90: Dead Rising 4
- Year: 2016
- System: Xbox One
It's a miracle that Dead Rising 4 exists at all. The game was almost finished when they decided to basically scrap it and start over. Not only does it exist, but Dead Rising 4 recaptures that weird from the original perfectly and is able to give you the greatest hits of the good things from DR2 and DR3.
You start in a mall, which is better designed than the mall in the first one. Weapons crafting sort of took away from DR2, but DR4 finds a way to make it fun. You move through a military encampment, which then opens out into a full realized town, which is better than DR3. There's plenty of opportunity to drive over zombies, make wacky weapons, take the story seriously, or just mess around for a few hours.
89: California Games
- Year: 1987
- System: NES
California Games didn't really give you much instruction, but the events were bite sized enough to sort
of figure out after a dozen failures.
I didn't understand the half pipe or Frisbee for probably a decade. But every time I played a head to head game of all events, my friend and I would sort of figure out how to partially turn on the half pipe or make it to the "Beware of Bears" sign in Frisbee. And eventually, you find out the half pipe is about timing where you turn and the Frisbee is about catching the disk on it's descent.
Once you figured out the spin move on hacky sack, you could just rack up the points and keep it up in the air the entire time.
Surfing didn't make any sense. It was basically a half pipe made of water and a shark would appear sometimes.
But the skating and the BMX... chef's kiss. Basically high speed obstacle courses, these had you and your friends trying to have a longer and longer run. Sure it didn't make a ton of sense that there was nuclear waste on the board walk where you were skating, but who cares, it was fun to jump over it.
88: Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle
- Year: 1993
- System: PC
Well, turns out I was an idiot kid. Maniac Mansion 2 has some of the best comedic writing in any game I've ever played. I played it again a few years ago... man... holds up.
Day of the Tentacle only suffers from what all point and click adventure games did at this time. There's some puzzles that don't make a ton of sense and you end up just clicking on everything with every object you have. But the game is filled with jokes when you try to use the wrong object, so the slog that was around in say Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, didn't exist. You almost wanted to fail.
87: The Punisher
- Year: 2005
- System: PS2
It's a bit crazy that there aren't more Punisher games. He's basically a video game in comicbook form. 
The same reason why he would work for a video game is the same reason why a movie doesn't really work, Frank Castle kills his enemies. There's no through line story like Magneto or Lex Luther.
The 2005 game was great, but ultimately was written off by the main stream media for two reasons, it took the Mad Max formula and made it better. Even though it was better, it was already done. Secondly, the interrogations caused controversy. Every now and then, Frank would capture a prisoner and say... hold his head under a drill bit asking questions.
And at the end of the interrogation, you could choose to kill the bad guy or let him go. You always ended up killing him, who am I kidding.
86: The Sims 2
- Year: 2004
- System: PC
The Sims had a great loop. It sucked you in doing normal people things in this virtual world. You could live out fantasies with low risk.
You want a pool, get it? Billiards room, regular or bumper pool? And every now and then all the AI routines would come together and create chaos of uninvited neighbors barging in while you pooped and your kitchen caught fire.
85: Half Life
- Year: 1998
- System: PC
Some of you younger people may not remember this, but approaching the first security checkpoint and 
having an NPC say, "Mr. Freeman, welcome..." was game breaking. Never had NPCs actually felt like they belonged in a fully realized world.
The suit with the shields, the way the guns felt, the way the AI seemed to actually have intelligence to do some tactics and not just run at you.
I only had the demo of Half Life for the longest time and I ran the first 90 minutes of the game over and over again.
And when I finally got the full game, that first 90 minutes still somehow felt new and different. I remember the demo ended with you climbing into a vent... I had never seen past this. And then the map opened to an outside spot and it was a world of wonder for the next 10 hours.
84: Mario Strikers
- Year: 2005
- System: GameCube
I want to choose if I'm the turtle guy or the plumber guy.
I want to pick a ridiculously cartoony field.
I want to charge up a shot and make my opponent slip on a banana peel.
Mario Strikers is the forgotten Nintendo sport franchise. Now is the time to strike (pun intended) on the Switch. Come on Nintendo, give the people what they want!
83: Final Fantasy VII
- Year: 1991
- System: PS1
First time I played Final Fantasy VII, I didn't know what a JRPG was. All I saw was moody cover art 
with a spiky haired guy with a giant sword on his back. I assumed you ran around hack and slash style like some sort of dungeon crawler.
I didn't understand why I was fighting via menus. I didn't understand how to balance a healer and a fighter. I didn't understand the story. And I kept dying in the opening reactor area.
I came back to Final Fantasy VII a few years later with the help of a friend who had beaten it. He explained the story line, got me to the meeting of the flower girl, and I was hooked.
I hated Golden Saucer, I hated the Condor Mountain tower defense game, and I hated that the only ways to beat the game was insane amounts of grinding or getting Knights of the Round via some annoying Chocobo breeding.
But boy did I love the story of these sympathetic eco-terrorists and I wanted to see it through.
82: Age of Empires 3
- Year: 2005
- System: PC
This was the game I played during the summers in college when everyone would go home for break. I would haul my tower over to my buddy's house and we'd make frozen pizzas and play scenarios against the computer until 4 am.
People sort of slept on Age of Empires 3. It was right around the time when RTS fatigue was real and the DOTA's and League of Legends were on the up and up. The announcement of Age of Empires 4 has me hopeful that Microsoft will pull off a modern Age of Empires.
81: Time Crises 2
- Year: 1997
- System: Arcade
Time Crises 2 may be the first cover based shooter. It was actually hard to train your brain to duck and 
cover. Every shooter up until then trained you to try to strafe out of the way or find some health.
I generally only had a couple dollars to spend at the arcade at any time, so I never got far on a dollar a play game like Time Crises... that is... until one day in 2000, fresh off a paycheck from the pool place I worked at, I cashed out about $30 in tokens, and I made the choice that my $30 was already spent, so pop those coins into the machine.
And on that day, I saw the end of the game. No one was around to experience it with me, but I did it.
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