Just like the title says - i will count down my all time top fifty favorite video games in this thread - the key word here is “MY” – there will be some on here that will raise an eyebrow and some I’m fairly certain few if any have ever even heard of - this isn’t going to be all at once, though i don’t have an exact time frame for doing updates - there’ll be at least two or five days between each new post, though there can also be a couple depending on how busy I am - Feel free to offer thoughts or opinions or comments, or not.
this is old school try-die-repeat gaming at its best - You try the level, you die - and then you do it over and over again until you finally beat it a half hour a later - A bit of an exaggeration, but it’s one of the rare games that gives you a real satisfaction from beating it - Most games entertain you, but don’t necessary really challenge you; Super Bubble Blob does both.
It’s even cooler because it’s a free game made by some guys sitting around at home and not a $30 title sitting on a store shelf, which I believe it could very well be if the guys wanted.
If interested, you can download the game from this site.
This is real multiplayer my friends - You and three pals. squished together on a dingy couch in your basement, blowing the crap out of each other - No lag, no anonymous opponents - Anyone can pick it up and play after two minutes of practice. We used to have all kinds of fun with this - everything from one on one deathmatches for skilled players only to huge tournaments where half the neighborhood showed up. No exaggeration on that either - it was amazing how many kids of all ages we could stuff into that basement.
i put it under the "other" category; if i had to get specific I'd call it a "Party" game. It has a single player mode, but if you played it more than once on a random rainy Saturday afternoon then you're missing the point - It's pure multiplayer with the more people, the more fun it is - It requires almost no gaming experience to play and the matches are lightning quick, which made it perfect for parties - It was the sequel to the also awesome Super Bomberman - and it had some positives (better single player for those who cared, special power-ups for match winners) and negatives (worse levels, much lamer glove power-up) over its predecessor.
I know i knocked on the online multiplayer a bit, but if there's any game that could use a massive release with that feature, it's Bomberman - there have been some in the past, but they were smaller releases on less popular systems such as the Dreamcast. If a Bomberman compliation pack came out for PS2 - I'd have to seriously rethink my no-online mindset.
In retrospect - i m deeply disappointed in Square for not bringing this one out stateside in any way, shape, or form. Not for the NES, not in a remake for the Wonderswan, not even in one of their recent compilation packs for the PSOne. For the fans that think the FF series really kicked off on the SNES or or PS - you must not have played this game - Many have played the original FF and some even the recently brought over FF2, but those were mere stepping stones to this bad boy.
The graphics and gameplay are only slightly better than the original but this one fleshes it out with a fantastic class system and a storyline that is more enjoyable ten minutes in than the entire thing from the earlier entries - it is the classes that make the game truly enjoyable though - Every RPG has battles - and this one is up near the top in making them fun as opposed to a chore - it is tough to explain, but being able to change your characters' abilities on a whim does wonders for keeping random fights against slimes and ogres interesting.
It's sad, but this game is only available in English via illegal roms. It's incredibly easy to find if you're interested, although I can't post here about how to go about doing that - For anyone that enjoys classic styled RPGs, i recommend taking the time to sniff this one out. You won't be disappointed.
It's a tough game to explain. At its heart, it is unbelievably simple - A series of buttons appear at the top of the screen, and when a cursor moves above one of those buttons, you push the corresponding button on your controller - Repeat twenty or so times per stage for six stages. That's the entire game. No real bonus modes or secrets to be unlocked.
Despite the seeming nothing-to-it quality this game seems to possess, has anyone played this game and not loved it? I don't think it's possible - For those unaware, it is a music game, but not just any music game; the music is the catchiest, coolest stuff I've ever heard in a game - I've got all six stages' raps on my computer and I listen to them like i would with any other song - the graphics are neat, with everything having a paper doll-like flatness to it - It just fits with the game so well nothing would have worked as perfectly if they were typical sprites or models - the cast is made up of cool characters, every last one of them. Cutscenes in between stages are bizarre yet funny, telling the ridiculous story the game uses to link levels together.
This probably isn't the type of game that is really worth owning, as there isn't too much to it after you beat it on the second day. However, it is the type of game that absolutely everyone should play through at least once - i have no clue how one would go about playing it now if they didn't already in the past, but if the opportunity ever arises, I urge you to take it.
i had never strayed off of a Nintendo console to get my 3D platforming action - i had Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, Super Mario Sunshine ... plenty enough platforming to tide me over - frankly i couldn't imagine even moving around a 3D world with anything but a Nintendo controller - then something happened. A pair of platformers, Jak and Ratchet, were released for the PS2 to rave reviews - i took notice but never actually went out to buy them.
Fast forward a year - and Nintendo had gone dry on me - they hadn't put out anything worth buying in the genre since Sunshine which i'd beaten a couple of times already - the sequel to each of the PS2 platformers had just recently come out - i think it was around Christmas- i figured if I asked for them as gifts and didn't have to pay - there was no risk, right?
Great idea!!!!!!!!
I played Jak II first - and i loved it - it was almost like a Grand Theft Auto game, just based in an alternate world - Huge city with tons of traffic to carjack, mini games, guns to take down the baddies, citizens walking the streets, choose your mission gameplay, cops to chase you down if you kill too many people, and so on. Gameplay is very varied, with everything from driving missions to hoverboard competitions to target shooting to straight platforming - the game recently dropped down to only twenty bucks as a greatest hits title - so there's no reason not to pick this one up unless you hate platforming or GTA.
i bought this game because i picked up Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 a few months earlier and loved it - and was looking for another extreme sports game to keep me entertained - i remembered this little game getting a review of like 9.5 on IGN not too long ago, so I went out and picked it up - i remember the big deal with it was the cel shaded graphics and the fact that some groups protested the game because it supposedly advocated gang-related graffiti; needless to say, i wasn't sure what to expect.
Well, it definitely isn't an extreme sports game (which is why I marked it "Other" instead of "Sports"). You use your rollerblades to move around - and you can earn some points for grinding, but that's about it - there are four types of goals that the game's thirty or so levels have: beating a rival skater in a race, mimicking a buddy skater's line - chasing down and tagging rival skaters before time runs out, or having to find and spraypaint all the graffiti spots while avoiding the cops or rivals or dogs or anyone else out to get you - the game is set in the not too distant future, and you're a member of a new startup gang who is looking to leave your mark on your city - there is an amazingly bizarre story tying all the levels together, which is pretty awful but in such a way that you can't help but watch with a stupid grin on your face.
The only negative thing i have to say is that there was a sequel released which I never have gotten a chance to play. It's the closest i can come to giving myself a reason to pick up an Xbox. ;)
Here's a bit of interesting trivia i have come across often enough that i believe it's real - the Mega Man X series wasn't designed to be a Mega Man game at all. In fact, it was a series that was supposed to star newly created Zero - However, two factors made Capcom decide to swing things around and add the Mega Man element to it: people were screaming out for an upgrade for Mega Man from the NES to the SNES - and they weren't sure if a series based around a character nobody had ever heard of would sell well enough - they knew that they had a quality game on their hands, and they wanted it to make it big - adding the super popular Mega Man element to it guaranteed it of that.
Mega Man is my all time favorite video game character (side note: Mega Man and X are not the same "person," but for all intents and purposes - i treat them as the same) - i have loved his games from the very first entry on the NES. Even when people started to get tired of doing the same thing over and over again - i still enjoyed it quite a bit - i even bought many of the series spinoffs, from the interesting Legends to the awful Soccer.
The original X game is still my favorite of the post-NES games - it has the most memorable villains, the least intricate storyline (i don't need a deep story in my 2D platformer), the coolest weapons - it was also the first, and it's hard to get past the nostalgia of the original. i would recommend everyone who likes their emulation to download a copy - although i must warn that it's a darn tough game to play with a keyboard - you have to hold a direction and dash and jump and charge your shot all at once - a controller is really needed to get the real gameplay feeling.
I'm a 2D person - there's no way around it, it's what i grew up with, it's my first love in gaming. Its usually simpler but more fun and more challenging. The fighting genre was one i stuck to that conviction with for a good long while - i played a bit of Tekken for the PS, but outside of that, i was perfectly happy with with the 2D offerings. Then the Dreamcast came out with the launch title Soul Calibur.
I'm usually pretty good at using my own judgement on games, only using reviews as a general guide and more going on what i know I like - If a survival horror (one of my least favorite genres) game gets a 9.2 rating, i am not going to pick it up, no matter how wonderful they make it sound. However, there's a difference between getting a bunch of 9.0 ratings and getting 10.0 ratings across the board - Soul Calibur wasn't getting anything below a 9.5 from any source - and most of my most respected review teams were giving it a perfect score - i was picking up a DC and needed a game for it, so I chose Soul Calibur. Boy was i not disappointed.
Good character variety, amazing graphics, widest move selection i would ever seen, a very cool mission mode -- all qualities this game had - It could be played by experienced fighting game fans or by people who'd never touched it before - and they'd all have a good time.
i haveve never been into football games on the same level as the average gamer. Sure i enjoyed picking up Madden every couple of years -- i think i owned one copy for Genesis, one for PS, one for PS2 -- but i never outright loved it like most people. Fast forward a bit to the summer of 2002 when a potential new football pickup came out - i don't think i have ever watched a full game of NCAA football - and I have no clue what really makes it different from the pros - i just knew that I wasn't getting whatever other people got with the pro football series so i went the college route.
It's something i can't really explain. I love this game. I still play it, 2+ years later. i haven't even looked to pick up the sequels, because this one seems so perfect - i don't know what makes it so much better than Madden for me - what makes it good enough to play for several years after its initial pickup. This is all a bit more vague than my usual description, but i honestly don't really know why - All i know is i still have as much fun playing a game of football now as I did two years ago - and that has to count for something.
This game is not as perfect as most of the others on the list - It's too easy in most places and too hard in a few, but rarely in the middle. Most levels have a very similar feel; you never seem to be doing much new - Bosses rarely require much effort. You get about a million 1ups during your adventure, making it impossible to ever actually lose.
No - this game is not perfect in a typical review sense. However, it succeeds in the one category that really truly matters to me -- fun factor - i could care less if the game is impossible to beat, completely made up of stick figures, and has no sound effects at all. It's the fun you have playing it that matters. Kirby's Adventure, like all Kirby games, is just flat out fun.
You walk around, suck up enemies, steal their powers - there's just something about taking an ability from an enemy that is cool - not just in this game, but in any game. This game takes it to the max though - nothing beats turning into a superball, or a UFO, or even making the mistake of absorbing the enemy that does nothing but sit there and sleep.
If you played all the FF games without knowing what order they came out in, you'd swear this was before FF4 - the graphics aren't as good really, the storyline is barely there, you only control five characters over the course of the game (none of which are fleshed out at all), and so on - However, it has that one thing that always seems to make an RPG fun: a job system.
I talked about it a bit earlier, but a job system always improves the fun i have with role playing games - Battles are more interesting when you constantly are changing abilities - and you actually want to get into them so you can get level up your job - You have to decide which skills match with which job, weigh whether its worth taking the time to level up a job just to get a particular skill ... the whole thing just makes the game more enjoyable for me - a game doesn't have to have this to be loved by me, but it never hurts.
There isn't much else to say about this one actually - It has an excellent job system, very fun and often challenging battles - and not too much else. Normally this wouldn't amount to a game I'd put on my top fifty list, but this one has that SNES era charm - iI didn't play this one until we'd already moved forward into the later PS era when i was desperately looking for simple 2D RPG action - Nostalgia works its wonders again.
Ok what happened to the Zelda series? If that is not on your list **** you don't deserve to be a gamer. Btw this is only Nintendo or are you gonna include other consoles as well?