200: Tetris
Year: 1989
System: Gameboy
Blasphemy! One of the top selling games of all time at 200? The inspiration for essentially every puzzle game ever made! Well buckle up, cause games that were inspired by Tetris show up much higher on this list. Honestly, out of all the games on my list, this one traveled and up and down the most. It peaked around the 30 mark, but I felt like I was supposed to have it there and not that I actually wanted it there. I like some of the other puzzle games better than Tetris, but that doesn't take away from how good it is.
My list of favorite games was damn near 400, so the fact that this was in the top half of games I just considered good, says a lot.
199: Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time
System: DS
Not starting off great. I can already see people jumping down my throat for putting this over Mario RPG. Well... I never had Mario RPG, but I did have Partners in Time and I found it charming and addictive.
This was also the game where I learned about the rampant DS bootleg market. I bought this from Gamestop and then tried to re-sell it on eBay. And I got an angry email from my buyer. And then when I told the buyer I had no idea what he was talking about, I got 8 pages explaining different ways to spot bootleg DS carts. I gave the guy a refund at at some point lost the cart in my couch cushion.
198: Donkey Kong
Year: 1986
System: NES
This was the ultimate trial and error NES game. It didn't fell unfair like some games (Looking at you Bayou Billy, you piece of...) but it was challenging. Although it only had like 4 stages, they were a challenge every time you played there. There wasn't really "memorizing" the stages cause things would always bounce weird, frame rates would drop randomly, and there's always that terrible moment where you felt cocky and you tried to get one over the big gorilla.
It never worked out and you always lost a life.
197: Mariokart 64
System: N64
My cousin dragged a kitchen chair into the room, attached a steering wheel to the kitchen table / entertainment center, and put pedals on the floor. I sat 18 inches from the screen and played until 3 in the morning.
I had played the SNES version of Mariokart and I was a seasoned veteran of Wacky Wheels on the PC, but nothing prepared me for the chaos of a 3D racing game.
I was total dogshit and still largely am, but somehow Nintendo pulling off four player split screen with very little slowdown was life changing. I only had one friend who had a TV big enough to actually play four player split screen, but those Friday nights locked in the battle mode were special.
196: Sonic Adventure
Year: 1998
System: Dreamcast
That demo Sears had playing over and over again of Sonic outrunning the whale... that alone gets you on the top 200 list.
To this date, Sonic Adventure is one of the few 3D Sonic games to feel fast and capture the general feeling of Sonic the Hedgehog.
If not for the short comings of the Dreamcast controller or some of the mid-game confusion around what you needed to do, this game would've been much higher on the list.
195: Ice Hockey
Year: 1988
System: NES
Nintendo sort of knocked it out of the park on their first try. This game is old enough to where they could just call it Ice Hockey cause nothing else existed like it yet.
Some people might get pictures of Blades of Steel in their brain, but as soon as you talk about the fat guy, everyone knows this game. You built a team around a skinny fast guy, a very average guy, and a fat slow guy and dammit, that's all the strategy we needed in 1988.
In instead of getting an expensive license like the NHL or Olympics, Nintendo kept it simple and opted for generic national teams of countries that probably played ice hockey.
194: CyClones
Year: 1994
System: PC
My dad worked with a bunch of tech nerds in the early to mid-90s, which meant every now and then, when I went to sign into the ole Hewlett-Packard on the weekend, I'd find random CD-ROMs and Floppy Disks hanging out. Most of the time is was dumb Simpsons WAV files, but sometimes I found find games.
One of those games was CyClones. You know Raven Software, the people that bring you many of your favorite Call of Duty maps? This was one of their early gigs.
I was used to playing Doom where everything technically lived on the same plane of existence or Duke Nukem 3D where if you dared press the Page Up button you'd shoot your weapon into a distorted reality. This was the first first person shooter to use the mouse look. Eat shit Half Life, CyClones beat you to the punch by 4 years.
193: Costume Quest
System: PC
This was Double Fine's Renaissance period. Their second coming. Costume Quest, Double Fine Adventure, Stacking, The Cave... all these very charming puzzle games in a time where we were duct taping chainsaws to our giant machine guns.
This RPG stayed the perfect amount of time, once credits rolled you felt like it had reached a nice conclusion. You didn't have the grind you get in Final Fantasy games. I also happen to be working on a similar game with my brother at the time. Costume Quest beat us to market by a long shot and did it much better than we probably would have.
192: Earthworm Jim
Year: 1994
System: Genesis
This slot was a constant battle between Earthworm Jim and Vector Man. I loved the 2D run and gun platformers of the Genesis era, but could only find one spot on the list for them. And that number is 192.
They were able to have these big beautiful sprites and not sacrifice frame rate or speed. When many games would slow down character movement or felt like you were running through syrup, the Earthworm Jims of the world sprinted and fired a machine pistol.
This was one of the first games that I felt captured that Saturday morning cartoon / Ren and Stimpy art style.
191: LHX Attack Chopper
System: PC
There was a time in PC gaming before the ASDW keyboard scheme wasn't standard yet and you would find your hands playing finger Twister on the keyboard. This was one of those games. Legit, I tried to play it on the Internet Archive and I couldn't figure out how to take off even.
My friends and I thought the maps in LHX were infinite. You could pick a direction and just keep flying, always finding little patches of enemies here and there.
There was nothing more satisfying than loading up a Hellfire missile and firing it on a lone bazooka carrying infantry man on the ground.
The best this game felt was when you locked onto a tank and while dodging it's ground fire just unloaded everything you had. The use of 3D space felt great (in 1990).
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