. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain or Super Rescue Solbrain was a superhero show where cops wore special high tech armor to fight crime in Tokyo. This is the sort of thing that licensed game dreams are made of. If you want to make some money selling games to kids there are a few things you will need to do. Make something flashy, make it vaguely resemble the show, design and develop it quickly so that it comes out while the show is still relevant. Making the game good usually doesn’t factor into these equations. If you can, you just copy another game, a popular game, and you use all of those mechanics in your licensed game. Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain does none of that.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. They did make the game quickly, and it did come out when the show was still on the air, but Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain is not a quick flip of some existing game design. It is the height of what the developer, Angel, was capable of making at the time. Nearly a decade into working with the famicom hardware, they made a game that is rock solid, interesting, challenging, beautiful, and, above all, fun. That isn’t normal for licensed games.

Even if people from Angel or Bandai suspected that they may have a hit on their hands, localizing the game must have been difficult. Obviously, very few people outside of Japan had any reverence for Tokkyū Shirei Solbrain. Instead of a basic translation, the developers opted to create Shatterhand, a recreation of the original with new art, a slightly modified story, and some new level designs. Playing them back to back, I would even say that Shatterhand plays a bit nicer. Smoother. Better.

The game is, as the English name would suggest, all about punching. Unlike Mega Man your attack range is the length of your arm. That means that playing Shatterhand feels a lot more timing based and visceral. There is an immediacy to all your actions that just feels great to play.

You do have more than your fists to get you through the game. Shatterhand also has one of the most innovative upgrade systems I think I have ever seen. You collect Greek lettered power ups, either Alpha or Beta. When you collect three of them they combine to activate a satellite robot. Depending on the order you collected them, you will get a different helper, with different abilities. Trying them all out and finding which ones are the most useful for each stage offers a whole range of exploration that action games of this type just don’t have. To top that, if you collect two sets of the same robot helper in rapid succession, they will turn into a super armor that will give you enhanced abilities for a short while.

There are a lot of reasons that Shatterhand shouldn’t exist. It was released too late in its console’s life. It was a remake of a Japanese licensed game. It bucks convention for the type of platform action game that it is.

This is a game that should never have seen a North American release, and yet, here it is. Claiming its place as one of the Best Games.

568 - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The core of the machine was a CP1610. This was an update to a processor that was already close to a decade old at that point. CPUs in the ‘70s didn’t advance at the pace that they do now, but this wasn’t exactly state of the art hardware.

The good thing about any computer hardware is that it is always more capable than it seems at first glance. Given enough time and energy, people will come up with all sorts of interesting ways to use a processor or pool of memory. Things that seem impossible become common. Operations that used to take seconds are refined to the point that they happen before a CRT screen can draw the next frame.

There are limits, of course. You can‘t run Doom on an Intellivision. Still, the games released in the early ‘80s bear very little resemblance to the games released at launch. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin seems like it shouldn’t even exist on the same platform. It’s astounding.

Treasures of Tarmin is the second AD&D game for the Intellivision. The first is a fairly basic, but fun, roguelike. Now I can’t be sure if it takes any inspiration from Rogue, or if both games are simply dipping into the same Dungeons and Dragons well. Either could be true. In any case, Treasure of Tarmin does a much better job with the material. Both were made by the same single developer, Tom Loughry.

Treasures of Tarmin is a sprawling, first person, adventure game where you will have to explore dungeons, battle a legion of different monsters, collect and manage a fairly intricate yet intuitive inventory, and level up your weapons and items. It defies belief that this one guy was able to pack that much into a cartridge that couldn’t fit a JPEG. And a pretty small one at that.

I could attempt to describe the game, but you already know what it is. Imagine wandering around a meandering dungeon, picking up items and using them to smite skeletons, goblins, and the like. You know, D&D stuff.

It would be a few years before a game like Legend of Zelda would come along to advance console adventure gaming. For the most part, I imagine that developers simply didn’t think that it was possible. To create a wide ranging, dynamic adventure you needed the memory, processing, and storage space of a full blown personal computer. And they wouldn’t be wrong. There are very few outliers like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Treasure of Tarmin. It’s surprisingly deep and fully featured.

This was an early 80s game made on late 70s hardware, and it can still manage to surprise all these decades later.

AD&D Treasure of Tarmin is one of the best games.

564 - Elevator Action Returns

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In 1994, Taito released the sequel, Elevator Action Returns.

Eleven years and many generations of computer technology later, Elevator Action Returns is as much a leap ahead as it is a throwback. It looks every bit a 1994 arcade game. Great character art, fantastic animation, gameplay action spread over beautiful levels that change dynamically. It looks that way, but it plays very much like a tuned up version of the original. Don’t get me wrong, it plays great, but so did the original.

Had this sequel been made any sooner, it just wouldn’t have been the same. This is a dream remake of a game.

When you play Elevator Action Returns, you can kind of imagine what was going on in the developer’s heads. It’s like they wanted to make the version of the game they remembered. The game they imagined in their childhood reveries. In place of the tiny, blocky spy character from Elevator Action, they imagined a trio of anime inspired action heroes. In place of the building, a set of sprawling levels in a continuous campaign. In place of the replicated, fedora wearing enemies from the original, they created a whole army of enemies with different looks, behaviours, and attacks.

Older video games didn’t look very good. We can just accept that as fact. The resolution and color palettes of most games left a lot to the player’s imaginations. Characters and locations were representational glyphs, at best. When you play them, your brain sort of fills in the blanks. Making a sequel to a beloved game over a decade later, some things can remain the same, but others will require some translation. Elevator Action Returns is like the real working model based off the Elevator Action sketch. Similar, but fully realized.

The elevators are still elevators. They go up and down, but that’s not all that they are for. It’s not long before you are using them not just to travel the various buildings, but as strategic weapons against an array of terrorist baddies.

You probably won’t even play a full level before you are waiting for just the right moment to roll a barrel down on top of a group of enemies, lighting them all on fire, or tossing a grenade into an empty shaft to light a completely different group of enemies on fire. In no time, the motion of the elevators becomes your plaything.

Some reviews at the time of Elevator Action Returns release weren’t particularly kind. There were some sentiments that the game was too simple, or not up to the level of its contemporaries. By 1994, the trend toward 3D was in full swing, and punched up versions of older game mechanics were very much not in fashion. Oddly enough, had the sequel been made even later, the reception for it may have been warmer.

Now, Elevator Action Returns is pretty universally recognized as a lost gem. A game that did what it was intending to do so well that some many people missed out on it at the time. The only problem is, most people never really got around to playing it.

It’s a sequel. It’s a remake. It’s a reimagining of what might have been, had the technology been available eleven years earlier.

Elevator Action Returns is one of the Best Games.

559 - Dead Connection

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Dead Connection is set in 1953 in a big city somewhere. It says so in the opening titles. The game drapes itself in a film noir, gangster pastiche. Nothing about it is realistic or properly historical. It is, at times, anachronistic and overly cliche. But that’s okay. This is a fanciful take on the crime and revenge genres. More than that though, more than any of the trappings, Dead Connection is a game. The way it plays matters more than the way it presents itself. And it plays like no other game I know.

There are plenty of games where you direct a character to walk toward enemies and punch them. There are even more where you use some sort of weapon to shoot at enemies. There are games where you can interact with the background, and there are games where you can dodge and dive for cover. Dead Connection combines all of these, and it did so at a time when that didn’t happen. Games did one or two things very well. Or at least they tried to. Games didn’t try to incorporate multiple overlapping systems. Dead Connection is a piece of gaming history that is both obvious, and well ahead of its time.

I’ll attempt to explain why.

There were a few run and gun character shooting games made previous to Dead Connection’s release in 1992. Okay, more than a few. Literally hundreds of games had you controlling a character who runs around the screen and shoots at enemies. There were even a couple of games like Cabal, and Blood Bros. where you can dive and dodge enemy fire. It’s possible that Dead Connection took some inspiration from those games. There are a handful of games where they will give the player a certain amount to auto aim, inferring your intentions from simple directional and button inputs. Maybe Dead Connection is aping those games. There are even games that offer a variety of interactions with background elements in the levels using the same simple, context-sensitive, controls. It could be that Dead Connection is trying to be like one of those games.

Maybe. But Dead Connection is all of those things. All at once. The wild amount of potential interactions is staggering. You can set parts of each stage on fire. You can destroy almost everything in various ways, and they will display different levels of destruction depending on what happens to them. Cover comes and goes dynamically. You can hit the deck and enter buildings to hide behind walls. You can climb stairs and ladders to take the high ground, and you can lay prone behind a vehicle until it blows up. There are switches and doors. Glass that shatters. Chandeliers that can come crashing to the ground.

In 1992, arcade games simply did not have this level of interactivity. They just didn’t. And, as it turns out, they never would. Games like Dead Connection would never be the norm until they were developed specifically for powerful consoles and home computers.

There is a fairly minor tradeoff for all of that interactivity. Every level in Dead Connection takes place on only one screen. I said it was a tradeoff, but it may be a strength. Keeping the action on one screen means the player has some time with each level. They have time to investigate each of the interactive elements. They can try to use the level in different ways. If the levels were long, scrolling affairs, it would be likely that you would miss a stairway or switch in all the gunfire, and just walk right on by.

Dead Connection is an anomaly. A unicorn. The action arcade game that tried to do a lot with a little and succeeded.

At the end of the day, it’s still an arcade game. Relatively short, borderline impossible without spending a mountain in quarters. But that shouldn’t be too surprising. What is surprising is that this game wasn’t copied a million times. There are no home console ports. There isn’t a genre based around the Dead Connection framework. It is really one of a kind.

When you look into the resume of the team who worked on Dead Connection, it all starts to come into focus. They worked on several games that I have either covered in a Best Games or have on my list. Dead Connection was made by people who know how to push the envelope. Try new innovative game design solutions. They made sure that Dead Connection is one of the Best Games.

557 - Silpheed

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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”

When Cassius speaks these words, he and his co-conspirators have just murdered Caesar and are in the process of smearing their arms with his blood. They want everyone to know what they have done. They are seeking infamy. They are seeking immortality.

The game itself is a fairly standard space shooter. The absolute earliest video games were stocked to the rafters with space shooters. They had the sci-fi obsessions of the day to thank for that. Star Trek and Star Wars stand as the inspiration for far too many video games. Early and recent. But, unlike their inspirations, very few of those games can claim to be space operas.

Silpheed wants to be a space opera.

Of course, the very limited scale provided by the japanese PC-88 computer would never allow for a soaring adventure. Not really. So the developers picked their battles. They would wrap a twenty level space shooter in the trappings of anime space operas. They would do anything to make the game feel grander. More important. It worked.

After the Shakespeare quote fades, you are immediately treated to a flythrough of a wireframe 3D spacecraft. So again, this game is punching well above its weight. The PC-88 has more in common with a ZX Spectrum than any modern computer. This is not the sort of machine that should be able to do 3D anything. Yet here we are. The effect still resonates today. This is a space shooter game with cinematic trappings. Operatic ambitions.

The FM synthesized music is on point throughout. While it’s not quite a John Williams score, the sense of grandeur is there.

While you start out in Silpheed destroying simple waves of enemy ships, the game quickly escalates to battles over planets, Star Wars style trench runs through massive space stations, and battles against devious boss craft. All of these are intermixed with cinematic interstitials. Silpheed wants so badly to be a grand anime, and for the most part, it hits.

When ( if ) you finally reach the climactic battle against the massive battleship, Gloire, you will have to contend with terrifying laser blasts, impenetrable shield walls, and every variety of bullets you have dealt with so far. It’s a fitting end to a spectacular game.

Silpheed is the sort of game that doesn’t seem to fit in the era when it was made. A game too ambitious for the hardware. Too far ahead of its contemporaries. It’s the sort of game that spawns a series, which it did, for better and worse. Most of the games that came after were space shooters, but they lacked the space opera wrapping that made the original so memorable.

Silpheed is one of the best games.

553 - Area 51

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Years ago I bought a light gun that works with non-crt displays, but due to time and old drivers getting it to run on current hardware is challenging. It sits in a box inside my arcade cabinet. It will likely continue to. As a result I haven’t played many light gun games unless I happen to be at an arcade. That’s unfortunate because I truly love some of them. Area 51 is near the top of that list.

Area 51 didn’t break any new ground for the genre. There were already more technically advanced light gun games available when it came out. It did some new things, combining pre-rendered and live action footage was fairly novel. It used some interesting hardware that was across between a home console and a pc. None of that makes Area 51 good. Area 51 is good, because it excels at hitting that ball straight down the middle.

Arcade games are experiences. Some can offer a challenge or provide a way for people to compete head-to-head. Games can create a sort of fantasy or sense of escapism. At their heart, they are experiences, just like amusement park rides. Some of the best amusement park rides give you exactly what you are expecting. No hidden twists, no surprise endings. It’s just exactly what you are looking for.

That might seem like another way of saying ‘mediocre’ or ‘dull’. It’s anything but. It takes real skill to create exactly the sort of experience a player is looking for, and keep that experience going for as long as they are playing. Not only that, but they have to want to come back to play again and again. Area 51 absolutely nails it. It is a consistently solid experience every single time you play.

Here’s where I get to be very specifically nerdy. I used to play Area 51 using both guns. Every Area 51 cabinet has two light guns tethered to it so two people can play together. One day, on a whim, I thought ‘why don’t I just try both’. I wanted to play it that way ever since. John Woo-ing it up at the arcade. I tried the same trick playing Lethal Enforcers and the like, but only Virtua Cop played as well with both guns.

I got pretty good at it too. Like actually good. I didn’t feel like I played well unless my left hand accuracy was above 80% and my score was similar on both hands. I’m not left handed. I probably didn’t set any records, but I was good at it.

It was easy to get good, because the game is easy to love. It’s simple, straight forward, and it does exactly what you want it to do, and it does it very well.

Area 51 might be a simple game, but it’s one of the best games.

550 - Duke Nukem 3D

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Character and tone of Duke Nukem has not aged well. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that the framing of the character hasn’t aged well. If you go back and play Duke Nukem 3D, it seems fairly obvious that the creators of the game made Duke the butt of a lot of his own jokes. Most of his one-liners are simply lifted from films and TV shows, and often in a way that seems to suggest that Duke himself is unaware of context or nuance. This isn’t an example of a character saying or doing things that were once okay and now aren’t. Duke isn’t cool, he’s a misogynistic, meathead, dumbass, and he sucked back then too. The problem is, this doesn’t always come across, and there are far too many people that assumed if Duke was the main character of the game, then he must also be the ‘Hero’ of the game. Duke is the protagonist, but he is not heroic.

This is an absolutely valid way to write a protagonist. There is no rule that says protagonists need to be likeable, or right, or decent people. They only have to be the point of view character for your story. Or, in this instance, game.

There is a possible timeline where Duke Nukem Forever doesn’t come out. Where Duke Nukem 3D is the one game that exists where Duke has been gifted any sort of personality at all. He is seen for what he is, terrible, but comedic and farcical. And the game shines because of that knowing farce, and not in spite of it.

Unfortunately, we live in this reality, this timeline. People have wilfully misinterpreted a buffoon as heroic, and we have to address that.

There, now that that’s out of the way, we can get to it.

Duke Nukem 3D is a masterpiece of design.

In a time when first person shooter game design meant navigating what are essentially mazes and occasionally shooting at monsters, Duke Nukem 3D aimed to create spaces. When you play Duke 3D, you will run around a lot and you will shoot a lot of alien monsters, but the spaces that you are playing in feel a lot more real and a lot less mazelike. They are recreations of spaces you might recognize. Streets, a theatre, stores, offices, apartments, and even when the game swerves into more alien architecture, the sense that these are usable spaces is still there. Despite the slightly janky pseudo 3D graphics of the build engine, navigation in Duke 3D feels, for lack of a more accurate term, real.

Duke 3D is also one of the first games to create a sense of place by having a lot of intractable elements. Light switches turn on and off lights. Security cameras show different parts of the level. Urinals, toilets, and mirrors work. They do the things you expect they will do. The game is a long way from a systems based simulation, but just having a few things function as you would expect means that the spaces those interactables inhabit feel more real as well. It’s a necessary step forward.

Other complex simulation games existed, System Shock, for example, but they tended to be fiddly and complicated in a way that didn’t really provide that sense of place. Place has to feel easy. It has to feel natural. It has to feel intuitive. Duke Nukem 3D does that. That ease makes the gameplay feel real. It’s truly a wonderful thing, and makes for one of the best games.

547 - Half-Life

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

You will have fun. You will have new and uncommon experiences. A lot of those experiences will be designed for you. You wouldn’t call an amusement park a game. You wouldn’t call a holiday a game. They’re different.

Half-Life is like that.

There were, of course, many first person games, adventure games, and even first person adventure games, before Half-Life. Half-Life was built on a modified Quake engine, so there was already a legacy of first person games when Valve started working on it.

It’s not surprising that Half-Life shares a lot with those earlier games. Fast action, lots of shooting, encounter spaces custom built to deliver certain moments. The difference is, most previous games are sort of a set of toys, or a series of challenges. Half-Life is a place that you inhabit for a while.

The story for the original Half-Life is not earth shaking. You won’t feel emotionally invested in the characters or plot, but it’s serviceable. There is enough there to give purpose to your actions.

What you will feel, is a sense of place. You will recognize the shape of the world of the game. It will be encoded in you as if it were real. That makes everything you do there much more meaningful.

In the very opening moments of Half-Life, you are introduced peacefully to the environments you will later be fighting through. The opening of the game is slow and methodical and mundane. You have time to wander. You become accustomed to the lighting, the sounds. How common and normal everything is. You are given just enough time before everything changes.

I think that the first person perspective does a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to really burning the locations and events of Half-Life into your brain. Doom was probably the first game that gave me that feeling of truly playing in a new environment. I remember those places, but there was no logic or reason to Doom or Quake levels. They are built for your enjoyment, not for practical reasons. The areas from Half-Life are pulling double duty. They act as interesting gameplay spaces, but they also have a sense of practical realism to them. This is a place where people worked and lived. They did paperwork here. They chatted with friends here. They picked fantasy football teams and brought their kids to work. This is a recognizable and real place. Until it isn’t. And that makes the events of the entire Half-Life series so much more memorable and terrifying.

Maybe Half-Life isn’t the absolute first game to create this sense of place, but nothing before (and even for a while after) took advantage of that feeling in quite the same way.

Half-Life is one of the most enjoyable adventure travel destinations, and maybe even best games.

543 - Driver : You are the Wheelman

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The driving is absolutely spotless.

That’s a very good thing, because the only thing you do in Driver, is drive.

There are a lot of driving games, but they tend to be racing centric. You might race around virtual versions of real tracks with virtual versions of real cars, or you might race on fictional tracks with fictional cars. No matter the combination of those, you will be ‘simulating’ a sport. Getting from one place to another, in competition with other drivers. That means you are primarily using the car to travel forward as fast as possible. There are other ways to use a car.

Driver is a semi-open world game based on real locations, where you may as well be playing as the car. There is a story, involving you taking on the role of an undercover cop, but there are no real opportunities for you to interact with the world outside of a car.

The game is called Driver, and you drive.

What driver did, that only Grand Theft Auto 3 would do a few months later, was to treat a car as a way of navigating a space. Going flat out at all times isn’t the way to beat the game. Turning, sliding, going in reverse, and even driving casually at the speed limit are all tools you will need to master in Driver. Since you are, allegedly, an undercover cop and not an autonomous vehicle, keeping a low profile is pretty important. Why draw the wrath of random patrol cars when you don’t need to.

None of that would work if the driving didn’t feel right. There is a weight and momentum to the vehicles in Driver that is extremely satisfying. You spend most of your time in American muscle cars and huge boxy sedans with chromed steel bumpers. These aren’t twitchy sports cars that stick to a track. They want to keep moving in whatever direction you propel them. Sometimes that means driving up a curb or through a park or crashing through other cars.

There are other modes that task you with either chasing or evading other cars, and despite the developers putting time into the mission based story mode, these are where you will have the most fun playing Driver. This is what the game is really about. Using a car to navigate a space in any way that a Playstation game from 1999 could muster.

There is something to be said for exploring a mechanic fully. Using all of the available verbs. There are more verbs when driving a car than just racing, and all of them can be fun. Games that set up playgrounds for that sort of mechanical exploration aren’t super common, so when they come along, we should celebrate them.

Driver is about driving, and it’s one of the best games.

539 - Final Fight

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

First, let’s talk about the characters. The bigness of the characters. Can you imagine, walking into an arcade in 1990 and seeing a lot of games with little characters or planes or spaceships, and then you look over and there are these positively giant men of this one screen just punching the crap out of each other? It’s not only a couple of dudes, either. The screen is full of huge men and women. All of them are punching and kicking and flipping.

There have been some big guys on screens before Final Fight. Some of the guys on Double Dragon are pretty big. Nothing like this though. The guys on screen in Final Fight are enormous. They are detailed and vibrant in a way that’s still pretty shocking to look at today.

Just look at that. Also, that door has DICK written on it.

Big, glorious sprites are great and all, but if the game doesn’t play well, it really doesn’t matter how pretty it is.

This is a developer that is one iteration away from creating Street Fighter II, inarguably one of the best fighting games ever made. While games like Streets of Rage, and subsequent brawler games, might feel as good or even better than Final Fight, at the time when it was released, Final Fight had the fastest, most precise, most solid feeling hand to hand combat that had ever graced an arcade machine. Characters punch and kick almost as fast as you can press the buttons. There are a small set of special moves for each character, and some unique joystick and button inputs. A combination of speed, animation, and sound effects make punches and kicks feel like they land. Sprites don’t just overlap or pass through each other, they hit. It’s all an illusion, but it’s a satisfying one.

Other developers would go on to make better, faster, more complicated brawlers in the years after Final Fight, but this is the game that gave those other teams permission. This is the one that paved the way.

It’s so beloved that most, if not all, characters from Final Fight have made appearances in other Capcom games, several of them showing up as playable characters in the Street Fighter series.

Final Fight is one of the best games, and that door just has DICK written on it.

535 - Choplifter!

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

There was never any hope that the graphics of an Apple II would come anywhere near to the graphics of a contemporary arcade machine. The frame rate would never be as smooth. The sound would never be as rich and full. An Apple II computer can do a wide variety of things, but being a match for any arcade machine would never be one of them.

Maybe this is why a lot of the greatest innovations in gameplay arrived on computers first. If you can’t match them on razzle dazzle, you better be able to make the game interesting in other ways.

Choplifter! is a rare breed of game where the main objective is something ancillary to the main verbs the player has available.

If I told you that you are controlling a helicopter that can fly quickly or slowly, pitch up or down, fly backward or forward, rotate to face in one of three directions, and it can shoot in any of them, what would you imagine the main game objective would be? If you picked flying around and shooting, I wouldn’t be surprised. It seems obvious that the player would use those verbs to play the game.

Other than flying, you don’t really need any of them. It would be possible to play, and win Choplifter! never firing a shot and never rotating the helicopter.

The main objective of Choplifter! Is to save as many captured prisoners of war as you possibly can. Not all, not a set amount. As many as you can. Maybe that’s only one. Maybe that’s all of them. Honestly, that’s up to you. The game only demands that you save as many as you can.

You could fly out, land, pick up prisoners, and take them back, while never engaging with any other verb in the game. Never pressing a button on the controller. It wouldn’t be as much fun, but you could do it.

Add to that, all the small interactions in the game. There are tanks, airplanes, and depending on the version you play, ground based cannons, and some sort of drone unit. You can choose to fight them or avoid them, and most of the time it’s best to just avoid them. You can shoot open the prison huts, or get a tank to do it for you. Prisoners can be killed by tank fire, missiles from airplanes, your own shots, or just by landing on them.

The best part about all of this interactivity is, you don’t really need to engage with any of it to play the game. You will, because it’s fun, but you don’t need to. How you play the game is left to you.

This is really what I mean when I say ‘did a lot with a little’. Sure, the processors and memory of those 8-bit computers were laughably small by comparison to today, or even the arcade machines of the time, but that’s not what I’m getting at. Here is a game that is about a single objective. Rescue prisoners. But the way you go about doing that is extremely nuanced. You can shoot every enemy, or never shoot at all. You can pick up as many prisoners as your chopper can hold, or you can make dozens of small trips. The game doesn’t care. There are a lot of tools here, and you can use them however you like.

Choplifter! Lets you decide how you will play it, and that’s almost always a recipe for the best games.

533 - Best Albums Geddon Dangerous by Doublegeddon

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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.

https://youtu.be/h-iUtkleVt8

While you could just listen to this music and enjoy the blend of power metal and new wave synths, I don’t know if you would get the whole experience.

There are a lot of concept albums, but there are fewer concept bands, and only a tiny handful that make good music. Only really Ghost and Gorillaz come to mind.

To sum up, Doublegeddon is, at least by their descriptions, two 5000 year old Sumerian demigods who have re-emerged from the 7th dimension to play metal music. One lives on the moon and one lives in Antarctica. Since one hates heat and the other hates oxygen, it works out.

I’m a sucker for satirical lore. Doublegeddon has it in spades.

If you would like another link, here is an interview they did with a metal magazine.

https://www.filthydogsofmetal.com/interviews/interview-with-doublegeddon

All of their songs are similarly silly, but with a narrative consistency that speaks to some real writing talent. The lyrics of Revenge of the Vampire sounds like a bunch of metal tropes laid end to end, but it’s not just nonsense. The song tells a story. It’s a goofy story, but it’s fun, and good, and most important, well told.

None of these songs are just tossed out there. The musical skill is obvious, but there is some real songwriting skill on display as well. Writing almost forty minutes of good music in service of a joke is worthy of applause.

Jokes aside, Geddon Dangerous is just a really listenable album from end to end. I have put it on several times this year, and I will probably listen to is several more.

I look forward to whatever they do next.

527 - Pitfall II

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

As it turns out, it was the last one.

Game developers never stopped. For all the talk of a market crash around this time, the innovation and creation of new video game experiences just kept rolling.

Pitfall! Had been a real technical and artistic achievement. The Atari VCS wasn’t exactly known for beautiful games. If a few blocks could move their way around a TV screen, that was achievement enough. If you went looking for legitimately pretty Atari VCS games, it might just be Pitfall! and River Raid.

Pitfall! was a fairly simple game. Almost a proof of concept. A little stick man could be made to run across the screen in either direction dodging traps and jumping over obstacles. It was an adventure, in as far as it contained all the trappings of adventures. Dangerous pits, deadly creatures, swinging on a vine. Ultimately, though, there is no real adventure in the game. Just a series of procedurally generated screens for you to move through.

Pitfall II is astounding for the time and a technical marvel for the platform. A year before Super Mario Bros. Pitfall II presented a true adventure. A game that reveals itself over many attempts and failures. The opening few screens of Pitfall II are unlike anything else on the Atari VCS. It teaches you how to play. How to explore. How the game will unfold. You will have to take risks. You will have setbacks, but those will teach you what to do on the next run.

There are checkpoints that you will return to over and over. Reaching a new checkpoint is extremely satisfying. It’s similar to finding a bonfire in a souls game. You now have an anchor, but you know that the next leg of the adventure will only grow more difficult.

Pitfall II is an adventure game. Maybe one of the first. As you play through the game, attempting to retrieve some lost treasure while rescuing your niece and pet mountain lion, you will engage in an amazing variety of adventurey type activities. Every time you come across a new mechanic or a clever new environmental puzzle, it will be surprising and ingenious. All of this on a tiny Atari VCS cartridge.

Because of when it was released, during the decline of Atari and right before the rise of Nintendo, Pitfall II is a game that was destined to be lost. It was ported to other machines, but never with the same magic. Something about the stark block color images and clean, precise gameplay make Pitfall II rise above almost all other games of it’s era.

If you haven’t played it, and you probably haven’t, you should give Pitfall II a try. It’s one of the best games.

524 - Warlords

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Did you have more than one other friend?

Warlords is what you get if you combine all of those things. It’s pong, it’s breakout, it’s four players. It’s great.

In Warlords you control a small shield defending one of four castles nestled neatly in the corners of a regular TV monitor. A dragon sweeps in at the start of each game and let’s loose a fireball. If the fireball hits a shield, it bounces off at fairly controllable angles. If the fireball hits a castle wall, it takes out chunks before bouncing off unpredictably. The harder the fireball hits, the more of the castle wall it destroys.

Each player has a button that lets you catch the fireball and, more or less, direct the angle that you release it. This lets you turn another player’s attack into a focused counterattack.

When a wall has a large enough gap in it, and a fireball makes its way inside the castle, that player is out.

The game continues until there is one Warlord left standing.

Warlords is so simple you will pick it up in seconds. By the end of your first game you will already have started to develop strategies and, more than likely, rivalries.

By the tenth game alliances will form. One player will be singled out as the strongest and everyone will gang up to take them out early. Deals will happen where two players will agree not to attack each other until one of the others is out.

Warlords will turn friends into enemies and mild-mannered souls into monsters.

You will likely enjoy every minute of it.

Warlords is elemental and primal.

Warlords works just as well today as it did in 1980 because it relies on the one part of the video game experience that hasn’t changed. Other people.

There is an AI that you can play against, and it’s useful for filling out the board in the case that you are missing one of your four, but the game is ultimately unsatisfying when played against a computer. You need another person there that you can kick under the cabinet when they mercilessly toss fireballs at you.

Because it exists solely to facilitate a good time, Warlords is one of the best games.

522 - Pang

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Two games, Galaxian and Asteroids, came out right at the start of the decade. There were about a thousand riffs on both concepts. A two dimensional shooting gallery and a game where you shoot one thing and it splits into two smaller things. Both of these games are built on extremely basic concepts and probably no small amount of clever code entirely unrelated to creating a game.

It didn’t take long for someone to merge these two ideas. In 1983 Hudson Soft came out with the game Cannon Ball for the Japanese MSX series of computers. A game where you guide a character back and forth across the bottom of the screen shooting ropes upward at bouncing balls. When you hit a ball, or a ball ran into one of your ropes, it would pop and split into two smaller balls. At some point fairly early in the development of the MSX computer, someone figured out how to make balls bounce. They thought, why not make a game out of that.

Cannon Ball is pretty bare bones. It came out very early in the life of the MSX and what people were looking for out of their entertainment software was probably just that it existed and ran. Still, the core is already there.

It would be another six years before Mitchell Corporation would do something that was rarely done in those days, they would license Cannon Ball from Hudson Soft to create an updated version. They would call this new version Pomping World. Typically companies would just steal game concepts and move on. Just ask Mitchell Corporation who’s own concept for Puzz Loop would be lifted by Popcap to create Zuma. You could ask them, except Mitchell Corporation shut down only a few years later.

Treachery of the game industry aside, have a look at these two games. I think old MSX Cannon Ball polished up quite nicely.

In Pomping World (later retitled Pang) you direct a character left and right across the bottom of the screen and fire ropes upward. There are balls bouncing around up there and if you hit one of them it will split into two smaller balls, or bubbles. The object of the game is to clear out all the balls and their debris, without the character being hit by any of them.

While Pang does offer a nice graphical upgrade over Cannon Ball, the main difference between the two games is the power-ups.

You start out only being able to fire one rope projectile that disappears when it touches any barrier. You can pick up a power that lets you fire two ropes, one that lets you fire a rope that grapples in place, only dissolving after a set amount of time unless it’s hit by a bubble, or a gun that fires quickly but leaves no ropes behind that you can use as barriers or shields.

That’s the main mechanic in Pang that makes it different from something like Galaxian. When you shoot a rope up the screen, the bubbles can crash against the side of it and pop. That means, ropes aren’t just an offensive weapon against the bubbles. You can fire one and then step to the side, putting the rope between you and any bubbles coming to hit you. It’s not enough to just aim up-screen like you would in Space Invaders. In Pang you have to plan for bounces and deal with the smaller bubbles when the larger ones burst. It’s an action game that boarders on the strategy of a puzzle game. There are other power-ups that play with time, but none of them are an instant win. They all have upsides and downsides that you will have to get used to if you want to succeed.

Pang, and it’s sequels, are such simple and refined games. It takes a few minutes to develop a winning strategy. After a few more minutes you will discover that strategy was terrible and you will develop a new one. This will keep happening for as long as you play the game.

Pang may be one of the last games that sprang directly out of some clever thing that someone figured out how to do on a computer. Game development now is a much wider field. If you can think something up, there is probably a way to do it. Some clever person probably already has.

Pang is truly one of the best games.

518 - Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Mon, 03 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Once the game was on more capable hardware, like the NES, it was inevitable. The official Nintendo version of the game didn’t have competitive multiplayer included, but the Tengen version did. There is an entire story behind that, but I’m not writing about Tetris today. I’m writing about Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. A game that might be the pinnacle of head-to-head puzzle games.

When you are playing a head-to-head game, say a fighting game, or Chess, or Battleship, it is assumed that each player starts out on roughly equal ground. Now, one player can work very hard at getting good at the game giving them an advantage, but just based on the rules of the game, neither side of the board should have an inherent advantage. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is the ultimate expression of that.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is VS. only. Even if you play by yourself, you will be matched up against a computer opponent. There is nothing zen or meditative about this game.

Like Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a game about dropping things into a well. In this case, the things are gems. If you stack up a bunch of the same color, they become larger gems. There are also special exploding diamonds. If you drop one of the same color on a column or series of connected gems, they all break. The ability to combo those gem breaks into other gem breaks is the very core of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo.

As the name might suggest, this game is part of Capcom’s fighting game renaissance. There are chibi versions of characters from the Street Fighter and Darkstalkers games that give Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo an attraction that the gem based gameplay might not otherwise have on its own. It wouldn’t have needed it. The game is that strong.

Here is where it’s a different sort of puzzle game than Tetris. If you play VS. Tetris, the most skilled player will almost always win. The one who has had the most practice. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is more intuitive than Tetris. It’s more improvisational, more dynamic. After a couple of games, a new player will probably give an experienced player a serious challenge. It’s a game with almost no learning curve, and a variety of strategies to victory. In that way, it is something like a fighting game. It is very difficult to get yourself into a hole so deep that you can’t dig yourself out of it with a series of good moves. It’s likely that you can set yourself up to deliver a powerful attack almost by accident. This is a game about taking advantage of the opportunities before you, not necessarily strategizing your way into them.

I could be wrong. There could be an extremely high level of play in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo where combatants plan many moves in advance. That has never been my experience. This is the accessible, party friendly, head-to-head puzzle game.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a great game to introduce to people who don’t really play games. Simple to pick up, and fun to play, really it’s just one of the best games.

516 - Lode Runner

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In every single case, Lode Runner is brilliant.

Developed by Doug Smith, allegedly Lode Runner was based off a recollection of a retelling of a kid’s time at an arcade playing Space Panic and a somewhat failed attempt to recreate Donkey Kong. Lode Runner and Space panic share the ability of the main character to dig holes and have pursuers fall into those holes, but that’s about it. Where Space Panic is an action game, Lode Runner is a puzzle game through and through.

I think that’s what makes Lode Runner so special. It’s a puzzle game, where you might have to play a little action game jazz to arrive at the solution. Juking and dodging are tools just as vital to your success as planning and strategizing. This ain’t Donkey Kong either. Moving in one direction and dealing with threats as they come to you won’t help win a level of Lode Runner.

Lode Runner is a game about stealing gold, including gold that guards might pick it up as they pursue you, escaping, and then stealing all the gold on the level. Sometimes you can approach the level in a haphazard manner, and sometimes only a perfectly precise path will solve a specific level’s puzzle. You won’t know what sort of level you are on until you fail at it a few times. Since the game has something like 150 of the things, you aren’t likely to get bored. And even if you do, Lode Runner has a remedy for that.

Lode Runner is one of the first games that shipped with a level editor. You could make your own levels, or modify the existing ones, to make any sort of challenge you want. The real joy of this feature would be to see your friends attempt to beat difficult levels that you created, unfortunately I didn’t have any friends with an Atari 8bit computer, so I just made weird levels for myself. Not gonna lie, it was still fun.

More important than the level editor, or the hybrid, action, puzzle gameplay was what Lode Runner meant to game design in general. While there eventually was an arcade port, Lode Runner isn’t an arcade game. Lode Runner takes advantage of the environment in which it is experienced. Lode Runner is a computer game. It expects that you will be at home, on your computer. You will try one puzzle room again and again to perfect it. This is one of the earliest games that understands where it is and how that changes the way you play it. Lode Runner is undoubtedly an influence on later home console games like Legend of Zelda, games that are built around a different way of playing. A different pace. A different level of focus. This is a game that isn’t content to only hold your attention for ten minutes at a time. This is a game that knows that you might have hours to devote, and it lets you.

Type Lode Runner into a web browser and go play any of the many html5 versions out there. You won’t be sorry. It is one of the best games, after all.

512 - Street Fighter Alpha for the Game Boy Color

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I tried the Game Boy port of Street Fighter II on a friend’s Game Boy once, and found the experience frustrating. Nothing worked right. The inputs felt off and everything ran at around ten frames per second. I think I played a couple matches before giving up.

I figured that the Game Boy was just not the right platform for a game so kinetic and demanding. Street Fighter Alpha proved that assumption wrong.

Whenever I write one of these, I always try to find a way to play at least a bit of the games that I am writing about. Often, I think a game would be a great candidate for a Best Games post, and find that raw nostalgia is not enough. They might have been interesting diversions at the time, but some games just don’t hold up as classics. In other words, they aren’t actually the best of games. I believe Street Fighter Alpha for Game Boy Color deserves a little context here.

I have been regularly playing a few rounds of Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Street Fighter Alpha 3 on a handheld device. These are arcade accurate. Tough act to follow. Not being able to find my old Game Boy Color, I tried Street Fighter Alpha on the same handheld, and it is absolutely breathtaking.

The pixel count and color pallet are extremely limited on the Game Boy Color, but the game is unmistakable. It looks and, more importantly, moves like Street Fighter Alpha. There are only two buttons, but the developers have somehow managed to fight most of what makes a fighting game work into those limited inputs. Specials, Supers, Counters, they are all in Street Fighter Alpha, and they work just like you would expect.

I went and looked up who could have executed such an amazing port. What I found was both astonishing and unsurprising.

The Game Boy Color port of Street Fighter Alpha appears to be mostly the work of two people. A tiny team managed to pack all this game into a tiny amount of space and processing power. It seems impossible until you look up the other things that they worked on.

Keith Burkhill is a British programmer that worked on some of the smoothest, fastest, and most technically impressive ZX Spectrum games. The ZX Spectrum was never a powerhouse, so lots of tricks had to be employed to get games to run well on a speccy. Kevin McMahon worked on some of the fastest pixel art games of the early 90’s.

There were probably a few people or teams that could have created a port as good as this one. I would guess that most of them had experience working with the extremely tight constraints of early home computers.

It might be fair to say that the title of Best Game should go to the original arcade version of Street Fighter Alpha, but I think that the ability to carry a game of this quality in your hand changes the way you relate to it. There was nothing else like it at the time, and while it was missing multiplayer, it truly felt like playing a good game of Street Fighter.

The Game Boy Advance would go on to have many spectacular ports of fighting games. Possibly the most impressive is Street Fighter Alpha 3, and it may come as no surprise that it was worked on by the same people.

At the twilight of the original Game Boy, there was no better way to play Street Fighter in your hand than Street Fighter Alpha on the Game Boy Color. An achievement, and still one of the best games.

509 - Cameltry

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The game itself is beyond simple to describe. A marble is dropped in a maze. The only thing the marble will do on its own is fall. The player of the game has no direct agency over the marble. The only thing the player can do, is spin the maze. By spinning the maze, you direct the path of the marble. Get the marble to the goal, repeat on the next maze. That’s the whole game.

There are, of course, some additional wrinkles. You have a limited amount of time to reach the goal. You can press a button to hop the marble a bit, or hold it down to speed the marbles fall. There are different obstacles and bonuses spread through the mazes that you will need to deal with.

There is no story to speak of. No indication of where the name comes from. There is an appearance from a goddess of space and time, but the reasons for that are never provided. None of the backgrounds seem to have anything to do with the maze game happening in front of them, and none of them seem to be connected to each other. The strict, beautiful, mechanics of directing a ball through a maze is the only through line for Cameltry, and that’s all that it needs.

The game, designed at Taito and released in 1989, sets out to do one thing, and does that one thing so extraordinarily well. It is almost unbelievable that we aren’t playing Cameltry XV right now. And yet, here we are, living in a world where most people have never even heard of the game.

When the arcade game got its eventual computer and SNES ports, it was renamed On the Ball. A slightly more memorable name, but nothing that stuck as a franchise. There was a version for the DS and iPhone called Labyrinth, but none of them gained any traction.

Maybe it’s because the game is so singular, so perfectly unadorned and uncomplicated, that no one ever tried to resurrect it or create new versions of Cameltry.

It could be argued that something like Monkey Ball might be a spiritual successor to Cameltry, but that’s a stretch. I think that maybe the game was so perfectly formed on the first version that no one ever tried to improve on it.

Lost or not, Cameltry is still one of the best games.

505 - Dig Dug

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The video games industry, with all its diversity of ideas and themes, is very much not immune to chasing trends. In fact, if there is one thing you can be sure of, any time there is a hit game there will be some sort of riff on that concept coming down the pike in short order.

When maze games became popular, you could be pretty certain that any and all types of maze chase games would be available soon.

There is another thing about the video games industry. It’s extremely iterative. If there is a good game out there, not only will there be a copy or clone available soon, there will also be new and interesting twists on the concept.

Dig Dug is what happens when you make a maze chase game, but you take out the maze, and dramatically reframe the chase. In Pac-Man, you spend most of your time running away from pursuing ghost monsters. The corridors are unyielding, and you need to plan a head to stay just out of reach of the ghosts. Occasionally you can turn the tables for a few moments, but only a few.

Dig Dug removes the maze. You can go anywhere you want. Dig any patch of dirt. You create the maze. While you do move slightly faster through air than dirt, you are not constrained in any real way. That’s genre flip number one.

Genre flip number two? You aren’t running from the monsters. The player character, Taizo Hori, is easily the most dangerous thing on the screen. The monsters are running from you.

While the monsters outnumber you, they will try to be aggressive and chase you down, but you can pretty easily dispatch one monster. Even two is not much of a problem. You simply pump them up with your bicycle pump until they pop. Comical, but not exactly non-violent.

It’s only when you are swarmed that the monsters have much of a chance against you. You need to play smart to out maneuver them. Force them into tunnels that lead them right to you, or drop carefully timed rocks on their heads. If you plan well, you can crush a whole group of cartoon monsters under the same rock.

This is a maze chase, but you are the one doing the chasing.

These simple changes to the genre lead to a game that is far more strategic and thoughtful. You aren’t reacting. You are setting traps. You aren’t prey, you are the hunter. You are corralling and managing space.

It doesn’t hurt that Dig Dug is a cute and borderline delightful affair. There is a jaunty tune that plays every time you take a step, but stops when you stop. This gives the player a subtle nudge. If you keep moving, the music keeps playing, so you should always be moving. Moving, planning, scheming.

Dig Dug is not just another maze game. It’s a jazz remix of maze games, a stylistic bit of genre bending. Dig Dug is what happens when a developer doesn’t slavishly follow the trends, but instead plays with them. More than that, Dig Dug is one of the best games.

501 - Bagman

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

There was a slight snag for a year or two after that. Honestly, no one could have predicted it. Atari was the biggest player in the industry by far, and they over extended. The floor fell out, and for a hot minute it seemed like video games might be just another fad. If you were designing an arcade game set to be released in 1982, you could be excused for trying to make something a little more ambitious. Something that no one was doing. Something that players wouldn’t be ready for. If you were making an arcade game in that heady environment, you might make something a little weird. You might make Bagman.

Bagman, or Le Bagnard, is an action platform game made by French developer Valadon Automation. In it, you direct an escaped convict around an old mine in a mission to gather up your stashed loot, stuff it in a wheelbarrow, and cart it off screen. It’s a very simple idea, and it could easily have been a riff on Donkey Kong, or a clone of Space Panic, but it’s not. It’s an entirely different sort of beast. Bagman might be the world’s first systems based game.

Maybe that’s a stretch, but maybe it’s not.

Here are some things about Bagman. It’s a game played with a joystick and one button. With that stick and one button you can, climb ladders, pick up money, drop money, put money in a wheelbarrow, drop a bag of money on a guard from the top of a ladder, push a wheelbarrow, grab a mining pick, put down a mining pick, scare a guard with a mining pick, hit a guard with a mining pick, hang from a beam to avoid a minecart, ride in a minecart, garab a bag of money while riding in a minecart, and ride an elevator.

More than that, the state of the multiscreen mine is saved between lives. If you get caught or fall, all of the bags you have moved stay moved. It’s a small thing, but it also means that the game is built on independent systems that interact with one another in predictable and player influenceable ways. This was an extremely uncommon way to develop games at the time.

It’s sort of unbelievable that you can do so many, context-sensitive things in one game using only a stick and one button. Not only that, but so many of those actions combine and overlap. Bagman is one of the first ‘If it looks like you can do it, you probably can’ games. There are unique bits of animation and sound that kick off when you trigger most of these actions, but it’s really sort of amazing that you can do them at all. This was in the era of very simple arcade games that could be understood and played in seconds.

You might think that all this interactive complexity would make Bagman difficult to learn or understand, but it is just as intuitive as a game like Donkey Kong. Your goals are clear, and when you mess up, you know it’s your own fault.

So why then is Bagman not up there with Donkey Kong in the list of fondly remembered classics?

There are two reasons.

First, there might be a lot of ways to interact, but there are almost as many ways to get caught or killed. The game is incredibly difficult.

That difficulty is probably to the game’s detriment. Sure, it probably gathered a lot of quarters, at least for a while, but that sort of variety of player driven interaction wouldn’t be seen again in a game for a few years. Had it been even just a little easier, more arcade goers would have played it, and more developers would have tried to copy it. Maybe that doesn’t make the best short term business sense.

Second, It’s too easy. I know I just said that it was too difficult, but, like a lot of systems based games that would come later, there are ways to exploit that difficulty. Exploiting games usually means being very patient and taking your time to do everything. If you are willing to pick up a bag, move it a few steps, put it down again, use the pick for a few seconds, and then start moving the bag again, you can finish the game’s, single level. If you are very patient and willing to play for somewhere between twenty to forty minutes, you probably will finish it. Your time playing might not be the most exciting to watch, but it will be full of near misses and well planned escapes. Depending on how much you like exploiting systems, this could be a bad thing, or a very good thing.

I think that we have seen, time and time again, that letting the player win is a good business strategy when making games. Letting them win in a way that is satisfying and makes them feel like they earned it is even better. We did get a Super Bagman, but it was more of a minor iteration on the theme rather than a full evolution. I wonder what an entire series of Bagman games might have been. What could have been done with that innovative layering of actions and systems during those early stages of the industry. I suppose we will never know.

Regardless, Bagman is one of the best games.

498 - Karate Champ

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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?

Without Karate Champ, we don’t get a Street Fighter or a Street Fighter 2. Without Karate Champ, there is no Mortal Kombat. Karate Champ represents a fundamental shift in how arcade games could, and would, be made.

If Karate Champ didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.

Karate Champ (or Karate Do in Japan) is a one on one fighting game released in 1984, well before fighting games were a genre.

It is a game that aims to be as much a simulation of a sport as it does a martial arts fantasy. In the single player mode, the player alternates between rounds of one on one fighting with computer opponents, and challenge stages where you have to break pots or bricks or fight a charging bull. It’s weird, but it all works as a piece. All at once, regional Karate tournament and martial arts action movie.

In the versus mode, you use all of those same Karate skills against a real live human on the same cabinet. It can make for very fast, fun, and dynamic matches.

The innovation in Karate Champ is, without a doubt, the control system. Most arcade games in 1984 used one joystick and one or two buttons. Any layout that varied from that template usually meant you were in for a wildly different game.

A couple years earlier, Robotron: 2084 operated with two joysticks. That game was a fairly standard move and shoot type game, but the two joystick control scheme allowed players to move in one direction while shooting in another. It was the game that created the twin stick shooter genre.

Karate Champ used that same control system, but combined the stick movements together in a sort of macro. The left stick was primarily used for moving your Karate combatant around, but when you chained movements on the left stick with directions on the right, you could pull off all sorts of authentic looking Karate moves. It introduces pull back to block. It includes high, middle, and low attacks. If you pull down on the right stick and up on the left, you can do a forward flip that can put you on the other side of your opponent. There are moves that attack behind you. There are jumping kicks. Link all of this with the ability to fight a real human opponent and, make no mistake, Karate Champ is a fighting game.

Karate Champ, out of the gate, incorporates so much of what would become the core of modern fighting games. It was an arcade hit, but it could have been massive. A cultural totem. It comes up short in one area, otherwise we would probably be playing Karate Champ 8 at EVO now. It’s the one thing that fighting games wouldn’t get right until Street Fighter 2. It’s really hard to hit anything.

The collision system for Karate Champ is odd. Often, your fist or foot will pass harmlessly through your opponent. Then, every once in a while, a strike that seemed to end a few pixels before them will land. In a game where it only takes two solid hits to win, it feels far too random. The hits, when they land, are solid and satisfying, but it could be anyone’s guess whether they will land at all.

Street Fighter 2 is far from any sort of simulation of fighting. There are a lot of strange impact shenanigans that happen every match. It is also extremely rare that a punch that looks like it hit, will whiff. You can always be reasonably sure that your range is right for a particular attack. It feels like what you try to do, you can do. Karate Champ is just too much of a constant dice roll. The same kick at the same range may or may not hit depending on the frame of animation your opponent is currently in.

If you played some chess, but on every turn three of your pieces went into a quantum superposition between two other pieces, it would become impossible to play. You wouldn’t know, until you made your move, if a piece was a pawn or a rook. If you lost, it wouldn’t feel fair. If you won, you would have no idea how to repeat it. That’s what playing a lot of Karate Champ feels like. A constant game of guessing if the thing you are doing with your hands will have the desired effect on screen.

I’m certain that there are people out there who have become deft at playing Karate Champ. Not nearly so many as there are for Street Fighter 2. It’s a matter of expectation and consistency. If you swirl the controls in a certain way in Street Fighter 2, you can be pretty sure what will happen. Not so for Karate Champ.

This is another one of those almost games. Arcade experiences that point the way to huge things in the future. I think it’s fair to say though, without Karate Champ, we may never have developers explore the one on one fighting space. It does so much right, and it is still fun to play. It came up inches short of being revolutionary.

Maybe it’s only for historical reasons, but Karate Champ is one of the best games.

493 - Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I just finished looking at some old reviews of the game. Time capsule takes from the early 2000s. There were a lot of people praising the game, but the menu system was either not mentioned or maligned. I think a lot of people just didn’t know what they had on their hands. Or, in their hands.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is part of a long-ish series of strategy rpg game put out by Square. It is charming as hell, and mostly joyful. The art takes beautiful advantage of all 240x160 pixels of a Gameboy Advance screen. Subtle touches make the character designs and landscapes appear more detailed than they actually are.

The story, though slow to get going, is interesting and nuanced for a game like this.

The missions are fun and work like a multilayered puzzle, where you can sway the constraints and advantages in your favor even before your first attack.

Strategy games like this live and die on their interfaces. There is usually a lot of complicated machinery and statistics that the player needs to be aware of at all times, and 240x160 pixels is just not enough room to display it all. Rather than attempting that, the devs of FFTA decided to tuck all the relevant menus and UI away under a few button clicks.

I think this is what reviewers were complaining about. They would have rather had all information visible at all times. That would never have been possible on such a small screen. Instead, they made every relevant menu one click away.

Now this might sound obvious, or simplistic. Every PC game has pop out menus. Most PC apps have pop out menus. They are context aware so that only the stuff you truly need at the moment is available. You would think that game menus would be exactly the same. Except they aren’t, and back in 2003 on a handheld system, they super weren’t. Menus would commonly be stored in subscreens where you had to press the start or select button first, and then navigate around to what you were looking for. Or you would press ‘Attack’ and all of the relevant attack menus would become available.

FFTA uses true, context aware menus. For everything. No feature of the game is more than two or three button presses away. And as soon as you get used to navigating it, you can just fly around those menus. And that is where the interactivity of a strategy game lives. A series of menus and button presses.

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance is one of the best games, and it’s not because of the story or the art or the music or even the complex but satisfying strategy. It’s because they did menus so very, very well.

490 - Sydicate

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I have played the first few missions of Syndicate many, many times. There are fifty missions in the game. I doubt if I have ever played more than twenty.

As a game, Syndicate controls pretty poorly. You point and click where you want your agents to go. You point and click where you want your agents to shoot. You point and click what you want your agents to carry. If there is a thing to do in Syndicate, you probably point and click it. While this does seem like the simplest type of interface on any computer with a mouse, this game is too complex for a simple point and click. Syndicate wants you to do a lot in a short amount of time. It gets really cumbersome, really fast.

Why then, have I played this game, or at least the start of this game, so many times over the years.

Syndicate has amazing promise.

It’s for the same reason that people bring the game up with fond nostalgia in their voices. It’s why the game shows up on a lot of classic games lists. It’s why people have tried to make sequels or successors over the years, and it’s why there is probably someone actively pitching for a new Syndicate right now.

Nothing ever comes close. Nothing ever will. Not even Syndicate comes close to being Syndicate.

The concept is the most jet black of dystopic fiction. The world is terrible. As an escape, the entire population is fitted with chips that distort reality for them just enough to not be constantly depressed. The sky is artificially just a little brighter. The earth just a little greener.

Of course, the same chips that keep people happy and docile can be used to control them. Corporations turn ordinary citizens into cyborg agents and wage wars for territory and control. The Syndicate with the most brains under their control wins.

Wins what exactly, we will never know. The world of the game is in a constant cycle of domination and control. The dominators change, but the world is stuck in an awful stasis.

It is unapologetically bleak. More important, you are not the hero of this story. You are not a savior that will free everyone from the shackles of evil. You are the evil. You are in control of a squad of agents on missions to murder, kidnap, and coerce until the world bows to you.

There is something very cathartic about that sort of fantasy. A perverse joy in being morally empty. It’s a role that very few games let you play.

Besides the setting, the world of the game is surprisingly dynamic. For a game from 1993, the world can occasionally feel alive. People and traffic follow their own patterns. Guards and police are usually quite stupid, but there are flashes of brilliance every once in a while.

But, not enough.

Syndicate is an almost game. It almost controls well enough. It almost breaks new ground for a an interactive, dynamic environment. It is almost fun enough to last for fifty levels. But it isn’t.

I think that is why it persists. Why people still remember this game. It’s a game where you can imagine all the things it could have been, but no other game has ever come close to matching that. Syndicate has never matched that.

It’s so very close though.

It’s like that movie that would have been wonderful if only they had a slightly higher budget, or that book that almost hits, but there are two chapters too many and a major plot element is unresolved.

Most games are either pretty good or pretty bad. There aren’t many ‘Almost’ games out there. Syndicate is one of them.

Is Syndicate one of the best games? No, not really. But it points firmly in the direction of greatness. The direction that games like Grand Theft Auto, and X-COM would eventually go.

I think that’s why Syndicate still lives in the memories of so many people who played it. Something about the setting and the dynamic open world really dug into players thoughts and expectations.

Syndicate might just be the best almost game.

486 - Mass Effect (1, 2, and 3)

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Games aren’t a moment in time. A snapshot. Games are an era.

It’s partially about time. Games take a lot longer than a movie or a handful of pages to do their work. The emotional impact that etches itself into your memory takes a little longer. Occasionally, a lot longer.

I can only really compare Mass Effect to Star Trek. And it’s not for the obvious reasons. The apparent ones. That both are space faring adventures, or that both have a rich fictional history with memorable personalities from a variety of alien races. No, it’s not that. They are similar in the way that they burrowed their way into me. Slowly. Bit by bit. Scene by scene. Idea by idea.

There is no single scene that I can point to, and say ‘there, that’s Mass Effect’. There is no single combat encounter. There is no dialog sequence or character interaction. Mass Effect is the entire trilogy. All of its triumphs and fumbles. All of its strengths and failings.

I know things about Turian and Quarian Biology that will never help me in life. I can tell you the difference between a Salarian and Krogan and the complicated history of their people. This isn’t the sort of information that you casually accumulate. This is the sort of thing that you need to seek out. It needs to be reinforced over hours and hours of play time. You need to want to know this stuff. And I did. Still do.

With the singular exception of Metal Gear, I don’t think that any game series has the depth and detail that is woven into Mass Effect. None of them have spent the time. None are as cohesive. I could be wrong. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have played a lot of games. Frankly, nothing I’ve seen comes close.

Star Trek had many decades, hundreds of hours, three full, human, generations to develop its lore. Mass Effect did something similar in about a hundred hours over five years. Impressive, really, when you think about it.

I could attempt to list of great moments or characters in Mass Effect, but that’s not how they are structured in my memory. It isn’t moments. It isn’t single images. There was a time when I thought a lot about Mass Effect. An era. It is a game series tied to a time in my life. I suspect it’s similar for a lot of other people who played it. People who know, will know. For everyone else, I think I can only offer, You should play Mass Effect.

It’s one of the best games.

483 - Puzz Loop / Zuma

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The problem I have, is that Puzz Loop is good, but not great. Zuma is great, but not original. So who do you give the honors to.

First, let me describe what we are working with here. Zuma, like Puzz Loop, is an action puzzle game. Think Tetris or Bejeweled. Three in a row, color matching mechanics, but with a ticking clock. You are trying to combine three orbs of the same color. Simple enough right? A snake of different colored balls travels along a set path. In the case of Puzz Loop, a spiral. In the case of Zuma, a slightly wiggly spiral that sometimes crosses over or under itself. In both, you operate a device in the center of the spiral that spits out different colored balls. You fire the balls out, lodge them in between segments of the snake, and, if you did it right, you match three of a kind, and they blow up. There are lots of little powerups and mechanics that add to that, but really that’s the core of both of these games. Shoot balls at other balls to make them go away before they reach the center. When they reach the center, the game is over.

Puzz Loop could have been a great game. It had all the features of a great game. Fairly simple to learn, high skill cap, lots of ways to approach the same situation. Unfortunately, it’s good, but not great.

Zuma took the concept and ran with it.

At the most basic level, just changing the path that the snake of orbs travels down is pretty profound. Both Zuma and Puzz Loop incorporate a travel time into their ball firing mechanic. When you shoot, it will take a moment for that shot to get to where you are aiming. This means that you will, however slightly, have to lead your targets. The further away they are, the more you will have to predict the path your shots will take. As soon as the snake starts to take a curvy, non-uniform, path, the skill requirement on your shots goes up. You are rewarded for playing better.

There are other, surface level, things that make Zuma better, like better graphics and sound. Those aren’t strictly tied to the quality of the game, but they are nice to have.

The real kicker is platform. Puzz Loop is an arcade game, and it lives in a standard arcade cabinet. The default control scheme for arcade machines are the venerable stick and buttons. While it works fine, Puzz Loop on a stick and buttons just can’t compare to Zuma using a mouse. The speed and accuracy of mouse control is tough to beat. It’s like going from a working concept to a full-fledged production model. Zuma is just a better game.

So what do you do when one developer lifts the ideas of another developer, but rather than creating a crass clone, actually enhances the core gameplay. It happens all the time in other genres. For a long time, first-person shooters were called Doom clones. RTS games were referred to in publications as ‘like Warcraft’ even though warcraft was like Dune II and Dune II was sort of like Herzog Zwai. Developers taking inspiration from a game and then pushing that ball further down the field is sort of how things have always been done.

Puzz Loop is en extremely simple game. The core mechanics can be intuited from a single image. It’s a good concept, but someone had to push that ball further down the field. There is a Puzz Loop 2. That game doesn’t advance the concept. Zuma does.

So, Zuma might be one of the best games, but Puzz Loop is one of the best game concepts. When offered the choice, I would pick Zuma every time.

480 - Aliens TC Doom Mod

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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?.

It’s a mod. A mod of Doom.

The Aliens TC (total conversion) Doom Mod uses all the built-in content of Doom, controls, gameplay, a fair bit of the graphics and sounds, but it also adds a lot of its own additions.

There is no doubt that the movie Aliens had a massive impact on game development in the early 90s. Games where you battle against unstoppable hordes of monsters were nothing new, but the thrill ride mentality of Aliens was an easy bleed over to the newly minted genre of first person games. Doom already had a lot of Aliens in its DNA.

Licensed games in the early 90s were a bit of a crap shoot. Most of the ones made during that time were cross marketing tie-ins with little or no intrinsic value. There is a tragically large library of 8 and 16 bit licensed games that are absolute junk.

Making a game built on the Doom engine that follows the events of Aliens, seems like it would be a no-brainer. Space marine walks down darkened hallways shooting monsters. It’s surprising there wasn’t ten of them. Of course, due to the track record of movie tie-in games, they would probably have been awful.

So what’s to be done about it then. If you’re Justin Fisher, you pick up the Doom modding tools and do it yourself.

Aliens TC includes a full campaign of custom levels, sounds and graphics ripped from the movie, and reskinned and tuned weapons made to resemble the ones in the film. There had been game mods before Aliens TC, but none of them took the base of a game and built an entirely new one on top of it. There are games like Heretic, where Raven software took the Doom engine and built something else entirely out of it, but that was an effort on the scale that a single person could never have accomplished it. For the most part, the Aliens TC was made by one guy.

It was a good mod, and that is great and all, but why is Aliens TC important at all in the history of video games? Mods don’t typically deserve much mention in the history of the medium.

Aliens TC wasn’t just good. It was a fundamental shift in the way people thought about games. This was a massive effort, but one that could be accomplished by a single person. The tools that the original game developers used were available, and sometimes they shipped on the disc with the game. The separation of engine and game had just hit a pivot point, and one guy decided to take advantage of it.

For anyone that thought about getting into game development, there was before Aliens TC, when you needed a comp-sci degree or 10000 hours of bedroom coding on an 8bit computer, and there was after Aliens TC, when anyone sufficiently dedicated to the task could learn some tools and make a mod.

Even if you had no interest in making games, Aliens TC was an extremely fun way to play a game you already owned all over again. Only this time you get to shoot xenomorphs.

Aliens TC for Doom is one of the best games.

476 - NHL 96

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The real world sport that I have played more than any other is hockey. I have only spent a few years of my life not playing hockey. Those were the first few and the most recent few. For the first few, I couldn’t skate, and for the last few, well, no one could.

There are a lot of sports game that are not simulations. They are arcade style games with a loose sports attachment. A sort of vestigial draw that people can recognize. Games like NBA Jam or NFL Blitz. They don’t really have a lot to do with the sports they are based on. Something like 90% of all car racing games are not really about the sport of racing.

This tends to work out in the game’s favour. The closer a game hews to actual simulation, the more likely it is to come up short. There are simply not enough buttons on a controller, not a granular enough interface available, to describe the intricacies of most sports. You can pretend to Quarterback the Dallas Cowboys, but you can’t simulate throwing a perfect thirty yard spiral with a game pad. Not really.

There is no way to properly simulate playing hockey in a video game. No VR system will ever have the fidelity to incorporate the full body experience of skating, slapping a one timer, or executing a poke check.

Still, I know what hockey is supposed to feel like. How the game is supposed to move and flow. NHL 96 (on PC, and even somewhat on consoles) was a massive leap above every video game representation of hockey before it. NHL 96 took the momentum and agility of moving on ice, and actually did a pretty good job of representing it. AI players made an attempt at playing their positions. The puck slid and bounced in ways that approximate realistic.

A lot of simplifications were made to keep the game fun and accessible, but, for someone who had, up to that point, played a lot of hockey, the game felt like hockey. Up until that point, I had never played a game that felt anything like a real sport.

Is it perfect? Of course not. Are any of the subsequent versions of the game perfect? Also, a big nope. They never will be, and that’s okay. Sometimes you want the feel of hockey without going to the rink and lacing up your skates. The developers of NHL 96 seemed to feel the same way. This is not an arcade game that looks sort of like hockey, it’s the feeling of hockey in a simplified form.

It probably won’t go down as the best sports game. Hockey games will never match the popularity of soccer, football, or basketball games. None of them will ever have the universal appeal of racing games. For one, brief shining moment, there was a sports game that aimed to simulate what the game felt like, and that deserves some recognition.

NHL 96 is one of the best games.

470 - Mortal Kombat

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Mortal Kombat is the absolute picture perfect example of the bait and switch done right.

Digitized photos and animation of actual humans in costumes was the first dangling of bait. When MK1 came out in arcades, seeing realistic images of people on video game screens had only been done a few times and it never made for good games. It was, undoubtedly, a gimmick, but a rare enough one that the game could draw a crowd.

The characters could bleed. Not super uncommon in arcades at the time, but rare enough to be bait. Watching blood fly off of digital characters was novel enough that it caused a buzz.

If you won, you could kill your opponent in flashy and gory ways. The last piece of bait. The cherry on top. Any fighting game player, hell any arcade goer at the time had to at least see what Mortal Kombat was all about.

All gimmicks. All flash. Not the sort of thing that would land you on the Best Games list.

When that wears off, what are you left with. As it turns out, an extremely solid fighting game.

Mortal Kombat is a slower, harder hitting fighting game. Where Street Fighter 2 is a sort of high speed dance of feints and counters, Mortal Kombat is all marching forward and trading blows. Mortal Kombat is meatier. Heavier. When hits land, you feel them. If Street Fighter is like a kung fu movie, Mortal Kombat is like Rocky. Jumping in is not something you do without significant risk.

There is something about the pace of a Mortal Kombat fight that I really like. It can be over in an instant, but you will be aware of all of the times you messed up. Mashing buttons won’t help you. Range and timing matter more than speed. Special moves aren’t difficult to execute but they follow a slightly more aggressive pattern than most fighting games. Lots of double taps and quick back and forth movements of the stick versus Street Fighters lean toward smooth half and quarter circles and charge moves.

It would be pretty easy to argue, and I would probably agree, that the series didn’t really get going until Mortal Kombat II. The second game was more fluid, faster, more dynamic, but it still hit as hard and still felt stiff in a very good way. A drop kick to the face has weight and impact and stops the fight for a second while both combatants (Kombatants?) recover. It makes space for the players to respond with a block, counter, or follow up. It’s not uncommon to see a moment in a game of Mortal Kombat where both players just stop and stand perfectly still for a few frames. This hold or rest or break in the action is exactly what the game needs. It makes the next punch feel that much heavier, that much more damaging.

When you take away the bait, the digitized actors, the blood, the finishing moves, you are left with a fighting game with a slightly different rhythm. Something that feels like the more vicious martial arts movies the developers were trying to emulate. Something with some heft.

Both the Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat series are still going. They are both very good. They feel incredibly different to play.

Mortal Kombat is one of the best games.

463 - SSX 3

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It was probably the Tony Hawk games that made extreme sports prime video game fodder. There were skateboarding and snowboarding games before that, but none of them had the same feeling of flow. The accuracy of control and speed and great looking tricks that make the player feel like they are floating from one obstacle to the next.

There were a lot of imitators to the Tony Hawk formula. Like a lot, lot. Way too many. SSX sort of goes it’s own way. The action sport element is there but after that, they are very different games.

SSX captures the speed of snowboarding. It is trivial to go fast. It’s not all about tricks and spins. It’s about speed. And not just simple acceleration. The way you turn is fast. the way you recover from crashes is fast. The way you get in and out of events is fast. Everything in SSX happens fast.

By the second game in the series, SSX Tricky, the core of the game was rock solid. You ride a snowboard down mountain slopes doing tricks and catching air. Do a big enough trick and you pull the board right off your feet and spin it around your head or something wild like that. But both the first two entries in the series still feel a little broken up. Each event is it’s own track and you learn them, beat them, and move on.

SSX 3 lets you ride a mountain.

It is a proto open world type game that borrows a lot from some of the racing games of the time. You can start a run from a few different points along the mountain and do pretty much anything you want on the way down. Flips, spins, ride rails, pickup bonuses, do side missions, enter races, compete in trick contests. Or you could just glide down to the bottom of the mountain, ride back up and do it again.

If you want to go to a race you ride to it. If you want to go to the shop and change your gear you ride to it. If you want to go to a different part of the mountain you ride to it. You can do any sort of grind, trick, or jump you want along the way.

Some of the races can be difficult and frustrating, but fun is only a button press away. Whatever you find fun, you can do. You are never locked into anything.

SSX On Tour would expand on the idea by making a single mountain that is massive and seamless from top to bottom, but SSX 3 got so much right already that it just seemed like a rehash of the same ideas.

SSX 3 does the same stuff as the rest of the series, only more polished and geared toward fun above all else.

In the years following, almost every sports or racing game that leaned toward goofy, fun, action would include an open world element. It might be a coincidence, but probably not.

This is just one of those games that gets everything right.

SSX 3 is one of the best games.

460 - Gunblade NY

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

This is a game that knows what it is, and more importantly what it isn’t. It’s quick, it’s fun, it’s ridiculous.

Let’s go back a bit. SEGA has a pretty good track record with light gun games. Most of that is on their consoles. Just a bit prior to Gunblade NY, Sega had a huge arcade hit with Virtua Cop. Virtua Cop is what you get when you take these newfangled polygon 3D game and pair it with tried and true lightgun shooting. Gunblade is what you get if you take all the best parts of Virtua Cop and get rid of everything else. All that’s left is high speed robot shooting action out the side of a physics defying helicopter. With a rip roaring soundtrack.

In a lot of these Best Games posts I like to look at a game that did one thing better, or earlier, or different, than all the other games. Something that blazed a trail. A game that designers can look to as a touchstone of the artform. Every once in a while it’s worth looking at a game that just does what it does very well with no missteps. A small, simple game that never claims to be more than it is.

In that same spirit, this is a small simple post that is only here to praise Gunblade NY. If you get a chance to play it, you should. Gunblade NY is one of the best games.

458 - Bushido Blade

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Most fighting games, even the ones with swords, are not very realistic. I can hit a character in Soul Calibur with a giant axe and they will be back up and swinging a few frames later. It doesn’t seem like that’s how that would happen. Of course I’ve never been in a sword fight, so what do I know.

I have played Bushido Blade. There are no health bars. No timers. No points. In Bushido Blade one slice to the legs or arms will maim. One good slash will kill . No counters, no reversals. Just stab and then dead. This makes every moment tense. Every button press counts. You can stand out of sword range or attempt to deflect an attack, but really, what you want to do is wait out your opponent and strike when they are defenseless. A match can last several minutes or a few seconds.

Input in Bushido Blade is incredibly slow and deliberate. That might sound like a bad thing. Most fighting games benefit from snappy responsive control. The slow control is part of the game’s design. You can’t mash buttons in Bushido Blade. You can’t jump in on your enemy. Nothing but steady precise attacks will win. The controls in Bushido Blade are telling you to slow down, focus, be patient, be decisive. Be a Samurai. Or at least pretend like you are a Samurai.

Bushido Blade isn’t the sort of game that gets played at tournaments. There aren’t going to be many master level players out there. There is a level of luck involved in the outcome of a fight. Skill alone won’t win. It just depends which player blinks first, strikes slowest, or misreads the opponent. Long stalemates are as common as instant wins. It’s not the best fighting game. What it is, is uncompromising.

When Bushido Blade was developed, the fighting game genre was in full swing. If you were looking to make a new one, there were many strong examples to “borrow” ideas from. Bushido Blade carved its own path. It’s a path that I don’t think any game will ever wander down again.

Games are made to be enjoyed. There are a lot of aspects of Bushido Blade that are not enjoyable. Stiff controls, impossibly high penalties for failure, and a singular focus that is almost adversarial to a casual player. There are a lot of aspects of Bushido Blade that would never pass a focus group or play testing. The game would be labeled “not fun” and that would be that.

What is here though, is incredibly compelling. You want to play round after round. You want to try different tactics, different weapons. You want to change up your attacks and play with adjusting stances. It’s a game that you want to play. You want to understand how and why it was made. How an idea so pure and uncompromised made it to release as a commercial product.

In spite of itself Bushido Blade is an excellent game and a really good time. There is some developer out there right now trying to capture that magic in their own uncompromised vision, and I wish them luck. Maybe they will be able to execute with one perfect stroke.

Bushido Blade is one of the best games.

452 - Trial Bike

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I’ll back up slightly. Trials, in the real world, is a competition where people riding motorcycles attempt to climb, hop, and navigate increasingly bizarre obstacles. Rocks, logs, concrete blocks, child play structures, stacked barrels. If you could find it in a landscaping storage yard, these folks will probably ride a motorcycle on it. Some of the obstacles are twice as tall as the riders zipping over them and they roll up these things like a squirrel climbing a tree. It’s unreal to watch. I can honestly say that Trial Bike was my introduction to the sport. It’s the sort of thing that would pop up on late night sports networks between infomercials. So, of course, It’s amazing source material for a video game.

Here we have this Finnish game from the early 2000s that borrows its theme from an obscure motorcycle obstacle course competition. The original game was made in Java and then ported to Flash. You could play it in a browser. Nothing about that description should make you think ‘franchise spanning two decades’, but new games in the Trails series come out at a fairly regular pace. Not only that, they are still made by the original developer. Now they are highly polished 3D affairs with lots of particle effects and ragdoll physics, but they haven’t really deviated from the initial concept. Ride a motorcycle, climb obstacles, try not to crash. It just works.

The other thing that works is the control scheme. Web games of the early 2000’s were fairly simple out of necessity. There was no real way to stream high quality graphics to you at that time. You couldn’t use a webGL plugin to play a game in your browser. Web games were quick things that you could drop a few minutes on here and there. Unfortunately that does mean that a lot of them have been lost to time. There probably aren’t many that you would still want to play, but from a preservation standpoint, it’s upsetting that some games might be lost forever. Tangents aside, the control scheme of Trial Bike is really something special.

Like I said before, Trial Bike only uses two axes, or four buttons. Forward and back control the throttle and brake on your bike, up and down control where the rider balances their weight on the bike. When you press down the rider sits lower on the bike, but also further back on the seat. When you press up the rider stands and leans over the handlebars. Shifting the riders weight changes how and where your bike grips the ground. Press down and forward on the throttle and you can make you bike do a wheely. Press up and slam on the brakes kicks your back wheel up into an endo. Feather each of these controls just right and you are doing some Trials! You climb straight up that pipe that looked impossible to scale. You hop those boxes and land each tire perfectly straddling a dangerous gap. You ride just on the edge of control. You only use four buttons.

The legacy of Trial Bike is sort of a wild one and it’s really no surprise. Trial Bike is one of the best games.

450 - Death Rally

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In 1995 a group of Finnish demo scene kids set out to make a game.

Let’s walk this back a little. The demo scene, if you’re not familiar, might be described as a loose network of extreme hacking clubs. These are the type of people that like to make dazzling animations set to electronic music on Commodore 64 and Amiga Machines. Sometimes long after the usable lifetime of the machine. They like to compact an unreasonable amount of data into a miniscule space just to watch it sing and dance. These are the type of folks that want to see what they can make a computer do. They are most often European. Not sure why. It might have something to do with the Amiga.

This group of demo scene kids had been dabbling with the PC. In 1990, no one would have tried to make a fast action game on a PC. PC’s were primarily business machines. Beige monoliths with green and amber crt screens. Good at crunching numbers, awful at moving pixels. Machines much more suited to spreadsheets than Mario. In five short years PC’s went from ascii art to Commander Keen to Doom. Formidable graphics and sound advancements, along with the concept of shareware, had made the PC the place to play for up and coming developers.

That’s the world that this group of Finnish demo scene kids were working in. They knew how to make a PC sing, and they wanted to try their hand at making a game. They pitched a car combat game to Apogee, the shareware people, and got to work. They needed some writing done, so they got their friend who was studying English literature to do it. They were in the right place at the right time, yes, but they had arrived there with the right skills.

Death Rally is a PC take on arcade and console driving games like Super Sprint and Badlands. It remains a great game to pick up and play. The controls feel great and the car combat is satisfying, if maybe a bit too difficult. It looks like a SNES or Genesis game that got dislodged from its cartridge and somehow ended up on a PC floppy disk. Suffice to say, the game is great but the real reason I selected Death Rally for a Best Games has less to do with the game and more to do with who made it.

The team at Remedy who made Death Rally went on to create Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control. Some of those same demo scene kids are still there, still at it, making dazzling images set to phenomenal music. Death Rally was a first step. It’s a very good one. While their games diverged from Death Rally in terms of genre and point of view, one ingredient remains. You can tell that these games are made by people that aren’t aware of what the boundaries are. They don’t know what the ‘right and proper’ way to make a game is. They are still demo scene kids trying to pack as much of everything they love into every single game. As a result the pacing and tone of each of their games is slightly different than what most studios would make.

So there it is. As a first step, Death Rally is really quite phenomenal. Go give it a try. It’s one of the best games.

445 - The Outer Wilds

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The linear nature of stories isn’t a limitation. It’s a feature. Imagine trying to decipher a film that has been chopped up and rearranged in a random order. Each edit decoupled chronologically from the ones before or after it. I’m sure it would make the rest of your experimental film class very happy, but no one else would want to watch it. Our squishy meat brains can’t deal well with non-linear time. I mean, we can intellectualize it. We can wrap our minds around the idea of it. We just aren’t very entertained by it.

Now imagine this scenario. You walk out into the woods. You come across an abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin are the remnants of a life you weren’t aware of until now. Bits of writing. The places where people slept and ate. Things they collected but were unable to take with them when they left. You gaze around at all of this and then head back home. All of those tableaux tell a story through clues and inferences. It’s a story that you build in your head during the quiet parts of your hike. These sights become a story that you tell to yourself.

The story you create is linear. You left home, you saw things, you came back. Beginning, middle, end. It satisfies the arrow of time that our brains demand. But there was no authorial hand directing you to see the kitchen of the cabin before the bedroom. What is the story you tell yourself when you examine a poem etched into the doorframe before seeing the jar filled with potting soil or the yellowing single mattress? Is it different than when you see the unwashed dishes in the sink first? Does reading the signature on a painting determine what you think of the rest of the house? Does the story of the space feel different depending on how you experience it? This is storytelling through discovery and it is something only the real world, or a game, can do.

There are a great many games that tell their stories through discovery. This style has a name. Environmental storytelling. Most times, environmental storytelling is additive to a more explicit linear story. A narrator or quest giver will direct the player down a path and the environmental storytelling will be used to fill in the gaps. Apparently, a lot of game devs imagine that a person might write on a wall with their own blood rather than attempting to stop bleeding it. Unlikely, but it does tell a story I suppose.

The Outer Wilds is straight, uncut, and distilled environmental storytelling. Any bit of story, any strand of narrative, is something you, the player, must seek out or encounter on your travels. Not one bit of important story is required for you to ‘beat’ the game. You can easily bypass all of it. The entire game can be finished in minutes, but there is enough story written and presented visually to fill dozens of hours. This story won’t come to you. You will have to wander into those woods, open the door to that cabin, and find it for yourself. This can happen in literally any order. There are clues and processes that you discover while playing The Outer Wilds that will lead you to new mysteries and additional vignettes, but there are a lot of tales that you will come upon by chance.

In your life there will be stories that you remember because they were told to you. Everyone has their own favorite childhood movie or book. The sort of thing that you will recall with nostalgia years and decades later. These stories will be important because they mirror or inform a part of your life. Songs will bring back memories of impactful moments. These stories are tied to you, but they are separate from you. Distinct. Maybe more important are the stories you experience.

The Outer Wilds has its own story to tell. It’s a story that is as grand as it is simple and personal. It is melancholic, joyus, introspective, and harrowing. Most important, it is a story that you can only experience. No one can tell you this story second hand. You can’t watch a video of that first descent into the maelstrom of Giant’s Deep and feel what the game is presenting to you. Multiple trips into Dark Bramble wouldn’t stick with you unless you have felt your own pulse quicken in preparation for the trek. Stitching together the tales of Nomai travellers who came before you would have no impact if they were read from a script. They need to be found and discovered and mined for meaning. Each scrap of text landing harder as they lock, puzzle like, into empty spots in this story that you are telling to yourself.

The Outer Wilds is a walk in the woods where you stumble across a splayed out campsite. An abandoned cabin. A story that ended before you arrived. A story filled with danger and mystery and lightness and sadness. A story that you now have to tell yourself. It’s a walk in the woods on a universal scale. It’s also a small story that roots itself inside you, because the only way to really know this story is to experience it.

The Outer Wilds will be remembered as a pivot point in video game storytelling. It might not be a thing that can be replicated or even emulated. It might be that only the relatively small number of people who will ever play it will carry that story with them. Without a doubt though, The Outer Wilds will be a touchpoint for every game developer and serious storyteller creating from this point on. In a medium that values experiences over traditional, linear, storytelling, it is an important artifact. The one that showed how it is done.

I look forward to playing the descendants of The Outer Wilds style of storytelling. Truly some amazing experiences on the horizon.

And storytelling is only one of the reasons that The Outer Wilds is one of the best games. Really, you should play it.

442 - Moto Racer

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

That might sound like a recipe for a bad game. Players typically don’t want to trial and error their way through most games, let alone a racing game. Racing games are supposed to be about speed and timing and weaving through opponents. Taking advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. Balancing aggression with racing tactics. Moto Racer isn’t that type of game.

There is a certain joy in learning and then perfecting a system. Optimizing to the minimum number of movements in the shortest span of time. That is the type of game Moto Racer is. You are presented with a handful of tracks in two different modes. In the street racing mode it’s all about speed and careful use of a turbo that boosts your bike forward, but also decimates your maneuverability. In motocross mode it’s about drifting hairpin turns and hitting jumps with the right amount of speed so you land cleanly with your speed intact. In both modes you will have to hit buttons and lean your bike at exactly the right time lap after lap after lap.

That’s really what this game is about. Moto Racer doesn’t boast a realistic physics model, or complex tracks, or deep upgrades. It’s about learning the tracks, perfecting the tracks, and then trying to shave millisecond off your lap times. It feels like racing.

You will not win the first time you play Moto Racer. Every time you start a new track, you will lose. It won’t matter how well you did on the previous track. It is unfair in that way. It is unfair as a game. Run a track 5, 10, 20 times though, and you will start to memorize it. When to let off the turbo and when to open it up. How early to start a turn, and when to dive out of a corner. You will master the tracks and you will win. You will have earned it.

Moto Racer might not be able to stand up to modern racing games, but the developers added something to the game that a lot of its current day counterparts lack. The heart pounding feeling of pushing your precision to the edge and succeeding.

Moto Racer is brilliant and it’s one of the best games.

434 - Burnout Paradise

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Burnout Paradise might be a perfect driving game. You will notice that I didn’t write ‘Racing Game’. Burnout Paradise is a driving game. It’s an exploration game. It’s a toy car sandbox game. There is racing in it but it’s not, strictly speaking, a racing game. The draw of the game is not the racing. I suppose for some people it might be but the game isn’t really designed around the racing. It’s designed around the driving.

No matter what you do in the open world of Burnout Paradise, the game tracks it. How far you drive. How fast you drive. How much time you spend in the air. How many flips and spins you do. How many cars you crash, both your own and your opponents. If it’s a trackable stat the game probably tracks it. The game tracks it and then rewards you for it. It incentivizes driving over winning races or completing challenges. Burnout Paradise is a game about driving.

There are a lot of people who didn’t like it when the Burnout series shifted from the focused event based structure to a flowing open world with potential events at every intersection. There were complaints that it took too long to get from one event to another, or that it was too easy to get lost in the labyrinth of city streets and shortcuts. Not liking a game is no real crime. There are and were certainly other games for people who didn’t enjoy the open world of Paradise, but I can’t help but feel like they missed the point.

It’s a driving game not a racing game.

The events are secondary to the reason you load the game up. You play Burnout Paradise to drive. You play it to drive in the most irresponsible and chaotic way possible. You play it to manifest fantastical driving situations. You play it to enjoy the feeling of speed and impact and exploration.

Burnout Paradise is about driving and it is one of the best games.

429 - Police 911 - The Keisatsukan

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I think every game that I have written about in Best Games is pretty easy to get a hold of and play. A lot of them are available to play through your web browser with no special setup at all. While that might not be the best way to play them, they are available.

Police 911 is an arcade game that came out in 2000. It’s a lightgun shooting game that makes heavy use of motion tracking years before the Nintendo Wii would popularize motion controls.

First, here’s specifically why it’s a bummer. The only ways to play Police 911 are on an original arcade machine, or on a Playstation 2 port that was never released in North America. To play the PS2 port you will need to have a special Konami made usb camera and a Konami made light gun. You will also need a CRT screen. Also the PS2 will have to be able to play Japanese games. It’s worth noting here that none of this equipment is currently being manufactured so you would have to scour the used market to acquire any of it. It’s sort of a lot of kit to assemble just to play this one game, good as it is.

That aside, here is why it was so good. Police 911 is sort of slow. Well, it’s slow when it needs to be. You might say ‘hey that sounds like a bad thing for an action game to be’ but being slow is what makes this game great. This is the arcade machine. It has a place for you to stand so that you are the perfect distance from the screen, properly centered, and directly beneath some sensors. Those sensors keep track of where your head is at all times. This means that while you are playing the game you can lean, duck, and sway all over the place and the game will know where you are. This also means that the in game camera will move around changing the view on the screen to match your current position. There are no 3D glasses and no headset to wear, but the feeling of immersion and depth comes very close to a VR experience. An arcade game in 2000, displayed on a standard definition CRT and using some fairly common infrared sensors could offer up a VR like experience. It does that because the gameplay is sort of slow. Only a small handful of enemies will pop out at each checkpoint in a level and they will tend to wait until you are exposed before unloading on you. Most of them will go down from one of your shots. It is better in Police 911 to duck behind cover, lean out only as far as you need to, take careful aim, and fire only as often as you need to. Standing still and spraying bullets will get you killed very quickly.

The pace of the game forces you to use the movement mechanic and experience the immersion of having the view on screen track your head. That, in turn, makes you want to keep using the movement mechanic because just leaning around feels novel and fun. It’s a nifty feedback loop of joy. Konami could probably have made an entire game focused only on looking around corners using this same sensor hardware and it still would have been a hit because moving around in Police 911 is so much fun.

I like a lot of light gun games. I used to play Area 51 and Virtua Cop as both players with one gun in each hand. Getting an accuracy rating in the high 80s or low 90s on my left hand, my non dominant hand, was usually my goal. That is to say, I am pretty particular about how accurate light gun games are and how quickly you can move from target to target without the light gun letting you down. Police 911 (along with a lot of Konami light gun games come to think of it) is among the best. You can lean out, snap off 3 shots and drop 3 low poly bad guys in one movement. It plays great. If you can manage to play it.

So, that’s the conundrum. I thought about adding this game to the Best Games list a while ago, but I didn’t want to add something that is pretty much impossible to play. I thought, what the hell. If you do somehow manage to spot this cabinet in the wild, you should absolutely play it, because it’s one of the best games.

424 - Batman: The Video Game

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Batman: The Video Game

Look at this. Just look at it.

Okay. You seen that. Now look at this.

Did you take that in. Did you count how many colors are on screen. I did. The first screenshot has 8. There are 8 colors on the screen there. The second jumps it up all the way to 12. 12 colors. I suppose it’s technically 13 since one of the values in the foreground elements is transparent. The rest of the game proceeds the same way.

I’m no expert on the capabilities of the Nintendo Entertainment System, but from what I can gather it would have been possible to have around 24 colors on screen at any one time. 25 if you’re feeling squirrely. It might have even been possible to display more colors with some trickery, anywhere from the low 50’s all the way up to 256. Most devs at the time could assemble a solid palette of 24 colors from a preselected range of 64. Not great, but not too shabby.

When Sunsoft created Batman: The Video Game they looked at all of those available colors and just said ‘Nah, 12 and one transparent value is fine”. They were right.

More striking than the extremely limited palette is the use of black. The overwhelming majority of every frame this game draws to the screen is black. Background tiles blend away naturally. Shadows are so deep they swallow up everything leaving only the faintest hints of distant Gotham lights. It’s a bold choice. It feels very Batman.

There were a lot of games around the time that Batman came out that used very limited color palettes and spare background graphics. The NES, after all, was not a powerful machine even by the standards of the day. Most graphically constrained games on the hardware seem like compromises. For Batman, it seems like a choice.

I realize that I haven’t really talked about the gameplay. The game plays great. Extremely precise, extremely difficult. It’s not a hectic game. Every movement, every jump, every batarang toss, is demanding and calculated. In that way the game also plays like Batman. Every button press has to be considered, accurate, and timed perfectly. I know that I finished the game at one point, but I don’t think I ever made it past the 4th level without cheats. Games used to be really really hard.

I think that Batman: The Video Game is one of the best examples of a limitation being turned into an asset. The game remains as beautiful today as when it came out, and I doubt anyone would ever notice that the color palette is so limited.

It’s a great game, but even based on looks alone, Batman: The Video Game is one of the best games.

420 - Karateka

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Karateka is probably best known as one of the first, if not the first, cinematic games. Jordan Mechner was a college student studying film when he developed Karateka. The game wears those film school influences proudly. Musical stings. Cuts to establishing and framing shots. Presenting your progress through the stages with wordless camera movements rather than scripted story dumps. Fluid rotoscope style character animation. It all works to propel you through the game, but I don’t want to talk about any of that.

It is amazing to me how successful Karateka is as a fighting game.

Karate Champ is typically thought of as the first arcade fighting game. It is a twin stick game where you can use fairly complex inputs to manipulate the would-be Karate Champ. You can engage in martial combat against a computer opponent or against another person.

While firing off attacks in Karate Champ isn’t too terribly difficult, actually landing them is. Still, as a first shot in a genre Karate Champ is a decent game. A flawed early step into what would eventually be the last great arcade genre before home consoles overtook location based games.

In contrast, Karateka nearly knocks it out of the park.

Karateka, Karate Champ, and side scroller beat’em up Kung Fu Master, were released the same year so it is pretty much impossible that Jordan Mechner took any inspiration from them, or any other fighting game for that matter. Karateka is a fully formed singular creation. Punch and kick fighting was just in the early 80’s air. Even with that ‘first game in a genre’ deficit Karateka manages to nail the fighting game formula. It’s all about range and timing.

It’s true that Karateka offers no player vs. player mode, but in the game’s defence, it was programmed on an Apple II. Not a real powerhouse of computer hardware, even at the time. The best that could be accomplished was pitting the player against one solitary computer enemy at a time. It does help that this limitation plays into all the Kung Fu and Karate movie tropes of a lone warrior defeating a cadre of villains singlehanded. Only Karateka seems to be set in a world where no one ever learned to turn around.

The fighting system itself does seem like it would probably work in a player vs player mode, as evidenced by this patch to the game that lets a second person play as the enemies ( https://archive.org/details/karateka-two-player ).

Karateka is a smooth and deliberate game. You will quickly learn over the first handful of enemies that you can’t mash on the attack button and hope to win. You need to wait for your enemy to overextend themselves before you dive in to deliver a kick or series of quick punches. The whole game is range and timing. You can keep yourself a hair out of their range, rocking back and forth in a crossover step just waiting for enemy goons to slip up and launch a kick at the air where your head used to be. And if things are getting too hot and your health is dwindling you can retreat a few steps.

Jordan Mechner recounts in the journals he kept while making Karateka how he thought games needed to have two different but overlapping goals. In Karateka you need to balance the fights against individual enemies with the total ground you have to cover. You will need to start at the edge of a cliff and fight all the way through a fortress in order to battle the final enemy, Akuma. If you retreat more than you advance during a fight you won’t reach the next checkpoint before a fresh guard appears. Retreat too far, and you fall off the cliff. The faster you close the distance between you and Akuma, the fewer guards you will have to deal with. Some of the later fights can be very tough so you won’t want to retreat much if you can help it. Even the meta game of Karateka hinges on range and timing. It is a fighting game to its core.

Karateka might be one of the earliest fighting games, but it’s also one of the best games.

416 - Metal Gear Solid V

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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?

You could simply walk through the water counting on the heat of the day to dry out your shoes and socks. You could toss enough fist sized stones into the water to create a makeshift bridge. You could fell a nearby tree to span the creek. You could scrounge through the forest for enough deadfall to create a pathway over the water. You could walk until you found a path around the water, assuming it pooled at some point. You could leave and come back tomorrow with a truck or a bulldozer and bend the earth to your wants.

Any of these are possible because this is a real world situation that involves real world interactions. In the real world there are more options than there are constraints. Sometimes there are so many options that it seems like none of them are viable. Unlimited interactions, unlimited choice, unlimited solutions to unlimited problems.

Videogames are not like the real world. Videogames are extremely limited sets of systems that play off of one another. Pac-Man eats dots, ghosts eat Pac-Man, Pac-Man eats big dot, Pac-Man eats ghosts. Repeat. This limited interaction space is one of the things that makes videogames fun. When a player can explore the boundaries of the play experience quickly they can also attempt to optimize for better solutions quickly. Optimizing for better solutions to seemingly random problems is something that humans find fun, so getting there quickly is often a good thing.

What if, instead of creating a small interaction space to get to ‘fun’ quickly, you went huge. Like ridiculously huge. What if you layered systems on top of systems on top of systems and created so many potential solutions that it would be difficult to untangle them all or to determine which ones are viable. While you would never be able to create so many possible interactions that it rivaled the real world, what if you made a videogame that gave you a taste of that real world interaction space. Just enough to trick your brain into thinking that anything you attempt might be possible. What if enough of those attempts actually did turn out to be possible, not because they were specifically designed to be possible, but because there was no restriction against whatever weird garbage you tried. Now you have a different sort of fun. The type where you aren’t compelled to optimize, but to experiment. To improvise. To see how far you can push the simulation before you break it. To push the simulation with the intention of breaking it.

Pac-Man is a fun game. It’s fun for about 15 to 20 minutes. That’s enough time for a couple games usually. Maybe you play really well and you manage to extend one game for that entire 20 minutes. You leave the game satisfied and you can probably go back and play again in a day or two for another 20 minutes. That’s great. It’s a great way to design a game.

Metal Gear Solid V is the other type of game. It’s a game that you explore and experiment with. It’s a collection of systems so deep that you can run the same mission countless times (and you will) without ever exhausting the potential solution space. You can improvise or plan, use the systems or rail against them. You can play it whatever way you want for 100 hours and still never see every possible interaction.

Is Metal Gear Solid V the best game in the Metal Gear series? Yes. And No. I suppose it depends who you ask and when.

Is Metal Gear Solid V one of the best games? Absolutely.

413 - Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Star Wars - The Empire Strikes back on the Atari 2600 is Star Wars as imagined by Mondrian. Large flat blocks of color with a palette counted in single digits. It is a representation of the battle of Hoth in abstract. Imperial walkers look more like paper cutouts pasted in a shoebox diorama. The hero snow speeder is a rectangle with one bit jutting out the side. Sound effects are tinny digital farts and bloops. Even with all that simplification, the game feels like the battle of Hoth. It’s all here, just compacted down to the thinnest of essentials.

This game works, because it feels right. Your snow speeder can whip along at a staggering pace, but it can also stop and reverse direction with shocking agility. There is a slight drift to all of your movements that presents a sense of weight, but doesn’t feel out of control. The horizontal flight of the ship is incredibly smooth for the Atari 2600, a system not really known for its smoothness. The walkers are menacing and durable, but not indestructible. The odds are stacked against you, but there is at least a feeling of hope.

The truth is, there is no hope. This is a game, like the movie sequence it represents, where the good guys will lose. You will either see all of your ships destroyed by blaster fire or the inevitable march of Imperial walkers will overrun your base. Those are the only two ways this game ends. Surprising enough this only adds to the game’s feel. Letting the player change the fictional history of the battle would just feel wrong I suppose.

The game is simple, spare even, but it feels great to play. Smooth and fun and correct under your fingertips. More than the setting, more than the visuals, more than the mechanics, this is what matters. When a game feels right, it plays right.

This is why Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back is one of the best games.

408 - Trackmania

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Or you could do none of that and play Trackmania.

You pilot a car, yes, around a track, yes, but Trackmania is nothing like Forza or Gran Turismo. Trackmania is not like car racing.

Trackmania is filled with impossible tracks that you careen down as fast as you possibly can. There are other vehicles on the track but they are intangible and you will have no interaction with them besides watching the path that they drive. There are special interactive zones on the track that will speed up or slow down your car. Some will cut your engine forcing you to glide the remainder of your race so you best have your speed up before you hit them. Solving this puzzle of speed and angles, drift and airtime, that’s what Trackmania is.

You can play it with the four arrow keys on your keyboard. That might be the best way to play Trackmania.

There have been about 150 different Trackmania games. Don’t let that fool you. They are all the same game. They are all a perfect distillation of speed, reaction, and anticipation. They are all perfect games.

Trackmania is one of the best games.

402 - Saints Row IV

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Then they made Saints Row IV. It would be easy to see this followup game as derivative. After all it did use a lot of the same assets and gameplay loops. The mission structures and events in Saints Row: The Third that seemed fresh and interesting were rehashed with the thinnest layers of polish in the 4th game. All of your favorite old characters were back. But they were old, and they were back. Like from before. Previous.

Still Saints Row IV made it here into one of my Best Games posts.

With Saints Row IV, Volition chose fun. If there was a decision to make between difficulty and fun they chose fun. If they had to choose between realism and fun they chose fun. If there was an opportunity to prioritize fun over engaging with the systems already in the game, they chose fun.

This is a game world full of a variety of fun cars and planes you can steal and roam around in, but your character can run like the flash so that is usually more fun than driving. This is a game with an arsenal ten miles deep and you never need to use it because running up a building and jumping down with the force of a small nuke is more fun. The story is absolute nonsense that straddles the line between The Matrix and Independence Day and it wears all of its influences proudly on its sleeve, but it is fun.

If you look back to reviews of the game you will see a lot of folks taking a few points off the game for being too easy. And it is. Saints Row IV is an absolute cakewalk. Past the halfway point there will rarely be anything that pops up that challenges the player in the slightest. And it doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes fun is what matters. Sometimes you have to prioritize fun.

The characters and their antics are genuinely funny, if a certain level of side eyed lowbrow is something you find funny. The kind of irreverent that is smart enough to know where to land it’s punches and when to just be silly. The writing in Saints Row IV prioritizes fun.

Saints Row: The Third is a rare beast. An open world comedy action game that refuses to be snide or gritty. There is an upbeat optimism woven into the mayhem. Violence so bizarre and unrealistic that it lends the game a sort of helium filled buoyancy. It was and is a brilliant game.

Saints Row IV does that all again but removes any and all barriers to fun. Do what you want. Be what you want. Become an agent of chaos in this simulated world. Just don’t worry, the pins will be set back up for you to knock them down all over again and again and again. In any way you like.

You know, Fun.

Fun is why Saints Row IV is one of the best games

395 - Dragon's Lair

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Dragon’s Lair was released into arcades in 1983 and it’s safe to say that no one had ever seen anything like it. Every other arcade game at the time featured screens filled with blocky pixelated graphics or sharp but simple vector graphics. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Mario Bros. were bright and colorful. They were accompanied by memorable bits of music and catchy sound effects. Not one of them looked and sounded like Dragon’s Lair. How could they. Dragon’s Lair was a fully voiced, orchestrated, and animated production created by Don Bluth’s studio. Former Disney animators had worked on this game. All of the movement and life that went into an animated feature film was on display in this stand up arcade machine. No video game had ever looked and sounded like Dragon’s Lair.

It was the most popular game of it’s time, and one of the most popular games of all time. There are three arcade games on permanent display in the Smithsonian and Dragon’s Lair is one of them. It also absolutely sucks.

The technological beating heart of the Dragon’s Lair arcade cabinet was a laserdisc video player. Laserdiscs weren’t a new technology in 1983. The format was created more than a decade earlier and enjoyed a limited commercial release during the late 1970’s. To oversimplify it, a Laserdisc is like a video record that is read with a laser rather than a physical needle. Because the video is stored on a disc, the laser can move to a new track very quickly and play back a video clip in a blink. Someone at some point noted this fact and wondered if it would be fast enough to react to a person’s inputs, like a video game.

It sort of almost works too.

When you play Dragon’s Lair it starts playing a video clip of a gangly looking knight walking across a drawbridge. You are told during the attract animation that this is Dirk the Daring and you are leading him in his quest through a wizard’s castle to save Princess Daphne from an evil dragon. Pretty standard fare.

In an instant, part of the drawbridge collapses and Dirk almost plunges into the monster infested water below. In that sliver of a moment you are able to select from one of five different inputs. Up, down, left, right, or sword. If you do nothing you will be pulled down by the monster. If you attempt to move in any direction you will be pulled down by the monster. If you use the sword and then push up on the joystick you will succeed and Dirk will move on to the next scene. There is no nuance, zero room for error. You enter the correct inputs within the time window available or you watch Dirk succumb to one of many grisly ends.

What you are really doing when you enter inputs into a Dragon’s Lair cabinet is selecting what video clip will play next. Most inputs are accompanied by a slight pause in the video while the Laserdisc player’s read head is seeking for the appropriate clip. Since the outcomes of each scene are predetermined and had been hand animated, painted, and transferred to that Laserdisc months earlier, all of the clips are laid out in such a way to minimize those seek times. It is hard to imagine that anyone was ever convinced that they were actually in control of Dirk’s movements. You were absolutely at the helm of the world’s quickest (at the time) fast forward and rewind buttons.

The animation on display is absolutely top quality, but as a game experience Dragon’s Lair is terrible. There is only a tenuous connection between what you are doing with the controls and what happens on screen. The game often requires inputs that would be impossible to decipher in a time window that borders on prescience. While some of the scenes provide flashing hints toward your next action the only real way through a lot of the scenes is by trial and error. When you break it down there really isn’t much ‘game’ to this game. No decisions to make, no puzzles to solve, no emergent behaviors to react to. Nothing gamelike at all. You tap out the predetermined inputs to watch a video.

But.

Dragon’s Lair did something to video games. Something important. Dragon’s Lair was the push. Every game released through the rest of the 80s and 90s would be compared to Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but it doesn’t look like Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but it doesn’t sound like Dragon’s Lair.

That game is great, but the animation isn’t as good as Dragon’s Lair.

This was the game that set the impossible standard. A standard that even it didn’t live up to. The standard that would drive game creators to try to make a game that looked as good as Dragon’s Lair but actually played as well as you hoped it would when you stepped up to the cabinet.

We have hit that point now. Many times. Games with fluid, responsive animation that looks and plays beautifully. Fully voiced and orchestrated games that sound at least as good as their non-interactive film counterparts. Games with life and energy and dazzling visual effects. Games that make good on the promise that Dragon’s Lair offered.

So why is Dragon’s Lair one of the best games? It set the standard in presentation for decades and influenced countless creators. It was a bar to leap over, a record to break. Had it been a film or a saturday morning cartoon, game creators would have paid little to no attention to it. But it wasn’t. It was a game. And a challenge. People who create, enjoy nothing more than a challenge. From the moment that the first Dragon’s Lair cabinet was powered in an arcade it was inevitable that another game would eventually be made that would look as good or better and would play as well as you wished Dragon’s Lair did. It was a goal too tempting. A challenge too worth undertaking.

Dragon’s Lair is a terrible game, but it is absolutely one of the best games.

388 - Zork

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Zork

Screen as a window
To an underground empire
vistas in your mind

384 - Chrono Trigger

Mon, 09 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It wasn’t until emulation in the late 90’s that I ever even saw Chrono Trigger on a screen. I had read about it in magazines and looked at the box in stores, but I never saw or heard it until it was running, dubiously, on a PC.

It was amazing. During the late 90’s era of ‘tude and grit, Chrono Trigger is a decidedly more complex beast. Fun and fanciful, but also much more nuanced than a lot of other media of the time.

During that first playthrough I could detect echoes of Star Control 2. Like that game Chrono Trigger seems, on its surface, so charming and joyous that you are often caught off guard when the narrative would dwell on very dark subject matter. There is a pleasant anime veneer on Chrono Trigger telling you that the game won’t ever take itself too seriously, and it doesn’t, but then it suddenly swerves into themes of fascizm, genocide, and hopelessness. It doesn’t just touch on those themes superficially. It sits in them, lingers on them, and makes sure that you are fully uncomfortable before moving on.

The bleakness of the world in Chrono Trigger connects in a much more profound way than any of the grim-dark nonsense that permeated turn of the millenium. Because it is so pleasant, so kind, so vivid, the underlying desperation of its time travelling story can be felt more deeply.

Don’t get me wrong, Chrono Trigger is not a slog of a game. Quite the opposite. It is a grand epic adventure that always feels fun to play. Just the simple act of pushing buttons in the overworld and in combat has a brisk joy to it that tells you that it knows it’s a game, and that you have come to play. But here, that play will have consequences, maybe not right away, but sometime during the centuries of time hopping, you will have to confront things that you have or haven’t done. It’s clever and fun and thoughtful in a way that games rarely are.

The second time I played all the way through it was when it was rereleased for the DS. Knowing the story and remembering most of the twists, I thought it would be less impactful and more of a fun thing to do on a lunch break. I ended up getting even more engrossed in the sensitivity of the storytelling.

The trojan horse of earnest and joyful presentation helped the creators of Chrono Trigger convey what would otherwise be a bleak and overly complex plot. All that, and it’s still just plain fun to play.

That’s why Chrono Trigger is one of the best games.

380 - Beat Saber

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It wouldn’t be very long before the arcades were packed wall to wall with 1 on 1 fighting games. Still difficult, but a different sort of difficult. Fighting games require a player to climb a learning curve before they can have fun with them. I love fighting games, but I think they drove a lot of people who had loved Pac-Man and Qbert from the arcade. They simply demanded too much practice from would be casual players.

It wasn’t long before the fighting games of the arcade made their way to home consoles and every player who didn’t want to wait in line at an arcade machine only to be stomped by someone who had simply practiced more, stayed home and played Marvel Vs. Capcom on their own couch with their own friends.

The last gasp of the arcade was to try to offer an experience that a player couldn’t have at home. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Drum Mania were all developed in this winding down of the arcade. All of these machines were simply too large and specialized to be something that you could easily play at home. This wasn’t joysticks and buttons, this was ruggedized dance pads and simulated drum kits. If you wanted to play these games, you had to leave your house.

Dance Maniax was released in the very early 2000’s and consisted of a set of infrared sensors that you waved your hand across in time to a musical track and on screen instructions. No buttons. Nothing physical to interact with. Just a giant cabinet and your own sense of self consciousness. The Bemani series of rhythm games ended up with the same core issue as fighting games. People wanted to play them because they were fun to play, but some people got so good at them that the developers needed to up the challenge with each new release and the performative aspect of being very good at a game in public meant that some people would play it, but most would not. Those other people went back home and played guitar hero and rock band privately or with their friends. I mean why play a game with a bunch of people standing around judging you.

That sure was a lot of non Beat Saber talk for a presumably Beat Saber focused Best Games, isn’t it?

I think the history is important, because of how and Beat Saber was developed and released. Beat Saber is a rhythm game very similar in play to Dance Maniax. To an outside observer, you wave your hands in the air to the beat of a song and look sort of silly or cool or somewhere in between. The difference is, Beat Saber is a VR game. It really only works as a VR game. While that limits its potential audience, this does mean that you don’t have to wait in line to play Beat Saber, and you especially don’t have to worry about people watching you and judging your performance… if you don’t want them to. When you are in Beat Saber, it’s just you, two laser swords, and a lot of incoming blocks to slice. Get good at it if you want. Play it on easy if you want. Play the songs that you want, and enjoy yourself. If you turn off any screen mirroring, only you will ever see how well you did. Or, you could stream out your game and show anyone who will watch how amazing you are at slicing blocks. It’s up to you.

There is an argument to be made that Beat Saber could have been developed for the Nintendo Wii or for the Playstation Move Controllers. But it wasn’t and moving it to a system where the action is displayed on a standard screen just wouldn’t work at this point. No, Beat Saber is a VR experience through and through, and all the better for it.

There will be a lot of new VR systems past this current generation. Head mounted display units that are lighter, faster, work completely untethered and don’t require controllers at all. For each of these units there will be a version of Beat Saber. In 15 years when a VR/AR system can be placed in regular glasses frames or light-weight goggles there will be a version of Beat Saber. When you can stand in a light field projection with no hardware at all attached to your body, there will be a version of Beat Saber. If one of the tests for new gaming hardware is to run Tetris or Doom on it, the test for new VR hardware will be, from now on, to run Beat Saber on it.

Beat Saber isn’t very old, but it’s already one of the best games.

372 - Soulcalibur

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In a year that also saw the release of Super Smash Bros., Street Fighter 3: third strike, and Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter, Soulcalibur stands apart. You see, fighting games are way too hard to play. I love them, but they are absolutely impenetrable to new players. I love that they are complex, and rich with nuance. I love that fighting games are very free-form and fluid. No matter how many times you have played a fighting game you can always work out new techniques and timings. Everything that I love about the genre makes them terrible for people new to them.

Of course difficulty in games is nothing new and a certain amount of learning is expected every time you play an unfamiliar game. The main problem is that most fighting games are absolutely obnoxious in their refusal to teach you anything at all about how to play them. Of the other major fighting series I mentioned up there, only Super Smash Bros. makes an attempt. Poorly.

Soulcalibur started as an arcade game. Simple, straight forward, 1 on 1 combat designed to eat quarters. When it made its way home as a North American launch title on the Sega Dreamcast, the developers could easily have left it at that. Basic 1 on 1 fighting, and maybe a tournament mode or something.

Instead, they added Mission mode. A massive sprawling story based around different types of fights with different rules and requirements. It would be easy to think that this was just a way to extend the playtime of a basic fighting game, but Mission mode does something fighting games just don’t do. It teaches you how to play the game. Not in a tutorial “hit this button now” kind of way, but in a deep many hours of practice kind of way. You won’t be able to mash your way through all of the fights and you will have to use different techniques and characters to pass the challenges. It’s fun, it’s engaging, and you won’t realize how much better you are getting at it until you play against another person and chain together some massive combo, or sidestep a potentially devastating blow. This is a fighting game that makes you better at it while you are playing it. Truly a rare bird.

I can set aside how I was obsessed with the Kilik kata animation before the game even came out and how I must have watched it a thousand times since. I can set aside how I played it on the Dreamcast until my thumb hurt and I burnt out a VMU while playing it. No, I’ll go with this; Soulcalibur is a fighting game that makes you better at playing it while you play it, and for that it will always be one of the best games.

367 - Worms 2

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

One of the earliest tasks for electro-mechanical and electronic computers was calculating firing arcs for long range ship cannons. When computers advanced from relays to transistors to integrated circuits, the desire for the navies, armies, and air forces of the world to figure out how to shoot at what they are shooting at didn’t go away. If anything, shooting at things rose to the level of complexity afforded by newer computers. Shooting at things became a science. If it seems like a lot of computer games are simply about things shooting at other things, it might be because that was quite literally what computers were made for. Like it or not, performing ballistic calculations is built into computers from the bones out.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a pervasive shift toward antiwar sentiment in the research centers and universities of north america. And yet they were using computers. Computers for which ballistic arcs and missile flight dynamics were essentially solved problems. A lot of the basic languages included functions to define these arcs. The tools were all there, but the want to use them for their intended purpose was not. So people did what people will always do. They made a game out of them.

Artillery isn’t really a single computer game. There isn’t one monolithic work that you can point to and say ‘that is Artillery’. Instead, artillery was an entire genre of computer games back in a time when genres for computer games didn’t really exist. Two or more gun emplacements would take turns firing at each other. Players would have to adjust the guns power and angle for each shot gradually trying to narrow in on their target. First one hit loses. Everyone programming a computer could play with and modify a version of Artillery. There were ones with changing wind, ones with variable terrain, ones where the gun emplacements could move and ones where they were ships on the sea. All of them variations on the same game.

Sometimes it isn’t the game that explores a mechanic first that is remembered. Sometimes it isn’t even a game explores that mechanic best. Sometimes it is a game that just does it the most. Worms 2 is the most Artillery game ever made.

Now of course, there was a Worms game before Worms 2, but it was really just Artillery in a comedy suit. Worms 2 though, they put everything in there. Every Worm had a goofy name and a slate of ridiculous voice samples for all situations. The amount of tools and weapons at your disposal is staggering, and most of them are bad puns and corny jokes. In 1997, nearly 30 years of Artillery style games were rolled into a single chuckle-worthy package. There have been a lot of Worms games since Worms 2, but not many have captured the joyous chaos of that game. Like using a sword to cut a cake or high explosives to create vibrant fireworks, Worms 2 took the core concepts of Artillery and repurposed them to entertain. What had been developed essentially as a weapon was transformed into whoopee cushions and cartoon googly eyes.

Worms 2 is the most perfect form of the Artillery genre, and a crowning achievement in irreverence. Worms 2 is also one of the best games.

363 - The Fighting Fantasy Book Series

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

A few short years after the creation of the first Choose Your Own Adventure books and the game Dungeons and Dragons, a couple of industrious writers decided to mix the two together. The result, rather than being a dungeon crawling choose your own adventure, turned out to be more like a story based roguelike. You had one shot to optimise your randomly rolled characters progress through the story. If they died or you chose poorly and got a bad ending you had to scrap your character sheet and start over at the beginning.

Of course no one ever played through the books like that. When the quickload system is as easy as putting a finger in between the pages and then flipping back if a choice or combat outcome turned out negatively, you fudge the numbers until you got all the endings. At least for me, it was only after I had ‘beat’ the book that I decided to see if I could make a run through to the end playing strictly by the rules. Most of the time I didn’t make it. A few of the books required some pretty lucky dice rolls to succeed.

Really though, when everything is considered, the fighting fantasy series didn’t do anything earthshakingly inventive. They were neat, and of their time, and that’s about it. It’s really only when you combine the infocom text adventures like Zork, the tabletop collaborative narrative games like Dungeons and Dragons, and systems based computer games like Rogue that were all being made in the late 70s and early 80s that you can see the profound impact they will collectively make on games over the next decades. Games went from being strictly intellectual or gambling based pastimes, to being a medium that could tell a story. Games became the only medium where you could not only be the audience for that story but a collaborator in its telling. Very early on the Fighting Fantasy series of books were out front and testing those waters.

The Fighting Fantasy book series deserves to be amoung the best games.

354 - Sid Meier's Civilization Revolution DS

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Ridiculous? Blasphemous? Not a real Gamer™? Maybe, but just hear me out. If you can get ahold of Civ Rev for DS, just play it. You’ll thank me in a day or two when you finally blink.

I’ll admit, I haven’t played every game in the Civ series, but I have put in the hours with a lot of them to know how the games tick. More than that, a few years ago I tried to examine what made the core loop of the Civilizations games so addictive. In other words, what made them good.

You might think that the magnetic effect of the Civilization series is the simulation of a world spanning fanciful take on human history. A ludic examination of everything that it took to get us to where we are. That ain’t it. Civ games are slot machines that payout tiny rewards continuously for five hours. Microscopic prizes at a metronomic pace. Everytime you press a button in a Civ game something happens, and often it is something you knew would happen, but you didn’t know when. You press a button and a city spawns a new settler. You press a button and discover a friendly village. You press a button and a wonder you had forgotten you were building springs into existence. You press a button and you conquer France.

Of course you are rewarded for planning ahead and strategically micromanaging your many towns and peoples. There is an element of skill to the game. You can make too many poor choices and end up with revolts and invasions decimating everything you have spent centuries building. But that isn’t what makes anyone play one more turn at 3:45 in the morning. It’s that casino game ‘Ka-ching’ of pressing a button and having a brand new rifleman appear in one of your cities.

Since every Civ game works this way, you might be wondering what makes the DS version so special. What would elevate that particular version to the rank of best games. Typically, as a game marches down the technological ladder they get worse not better.

Civ games are packed right full of all sorts of stuff. There is a technology tree spanning millennia, there is a civilopedia that includes actual historical information along with what amounts to the games manual. There are a variety of units, both military and civilian, you can use to explore, settle, defend, and conquer the world. All cool, but none of that makes the game a better game.

When they crunched all of Civilization down into Civ Rev for the DS they condensed everything. The pace, the scope, the complexity, the reward cycle. There is a possible version of Civ Rev DS where the reward cycle is exploitative, where playing the game takes a backseat to flashing lights and binging alarms. That isn’t what happened at all. Civ Rev is every bit a Civ game only smaller. Tighter. Quicker. More nimble. It takes the best parts of Civ and squashes them down into a bite sized package.

Is Civ Rev DS the best game in the series. No, probably not. But it is one of the best games on the DS platform, and it succeeds in ways no one would expect of a ‘down port’. No concessions, no exceptions, it’s just a great game.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution is one of the best games.

352 - UNO

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

What you may not have noticed is that UNO has a built in balancing system. A fun balancing system.

Most competitive card games have a sort of skill curve built into them. Players who understand the systems more deeply will tend to beat players who are just starting out. The random chance of the card draw keeps the game interesting for anyone playing at higher levels. The only problem with that is, with a game like Poker as an example, other than pure chance there is no way for a less skilled player to beat a more skilled player. There is a ‘good’ way to play and an endless variety of ‘less good’ ways to play.

UNO, on the other hand, has a few different paths to winning. Most players starting out will want to shed their higher value cards first and only hold on to a selection of lower value cards and action cards. This ensures that even if you don’t win a round, you won’t be providing many points for the person who does. This is sort of the beginner mode, and if you play it cleanly and consistently, you will probably win just as many rounds as other people at the table. Not quite luck based, but far from a deep strategy game. The simplicity and viability of this play style makes UNO an easy card game for kids to pick up.

On the other end, UNO is a game where you can count cards, bluff, flat out lie, devise fiendish card traps to dump unreasonable amounts of cards on other players, and did I mention lie. The rules not only allow lying, they offer ways for players to penalize anyone they catch lying. When you play this way you are not guaranteed success over players conservatively shedding cards and laying down actions. One way is not better than the other. ONE WAY IS NOT BETTER THAN THE OTHER.

This is where you say ‘Then UNO isn’t a game of skill. It’s just all luck! If more experienced players can’t always trounce less experienced players this game is garbage!’. Poor deluded player. That’s not the point. UNO is a game where, no matter your experience level, you can be competitive. If you are just learning the rules, and play a clean game, you’re gonna do okay. If you have played a lot of UNO you can bend the rules, bluff often, and draw cards when you don’t need to in the hopes of filling another players hand with a real lumber yard’s worth of cards. You can be devious. You can be nasty. You can make the game fun in the way that you want.

When you are playing a card game as a family, or playing with younger kids, there is often a ‘Let the Wookie Win’ problem. Kids hate to lose. No one likes to lose, but kids really really hate it. UNO is a game where you don’t really have to worry about that. Once they understand the rules, that kid is going to win a decent amount of the time anyway. Everyone can play however they want and it will still always come down to the last 3 or four cards. UNO is like the Mario Kart of card games. While that does mean that a certain demographic will have trouble taking UNO seriously, and I would suggest never betting money on a game of UNO, it does one thing right that a lot of other games get wrong.

No matter who is playing UNO, they can have fun.

That alone puts UNO up there among the best games.

345 - Forza Motorsport

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

From time to time, I can brush up against what it might be like to be a car guy. Almost always because of a video game.

Well before I was old enough to have a licence I played a lot of the game Test Drive on a 286 pc. I played it not because it was a particularly good simulation of driving, but because it included a Ferrari Testarossa in the lineup of exotic sports cars. This was a car feverishly fetishized among my peers. I couldn’t even tell you why, but I wanted to drive that Ferrari, and I wanted to drive it fast.

Unfortunately Test Drive, as a game, really couldn’t live up to the aspiration. You pilot a sports car down a cliffside road and veering to either side will cause you to crash. Traffic on the road is a constant hazzard, but you can only see about 20 meters in front of you so you will probably crash. If you over rev your engine, your windshield inexplicably shatters, and yep, that counts as a crash. Less a driving game and more a waiting for a tow truck game.

For the briefest moments, I was something like a car guy. Just without all the messy interest in actual cars.

By the time the original Gran Turismo came out on the Playstation, I had been driving for a while. I remember searching the car list for my Crown Victoria and mid 80’s Toyota Supra but coming up empty. I had to be content with driving the games version of the Subaru Impreza. While my interest in racing games and car games had definitely increased, my aspirations had been tempered somewhat. Driving pretend cars that I could possibly drive in real life seemed a lot more fun. That was probably because I now had a frame of reference. I knew what driving, even driving fast, felt like and trying to recreate that feeling in a game was exciting.

While Gran Turismo was a fun game, it didn’t really feel like driving. Conveying the feeling of speed and momentum was beyond the capabilities of a game from 1997 (spoilers: it’s still beyond the capabilities of a video game, mostly)

In real life, I drove the Toyota Supra until it finally gave up. I played racing and driving games on the Playstation, the Dreamcast, the Playstation 2, and the XBox. None of them felt like actually driving and none of them made me any more interested in cars. Hovercrafts maybe, but not cars. Until I played Forza Motorsport.

Forza Motorsport was packed full of cars to drive and tracks to drive them on. Still no sign of my Supra but I had gotten used to that. More important though, it included one crucial addition. Forza Motorsport included a driving line.

The driving line in Forza Motorsport is a truly wonderful thing. The option to turn on the driving line is in the assists menu. The developers considered it a cheat. A way to make the game easier. The real beauty of the driving line is that it makes Forza Motorsport feel more like actually driving.

There are no video games that can recreate the feeling of driving a car. The force of acceleration. A hard turn or slamming the brakes. The graphics and sound can attempt to recreate everything in precise glowing detail, and with VR you can even experience all of that from inside the car, but if you are not moving, you won’t feel like you are moving. The driving line in Forza is like braille for your sense of motion. What you can’t feel, it attempts to recreate using a curving line in shades of green and red.

Is it perfect? No, far from it. But the driving line in Forza, after I had gotten used to it, let me experience a closer approximation of driving than I had ever experienced before in a driving game.

I went on to race dozens of hours on those tracks. I raced a Subaru Impreza even in races where it wasn’t the best car to choose. I tuned cars and swapped out parts. I tweaked and adjusted tiny nuances to make the cars drive just as I liked.

For a short while, I was a car guy. Well maybe not really, but I did play as one in a video game.

Forza Motorsport is one of the best games.

341 - Pac-Man

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

That’s fine though. I’m going to cover a different aspect of Pac-Man. This post could apply to so many classic, celebrated, games. The really interesting thing about Pac-Man is that the developers didn’t know what made it good. No one did, at least not until much, much later.

It’s obvious that Namco, and designer Toru Iwatani, knew that Pac-Man was fun. At the time of the games release in 1980 they promoted it heavily to arcade owners. It is telling though, that Namco positioned Rally-X to be the big hit over Pac-Man. If you don’t remember Rally-X I’ll save you having to google it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rally-X . Rally-X isn’t a bad game at all, but it was nowhere near as successful as Pac-Man. Few things ever were, or will be.

Here is where I’m going to make a slight jaunt into game designer land. I’ll link to an article here that explains how that ghost path-finding and AI system works. I’ll also link to a video that explains the same thing in case you don’t want to read the post.

https://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior

https://youtu.be/ICwzQ0_RCcQ

The ghost path-finding system in Pac-Man is a work of genius on the level of the knight from chess. A very simple set of rules that can be re-purposed and reapplied to dizzyingly satisfying effect. A system that seems restrictively simple but allows for the chaos required to evoke ‘fun’.

I’ve written and talked a lot about ‘fun’ here. I’m pretty convinced that predicting patterns out of seeming chaos is what humans experience as fun. Successfully leading a target when throwing a ball, quickly navigating uneven ground, or even just tossing an object from one hand to the other. All of these have a finite set of variables, but they are far too many to actually calculate while you are completing the task. You have to predict the outcome using only your own pattern recognition skills and your estimations of the systems involved. Even a slow, methodical, game like chess involves an effectively random element, in the other player. You have to predict what will happen next based on what you know of the game and what you know of your opponent. It’s not too surprising that predicting outcomes to potentially random events is also an innate survival skills in humans. We find effective survival fun.

The game system of Pac-Man is a predictable pattern with enough variables to appear random. Since it isn’t actually random, the player can push on the system to affect outcomes. The first time you turn Pac-Man around and see one of the ghosts reverse direction as well the pattern of that registers somewhere in your instinct centers. The ghosts aren’t random, they operate based on rules and you can exploit that. Several people have, and, if done perfectly you can get the highest possible score and break the game. Perfect pattern prediction. You can jump through an example of that here and it is fascinating to watch.

https://youtu.be/AuoH0vz3Mqk

Pac-Man was released almost 40 years ago. People have had a while to pull it apart and figure out how it ticks. But it wasn’t until the release of Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007 that the original designer of the game figured out how to replicate it.

Ms.Pac-Man, the superior sequel (depending on who you ask) was a conversion of the original and used most of the same underlying systems, and so it was a similarly successful game. Pac-Man Plus was likewise a conversion of the original game with a few minor tweaks. It is less well known, but plays roughly the same as Pac-Man and Ms.Pac-Man. Neither of these conversions were worked on by the original team at Namco and were more or less ‘bootlegs that went legit’ so all of the actual gameplay can be squarely and fairly attributed to the original developers of Pac-Man.

The first real sequel created by members of the same team as the original was Super Pac-Man. Super Pac-Man was a maze chase with mild puzzle elements that, while expanding on the original never really lived up to it either. The players attention is pulled in too many directions and the active threat and the system that you are trying to manipulate are disconnected in ways that aren’t as satisfying. Not a bad game, but not on the level of Pac-Man either.

After that there are a string of strange, occasionally interesting, and sometimes terrible Pac-Man related games. Baby Pac-Man is a half pinball half arcade game hybrid that is mediocre at both. Jr. Pac-Man is another bootleg level development that makes the maze larger than the screen, but doesn’t actually improve it in any way. In fact, not being able to see the whole maze makes the game arguably worse. Pac-Land is a side scrolling platformer that has nothing to do with Pac-Man and isn’t a particularly good platformer.

When the original team came back to try their hand at a revival in 1987 with Pac-Mania, they created a game that worked on nostalgia alone. Pac-Mania shrinks the view-able area of the maze down to a tiny tile of the whole. It evokes Pac-Man, but it is a much more reactive game. The ability to predict patterns and exploit them is hamstrung by the visible play area and the perspective. The developers knew what made a Pac-Man game, but were lost when it came to what actually made it fun.

Lots of people tried to make a new Pac-Man game through the intervening years but they wouldn’t really hit success until Pac-Man Championship Edition in 2007. Less of a ‘Maze Chase’ and more of a snake like game, the object is to build up a long train of ghosts following hot on your heels and then choose your moment to eat a power pellet and turn on all of them. The game rewards quick pattern recognition and path planning, but eventually gets so fast that you would require superhuman reflexes to execute your plans. A tough game, but it activates those fun centers just as well as the original.

Namco and Toru Iwatani had captured the essence of fun with Pac-Man but it took them almost 30 years to do it again without just copying the original. The history of Pac-Man is a good lesson that just because someone creates something successful, that doesn’t mean that they know how they did it, or how to do it again.

Pac-Man remains one of the best games.

332 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Video games depicting sports don’t really simulate playing them. Tennis you play with your whole body. Everything is taxed. Your muscles, your reflexes, your perception, your decision making skills. All of your various interconnected systems have to be firing for you to play tennis. When, like Pong, you reduce that down to twisting a knob, tilting a stick, or pressing some buttons, it isn’t tennis, but it is still fun.

The fun part of most sports isn’t the mechanics of movement. It isn’t the competition, or the camaraderie. It’s solving tiny problems over and over and over again. Hitting a ball mid flight, taking a step on uneven terrain, anticipating the next quarter second of play on the field. These are the moments that fun is made of. Our brains just can’t get enough of solving these tiny problems. Like a positive reinforcement loop that keeps us practicing potential survival skills until we get good at them. It’s a dopamine thing. Pong gets it.

Skateboarding at a high level is something that an infinitesimal amount of people have done or will ever do. It’s a set of skills that require intense practice and a deep time commitment. The positive feedback loop on skateboarding must be amazing. I don’t really know though, since I can barely ride a skateboard over a level surface for more than a few meters. The last time I legitimately gave it a go, I was probably 13. I would hazard a guess that the majority of the audience for the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games falls into this category.

So how does a sport that almost no one has any real world experience with become one of the most popular video games ever? The developers, Neversoft, took a page out of the Pong playbook. They didn’t try to simulate skateboarding. Not even close. They weren’t even in the same room as a simulation. Instead they focused on getting their players to solve tiny problems over and over and over. Every time you steer the character you are planning half a second into the future. Every time your character hits a ramp you have to predict how much time you will have in the air and choose tricks accordingly. Every time you land a trick you have to be setting up for the next one. The tiny problems never stop.

Solving these tiny problems can be fun, but skateboarding, real skateboarding, is a demanding challenge of balance and dexterity, momentum and reactions. If Neversoft had tried to simulate skateboarding it would have resulted in some horrifying set of finger contortions that might be fun to some people, but not to most. Instead, almost every interaction with a Tony Hawk game is biased toward success. Every time you direct your character up a quarter pipe, they will always come down in the perfect position to land the jump. Every time you leap over a rail or ledge and press the button to grind, your skater will magnetically snap to the right position. With very little practice you can land any jump or ride any rail. You only start to crash when you push a grind too long or pack too many tricks into your available airtime. The game wants you to win. It set you up to solve all of those small problems. You reaching for more is where it gets challenging.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater understands fun, and that is why it is one of the best games.

327 - Landmaker

Mon, 04 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Released in 1998, Landmaker takes the color matching puzzle game and gives it a unique twist. Instead of matching blocks to clear them, you match the blocks to make increasingly mammoth structures. Firing a block with the same color at the leading point of one of these structures will dissolve it and any other matched blocks touching it. If you thought all of that sounds sort of familiar, you wouldn’t be too far wrong. On the surface Landmaker operates like a lot of other color matching puzzle games. You could try to play it like that, clearing any blocks you can as soon as you are able, but from level 2 on that would be a short road to a game over.

Landmaker doesn’t want you to clear those blocks. In fact building them up into monolithic chunks of similar color is more valuable. You see Landmaker is competitive by design. If you aren’t facing off against another player your rival is a deviously difficult AI. The playstation version of the game has a single player puzzle mode, but the less said about that the better. Landmaker is designed to be played competitively, and the only way to get an edge on your opponent is to build bigger and bigger things before smashing them down. The larger the collection of buildings you destroy on your side, the more junk will rain down on theirs.

Then there are the special blocks. Instead of granting the player a bonus as soon as you clear a larger area, Landmaker drops the specials right there on the board. You can shoot a block at them to activate them, but until you do they will sit there on your board, taking up space and being a general pain in the ass. It’s the ultimate risk reward mechanic. How many games make your success a potential liability that you have to plan for. It might sound frustrating, but actually it’s brilliant.

When all is said and done, Landmaker is a fairly simple game, but so is checkers. Similarly, the true depth of Landmaker doesn’t start to unfurl until you have played a few games of it. Pretty soon you will start to look for ways to slide blocks behind other blocks, or leave some garbage blocks right up at the edge of your failure line so that you can build larger structures somewhere else. It doesn’t just reward speed. Planning two or three blocks ahead can unleash a greater assault on the other player than simply clearing everything that comes down the board at you.

Landmaker is one of the best games with one of the best names. Don’t take my word for it. You should probably just play it, or watch this video.

323 - Marble Madness

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I invite you to survey the landscape of video games in 1984. A lot of really great games were created or released that year. Tetris, Excitebike, Elite, 1942, King’s Quest; true classics. But no game in 1984 compares to the technical wizardry of Marble Madness. Until the advent of full 3d game engines and physics systems a decade later, nothing even came close.

In most ways, Marble Madness is 1984 as hell. We were only 2 years off of Tron and hot on the heels of The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., a short film by an offshoot Lucasfilm division that would later become PIXAR. Smooth, shiny CG graphics and topographical grids had never been more in fashion. Limitations of the time meant the the graphics in Marble madness had to be composed of chunky pixels, but they certainly did all they could to feel like that glossy rendered CG stuff.

It is the movement that really sets Marble Madness apart from its contemporaries. The trackball controlled marble on the screen moves like something from the future. It’s future. Our past. Listen, I’m not a time traveller so I don’t know how this stuff works, but I do know that Marble Madness controls and moves like nothing else of it’s era. The marble travels with a weight and accuracy that you can feel when you play it. Counteracting the momentum of a steep requires a natural, instinctive series of inputs. Small touches on the trackball connect you to the on screen world in a very physical way. Ports of the game would go on to use gamepads and joysticks slightly muting the effect of controlling a rolling marble, but somehow the feeling of accurate physical movement still holds on most platforms. Probably an artifact of whatever future tech was used to concoct the game.

In many ways Marble Madness falls short as a game. It is not very long and ramps up the difficulty from flat to vertical wall in about 60 seconds. Sometimes the orthographic view angle makes it difficult to tell where things are in the levels. On the other hand, the music is absolutely bangin. So, I was wrong before, this game is actually fantastic.

If you’re looking for a taste of the future, well the future from the perspective of 1984, you should probably play Marble Madness. It’s one of the best games.

317 - Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - The opening credits

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Just like a book often doesn’t translate to film very well, most properties don’t make for great video games. It isn’t because it’s impossible to translate them, it’s usually because what makes artwork good in one medium doesn’t always carry over into another. With a deft enough hand, and a solid understanding of the medium, sometimes properties can shine on multiple fronts.

When Lucasfilm started an internal video game development studio (LucasArts) it was really only a matter of time before they started making games based on their films. Luckily for the world, the rights to create games based on Lucasfilm movies were tied up in deals with Atari. This left the game developers at LucasArts little choice but to come up with their own ideas, their own games, and their own style.

When it came time to create games based on Lucasfilm movies internally, they had already created their own game design language (figuratively and literally). When they started work on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis the LucasArts style of storytelling adventure game was several titles in and resonated strongly with players. They knew that games weren’t movies and that the medium asked different things of the material.

The opening shot of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis sees Indy crashing through the window into what looks like a dusty tomb full of relics and artifacts. In a voice that very obviously isn’t Harrison Ford but still feels like Indy, he asks himself how he’s going to ‘find that statue in all this junk’. The stage is set instantly. We know there is an adventure underway and that it involves finding a treasure.

Something seems a little off. This room is slightly too organized and sorted to be a tomb, but we carry on. If you hover your mouse over objects labels pop up and clicking sends Indy over to comment on the artifact you have selected. The game begins teaching you how to play it immediately and with no ‘How to Play’ preamble. Like an adventure, it just goes.

Eventually clicking on a particular statue causes Indy to fall and lay stunned a floor below. This room is even more odd. Brighter, more organized. Tidy shelves line the walls. An obvious passage leads down to an even brighter room. Introductory titles and credits continue to play across the screen letting you know that you are very much in the opening scenes.

When you direct Indy to climb down the rope to the brightly lit area, instead of a graceful action hero descent, he tips a statue over and crashes down another floor. This time he has fallen into a fairly standard looking library. Brightly lit by the sun streaming through large windows. Outside is a pleasant summer day. What you were initially meant to believe was a tomb raiding adventure seems to be nothing of the sort.

As the intro concludes, it is revealed that Indy has just broken into his own university to find something he or his colleague Marcus had misplaced. After swinging through a closed window, knocking over several priceless artifacts, smashing through the ceiling of one floor and rolling down a coal chute, he simply walks across the street to the building housing his office. Indy then immediately gets into a fist fight with a Nazi. This is the sort of game you are playing. This is the Indiana Jones of this world. He is constantly in adventure mode even when doing something mundane, and this game is self aware enough to know that the entire premise is silly.

The tone of the movies is captured without any attempt to ape the actual structure of a film. You came to play a game and a certain amount of that is suspending disbelief and reveling in the absurd. You might wander Indy around the same area for 45 minutes with no idea what to do, or struggle to solve a puzzle that is just a little to obtuse, but the game makes it clear that it isn’t because Indy is an idiot, this is just how game worlds work. The game lets you know all of this before the opening credits are over.

If you continue to play (and you will want to, this is a great game) the same tone is reinforced again and again. The characters and original ideas for this game might come from a movie, but this is a video game and the medium works differently. Interaction comes first.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is one of the best games with maybe the best opening credits of any game.

314 - Doom

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

What I’m getting at is, Doom needs no introduction. Also, Doom doesn’t need me to tell people how good it is. Doom is doing just fine.
None of this series has ever been about promoting games that people already like. It has always been about advocating for good things in general, and in the specific case of video games, exploring what it was that made them good in the first place.

Almost every review, promotion, and reverie about Doom will talk about its fast pace and enjoyable action. They will talk about the power fantasy and the cartoonishly horrific themes. The heavy metal album cover feel of the world. The satisfying impacts and throaty sound design. All of these are true, but none of them are why Doom is so fondly remembered.

Doom is a different place. There had been 3D games before Doom and games that were played from a first person perspective. Flight simulators were very popular at the time. Some of them were fun and a lot of them did right by the first person perspective. Doom was the first game that felt like it took place in a different world than our own. It’s the difference between watching a recording or representation of another place on a screen or looking at that other place through a window.

Starting with Doom, the illusion was complete. An entirely different world sat on the other side of that window. More importantly, you could position that window anywhere you wanted. You could move it through that world. You could recognize the places in that world, not as mazes to be solved but as real and solid and distinct. Places with specific architecture and residents. Places with secrets hidden just around the corner.

I will stop short of saying that you felt like you were there, in the hell world of doom, but you felt like you could be. It was real in a way that games had not been.
If you were able to connect to other people playing on other computers in this one shared world, Doom went from impressive to absolutely transportational magic.

The developers of Doom had created a world that fit onto a floppy disk. You could carry it in your pocket. Any computer could suddenly become a window into that world. Doom didn’t have to be an action game to be successful. In fact, it almost wasn’t. I doubt that would have mattered. What Doom promised and delivered was another place.
That is why Doom is one of the best games.

311 - Super Sprint

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Controlling the ultra slippery cars of Super Sprint is all in the wrist. Well, the wrist, forearm, shoulder, and maybe the hips. Can it be played without throwing a significant amount of your entire body into it? Maybe, but I can’t see how that would be fun. Success at Super Sprint requires very physical interaction. The really interesting part is that the interaction you are required to do bears no resemblance to the activity the game is asking you to simulate. What you are doing is nothing like driving, but it feels like driving a race car. Or it feels like what you imagine driving a race car would feel like.

So, in my research I couldn’t find any technical description of how the software in Super Sprint actually reacted to a player manipulating the wheel. I don’t know for sure, but examining it from the outside, it seems like Super Sprint doesn’t really care how fast the wheel spins. The cars seem to have a fixed rotation speed coded into them. Spinning the steering wheel faster than that would have no extra effect. What’s more, the wheel also has no actual center. It reads rotation clockwise and counterclockwise, but it doesn’t seem to care what position the wheel starts in. It’s only reading rotation left and right. That means that you can spin the wheel left very hard, stop it immediately, and rotate it slightly to the right and the cumulative effect would be that the car would veer sharply left and then instantly center and start turning right. Oversteer does not exist in the physics model of Super Sprint.

You don’t steer the cars in Super Sprint like you would steer a real car. You steer the cars, speedy, drifty, open wheel race cars, like you feel like you should. Physically, drastically, and with no small amount of style.

Super Sprint doesn’t even attempt to be an accurate simulation of driving. Instead it tries to recreate how we pretend to drive. The over exaggerated pantomime of winning an F1 race. It’s like air guitar with a steering wheel and it does it fantastically.

Super Sprint is one of the best games.

306 - Excitebike

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Excitebike is not at all about racing. Excitebike is about balance. The subtle difference between leaning too far forward or too far back. The balance between too much throttle and not enough speed. The balance between avoiding obstacles and deliberately choosing the collisions you can’t avoid. Excitebike is all about pushing that balance right up to the tipping point but holding on. Like releasing a clutch, Excitebike is about finding that balance point and riding it until you feel everything start to move as one fluid machine.

Excitebike was designed for the original Nintendo Famicom in japan and reconfigured for the NES in the rest of the world. The NES was a capable, but simple computer for the time and all of its inputs were digital on/off yes/no switches. When you pressed a button it was pressed. There was no soft curve of input for the NES. Even though everyone who played the machine would instinctively press the buttons and control pad harder, willing the in game characters to go faster or jump higher, there was just no physical way to do that. It registered all of its inputs as on or off. If you are trying to replicate a feeling of maintaining a tenuous balance with inputs that are all or nothing, what’s a game developer to do?

Shigeru Miyamoto is arguably the best game designer of all time. At every turn he and his team will design toward intuitive feel over mathematical specificity. They have become adept at turning the binary of on/off controls into something that feels granular and subtle. Something that you feel you can balance.

Excitebike uses two separate buttons to control the speed of your on screen dirt bike. On will never push the bike out of balance to the point that it overheats, but it won’t push the bike fast enough to get you past the finish line in the allotted time either. The other control revs your engine and pushes the bike faster, but you run the risk of overheating and stalling out. If you stall out you will have to sit by the side of the track for a few beats waiting for the bike to cool down. Using only one button will be too slow, using only the other button will generate too much heat and ultimately be too slow. To complete the timed races successfully you will have to rock your thumb back and forth between the buttons too keep your speed in balance.

Every design decision in Excitebike plays out the same way. Completing the jumps on the track requires you to nudge the pad left and right to maximize your jump distance, while still accounting for the stability of your landing. If you get too much distance, you sacrifice speed on the landing. If you pay too much attention to your landing you lose speed on the jump. Adjusting your track position up and down can help you avoid obstacles, but sometimes at the expense of the easier or faster path. When there are other riders on the course, there is no perfect path. You will have to balance your speed with your odds of a crash.

The arcade and famicom disk system revisions of the game retitled, VS. Excitebike, add more mechanics, but all of them deal with the push and pull of balance. No matter what version you play, it doesn’t take very long before you start sliding smoothly from pressing A to B and back and you start adjusting your bike in the air to land a perfectly smooth jump. Pretty soon, playing Excitebike is just like working a clutch. It’s not about speed, it’s about maintaining that balance and playing by feel.
Excitebike and VS. Excitebike are some of the best games.

303 - Missile Command

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Art is a reflection of it’s time. Surrealism and dadaism in the 1920’s sprung from the hyper-rigidity of a europe mechanized to sustain the first world war. It is a release valve of pent up emotion and a rejection of organized logical thought. During this same time there is the rise of art deco and science fiction, art forms that embrace the technological leaps that the war demanded, but repurposed them in the pursuit of aesthetic beauty and optimistic vision. Two very different, very human ways of dealing with the trauma of the preceding decade.

During the 1980’s, the cold war was coming to a close. One way or another it was going to end and the pervasive anxiety of the hows, whys and whens of that ending fueled a lot of art.

Maybe you could say that Missile Command is a little too on the nose. A little too representational and not nearly allegorical enough. Maybe you could say that it was too pessimistic in not including a victory condition. Games are supposed to be fun right? They are supposed to foster joy.

Missile Command offers you one choice, Defend these six cities, or don’t. That’s it. The truth is, you can’t and won’t. No matter how good you are at the game, no matter how well you use your limited munitions, no matter how well you defend the cities, you will fail. One falling bomb will get through. One attack will succeed. One city and all of its inhabitants will be lost. It will be your fault. The next city will fall. Then the next. They will all be destroyed and there is nothing you can do about it. When you ultimately lose your final city, Missile Command doesn’t present the customary Game Over, subtly inviting you to play again. Missile Command says THE END. There is a finality to your failure. You can only delay the inevitable.

In 1980 that’s how it felt. Inevitable. Not an all out nuclear war, but a change. The change from breathless hostility and geopolitical stasis to something else was inevitable. You just had to have hope that the world would choose a change toward peace. Stability. Art has the luxury of choosing both outcomes, or many outcomes. Art can be surrealist and reject rigid, lock step of progress, but can do it with the wide eyed optimism and hope for the future embodied in science fiction. Both can be true. For some art both must be true.

Missile Command is ultimately a positive and optimistic work. Your only job is to defend. You protect your cities, you preserve life. Never are you tasked with attacking an enemy. Never are you asked to destroy. You act as a shield, not a sword. The mechanics and business of the arcade demand that you eventually lose the game, but Missile Command suggests to you that maybe, if you don’t lose hope, you will succeed. You will save your cities and outlast the onslaught raining down on you. And maybe, just maybe, no one else has to lose for you to win.
If any work of art could so succinctly sum up the frozen emotional turmoil of the early 1980’s, it was Missile Command. Missile Command is one of the best games.

301 - Tetris

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

294 - River Raid

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

River Raid by Carol Shaw is one of the Best Games

290 - Commander Keen

Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Since the mid to late 90s, the best place to play the most demanding and cutting edge games was, and remains, the PC. Consoles, tablets, phones, have all improved to the point that there is a truly startling amount of computer power in your pocket or in your hand right now, but none of them can keep pace with even a moderately powerful PC. For every major change, there has to be a turning point. In the case of the PC dominated video game industry that turning point is one game. Doom.

Wait, no, not Doom. March back a few years and the same bunch of guys that eventually make Doom create a smooth, fast scrolling platformer that feels like a Mario game, but plays on a PC. Not a specially outfitted, super high end PC. Just a regular run of the mill PC that lots of folks had at their home or office used to run Word or Excel. Commander Keen was the proof that these computers could be used to make games that were at least as good as their console counterparts. And the first set of levels was free.

If you had a PC you could pick up a disc or get a copy from a friend and play Commander Keen.

So, was Commander Keen better than Mario? No. No it wasn’t. But it was good, played well, and it had a quirky attractive charm to it that felt honest and genuine, not just a blatant ripoff. But mostly it changed the way people looked at their PCs. If you were interested in games you wouldn’t instantly run to the current consoles or older Amiga games. You might give that shareware PC game a try. Commander Keen paved the way for 3D cards, Sound Cards, and PC gamepads. Without Commander Keen, I don’t know that the PC as a gaming platform is guaranteed.
Commander Keen, still one of the best PC games.

285 - Guwange

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

282 - Wipeout

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Shapes composed of parallel lines and strokes of a consistent thickness. Solid, vibrant color and smoothly radiused corners. This is the design language of modern technology. This is the language that defines the icons and controls on the computer, phone, or tablet you are reading this on right now. This was the same language used to represent fictional racing teams Feisar and Qirex and Auricom in 1995. Prescient, influential, or both Wipeout is pure, distilled graphic design from top to bottom.

It helps that Wipeout is a fantastic racing game. It combines the slippery speed of rocket powered hover ships with an on-track combat mechanic similar to Mario Kart. The game plays great and feels faster and more demanding than most other games of it’s era. That isn’t why Wipeout is important. That isn’t why it still resonates. It’s the visual design that endures.

Wipeout was made to feel, sound, and look like the future. That future, at least visually, became our present. Even if you have never played Wipeout you can see it’s influence all around you.
Now, knowing that, it makes you wonder what aesthetic being developed right now for some piece of pop culture will send its waves out into the future.
Wipeout is graphic design condensed into video game form, and it is one of the best games.

277 - Gauntlet

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

If you were handed a screenshot of Gauntlet you would have no trouble figuring out the moment to moment gameplay. You guide one of 4 fantasy trope characters through a maze of monsters and treasure. It seems pretty straight forward. If you play it, you would quickly find that it’s not so simple.

Like Dungeons & Dragons that influences it there are a lot of systems at play in Gauntlet. Your health is constantly decreasing but there is food available to boost you back up. Some enemies must be shot with your ranged weapon and some can be crashed into to defeat them hand to hand. Magic potions are room clearing super weapons but you might want to save them up to deal with the grim reaper. Combine these systems with the blistering pace of action and it would be very easy to miss most of them. It’s a game that you could very easily spend many quarters on and never understand what the traps do, or why that food just disappeared.

Gauntlet might be one of the first games to include an in game tutorial system in the form of the ever present announcer. Very few games before Gauntlet included digitized speech. It was just too expensive and there wasn’t a compelling reason outside of novelty to add it. In Gauntlet it makes sense to quickly pause the action and deliver some information. When you hear that “Elf needs food… badly!” you won’t forget or ignore it. When the music chimes in followed by the instruction “Don’t shoot food” you will pay a little more attention to your aim. When you hear “Valkyrie is about to die” you will know that it is less important to clear every monster from a level, and more important that you make it to the next exit.

Gauntlet teaches you how to play it while you are playing. It nudges you to improve.

Of course Gauntlet also originated and perfected the microtransaction with the ability to add more health just by paying a quarter for it. It was pay to win before that was ever a thing. But let’s not let it’s sins overshadow it’s achievements.

Gauntlet is a good game, but it teaches you how to enjoy it. That makes it one of the Best Games.

271 - Asteroids

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In Asteroids you control one small spaceship, iconically represented by a sharply defined line art triangle positioned at center screen. The rest of the screen is a black void that eventually fills with equally iconic representations of jagged rocks.

The playfield is like a continuous sphere unwrapped and laid flat. Objects travel around it, but never actually leave it, passing from one side of the screen to emerge again on the other. The infinite playfield concept is lifted almost entirely from SpaceWar. This was a smart move, because it means that any asteroid travelling off one side of the screen can easily be anticipated as it emerges from the other.

The asteroids travel in hyper predictable straight lines. This creates the first part of my theory of fun. The human brain’s ability to organize chaos is enjoyable. Identifying patterns of movement on a screen filled with icons of rocks all travelling at different speeds in different directions is fun. Using that information to shoot the asteroids breaking them into smaller parts that move in even more directions could have finished the design. That would have been enough to hold a lot of people’s attention. It would have been fun, but not challenging, and most importantly for the early arcade business, it wouldn’t have been difficult enough to make enough money fast enough. People are just too good at identifying and predicting patterns.

At intervals a chaotic ufo will appear and fire at you forcing you to shift your attention. If you ignore it, it can and will destroy your ship. If you ignore the asteroids, they can and will overwhelm you, predictable or not. The second you get comfortable destroying the rocks, the ufo appears to draw your focus. When you manage to destroy the ufo, the pattern of rocks has changed so substantially that it has become an entirely new mental problem to deal with. That means the game has become harder, but also more fun.

By mixing ideas from two very different games, the unpredictable actions of another human in SpaceWar, and the regimented predictability of the invaders from Space Invaders, Asteroids strikes an almost perfect balance of fun.

Games created after this will include more random elements, and more shifts between chaotic and predictable action. Asteroids is not only one of the best games, it might be the first video game to zero in on what makes games fun.

265 - Lego

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Lego

258 - Best Books - The Broken Earth series by N.K. Jemisin

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I chose when I started Best Games to only champion things I thought that other people might love. I never intended to write reviews, or make value judgement. I only ever meant to describe things that I love and the reasons why I loved them, in the hope that you would find a way to love those things too.

I suppose I should say something about these books too.

So The Broken Earth series is the X-Men and The Road and maybe The Notebook. It’s comic books and video games and Sci-fi wrapped in the horrors and triumphs of all human history. The characters are all deeply, messily, human and constantly contradict themselves mid-thought. The writing is beautiful and terrifying and immediate.

Just go read it. Just go read all of it and share the love of good things.

256 - Qix

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Would you move fast, or slow. That is all. Retreat from direct conflict with the Qix is not an option. The longer your line, the more fence you dare to lay out in an attempt to pen in the Qix, the higher the risk. One touch from the Qix delivers an audio visual concussion of screeching static. Failure is not ambiguous. During future attempts to cage this monster, you will have no choice but to be cautious.

Future attempts to reproduce, spin off, rip off, or riff on Qix, have been… unsatisfactory. There are a great many games that try to replicate the core of Qix, but the crystalline simplicity of the original remains astounding.

Qix is perfect, and it is one of the best games.

246 - The Outfoxies

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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 …

Got anything with freeform combat?

What do you mean? What’s that?

So like what if you had a bunch of guys?

And girls?

Yeah. Just a bunch of wacky guys and girls.

And a monkey.

What?

Throw in a monkey.

Okay. Sure. A bunch of guys, girls, and a monkey and they are all assassins.

Even the monkey?

Especially the monkey, only he gets paid in bananas. So you get this whole group of assassins. Like, you got the boring action movie dude

and the dangerous CEO spy lady -

Yeah, and the paralyzed martial artist in a weaponized robot wheelchair.

Really?

Yeah. we already got a monkey. Get weird.

Okay. How about the washed up film star that turns to crime for money?

Not weird enough. Jack it right up.

Maybe a bio-engineer that’s built like a wrestler and has a robot hand?

Getting there.

How about ex conjoined twins that were separated by a train crash, and they are kids, but also assassins that fight holding hands.

Now you got it. And they all get called by another guy…

Who?

Just some guy, like with a generic fake name.

Like Mr. Acme?

I like it. So Mr. Acme calls them all separately and hires them to kill each other.

Why?

Who cares. So they go to fight each other in all sorts of crazy places, like active weapons factory?

How about a flying plane or a boat in a storm? Like just huge waves and the boat keeps tossing back and forth.

That’s great. Or a train. No wait in a fancy aquarium and you can fight on top of a whale.

You fight in a building, but it keeps collapsing and you fall through the floor over and over fighting on different levels all the way down.

Circus! You fight in a circus during the performance. Just total mayhem.

And you can get the cannon out and shoot human cannonballs at your enemy.

Sold.

What about a boss? You fight through all the other assassins and what? You fight Mr. Acme?

Maybe there never was a Mr. Acme. or maybe there was, but really you fight Mrs. Acme. She set it all up. She’s the mastermind.

Why?

Who cares, right? At the end you fight a chopper. Just you, a chopper, and a rocket launcher.

I love it.

So how would this game play?

Almost exactly like Smash Bros.

What?

Yeah like Smash Bros. only crazier.

I thought Smash Bros. was crazy.

Crazier. Way way crazier.

240 - The Oregon Trail

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

237 - Centipede

Mon, 15 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

228 - 1000 Miglia : Great 1000 Miles Rally and World Rally Championship

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

225 - World Heroes 2

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

222 - Dolphin

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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 - Dolphin

First the boring description.
In Dolphin created by Matthew Hubbard for the Atari 2600. In case you hadn’t guessed you play as a dolphin. The entire game is nothing more than a single, unending, chase. You swim as fast as you can to escape a giant octopus that is trying to catch you. Currents can either speed you up or slow you down. There are walls of seahorses spaced at regular intervals that extend all the way from the ocean floor to the surface of the water. Each wall will have a gap located somewhere just large enough for your dolphin to swim though. Using the tone of your sonar you can tell where that hole will be before the wall arrives on screen. When the game picks up, and your dolphin is break necking away from that octopus, you will often have to be in position to pass through that gap before you can actually see it.
You can jump out of the water to catch a seagull that powers you up for some reason. A powered up dolphin can beat an octopus. Obviously.
Games were pretty weird in the 80’s.
Play Dolphin, and you will notice some pretty interesting things. First off, it’s an endless runner. This is the distant ancestor of some pretty popular mobile games, like Flappy Bird. An awful lot like Flappy Bird. Dolphin might not be the first of this type of game, but it is probably one of the first. Sure, you can change direction and head left instead of right, but you will be doing exactly the same stuff, just in the other direction.
Dolphin uses a tone scale to help you decide where on the screen the gap in the wall will be. You get used to using sound cues so quickly it almost seems as though other games had just been wasting one of your senses, with their digital bloops and farts. In that way it is one of the first musical games, or at least one of the first to use sound as a game mechanic, and not just window dressing.
There is a commonly known exploit in Dolphin that skilled players used to achieve very high scores. Your dolphin can jump out of the water, and if you time it right, leap completely over the wall of seahorses, ignoring the sound mechanic completely. This is also a very risky strategy, because the octopus will inevitably creep up on you, catching speedy currents, while you stay above them so you can time your jumps. If you mistime a jump you will hit the wall and get yourself knocked back toward the octopuses waiting tentacles. It’s a tactic you can use, but eventually you will need to dive and engage with the sound mechanic again. Nailing the timing of those jumps is a precursor to rhythm games. Again, maybe not the first, but a very early example.
It’s rare that you have one game that proves out several mechanics that are still fun and relevant decades later. Tastes change, technology moves forward. Here we see at least three mechanics, new at the time, that fully hold up today. Dolphin is still one of the best games.

219 - One Must Fall 2097

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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215 - Might and Magic Clash of Heroes

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Might and Magic is a name that can catch the attention of long time PC gamers, but outside of that small audience, the name really doesn’t count for much. Add to that, the fact that Clash of Heroes is only very tangentially related to the rest of the Might and Magic series. This game was doomed to obscurity from the jump. That’s an incredible shame, because Clash of Heroes might be one of the finest strategy games made in the last several years.

The meat of Clash of Heroes is matching three, or more, like items to create some effect. This lead a lot of review outlets to classify it as a puzzle game. This assessment could not be more wrong. There is nothing puzzle game about it. In Clash of Heroes you will match 3, but the game is not a match 3 game. That is just the mechanism by which you mete out your moves.

Three in a row vertically is an attack move and three in a row horizontally builds a defensive wall. Defence enacts as soon as you play it, but attack will take a different amount of turns to charge up depending on the type of attack and units involved. The real game is looking for holes in your opponent’s defence while shoring up your own, using very limited resources. When you find yourself looking to set up attacks and counters 2 or 3 turns from now, anticipating moves your opponent will make, you notice how deviously clever and simple a strategy game Clash of Heroes really is. It has more in common with othello than bejewelled.

There is one mechanic that completely cements Clash of Heroes as a strategy game. Rather than being completely formulaic like chess, Clash of Heroes contains one random element. The placement of pieces on the board is completely unknown when you start the game. After pieces are removed from the board you are able to replenish them by hitting the reinforce button. The new pieces slide in behind your existing ranks only semi-randomly. The game will never create a match three on it’s own. Only the player can do that, either by moving or removing a piece. When the new reinforcements enter the board, you can be absolutely sure of the places they won’t be. Depending on the way the board is already set up, a lot of the time that also means that you will know where they will end up too. This lets you start planning new moves. If you added elements of a deck building card game to chess, Clash of Heroes would be the result.

When you pile on the variety of unique units, the cutesy but solid art, and the serviceable and sometimes grin inducing story, you end up with a game that didn’t receive the attention it deserved. It is currently available on every platform you can touch or plug a controller into, so maybe someday it will be recognized as the true classic it is.

Might and Magic Clash of Heroes is one of the best games.

213 - Oddworld: Stranger''s Wrath

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

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208 - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Text adventures were a stopgap of course. They were the best that developers could do with the resources that they had. If they could have made an interactive story with graphics and sound there is no way that they would ever have stuck with text. In a lot of ways, games like the Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect series are direct descendants of text adventures. Had it been possible to have your character walk through lavish locations rather than describing them in text, that’s what would have happened. It’s tough to get the same level of detail in 200 pixels with a pallet of 4 colors than you can in one well worded paragraph.

Text adventures were always destined to be overtaken. All of the great games from the text adventure era could be realized better today with a modern audio visual experience. All of them except one.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy banks entirely on the writing. Not writing in the sense of vibrant descriptions of locations, or interesting nuanced characters. The literal, one word following another to create a clever joke type of writing. The precise placement of words magic trick comedians tend to use to such great effect. The writing in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is all setup and punchline. Even the puzzles. Especially the puzzles. There are several occasions where the game plays with the text you type in to create either a setup or a punchline, as if the writers could predict your behaviour well enough to invite you to participate in the joke.

The game itself is damn near impossible to beat without repeated playthroughs. It might even be unfair from time to time, dangling an easy puzzle solution in front of you just to yank it away and then joke about it. I certainly never completed it, back when I was much younger, and slower at typing. I did keep playing it though, for the near endless supply of funny phrases, situations, and asides that could be unearthed from every command you punched into the text parser. I pull it up on one of the many places it can be played on the web, probably once a year at least. I play through until just after I get the babel fish and then usual mess up and have the game murder me in some hilarious fashion.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the few games that was such a perfect blending of time, execution, and technology that I don’t think there is any way to meaningfully improve on it with new tools. Graphics wouldn’t improve it, and the only sound that could be added might be a skilled narrator. Specifically a skilled, british, narrator. You would probably do just as well to imagine John Cleese reading all the lines.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is still on the of the best games.

204 - Smash TV

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The Godfather and Goodfellas were built on a legacy of similar films and stories. They used all of the same ingredients, but those movies mixed them in a more successful way. It’s success through iteration. Movies aren’t usually very good at that. Games though, games are rooted in iteration. The only way to make a game is to iterate, and the only way to make a better game is to iterate more.

Movie sequels and remakes tend to be worse than the originals, but games follow the opposite trend. Every subsequent version and revision tends to be better than the last. Every sequel improves. Even games that aren’t direct follow ups to previous works can benefit from past innovations and build on them.

Smash TV is spawned from Robotron 2084, Berserk, and Space Dungeon. All decent games in their own right, but Smash TV combines all of those same ingredients into something outstanding.
Borrowing not only from other games, but also prominent action satire movies of the same era like Robocop and The Running Man makes Smash TV a surreal and nightmarish affair. With no real story, except what is delivered through the environment and set dressing, the player is left wondering what awful events could possibly have transpired to result in this game. Two shirtless men gleefully enter televised arenas and battle hordes of bald clones armed with 2x4s, laser firing robots, snake people, and enormous armoured mutants, for VCRs, luggage, and meat.

None of that really matters, since the gameplay is so sharp, difficult, and relentless, that most players won’t notice a lot of the nonsense around the periphery. Actually beating Smash TV in an arcade must have cost a small fortune in quarters. Some of the stages nuzzle right up to the border of impossible.

I won’t stand here and say that Smash TV is a perfect game. Some of the subject matter alone might put some people off. Even back in the dark ages of 1990, I think that presenting women as prizes was considered pretty skeezy. It’s sometimes hard to tell how much of that stuff is deliberate satire, or just the result of a game developed by a room full of dudes, who may have actually thought it was cool. If the point was to be unsettling, Smash TV probably does a better job of it than the movies it’s emulating.

Smash TV iterates on the precise, demanding play of previous games, it iterates on the nasty, sarcastic subtext of late 80s action movies, and it even manages to make fun of itself.
Smash TV is one of the best games.

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199 - Aero Fighters/Sonic Wings 2

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In the Aero Fighters series, like other games of their type, you control a fighter jet firing exotic laser weaponry up the screen as sci-fi enemies plummet down toward you. It is a direct descendant of Space Invaders. There is probably no reason to include a story or characters in this type of game. The action consists mainly of winding your way through increasingly treacherous bullet patterns, and that could be enough. They could stop there. The developers of Aero Fighters chose instead to envelop all the preceding in thick ridiculous sauce while still playing it fairly straight. There is rarely any acknowledgement that a dolphin in a leather aviator helmet isn’t the most natural thing in the world. They even include multiple endings based on the characters chosen. The game would be good without it, but it is the weird factor that pushes Aero Fighters, and particularly Aero Fighters 2, into the realm of the classics.
You fight tanks, you fight walking robot tanks, you fight a baboon, and you can do it as a dolphin in a jet. Aero Fighters 2 is one of the best games.

195 - Star Trek : 25th Anniversary and Star Trek : Judgement Rites

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

My uncle would record Star Trek onto VHS tapes, label, organize, and store them in an end table cabinet. Netflix for me in 1990 was a VCR and every episode of Star Trek that had ever aired. I have watched all of the original series, Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine several times over. Voyager and Enterprise to a lesser extent, but I still found things to enjoy in those shows.

Video Games have a tendency to lean on the action and combat aspects of any other fiction that they adapt. It makes sense really. The typical input method of video games is joystick and button, and pressing a button doesn’t exactly lend itself to expressing the moral and intellectual grist of your average episode of Star Trek. The tools the player usually has to affect a game world are blunt and destructive. Shooting, punching, kicking, smashing, stabbing, are all a mainstay of video games, and none of them are really a big apart of Star Trek.

To be fair, Star Trek has a lot of space battles and punching, but all of that violence happens when diplomacy ends and intelligence fails. There is always a cost for violence in Star Trek. Most of the video game adaptations of Star Trek focus on combat, and it never feels right. These Star Trek themed combat games don’t fit in my Star Trek shaped hole.

Star Trek : 25th Anniversary and Star Trek : Judgement Rites are point and click adventure games. They tell tightly scripted stories and offer up simple puzzles for you to solve. The puzzles are fairly simple by adventure game standards, but they are logical and depend on a fair bit of character interaction and dialog. The characters from the original series are well represented, and even voiced by most of the original actors, even if they do phone in the performances. The games are broken up into several bite sized adventures that all begin with a title card and a captain’s log voiceover or some other similar lead in technique lifted directly from the show. The games are designed to feel like the show, which goes a long way, but that isn’t what really makes them resonate as Star Trek.

At every step, these adventure games emphasize the use of intelligence and diplomacy over the use of force. They are written so that the characters and their interactions are more important than the mysteries being solved. The themes for each episode are high concept sci fi tropes, and occasionally a bit thin, but they make a good backdrop for Spock and McCoy’s brotherly bickering. If you can manage it, peaceful and clever solutions to every adventure will garner more rewards, and more importantly, keep your crew safe and your red shirts alive.

Other than Sam and Max Hit the Road, I think that Star Trek : 25th Anniversary might be the only adventure game that I have ever finished without ever looking up a single hint. Maybe that is because the game was quite easy or short, but I think it just felt so much like Star Trek that I was compelled to keep playing just to see what the characters would say and do next.
My adolescence has probably hardwired me to enjoy Star Trek in the same way as I enjoy Soundgarden songs, but I think I can still say that these are a couple of the best games.

192 - Puzzle Bobble / Bust a Move / Puzzle De Pon / etc.

Mon, 04 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

No one knows how long ago the bubble shooting genre began. Some say it started with the Romans, casting javelins at inflated animal bladders arranged in brightly colored groups of three. Some say that cave walls in northern spain clearly depict a collision of three circles, one having bounced off a wall using simple physics. There are even cosmologists that suggest that Bubble matching could be a model for the early universe, newly born particles being fired from a cannon manned by two cartoon dinosaur children. One thing is for certain, the shooting of bubbles and the matching of three similar types is as much a part of our present and future as it is our past. All hail Bub and Bob! Balls!

Bubble shooting games represent both types of children, transformed into bubble dragons or zodiac tarot card, so no matter who you are these games hold up a mirror to your life. Couple that with the moving tale of a bubble just trying to return to it’s family only to burst at the meeting. Balls invites reflection.
Bouncing things is fun. Puzzle de Pon is better than Puzzle Bobble. There I said it. Both are the best games.

190 - Virtua Fighter

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Of course Street Fighter wouldn’t be the only game in there, just most of them. Off in the one of the less populated corners of the place would be another fighting game. It would only use three buttons rather than the Street Fighter 2 six buttons or the Mortal Kombat five buttons. Seemingly, not enough possible inputs for a fighting game with a rich set of moves. The characters looked like people shaped pinatas made from serrated construction paper. All flat faces and jagged edges. Compared to the beautiful hand painted animation of games like Street Fighter 2, Virtua Fighter was unquestionably ugly. Ugly and strange. In still shots, the game looked awful, but in motion Virtua Fighter sang.

Released a couple of years before the first Toy Story, the real time 3D graphics of Virtua Fighter were an unknown quantity. Where movies, television shows, and commercials could devote the time and budget to render all of the glossy effects and characters slowly, one small patch of pixels at a time, real time games need to draw the whole screen once every 30th or, for a fighting game, 60th of a second. That isn’t enough time to render one leaf in A Bug’s Life. Given those limitations, Virtua Fighter can be forgiven for looking sort of ugly. The way the characters moved was the furthest thing from ugly.

Street Fighter 2 adopted an animation style of held frames followed by rapid motion and short, cycled movements. The whole game feels snappy and precise. Virtua Fighter is fluid. All of the characters take on a martial artist dance like quality as punch, kick, block, and jump actions flow one into the next. Street Fighter 2 pits a collection of anime wizards in staccato combat, throwing balls of energy across the screen, breathing fire, or excreting lightning. Virtua Fighter moves like Jackie Chan choreography, close up and visceral. The hits land like cannon fire, but smoothly defending, countering, and chaining blows can feel almost elegant. All the while the camera dynamically swoops and glides to frame the action.

The transition to 3D graphics was not entirely flawless, but it proved what was possible when character movements are comprised of a sequence of mathematical probabilities, rather than pre-drawn images. The game simulation becomes reactive to player input rather than pulling from a grab bag of predetermined drawings on a millisecond to millisecond basis. This game that, on the face of it, was ugly, could actually feel more alive and immediate than the dozens of other games that lined the walls of a 90’s arcade.

Virtua Fighter is one of the best games.

184 - Worst Games - Sonic Shuffle

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

~~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.

When I write one of these, I usually track down the game I am writing about and give it a quick once over. I’ll play it again for a few minutes, refresh my memory with some research, and collect my own thoughts on the game while trying to avoid other reviews and perspectives. Not this time. I could go and fetch the disc from the plastic bin it calls home, and I could either hook up one of the two dreamcasts in there with it, or attempt to run it on an emulator. I could search youtube for a commentary free playthrough of Sonic Shuffle. I could search out a review from the time that the game came out. I just couldn’t muster the interest. I couldn’t bring myself to devote more time than it takes to write this post. Sonic Shuffle hasn’t earned that.

There are a lot of games that are terrible. Some are broken messes. Some control poorly. Some are just plain boring. I guarantee you this, no matter how boring you think a game is, it is a goddamn rollercoaster compared to Sonic Shuffle. Zork is a rock concert shooting fireworks over a monster truck rodeo compared to Sonic Shuffle. If there was a game development flow chart where every branching path had an option to take more time and do less with it, Sonic Shuffle followed every single one of those. I have had more fun creating an Excel spreadsheet than with this example of entertainment software. That’s not a joke. That’s literally true.

Sonic Shuffle purports to be a party game, so maybe I would have had more fun with it if I had played it with a group of friends. That won’t happen. I like my friends, and watching them slide off a couch into a pile of disinterested disgust doesn’t appeal to me.

You might notice that I haven’t really gone into the card based mechanics of the game or the variety of minigames. The overarching mechanic is Nim as a multiplayer game. If the game succeeds anywhere, it is proving that Nim doesn’t work with more than 2 players. Go look it up yourself if you are interested. I won’t. I’m already bored from typing that sentence.

There you go. Now you know where the bottom of the scale lies. If I play a game that I don’t really like, I can always think “is it worse than Sonic Shuffle”. I can honestly say that nothing in the 40 plus year history of videogames is.

Sonic Shuffle is the worst game. Probably ever.

179 - Deus Ex

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

That first experience itched at me. Either there was something wrong with the game, or something was wrong with the way that I was playing it. I had to try it again. This time I took it slow. I was familiar with Thief, and that games first person stealth puzzle style. In Thief, avoiding combat is often the easiest way through a level. Pay close enough attention to the patterns of the guards or use your tools effectively and you can circumvent them entirely. I tried to play Deus Ex the same way, but everything felt so loose and sloppy. I couldn’t figure out the best pattern to avoid detection. Attempting to navigate the first few areas perfectly resulted in constant trial and error, saving and reloading. I was convinced that I did not like this game, and I put it back down.

It might have been a few months later and I started thinking about Deus Ex again. The reviews were out there, and people seemed to love this game. There had to be more too it. I reinstalled the game and everything clicked. I came at it this time thinking that maybe it played more like a japanese RPG, where the story mattered more than the action, and I would have to spend the first few hours flailing around before the meat of the game really started. I was wrong, but this was my entry point. Deus Ex wasn’t a shooter, it wasn’t a stealth puzzle, it wasn’t even a story based RPG. Deus Ex was something completely different.

It was fast and improvisational. You could attack any situation in a number of ways, and change your mind mid stream with no better or worse chance of success. It was also steadily paced and methodical. You could use stealth and long range tactics. You could set traps and plan multi part assaults. If it all went south, you could run and hide or lob some grenades and start laying down heavy fire. No single solution was given priority. There was no right way to play Deus Ex.

Gradually, as the game wore on, I started to find ways that I preferred to play and tailored my character to suit that style. It happened slowly and organically. I never selected a sniper or heavy weapons class from a menu. The game didn’t really seem to have an opinion one way or another. Whatever way I chose to play was good with Deus Ex.

Areas that at first glance appeared to be slightly larger, but otherwise familiar first person shooter levels, were actually much more intricate. If you could see a spot on the map, you could probably get there, but you might have to mess with the games systems to do it. Using the environment to achieve your aims became as enjoyable as straight ahead combat. The world was dynamic in a way that invited you to poke and prod at it.

Is Deus Ex a perfect game? Oh hell no. It is glitchy and unbalanced in all sorts of strange ways. It feels like a thing barely held together at the seams. One sharp tug and the whole game unravels completely. But what it does do is simulate a world. It is a world that is limited. The boundaries are visible, but still it is simulated not prescribed. If you want to influence the outcome of a given situation, you probably can. You can almost certainly do it in a way that the game designers didn’t think of or didn’t intend. All of the intermeshed mechanics of the Deus Ex world had been spun up and the designers had let go of the wheel. What the player did with them from that point was up to them.

Deus Ex was a unique and fresh take on game design. The games story was linear, to be sure, but nothing else about the game felt like you were playing against the designers. They had come up with a sequence of events, and gave you a whole box full of tools to deal with those events. The important part of this, the thing that makes Deus Ex work, is that the game makes no judgements about what you do with those tools. There is no good or bad way to play. There is no good or evil path through the story. It simply is what you make it. It is how you play it.

174 - Waku Waku 7

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Where a game like DarkStalkers can play off it’s silly nature with a classic monster theme, Waku Waku 7 pulls from all the embarrassing nonsense in both anime and fighting games. Let’s just run down the character list and you’ll see what I mean.

You have your plucky high school fist fighter.

The anime girl who points her butt at the screen as her winning pose who might also be an anthropomorphised rabbit.

The child robot nurse.

The Hayao Miyazaki styled walking robot tank.

The brooding swordfighter elf guy.

A kid riding a purple Totoro.

The rugged adventurer. Really it’s just Guile with a beard and a hat.

The cast rounds out with a Mario chainchomp and a sour faced punching bag.

It’s like they pulled the character traits out of a hat and mushed them together. This is what you would make if you wanted to simultaneously poke fun at a genre, while never letting on that you are poking fun. It is what it what it is a parody of. Subtlety is not usually the calling card of anime or fighting games, so it really refreshing when it works.

So is it better tuned than say, Street Fighter Alpha, or does it feel more precise than King of Fighters. No. Waku Waku 7 never attempts to ascend to those heights. What is though is both very good and very clever. I have one more very to add. Waku Waku 7 is very fun, and that earns it a spot as one of the best games.

168 - Sid Meier's Pirates!

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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.

That’s right. Four Strikes. That’s more than the recommended number of strikes. On paper Pirates! should be a dismal failure of a game. It is both repetitive and slow. It’s also fun in every direction. The repetitive minigames are fun, or at least short enough that they never become grating. The sailing is simple, but engaging enough that it still demands your attention. The naval combat is so enjoyable that you could probably base a game on ship to ship fighting alone and it would still be fun. The presentation, at least in the 2004 remake, is light and stylish in a way that makes it almost timeless. Save for the resolution of some of the textures, Pirates! could have been released last week.

The game is dense with numbers, sliders, and management. This could easily make doing anything a slog. That would be another strike, except Pirates! is so cleanly designed that maintaining a crew of hundreds on a whole fleet of ships is trivial. Even enjoyable.

If you had a list of features in front of you, Pirates! appears to be a terrible game. Dull, tedious, and repetitive. The final game is, of course, anything but. The best description would probably be fun. Top to bottom fun.

161 - Penguin Kun Wars

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In concept this is the simplest game in the world. If you have ever rolled pool balls back and forth across a pool table, you have played a version of Penguin Kun Wars. Since the fictional world of a video game obeys a strict set of rules, none of the looseness and unpredictable behavior of real physical objects exists. This is dodgeball or marbles or shuffleboard stripped to the very core. The game is iron hard.

Compared to its contemporaries, games from Nintendo, Capcom, and Konami, UPL created a spartan and dull looking game. There is very little in the way of graphical flourishes present in Penguin Kun Wars. The audio is basic and sounds largely lifted from other titles. It looks and sounds like a game several years older than it is, from a less technically capable time. Damning stuff, if the game didn’t play as tightly, as singularly focused as it does.

There are small interstitial mini games and additional wrinkles as you move from match to match in the tournament structure, but none of that really matters. All that matters is that you get those balls to the other side of the table. Roughly two rounds in, the tactic that seemed cheap and unsportsmanlike of continually pelting that poor animal across from you so they never get the chance to stand back up, becomes a basic survival skill. You would toss a knife at that cute, saucer eyed monster if you had it.

Penguin Kun Wars devolves this block coloured world full of stuffed toy creatures into a screaming, clawing death match, never once betraying the games internal violence through its presentation.

Play Penguin Kun Wars, and I defy you not to curse through your gritted teeth.

Penguin Kun Wars is one of the best games.

156 - Aztec

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fight Mode

S- spin around, A- move one to the left, D- move one to the right, L- lunge, M- strike down, G- draw gun, Space Bar- shoot, W R or J- move mode.

Games are defined by their verbs. The freedom that the player has to interact with a system of rules, opponents, and environmental obstacles is reduced to a few verbs. Run, jump, throw a ball, roll a die. The contrivance of a game necessarily constrains what we do and when we do it. A players verbs become very important. Look at that bizarre list of nonsense at the top. That wall of text is the collection of verbs presented to the player when you pause the game Aztec for the Apple II. It may not be the cleanest interface, but you have to admit, that’s a lot of verbs.

My friend had an Apple IIgs when we were kids. The gs stood for graphics and sound. It was a beefed up version of the Apple II computer that was ubiquitous in schools through the mid 80s, a computer not really known for either it’s graphics or it’s sound. While the Apple IIgs computer was certainly capable of producing a nice looking version of Tass Times in Tonetown or Winter Games, I always had a fascination with Aztec.

Of course, Aztec is terrible.

Aztec took the graphics and the sound out back and shot them. It was originally written for the vanilla Apple II. I can only assume that when the Apple II was created someone A/B tested the worst colors available with until the entire palette was composed of nothing but visual tragedy. I mean look at this.

That is the most god awful collection of pixels ever drawn to a screen. Even given the limited palette and low resolution, that is a sorry looking presentation. I have thought about it for decades, and I still have no clue what that blue mess on the right half of the opening screen is.

The sound is little more than mechanical squawks and digital farts. It makes sense that they put an option to turn it off completely in the main controls. Shutting off the audio is truly the most humane thing to do.

The controls are a finger contorting travesty. I have played flight sims with a more cleanly laid out interface, and in this game you only have to control a guy. Controlling a guy is something that game developers were actually pretty competent at in 1982. This advancement seems to have sidestepped Aztec. If you did manager to figure out the controls, getting the guy to move in a predictable manner was still close to impossible. Despite the existence of a run command, the guy has one speed, slow. If he collides with anything he will get knocked down and dizzied for a few moments. Fall and he’s knocked out. Hit a wall and he’s knocked out. Be in the room with an explosive and he’s knocked out. Bump into a pixel that the game thinks might be a wall and he’s knocked out. The end of game reward should be a CT scan.

One of the key innovations of Aztec was the procedural generation system. Each time you played, the game would create an entirely new set of maps for you to navigate, with different pathways, and different enemy and trap positions. Unfortunately the artificial intelligence laying out the maps was for real stupid. The system that created that maps didn’t seem to care if it was actually possible to complete the game, it just tossed objects and staircases around inside rectangular rooms until they were all full. Stairs would attach to other stairs with no way to actually climb them. Item boxes would be placed in inaccessible areas. Enemys would spawn inside a wall to remain stuck there for the duration of the game.

You might be thinking that this game sounds awful, and it is.

Games are about verbs. The verbs available to the players and the verbs that are built into the constructed world of a game. In Aztec, the verbs are more important than the game. If you place an explosive it will dutifully destroy entire sections of the level, even if that means the game is no longer winnable. If you shoot a the pistol, it might pass through the wall or hit some stray pixel cruft before striking your target, but it always does something. The game is glitchy and broken in ways that are impossible to predict, but there is always something happening, and the world is always reacting to your inputs. The game is ready for you to mess with it in all sorts of unintended ways. This was the first computer game that I had played that allowed that freeform approach. The rules of the system are really more like guidelines. It was as fascinating and amazing then as Minecraft and Terraria are today.

Aztec is a bad game. It’s also one of the best games.

153 - Unreal Tournament / Quake 3 Arena

Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Unreal Tournament included the most popular modes from earlier titles, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but also added new variations. More importantly, Unreal Tournament was user moddable. Through built in, and external tools, creating modifications for the main game, or even creating completely new games, was possible. New game genres, and new game studios were born as hobbyists transitioned from amature mod makers to professional game developers.

Unreal Tournament wasn’t just a great game, it launched scores of game industry careers. It is still played today by hardcore devotees, but the real legacy of Unreal Tournament is the impact it has had on the entire game industry.

Unreal Tournament is one of the best games.

Best Game - Quake 3 Arena

Launching at the tail end of 1999, Quake 3 Arena 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.

Quake 3 Arena included the most popular modes from earlier titles, Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag, but also added new variations. More importantly, Quake 3 Arena was user moddable. Through built in, and external tools, creating modifications for the main game, or even creating completely new games, was possible. New game genres, and new game studios were born as hobbyists transitioned from amature mod makers to professional game developers.

Quake 3 Arena wasn’t just a great game, it launched scores of game industry careers. It is still played today by hardcore devotees, but the real legacy of Quake 3 Arena is the impact it has had on the entire game industry.

Quake 3 Arena is one of the best games.

148 - Descent

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Descent hangs a very thin story, repetitive mission structure, and combat mechanics as nuanced as a schoolyard snowball fight on the ability to move in any direction without the hassle of pesky things like gravity or realistic inertia. It was amazing, groundbreaking, completely disorienting, and for most people, almost completely unplayable.

It’s not very surprising then, that after Descent, and a few other attempts at this freedom of movement based gameplay, the industry sort of just gave up on it. Our brains are really good at 2d and limited 3d movement. For most of our lives up is up, down is down, and our heads remain consistently level with the horizon. Even when we ride in vehicles that can operate in fluid environments like air and water, we still know that up is up, and down is down. Removing that restriction takes some getting used to.

Descent is more experiment than actual game though. Flight simulators had been around for a good long time before Descent came out, but they all operate on the idea that they are modelling a real physical world that reacts in ways we are accustomed to. Descent is a game of what if. What if gravity was not a factor. What if the horizon is relative to the observer, not a predefined aspect of the physical world. What if your rotation and direction of travel were independent vectors. Of course, all of these what ifs are actual facts of movement in a 3 dimensional universe, but for earthbound mammals like us it can be difficult to shed our preconceptions.

Descent would likely be a strange footnote in the history of video games. One success among dozens of failures. I think maybe it just came out too early.

In an industry driven by novelty, they ability to navigate your environment in ways that are just not normally possible might be the most novel thing of all. Pair that with a unique way to inhabit that environment, like the Oculus Rift, and you have the rebirth of an entire genre of movement based games. Keeping your lunch down might require a more old school solution. What I’m really saying is, maybe now would be a good time to stock up on ginger root.

144 - Miner 2049er

Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

I first played Miner 2049er on an Atari 800 computer. I knew that it existed on other computers, because I would paw over all the game boxes at the local computer store compulsively. What I didn’t know at the time, was that it had actually been written on the Atari 800. Like a lot of games from that era, it was ported to every object with a processor in it, but many of them have system specific changes, or concessions. The Atari computer version was created with such focused intent, that it’s difficult for me to imagine the game any other way.

At first blush, Miner 2049er looks like a Donkey Kong ripoff. There are platforms to walk and jump on. There are ladders to climb. A bulbous, hat wearing, protagonist is tasked with scaling navigating an impossible structure, one screen at a time. There are amorphous baddies that mindlessly march a set pattern and don’t actively assail the player character. All pretty damning stuff. Really though, Miner 2049er and Donkey Kong are nothing alike.

Donkey Kong is a sort of dexterity challenge. The players goal and path to that goal are perfectly clear, but navigating the games obstacles required fast reactions and quick thinking. Miner 2049er is a set of 10 puzzles. There is a time limit, but it is fairly generous. For the most part you can take your time and figure out how best to complete the variety of challenges on offer. Each level presents a different novelty from teleporters, to vats of radioactive waste, to scissor lifts, to cannons packed with TNT. The catch to these puzzles is that you must step on every platform tile in every level to win. Some levels have platforms that can only be reached by following a very particular path making the entire level a sort of navigation puzzle. Of course the main difference is that when Mario dies, he spins around and falls over, but when Bounty Bob dies he crumples into his hat like Super Dave Osborne. Now that’s comedy.

When I played Miner 2049er I had no manual and no one I knew played the game. There was no internet, so there was literally no way to ask someone what I was supposed to do on each level. If let’s plays existed they were probably recorded on betamax taped and placed lovingly in shoebox under someones bed. I have only just yesterday learned that there was a code that could start you on any level that you wanted. I just played the game over and over until each level was etched somewhere in the reptilian portion of my brainstem. I reached the 10th level, the one with the cannon you load with TNT, several times, but I could never quite put it together. I didn’t know at the time how close I was to finishing Miner 2049er, or I may have been enticed to complete it. I have held on to that as some strange mark of shame for all these years. It was a game I was good at, but one that I could never defeat. A low priority white whale.

Now, decades since, I know that I could go back and finish it. I have seen videos of the game being completed. It would be so very easy. I think I would rather not. I think that one level I never beat makes this game a little more special. A tiny nagging memory of joy. It’s small, simple and trivial, but it’s mine.

141 - Twinkle Star Sprites

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

It’s also damn near perfect.

In Twinkle Star Sprites you play as one completely ridiculous character selected from a roster of ridiculous characters. Each character rides on some sort of jet or robot or flying pig. Each flying monstrosity has different styles of attack pulled from every flying-shooting game from 1986-1996. You are shooting at friendly looking fluffy cloud creatures, attempting to get them to explode near enough to one another that it starts a chain reaction of exploding fluffy cloud things. Explode enough of them and it will send what appears to be an evil ghost comet streaking across the barrier between your playfield and your opponents. If you send enough of them your opponent will be overwhelmed and catch fire, ending in a looney tunes-esque charred husk with eyeballs. It’s all stupid, it’s all frantic, it’s all incredibly fun.

Twinkle Star Sprites is a game that should probably never have been made, and sincerely hope that a million more get made just like it.

134 - Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition

Mon, 25 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

My first encounter with Street Fighter 2 was not all that different. There was a vanilla SF2 cabinet in my home town arcade and, for a while at least, not many people played it. There was another game in my home town at the time called Violence Fight. Violence Fight is awful. You play as one of 4 meaty stereotypes and you attempt to defeat the rest in hand to hand to foot to head combat. The characters all control like they are hip deep in a swamp and punches may or may not land depending on whether or not the machine felt like giving a crap. It’s only redeeming features were that it had a character named Lick Joe and a large portion of the screen would be filled with the words GOON, GAGOON, and DAGOON when a fighter landed a particularly heavy blow. How and why that happened remains a mystery, as the game seems utterly hostile to skill or technique. Unintentional comedy aside, Violence Fight made me weary of any large character fighting game. Street Fighter 2 looked enough like Violence Fight that I was all too quick to sneer at it and walk away. I of course tried it, because I will try pretty much any game at least once. As soon as the enemy character launched magical fire from his hands, and it didn’t seem to be a move I could replicate no matter what combination of buttons I mashed down, I wrote the game off as cheap and that was that.

It wasn’t very long after that first Street Fighter 2 game showed up that the same arcade got several more of the machines. This never happened. Why would an arcade want more than one of a game. All sat in a row no less. The two new ones had a different marquee as well. They were Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition machines. People were playing them. A lot. Somehow word had gone out through the ether that this was a good game. A game so good that a small arcade required 3 of the things to keep up with demand. Not only that, but no one had told me. I was completely out of the loop. I watched intently over the shoulder of several other kids as they contorted the joystick around and pounded on buttons. Every now and then one of them would launch that magic fire, or launch their character into the air, or spin across the screen in a dazzling bouquet of flailing arms and legs. I asked how? How did they know? How was this done? Someone had a photocopy from a magazine, EGM maybe? There seemed to be a bottomless bounty of secret skills and strategies in this game. For me, that changed everything.

I started playing the SF2CE machine at the local 7-11. I would skate over there after work, after some event that kept me in town rather than heading back out to the farm, or just when I had nothing else to do. I would buy a liter of milk (because I was a doofus kid) and stand in my skates (see previous remark) occasionally playing as Ken or Blanka, but usually playing as Vega. Eventually they decided that they didn’t want me wearing my skates in the store, so I would carry shoes in a backpack ready to switch so that I could go in and practice timing the charge up for Vega’s roll attack. They kept that cabinet in there so long, and I played it so often, that I knew when another cabinet had different dipswitch settings.

I have played an awful lot of Street Fighter and it’s offshoots over the years. When they are played well, it is like high speed chess. They are the closest video games ever get to the combination of physical and mental synchronization required to play a sport. Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition is one of the best games ever.

126 - Caverns of Khafka

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

You might think that, until first blind pit you get to. A few ledges down from where the character starts, there are two choices, the left or the right pit. The bottom of both pits exists just off the bottom of the screen. If you choose the left pit, the screen will scroll up to reveal lava. You will fall into the lava and die. The right pit is clear, and would have been the safe choice. If you instead choose the right pit, you will find that it is filled with lava and the left pit is clear. When you start the game, both choices are wrong. This only happens once, after you choose one pit, and die in the lava, for the rest of that play through the pit with lava and the pit without will remain locked. There is a way to reveal the lava without dying, but it involves navigating to the far side of the map and back again.

As soon as you figure that out, you realize. This game isn’t broken. This game is fucking with you. Not only that, It’s inviting you to play along.

There are areas that can only be reached if certain, nebulous requirements are filled. There are areas that can only really be reached by glitching through walls. Some traps are rhythmic and predictable. Some are erratic and random. They often mix together. Careful movement and patience are your main weapons.

Caverns of Khafka takes place entirely in one very small playfield, but discovering all the fine intricacies of it’s design takes many repeated attempts. All the while you are left wondering if there is a slightly better way to glitch your character through that wall.

120 - The Last Starfighter

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

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.

In order to play a lot of the games you needed to defeat the cartridge door sensor by jamming a piece of wadded up paper in a hole in the top of the computer and flip a switch embedded in a special cartridge called the pill. The custom menu created for each disk would list the games written on it and instruct you when to flip switch. While you might have moral reservations about the state of software piracy in the late 80s and early 90s, you have to respect the ingenuity of it all. Some clever folks cracked copy protection with the help of a device that would not look out of place in a cold war era cockpit.

This is important, because, as I have learned, going through this arcane process of switch flipping and disk pirating might have been the only way to play this particular game.

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Obviously I have some nostalgia for this machine and its games. I thought that perhaps my love of the game The Last Starfighter was just a part of that. Some relic of a game that wasn’t really all that great tied to the joy only a child can derive from a decent, but thin space cowboy action flick, add some rose tinted glasses and let simmer for decades.

A few years ago I became aware of a project to recreate the game from The Last Starfighter. Not a game based on the movie. The game. The arcade game that Alex Rogan plays. That CG miracle that could not possibly have existed in 1984. It looked like a game that could possibly exist in the distant future. Well turns out the means now.

http://www.roguesynapse.com/games/last_starfighter.php

I’ve tried this game out during many stages of it’s development. The accomplishment by RogueSynapse is not to be taken lightly. They created a real game that looks and feels just like the one you see in the movie. More than that, the game actually works as a game. There is a goal, stages, a sense of progression. To take a few seconds of film footage and reimagine that as a functional game, is amazing.

Is it better than the version I played on the atari 800? No, no it’s not. I went back and played them both. The Last Starfighter is for the atari computers was and still is a fun action / light strategy game. The almost movie perfect recreation, is a tad dull. The newer version has almost everything over on it’s older cousin. Graphics, sound, nostalgia factor. Everything except being a fun game. For that you have to go back to the old Atari computers.

I learned during my research for this post that the game I played on the Atari 800 computer all those years ago was actually well into development under the name Orbiter before the movie license was attached to it. It was later released as The Last Starfighter, and then again as Star Raiders 2. The final name probably suits the game best, since it shares a lot with the Atari classic Star Raiders. The same action/strategy mix played from a first person, space shooting, perspective. I played it again as Star Raiders 2, and do you know what? Still fun. Still fun.

I knew it as The Last Starfighter and it’s one of the best games.

As an addendum, I found this while perusing the web this morning. This is a retail product that needs to happen.

Lego Creations Gunstar

113 - Black Tiger

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Once in a while the game would be extremely popular and the lineup would would be several kids deep. The odds of getting a game in before lunch was over was really low if you were trying to play something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and that machine could handle four players at once. Your lunch would be over, and you would have spent it standing and watching people play.

Other times, a game would barely get any attention at all. Usually it was because they were garbage, like Violence Fight. I know that name sounds like a joke, but Violence Fight is a real game, and it’s as awful as you would expect.

Every now and then, there would be a game that gets some initial attention and then all but a few kids would leave it to play the other games on offer. It was either because the other game was some licensed unit that everyone had some prior knowledge of, like Robocop, or, In the case of Black Tiger, it was because the game was blisteringly difficult.

Black Tiger, titled Black Dragon in Japan, shares some DNA with Ghosts and Goblins. Some would even say that it is a spiritual successor to the Ghosts and Goblins series, but where Ghosts and Goblins is almost unfairly difficult and can only really be beaten through luck and rote memorization, Black Tiger can be mastered through skillful play, caution, and strategic planning. A small amount of memorization helps. The crisp, pixel precise movement of the character, and the ability to level up your weapons, armour, and vitality give the player more than a fighting chance against the tremendous barrage of baddies thrown your way. Just don’t ever get poisoned, never ever get poisoned.

I’ll be perfectly honest. Maybe Black Tiger is only a very good game and not really one of the best games of all time, but here’s where nostalgia kicks in. During those noon hour excursions, and maybe a couple that went slightly over an hour (it was for research), I built up the ability to, at first, beat the game, and then went on to defeat it on a single quarter. I’m sure many other people have accomplished the same feat, but I wasn’t in high school with any of them. Sure it may be a dubious achievement, but anything you manage to get over on the other kids you went to high school with, sticks in your memory. They may not have known or cared at all about my small victory, but that hardly matters, now does it.

Black Tiger, one of, at least my, best games.

107 - DoDonPachi

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - DoDonPachi

speeding wings of light

screaming flurry of bullets

stillness equals death

100 - Battlezone

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The premise of the 1998 remake of the classic 1980 vector tank game Battlezone is schlocky scifi alternate history at it’s best. It posits that the space race was a cover for a covert war fought across the solar system for an alien metal called scrap.

Scrap has the ability to self assemble into all manner of space tank, space factory, space turret, and other space stuff. All you need to do is send out mobile resource collecting vacuums to suck it up in quantities sufficient enough to build new things.

The game is played primarily from a first person perspective, either on foot, or from the inside of a space tank. It would be easy to mistake Battlezone for a first person shooter, but it is a strategy game at its core. You manage your bases, defenses, and troops from on the ground. Issuing orders, building units, and setting waypoints is all handled from inside your tank.

What struck me immediately, was that there was no grid system, no suggested locations for any of the more mobile units. The strategy section of this action/strategy game is about as freeform as they could make it. I would regularly use moon craters and martian canyons as environmental cover, drawing enemies into a prearranged crossfire. Being flexible and using the terrain to your advantage is the key to victory in Battlezone.

The usual point of view for a real time strategy game is from high overhead allowing the player to command and organize their troops board game style. Since Battlezone is played almost entirely from the point of view of a unit on the ground the way you issue orders to your units is unique, and seriously hasn’t been improved upon in the last 16 years. Battlezone uses an incredibly elegant hierarchical menu system that you operate with the number keys. You get shockingly fast at wrangling your troops using this system, and what small amount of micromanaging that you lose by not having a birds eye view, you can make up for with your own tanks combat abilities and movement speed.

Just driving the hovering space tanks around is a pure joy, which is good because driving around is what you spend most of your time doing in Battlezone. You drive over here to tell this unit to follow you, then you drive over there to tell another unit to hold a position. You drive over to one of your other units to order the pilot to switch space tanks with you so you can drive out with a faster, smaller tank. You park that smaller tank in a crater so that it’s hidden when you jump out on foot to go spy on the enemy operations from a high cliff. Then you use your sniper rifle to take out a few enemy pilots while you’re up there. You jump down and hop in one of their newly driverless space tanks, and you drive that back to your base.

Battlezone is space tank driving, strategy thinking fun. There has never been another game quite like it, and it did things that have yet to be improved upon. It’s one of the best games.

087 - Last Blade and Last Blade 2

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Don’t listen to me though, watch this.

084 - Artillery

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The overhand, targeted, throw is a fundamentally human trait. With very little practice, the overwhelming majority of our species can pick up some junk they find on the ground, instantly calculate the weight and balance of the object, raise it above their head, and strike a target several meters away with force and accuracy. Computing parabolic flight, compensating for wind, and predicting the aerodynamic properties of projectile is built into us. Enjoying the activity of throwing things is inherent. Artillery is throwing things, abstracted into turn based strategy on a 2D plane.

Artillery also meets all of my criteria for both a game, and a computer game. It is a solvable, pattern based system where enough of the the calculable information is obscured, or random, that a balance of consideration and intuition is required. There is a specified purpose. That’s it really. That’s a game. Play it on a computer, or better yet, against a computer, and it’s a computer game.

Artillery itself, may not be the most memorable game ever, but the legacy of Artillery, the long and storied history of throwing stuff at other stuff video games, makes Artillery easily one of the best games.

080 - Shogo Mobile Armour Division

Mon, 12 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Shogo is a heavily anime influenced FPS. You would think that the developers would be interested in only lifting the best, most exciting elements from your typical anime. Nope, Monolith went all in and wrote a convoluted plot with too many characters and over dramatic plot twists. It doesn’t skimp on puerile humour and comedic levels of action and destruction. Shogo is as much a parody of anime as it is a celebration. The developers knew exactly what they were making and went for it.

First and foremost, Shogo is a shooter. You play half of the missions as a man on foot running around shooting at bad guys. The other half, you pilot an enormous robotic war machine, but you also shoot bad guys. Both halves are very different, but equally fun.

While on foot, combat is very unforgiving. Contact with an enemy can end with one bullet. Usually, not in your favour. You have to be careful, methodical, and accurate. Attempt to fight more than a couple of enemies at a time, and you will lose. Encounters tend to be more like solving ever evolving puzzles, than improvising with the environment and tools that you have available.

In the giant robot armour you are a walking fountain of destruction. Only other Mobile Combat Armour pose any real threat. All of the weapons are mammoth and devastating. Your enemies carry similarly ridiculous firepower, and your mech suit can feel a bit squishy at times, but mostly you just skate speedily forward riding the wave of explosions. There is some sort of systemic alchemy at play here that keeps the game consistently satisfying.

In a game where it gets just about every other superficial aspect so totally wrong, Shogo manages to get two very different styles of first person shooter play so incredibly bang on right. Shogo earns its spot as one of the best games.

074 - Pengo

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

During the 80s there were about seven thousand computer and game systems that you could port your game to. A lot of games were written for dedicated arcade hardware that could easily cost 10 times what a home computer sold for. The code and hardware were so closely tied in a lot of the arcade machines that the circuit boards were usually one offs. A massive, expensive, collection of chips, wires, and printed boards would be used in one game and that would be it.

Due to this level of specialization, porting a game from the arcade to home computers was more often than not, a ground up rewrite. You might have noticed that the video above was of a game titled ICE and not Pengo. If you could ground up rewrite a game faster than another developer, or better than another developer, and you couldn’t, or didn’t, get actual legal approval to do any such thing, you would put it out under a different name. That’s just how it went. Once in a while a developer creating a clone of a popular game would have the decency to change the art or music as half lidded shrug toward copyright law. Cymbal Software, the creators of ICE, were about as brazen as you can get. This was the version of Pengo I would play at my friends house.

I was aware of the arcade version of Pengo, but the only versions I had played at the time were the ones that were re-creations for the Tandy computers, Atari Computers, and of course, the Commodore vic20 and 64. They were much thinner clones of the original game. Still, I could tell that there was something more going on with Pengo than your standard maze chase game.

All through the early 80s maze chase games, like Pac-Man, were common as dust bunnies. At first glance Pengo seems to be yet another in this genre. I’ve even read it referred to as a maze chase more than once. Of course if you play it you will find that the Pengo shares very little with Pac-Man. First off, the maze isn’t really a maze at all. Pengo’s movement isn’t really restricted in any way. If there is a block in your way, just push it and it will slide until it collides with another block or the edge of the screen. If another block is behind it, smash it and walk right through. It’s not really a maze if you can make your own path. Pengo is action, puzzle, and strategy all at once.

That’s the really fascinating thing about Pengo. All of it’s levels are randomly generated, so while you can create strategies, there are no patterns for winning the game. Planning, and reaction matter in equal parts. The game is a series of interlocking systems that you have to learn and exploit to be successful. I may be wrong, but I don’t think there are many examples of unconstrained, systems based video games, like Pengo, from the early 80s. Pengo may be the earliest example of random level generation where the environment is actually a gameplay element. I could be wrong about this too, but I couldn’t find any other strong examples aside from Rogue, but in Rogue the levels are fixed in place after they are generated, and not really subject to player manipulation. For it’s time, Pengo is pretty unique.

While doing some research on the game, I came across this gem. It seems that some folks have been reverse engineering the original game code to port it to different platforms, emulated and otherwise. While doing this conversion work one guy came across a bug in the original maze creation algorithm. I could go into all sorts of nerdy rambling about how he found that the code is self modifying so the program is actually changing itself as it runs so that the programmers can pack everything more efficiently into the limited memory and processor cycles available. Suffice to say, if you are the sort of person that would be interested in such a thing you should read this.

Otherwise you should probably just watch these really cool videos of mazes being randomly created.

And just in case you missed it, here is Pengo and Popcorn again!Best Games

067 - Beyond Castle Wolfenstein

Mon, 10 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

We played Beyond Castle Wolfenstein in school. We would stay in recesses and huddle around the computer. This was not a school sanctioned activity. Our school did have an apple IIe or IIc in all the classrooms, so this was really just the students making the best use they could of the resources at hand. Maybe a few teachers in the entire school district had half a clue what to do with these machines. The students knew exactly what to use them for.

The disk was one that some kid had brought from home. Probably a twelfth generation copy, not even the distant vapor of legitimate retail lingered around it. No box, no manual, no nothing. We were flying completely blind. Every time we would take a fifteen minute run at the thing, we would learn new controls, and discover new secrets. Learning that you could crack locks if you didn’t have the combination was revelatory. As was finding that you could hold up a nazi guard with an unloaded gun just so you could steal his bullets.

It was Beyond Castle Wolfenstein and a trip to the school library that taught me who Eva Braun was. Before that game, I had never heard of her. While playing the game we discovered so many of her coats and diaries in locked chests and closets, I figured she must be worth looking up. Along the way I also learned about operation valkyrie, and figured out that they character you play in the game is likely a german resistance fighter, and not an intrepid allied soldier like some of the art would lead you to believe. So maybe it was somewhat educational after all.

Going back to the game now, the mechanics are thin, and the content is unique but sparse. What you do see though is the beginnings of something else. The road is pretty straight from Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, and it’s predecessor Castle Wolfenstein, to Metal Gear. This is one of the first stealth action games, even though it’s light on both. Beyond Castle Wolfenstein is the prototype on which one of gamings most enduring genres is built. That alone makes it one of the best games.

062 - Robotron 2084

Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Robotron 2084 is Google’s end game.

058 - Wing Commander

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The first time I played Wing Commander was on a 286. It sported vga graphics and an adlib sound card, but it was still barely able to run this game. The front of the machine housed two floppy drives, a 3 ½ and a 5 ¼. Through some trial and error and delicate file shuffling, I was able to make the game think that several floppies were, in fact, a single drive. This let me play without ever seeing an “insert disc” screen, just so long as I could deftly swap disks when I heard a particular “cachunk” noise. It’s worth noting that I could only do this because the the game was a pirated copy that everyone passed around school. I would feel bad about that, but I went on to buy every game in the series. I still have cd, dvd, and/or digital versions of all of the Wing Commander games.

The digital version of Wing Commander sits now, installed on my thoroughly modern computer. It is almost unplayable. Maybe it was just too far ahead of it’s time. Maybe it always suffered from rough edges and 23 years have cast them into sharp relief. But after 23 years, the music, presentation, sense of sweeping adventure, that hasn’t aged a day. After 23 years, Wing Commander still stands as high water mark. One of the best games.

053 - Alpha Centauri

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Civilization was a loose computer adaptation of the board game of the same name. I love, and have loved, the Civilization series on the PC. It is a solid strategic empire building game, a micro-detailed version of Risk. You have to be simultaneously aware of the global military mechanics, and, municipal level, social and economic dealings. You can, in equal parts, out fight, out negotiate, out research, or out spend the rest of the world. All these machiavellian interactions are set against a scrambled world history that borders on satire. Gandhi is often played as a loose cannon with his finger squarely on the nuclear button.

Alpha Centauri picks up where Civilization ends. Humanity has left the cradle of earth to seek a new home, the extra-solar planet Chiron. Nations lose all meaning and the small population of immigrants become divided by extremist ideology. Most of the gameplay and mechanics that make Civ a great game are still in Alpha Centauri, and some, like the custom unit creator are vastly deepend. Exploration, city management, combat and negotiation with other factions are handled similarly to previous Civ games.

What makes Alpha Centauri a step above the rest of the Civ series is the setting and the tone. Where Civ picks and chooses events from across human history, the story in Alpha Centauri is linear and evenly metered out. Where Civ will play events for satire, Alpha Centauri tends toward the deadly serious. Quotes and writing from history dot the Civ series, but most of the writing in Alpha Centauri is wholly original, and, more often than not, disquieting and poetic.

The Civ series alway boasted exploration and discovery, at least in the early stages of each playthrough. With the exception of a few barbarian tribes early on there is very little danger in exploring or expanding your territory. Chiron, simply referred to as Planet, is the harshest of frontiers. The crust of fungus that covers planet will push against your territories with increasing ferocity as you expand outward. Unthinkable terrors known as mindworms act as Planets native defence, overcoming your explorers with psychically projected nightmares before burrowing through their flesh and bone. Planet does not want you. It is made very clear that you are the alien.

As the game progresses, and the story unfolds, you discover that you are not playing a game of simple mechanics and management. Alpha Centauri is a playable novel with a rich narrative, and a lot to say about the awful nature of colonialism, extremism, and the human drive to dominate. It also has a lot to say about human endurance, adaptability, acceptance of being of the land and not it’s master.

That story is what keeps me playing until the wee hours. It’s that story that I can’t put down. That is why I keep it safely tucked in a box in the basement. If I started playing it I know I would have to see it through. I know I’ll play it again, some day. Or three consecutive days. It will probably make me sick. That’s why Alpha Centauri is easily one of the best games ever made.

050 - Megamania

Mon, 14 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Megamania

- through deep black empty
- drifting between stars and void
- space dice tumble down

046 - Bubble Bobble

Mon, 16 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

There was a Bubble Bobble machine at the front of the candy store in my hometown. It sat beside a Jackal machine, or Top Gunner, if you’re a heathen. Since you could drive a Jeep over dudes and launch missiles at tanks in Jackal, Bubble Bobble didn’t get much love. But while you stood there fighting tyranny, or whatever it was you were supposed to be doing in Jackal, that Bubble Bobble machine was bleeding pure joy.

Everything in Bubble Bobble floats. The bubbles your little dinosaur creature exhales zip rapidly across the screen before drifting lazily upward. The enemy creatures you trap in those bubbles rock gently like leaves on the wind. Your jump follows a slow breezy arc, rising briskly and falling back down with a sleepy pace. Gravity is daydreaming.

Happy Music. Happy movement. Happy Game.

042 - Trio the Punch

Mon, 19 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Usually I write a Best Games about a game that is so good that I think everyone should play it. A game that will have universal appeal. Trio the Punch doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t care if you like it. It has nothing to say. It is a fiercely, unapologetically bad game. The development team is probably still surprised they got away with making it. It probably still makes them laugh.

I think every game developer should regularly revisit Trio the Punch - never forget me. You will come away from it having learned nothing about creating good games. That’s okay, Trio the Punch doesn’t care what you think.

037 - Toy Pop

Fri, 19 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

031 - Enchanter

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Enchanter

remembered in twine.

025 - Star Control 2

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The computer usually sits on a desk out in the shop. On other nights, we would be out there. The shop sits about 100 meters across the yard. The faint smell of gasoline and diesel exhaust permeates everything out there, but that never stopped us from spending hours at a stretch playing games and laughing at our own dumb jokes.

Earlier, we disassembled the computer, carried all it’s components from the shop to the house and reassembled it. The case is constructed of thick sheet steel. We consider, for a while, that 286 computer cases were probably punched in single pieces from the hulls of decommissioned battleships. It makes moving the computer, even a few feet, enough of an inconvenience that we don’t do it often. It also means that it will likely grow roots in any new location. I’ll be told, in a day or two, to pack up the computer and carry it back to the shop. That’s fine. This weekend, we need to play.

The computer is set up on the large, heavy, dining room table. Ghosts of paint jobs past are still embedded in it’s deeper recesses. The table plays host to many items and activities, but only on holidays is it used for dining. We have cleared the sewing supplies, mail, and childrens hockey equipment, from one quarter of the table to set up. There is room enough for two stations. Over the span of 12 or so hours, we take turns manning each. The plan is to play for a few hours then crash on the floor for the night. We’ll pick up the game early in the morning, before we are ejected out into the daylight to “go ride bikes or something”.

Right now, Shawn is going over the maps. He checks the glossy poster against the blue, red, and yellow splotches on the screen, and marks any differences on the photocopies. The narrow slice of our galaxy represented on the map would be unrecognizable to an astronomer, but by now, a few hours in, we know it well. We have added notation for hyperspace and quasispace to the photocopy. Navigating these extra dimensions is old hat. He plots a course, from star to star, around Ur-Quan territory and I operate the keys to pilot us there. If we turned around to look out the picture window behind us, we would see actual stars in the actual sky.

The picture window faces east. Sunlight skates across flat prairie. It scatters through the trees at the far end of the yard past the shop, and paints the dining room a dull gold. We never did crash on the floor.

I’ve seen the sun set, and rise many times before and since. I’ve looked at the bare night sky, stretching out in a perfect dome of sharp contrast black and white. The stars on that map, the night sky on that screen, stands with equal strength in my memory to any sky I’ve ever seen. Because I shared it with my friend.Fest

017 - Encounter!

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Paul Woakes, seemingly alone, created what is probably the original first person shooter experience. There are certainly first person games that came before Encounter, and it would be easy to claim that Encounter is a clone of BattleZone. Where BattleZone is ponderous and methodical, Encounter plays more like the ancestor of Serious Sam. At least fifty percent of the time you will be backpedaling at breakneck speed away from a charging enemy. Attempting to lead targets is made more difficult due to their erratic, relentless behaviour. The action quickly becomes teeth grindingly intense when you realise that you just backed into one of the, ever present, pillars. You have milliseconds to dislodge yourself and escape. You probably won’t. Your game will end with a deafening blast of digital static.

That is the most striking and enduring element of Encounter!. The sound. While the small variety of diamond, circle, and square shapes in the game don’t really drive fear into our hearts anymore, the sounds still do. There is an odd sort of mystery to Encounter. While the rising tone of the kamikaze enemy screaming toward you still holds up, it is the foreboding growl of the level end portal that sticks in my head. A black square spreads it’s maw in front of you, like a rip in space. The game doesn’t reward you for completing a level, it dares you to advance. Even moving from one level to the next is an arduous task, where you have to navigate a barrage of obstacles just to be unceremoniously dumped out of another portal, into god knows where. The ominous and unsettling sound is ever present.

Go find an emulator, since 8 bit Atari computers are probably hard to come by, and try out Encounter!.

012 - Joust

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Joust

rhythmic flap of wings
one press to cheat gravity
van art in motion

008 - Puzzle Uo Poko

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Best Games - Puzzle Uo Poko

I’ll just get this out of the way right off the top.

Whatever you do, do it to the full extent of the jam.

If the perpetual hilarity of the of the warning screen was the only thing this game provided, it would be notable. Lucky for us this is also an excellent game.

The match three to win formula was already pretty worn when this game came out. We had gone through matching shapes, matching creatures, matching colours, matching squares, matching cubes, and matching pharmaceuticals. So what does CAVE do to advance the matching puzzle genre? Take away all control options, save one. You pull down on the joystick, and then you let go. That is the totality of your influence on Uo Poko. Pull down. Let go. I won’t describe the gameplay beyond that, because 12 seconds into this video you will understand all the complexity and nuance that Uo Poko has to offer.

Seriously, if that cats gleeful cheers don’t make your heart happy, then you are dead inside.

There is an amazing thing about Uo Poko. In the opening levels the game is taught to you so well, that when the guide that shows you where your bubble will land disappears, and you are left, unaccompanied, to make the shots yourself, you probably won’t notice. You will likely make several shots, each one precisely on target, before you realize that you did it on your own. The timing required to make accurate shots is etched on your cerebellum, leaving the rest of your brain free to listen to that cat, and feel happy.

There is only one kind of multiplayer on offer, and depending on who you play with, it is either a collaborative, back slapping, we’re in this together, good time, or a hate field of free form griefing, and counteractivity. Both players are meant to take turns firing their bubbles into the same play area, working together to clear the screen. Often, you are able to fire your bubbles at the same time, resulting in a mid air collision. Since each missed shot advances the board upwards by one notch, a few of those can end a game right quick. Maybe you didn’t mean to do it, maybe you did. I won’t judge.

Uo Poko is a great game, where you can do a lot, by doing almost nothing. You should play it to the full extent of the jam.

004 - Magical Drop 3

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Don’t wait for the chime! Move! You pull down the blues and instantly fling them back up.
You have bought a fraction of a second. The reds have faded from the board and you are already there pulling down a single green. Quickly, back to the blues. You toss the green back up, aiming to steamroll the still fading blues.
Don’t wait for the green to collide. There is a gold, one step to the right. You twitch right and pull it down. As the greens fade you twitch back to the left and toss it back up through the sparkling mist.
You run out of moves. The other spheres are two or three moves away. It could be miles. The last, highest, tone fades. You restart the process of setting up the board, clearing a line here and there. Holding off the stomping, inevitable, march of the bubbles. Looking for an opportunity for five, or even six. Next time, you will be faster. Never fast enough. You will strategize to the point of clairvoyance. Never enough. It feels like joy.

You play.