Top 200 Games of All Time: 160-151

See games

• 200 - 191
• 190 - 181
• 180-171
• 170-161

160: Assassin's Creed: Black Flag

• Year: 2013
• System: PS4

Assassin's Creed 3 sucked. It didn't have any flow to the game. The forest and tree jumping didn't replace the feel of parkoring through a city. 

On top of that, the story was pretty lame. And besides a few missions (like running through a Revolutionary War battle), I don't remember a damn thing about the game. 

So when Assassin's Creed: Blackflag was announced, I wasn't convinced. Luckily for Ubisoft, what the hell else was I going to play on my new PlayStation 4?

The ship battles were a blast, the small piece meal islands everywhere gave you unique scenarios you couldn't just run from, and the story both in the pirate world and in the modern world was fun.

The ACII trilogy left a lot of really interesting story lines open, ACIII took itself too seriously and killed the momentum of some of those storylines. Blackflag took it in another direction and just got so meta-snake-eats-tail-way, that it was great. 

An evil gaming company has figured out how to generate games based off the memories of former assassin's. And then the plot starts unraveling nefarious happenings at the fake Ubisoft. 

159: Urban Strike

• Year: 1992
• System: Genesis

The "strike" series was a staple of the 16 bit era, coming to a culmination with the fifth generation's

Nuclear Strike. Even though there were two Strike's on the newer consoles, the 4th generation's Urban Strike is the peak of the series. 

You flew a helicopter with limited fuel and limited ammo (you could pick up more) and you would get various missions. You may need to steal giant mirrors from the bad guys, rescue a plastic surgeon who did work for the cult leader, or blow up an oil rig. 

As a kid, this game just seemed limitless. (Checking a YouTube walkthrough, I realize now it can be beat in under 3 hours pretty easily) You could choose between a few different choppers. There were missions where you would drive a tank or run around on foot. 

For Urban Strike, there was some Bond villain like cult leader that you were trying to stop. The cult leader ran for president and lost the 2000 election, ultimately forming a coup of some sort. 

158: Fighting Force

• Year: 1997
• System: PS1

Anyone with a PlayStation 1 had this demo. It came with your PlayStation, it came with magazine demos, it came with any Eidos demo disks. And because you had this demo, you played the parking lot area in front of the evil headquarters or Dr. Zeng hundreds of times.

Somewhere around the 70th time, you realized there was a bazooka hidden in the trunk of one of the cars. Which in turn had you playing another 70 times trying to figure out what else was hidden. 

I bought this game eventually and it became a co-op go-to. Each of the four characters had different stats and a different special move. The frame rate stayed up, the combat was varied and challenging, and the interactivity of the environments kept things interesting. This is the last beat-em-up game to get it's hooks into me. 

157: Contra 3: The Alien Wars

• Year: 1992
• System: SNES

My cousin got a SNES three years before I had a Sega. I was still stuck on the NES. So when he invited

me to spend the night and fired up the Super NES for the first time, my jaw hit the floor. The colors were so vivid, the sprites so detailed, and in the case of Contra 3, you saw what Mode 7 could do. 

We launched into the first game, the background seemed to move independently of the foreground. Enemies attacked from all sides. Power-ups flew overhead. But your brain couldn't put everything together because your finger was on the machine gun and jumps buttons constantly. 

And in the Contra tradition, mission 2 was from a completely different perspective. Instead of the long shooting gallery we know from the first game, we instead had a top down perspective that became popular in the PlayStation era with games like Loaded. 

And then in mission three, you're flying through the air, jumping from exploded piece of city to exploded piece of building. And then there was the patented 90s motorcycle level. And incredibly varied boss fights. 

Contra 3 is the best of the series. 

156: Perfect Dark

• Year: 2000
• System: N64

The missions were better than Goldeneye. The designs much cooler. The weapons much more interesting. And you could play the entire story in Co-op mode. Perfect Dark was such an interesting game. 

There were definitely downfalls. Requiring the expansion pack to give the RAM a boost was a huge bummer and extra cost. In fact, when I rented this from Blockbuster the first time, they didn't tell me about the expansion pack and I lost a day of rental. 

And then there's the other downfall. The multiplayer had the standard death match, but there were also something like 100 scenarios you could play through co-op. The issue is, every time you added another player, the frame rate was cut by 3/4. So if you dared trying to get four people into a game, expect every flick of the joystick to freeze your screen right before jerking your gun 110 degrees. 

Perfect Dark HD fixed some of these issues. The game didn't age well, especially the N64 control scheme, but there were few other games (until Halo) pulling off the technical feats Perfect Dark did. 

155: Pocket Bomberman

• Year: 1998
• System: Game-boy Color

I've always enjoyed playing the various Bomberman games against my friends. There's a tenseness with

trying to move quickly, think quickly, without trapping yourself between a bomb and a wall. 

Pocket Bomberman took the top down perspective and flipped the same sort of game play into a platformer. There was a cat and mouse game of trying to plant bombs to take out the enemies, without taking out yourself. Sometimes the timing was frustrating as you barely warmed the mid-section of an enemy and other times you found yourself standing next to a bomb without much you could do. 

154: Syndicate Plus

• Year: 1994
• System: PC

Syndicate was my first introduction to the corporation owned future dystopia. Corporations grew more powerful until they replaced the world governments. People lived in squalor. The corporations came up with a chip they could insert into a human that numbed their perception of the world. This of course lease to cyber enhancements and advertising directly to the brain. 

You could choose to either play as the corporation or as the rebellion. Essentially you lead a group of four cyborg soldiers in missions meant to stabilize regions and gain control for your corporation. But this wasn't just corporate espionage and buy outs (there was a little of that), these corporations have no qualms about carrying out assassinations and bomb detonations to meet their quarterly goals. 

153: Super Mario Maker

• Year: 2015
• System: Wii-U

This was the first Mario game since Galaxy to capture that childlike wonder in me again. I could load

up a level in any Mario style I wanted and had an unlimited treasure chest of them. 

Sure, many of the user generated content wasn't great, but I was amazed that there was this universal language of Mario where I could hop in, understand the intent behind the designer, and then see a Japanese or French flag next to their name. 

Mario is Mario is Mario. It's a unifier. 

And then when I finally went into the build tools, I was almost overwhelmed at all the ideas, the creativity that flowed through my brain. I was instantly the 5-year-old, cross-legged on the floor, drawing Mario levels on graph paper. 

152: Resident Evil

• Year: 1996
• System: PS1 

I didn't know how much I needed survival horror in my life. I was definitely too young to understand this game when I first played it. The puzzles were a little over my head, (I spent dozens of minutes trying to figure out how to equip the Emblem as a shield) but the moment I figured out you could push the statue over the railing and get a key, I was hooked. 

My cousin and I did a controller pass, examining every item, and looking for a hint. We were always low on ammo (on account of killing everything in every room) and ink ribbons. Eventually I found Gamefaqs, printed out a walk through, and we made it through. (Although, we were out of ink ribbons at the end of the game and had to play the final 30 minutes over and over again until finally beating it)

I've bought this game in every form it's existed in. The Director's Cut (with a much worse soundtrack, but interesting "Arrange" mode), the DS post with some new touch screen sequences, and of course the remake. 

151: Die Hard Trilogy

• Year: 1996
• System: PS1

Die Hard Trilogy is three good games in one. 

There was the third person shooter that covered the first movie's plot as you scaled Nakatomi Plaza. 

There was the incredible light gun game that covered most of the plot to Die Hard 2. 

And then there was the incredible predecessor to Crazy Taxi, where you drove a taxi to grab bombs in time that covered the plot of 3. 

Die Hard trilogy was one of the most complete games ever made for the PlayStation 1. It's unfortunate that the sequel was lackluster because I would've loved to see what other John McClain adventures they could come up with. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 170-161

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• 200 - 191
• 190 - 181
• 180-171

170: Shovel Knight

• 
  Year: 2014
• System: Vita

I didn't know I needed Shovel Knight when I finally played Shovel Knight. I had just come off of a marathon Persona 4: Golden play through and had played through Uncharted 4 and COD Advance Warfare on the PS4. I was sort of exhausted from big experiences. 

Then Shovel Knight won my heart. 

The levels and enemies were a perfect combo to feel challenging, but totally do-able. You have a sense that you did something special, but obviously the game is built to allow you to win. I'm not that great at platformers and I made it far in Shovel Knight. 

It captured the feel of a NES game without any of the frame rate issues, cartridge limitations, a Nintendo seal of approval. 

169: Sonic Spinball

• Year: 1993
  
• System: Genesis

The frame rate was dogshit. I just need to get that out of way. Like single frames per second. But it was the early days of the 16 bit consoles. This was a common occurrence. So you adapted. You learned that the top right of the Spinball board had too much going on and things would crawl. 

There was a ton to do in this game. Lot's of objectives to complete to unlock chaos emeralds and boss fights. 

This was one of the first games I had for the Genesis, so I grew a fondness for it because I didn't have anything else. Even today, I dream of a rerelease where they redo the phsycis and give us the pinball game we deserve. 

Microsoft introduced Space Cadet with Windows 95. This is the pinball game most people remember. But Sonic Spinball was there first, and bette.... well not better... but FIRST!

168: Guerrilla War

• 
  Year: 1987
• System: NES

Guerrilla War was one of those games that just sort of appeared in everyone's entertainment center during the NES reign. No one ever bought it, but everyone owned it somehow, and it was a go-to multiplayer game no matter which friend's house you went to. 

I owned both Ikari Warriors and Guerrilla War to fill my top-down co-op combat games library. Guerrilla War was vastly superior. 

Large sprites, the characters moved quickly, and it felt innovative. One thing that Ikari Warriors was missing was the map being used to actually create varied and interesting scenarios. GW would have you rush through a wide open jungle where you could maneuver around. Then you would reach a village that had houses to hide behind, but you also had to be careful because the enemy could spwan from behind them. You'd get pinched between two high walls with machine gun nests on top and would have to throw grenades while dodging. 

167: Gekido

• Year: 2000
  
• System: PS1

I honestly had too much money when I was 14. I was paid something like $60 a week to babysit my brothers, which meant every other week I would go to the mall and blow it all on video games and paraphernalia. And on one of those trips, I bought the flour player multitap for the PS1 thinking, "Finally, every brother can play at the same time." 

And then I had a multitap and no games. So I did an internet search, "Hey Jeeves, what are the PS1 games that support the use of this $40 thing I bought."

Gekido Urban Fighters was on the very short list and was only $30. So I bought it and was surprised to find it was a really fun brawler that had a chaotic fighting arena mode that was Powerstone before Powerstone was Powerstone. 

166: Cool Spot

• 
  Year: 1993
• System: SNES

I was a dumb kid. I never knew with the hands of well placed marketing were massaging my brain subtlety. McKids... collecting those golden arches and cheeseburgers... didn't put it together. 

Cool Spot... literally the logo for 7Up, jumping around in platforming action, collecting more 7Up logos, title screen has him surfing on a bottle of 7Up... yeah, didn't think about it. 

In a way, I'm sort of glad. This was actually a really fun platformer. It ditched the normally rigid right angles of the platforms and instead the definitely rigid right angles into what looked like hand drawn backgrounds. And you'd flip around, spitting what I now know is Sprite, at all your enemies. 

165: Diddy Kong Racing

• Year: 1997
  
• System: N64

Why the hell haven't we had another Diddy Kong Racing game? Seriously, you ask people about this game and they get a far off look in their eyes and a smirk. Is it rights issues with all of Rare's characters? Does Nintendo hold the rights to a game from a studio that is a Microsoft shop now? 

When you think of the third person games where you flew, it was this, Rogue Squadron, and Star Fox. The air races were great, they literally brought another dimension to the races we knew from Mariokart. 

And, probably it's greatest accomplishment, this was one of the few games where the N64 controller actually felt natural. 

164: Kagero: Deception II

• 
  Year: 1998
• System: PS1

This is such an unique premise to a game. Soldiers come to your castle to kill you, some sort of witch/demon. You passively kill them by setting traps around your castle and luring them into it. 

I was first introduced to Deception II via a PS1 demo disk. The demo allowed you to kill three enemies and you had access to four or so traps. 

There were so many ways to set the traps and lure the guys into them. And then I accidentally discovered combos when my swinging ceiling axe knocked a guy into an electric chair. I played the demo for hours but could never find a copy of the game in the wild. 

Then as a college kid, just casually strolling through a second hand shop in town, I found a copy for like $45. A hefty price for a game that was 7 years old at the time, but I bought it, and to my pleasure found that it was as fun as I remember. 

163: Castlevania

• Year: 1986
  
• System: NES

Castlevania seemed so cool in the 80s. To have an adventure that had branching paths and secrets everywhere was unheard of. I really loved Simon's Quest and didn't know which one to put on this list. It wasn't until I was an adult that I realized how unfair Simon's Quest was. 

I had all the time in the world to come up against obtuse puzzles and to whip every brick in every wall looking for a secret. 

I fell off this series hard. I don't have the patience for any Metroidvania game anymore, but there was a solid few years where I would blow into the Castlevania cartridge and play for hours. 

162: Super Mario World 3D

• 
  Year: 2013
• System: Wii-U

The Wii-U had some great games on it. It's just too bad the controller sucked and had to be within 10 feet of the console and collected fingerprints like crazy. 

Super Mario World 3D was one of the best Mario games since Galaxy. This was an obvious throw ideas on a white board game. Nintendo would introduce a new mechanic in a level... and then just throw that shit away for a new mechanic in the next level and the next level. 

And damn if I don't love running around in the cat suit. 

If the rumors are true and this is coming to Switch next year for the Mario anniversary, everyone should pick this up. The game has so much charm, so many interesting ideas, and it just really light hearted.

161: Demon Sword

• Year: 1989
• System: NES

By now you've probably seen a theme with NES games that I like. They are all fast. Games on the

Nintendo tended to be very stiff and slow movements. (Fester's Quest anyone)

Demon Sword was fast. You'd quickly jump from tree to tree at breakneck speeds, tossing ninja stars, swinging your sword, and eventually fighting a boss. 

The objective was to rebuild your broken sword. So you start the game with a blade about as large as your forearm. And as you collect pieces, this shit gets wild. You think Cloud's buster sword is huge, this thing can get to be like 3 times the size of your sprite. 

And as an added bonus, the American cover art was that semi-homoerotic late 80s like buff shirtless dude with a sword. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 180-171

See games

• 200 - 191
• 190 - 181

180: NFL Blitz 2000

Year: 1999

System: PS1

The original NFL Blitz was this great game. It had that XTREME 90s attitude. It took the stuff you liked about Mutant League Football, but got the license from the NFL. 

NFL Blitz 2000 is the perfect version of that game. It's the last football game I enjoyed playing. My brother's and I have some incredible memories of 4th and goal, down by 6, and the game hinged on inches. 

I've since played the arcade version much more, but I still think the PS1 controller felt the best for the game. The game still plays well, it just might not look great... you know... blowing like 12 polygon models up on a big screen isn't the best. 

179: Crash Bandicoot Warped

Year: 1999

System: PS1

I guess today's list has a theme, and that is 90s raditude. It was the height of Bandicoot mania. Sony was running commercials of the mouthy protagonist calling Mario out of Nintendo's headquarters for a street fight. 

The platforming never felt great in the first two Bandicoots. Developers still hadn't really figured out platforming in 3D. Some played it safe and did a sort of 3D perspective like Crash. Some played it safer and did a sort of 2.5D thing like Pandemonium or Ironman X/O Manowar. And some just went full in and we were so mesmerized that we ignored how bad it felt, Mario 64 looking at you. 

Crash Bandicoot Warped was the peak of the PS1 platforming. Naughty Dog would revamp the platformer on the PS2 and get it completely right, but we had Warped, and it had animals you could ride, attitude, and a solid challenge. 

178: Command and Conquer II: Red Alert

Year: 2000

System: PC

Rush rush rush rush rush to build that nuke. That was always my strategy. It worked maybe 1 in 6 matches, but when you pulled it off... nothing more satisfying. The explosion would bring your network connection to a crawl, and when things returned to normal, there would be a giant empty hole where your enemies buildings used to be. 

Command and Conquer was the third pillar of the RTS genre (Age of Empires and Star Craft being the others) and I felt like largely it was a dad's RPG. I don't mean in that it was meant for older people, but just every dad that had a computer loved Command and Conquer.  

177: Micro Machines

Year: 1991

System: NES

The Nintendo actually had a few really solid racing games and I couldn't decide which one to have on my list. I had Super Offroad on here at one point, but ultimately Micro Machines won out. There was something that sparked this childlike innocence speeding over pencil bridges across gaps and dodging blocks. Years before Toy Story existed, Micro Machines created that "alive" childhood universe. 

You raced cars, boats, and helicopters, and as you win races you collect the Micro Machine to put in your carrying case. The secret was... they ball basically controlled the same, but the environments could change things up. The tabletops gave you precision control, the mud caused you to slide across the the road, and the water ... well the water pretty much felt like the mud. 

176: Rocket Knight Adventures

Year: 1993

System: Genesis

Platformers were the norm at this time. Everyone wanted their hit mascot platformer. Mario and Sonic were giant piles of money in the form of sprite characters. 

Each of these platformers tried to have some sort of gimmick to separate them from the pack. Kid Chameleon had masks you could switch to to have different powers. Toejam and Earl had a funky soundtrack. 

And Rock Knight Adventures had a jetpack that allowed you to charge up and bounce off walls and levels were built with this mechanic in mind. You'd jetpack over obstacles and fling your sword at pig knights.

The levels were gorgeous, the sprites were gorgeous, this was just a fun beautiful game. Simple as that. 

175: Eternal Darkness

Year: 2002

System: Gamecube

Eternal Darkness was one of the most interesting horror game ideas, maybe not packaged the best, but fantastic despite itself. 

It played largely like a Resident Evil game, but a little more maneuverable. Find a key, find a tablet, progress to the next area. Oh yeah, and there was time travel. 

The ideas that went behind horror, breaking the 4th wall, making you question real life. Was my memory card deleting itself? Did the TV turn off? Did I just see a spider crawl across the screen?

All of this contained on the third place console and never re-released. It's a damn shame. The things they could do with VR. Can you imagine if they made it sound like someone was in the room with you? I mean, physically in the room with you. Only to have you take your VR helmet off, look around, and by the time you slid it back on, you were surrounded by creatures. 

174: Dead Rising

Year: 2006

System: Xbox 360

Dead Rising sold me on the Xbox 360. I had been leaning PlayStation 3, but I was a broke college kid, so the price of the PS3 kept me away from it.  I didn't really feel convicted about any of the new hardware. 

Late one night, maybe a week or two before it came out, I watched a preview of Dead Rising on X-Play. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Hundreds of high-def zombies, surrounding a car with a photographer standing on top of it. I watched the 3 minute trailer and went to Best Buy release day and bought an Xbox 360 and Dead Rising. 

I played the game for about five hours and was murdered by a horde of zombies. And then the game restarted and I realized I was at level 6. And then I died again, but this time 10 hours in. And I started the game at level 16. 

I realized I had been playing this game all wrong, trying to fight the mechanics instead of use them. Once it clicked, this became my speed run game. I'd run it over and over and over again. 

173: Nier

Year: 2010 

System: PS3

I still can't tell you why I like the original Nier so much cause I will spend the first 10 minutes warning you about the boring combat, the large swaths of open land with nothing to do in them, and the worst fishing mini-game I've ever played. 

But there was something meditative about the game. The soundtrack, the repetitive button presses put you into a rhythm to just relax your mind. I loved the NPCs. They all had the brand of weird you get from Zelda NPCs. Just the whole game in general felt a little bit like a David Lynch experiment. And then the ending slapped me upside the face. I didn't see the twist coming. 

Nier has been sitting on my shelf for about 8 years now, waiting for a replay in the New Game +. 

172: Wolfenstein 3D

Year: 1992

System: PC

A floppy disk labeled Wolfenstein 3D sat next to my dad's keys and wallet. He was working 3rd shift with a bunch of IT nerds. Every now and then he would come home with a handful of Genesis games, or a NES cartridge, but something computer related was special. 

I didn't know what this was. I didn't know if it was even something I was supposed to be playing. But I knew I had four hours before my dad woke up and I wanted to see what a Wolfenstein was. 

After a few times misspelling Wolfenstain in the DOS line, it finally launched and what was presented to me was magical. Nazi killer B.J. Blazkowicz moved around in a 3D space. And it wasn't like those busted ass multimedia experiences like 3D Dinosaur Adventure, this was an honest goodness castle filled with Nazis for me to kill.

I spent hours pressing space bar on every inch of wall, looking for that sweet sweet secret. And then one day, I loaded up a save, found the end of the level, and was introduced to Meca-Hitler. 

171: Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker

Year: 2010 

System: PSP

The crazy bastard did it, a full fledged Metal Gear Solid on a portable. Not only did Kojima and team figure out how to make a full fledged and good Metal Gear game on a portable device, but Sony released arguably the coolest version of the PSP, jungle green. 

I had fun sneaking around the guards and doing Metal Gear things, but the most memorable part of this game were the boss fights. You were always playing around with the best combo of weapons to bring in, trying to not call in an air drop if possible. It was a game of chicken, trying to get distance, drop some C4, and then baiting the tank into your trap all while dodging artillery being fired your way.

Being that this game ran on a UMD, there were some gates built so the system didn't self-destruct. Missions were generally limited to 3-5 rooms (large and highly detailed rooms) and there would be a ranking, comicbook style story telling, and a shop between. Peace Walker is woven into the fabric of Metal Gear canon and arguably changed the universe more than any other Metal Gear game. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 190-181

See games

• 200 - 191

190: Medal of Honor

Year: 1999

System: PS1

I got a copy of the Official PlayStation Magazine. There was a center story that was an interview with

Spielberg where he talked about how exciting videogames as a medium was. 

He talked about how he could have symphony quality soundtracks with the disks and that technology has come far enough along to where the AI could react to what you were doing rather than just running at you. He talked about how they were programming the enemies to jump on grenades or take cover. 

I honestly didn't believe anything he was saying and expected the game to never exist. 

But we got it. Mission 2 especially stuck with me, the spy mission in the train station. You could hear some vague french music in the background that seemed to echo off the walls. The tension and anxiety built as you presented your papers to more and more German officers. 

189: Oregon Trail

Year: 1985

System: PC

Just the most brutal of dice rolls with every move you did. Would fording the river end with broken legs and lost supplies? Probably. Would half of your wagon party die of terrible disease, odds are in favor of it. And at some point would you spend too much time hunting and have to just discard a bunch of meat on the side of the road like white people actually did... you betcha!

But you know what, it was the only game on those somehow already outdated Apple II/DOS machines in your computer lab and you were happy to have it. Bang out your Mavis Beacon assignment and then switch over to the "learning" game. 

And when you inevitably died before reaching the west coast, you got to leave a curse word filled tombstone on the road, your semi-permanent mark on this game. 

188: Pokemon Red/Blue

Year: 1996

System: Gameboy

I came to Pokemon late. Long ago did the school yard stop talking of Red vs Blue vs Yellow. Everyone was looking to the next generation. 

My little brother bought a Gameboy Color fairly late in it's life and that's when I caught up on the classics. 

Pokemon Blue passed the time on a 4 hour car ride to the Ozarks in what felt like minutes. And that first game gave birth to my tradition of spending too much time trying to catch every Pokemon in the first grassy area and grinding up until I have a Pidgey maxed out with mega-pecs. 

187: Wii Sports

Year: 2006

System: Wii

Everyone knows the "dah dah dah dahhh dah dahhh dahhhhh" startup music for Wii Sports because this was the harbinger of the waggle revolution. 

Wii's were in such short supply that I spent roughly $100 more than face value and that was considered a good deal. After I got another Wii-mote and Twilight Princess, I legit could not afford another game for months. 

So you bet your ass I was playing bowling and baseball every weekend. I threw my arm out the first weekend I had this thing, throwing spicy fast balls before I realized you could cheese the hell of the controls. 

Wii Sports permeated the culture so much that even my grandma still has a Wii hooked up in her basement for the grand kids. She has two games, Wii Sports and a dancing game. 

186: Clock Tower

Year: 1995

System: PS1

The horror boom of the Saturn/PS1 era had it's hooks in me. After Resident Evil, I search for every

horror game I could find. 

This game had me staring at the PS1 mouse weekly at the local Babbages. The controls were dog shit. It was one of those move the cursor around the screen using the controller as if you had a mouse. 

But everything else around this game was great. The story had twists, the puzzles were hard but do-able, there were like eight endings, and anytime scissor man showed up, the music changed and you had seconds to figure out where to hide or fight. 

More than any other horror game of this time, Clock Tower force situational awareness on you. You needed to case a room as soon as you entered or else end up as a teenager chopped in half by a guy wielding giant scissors. You needed to know where you could hide or what could be used as a weapon.

185: The Simpsons Arcade Game

Year: 1991

System: Arcade

One of my fondest memories of my childhood was the day at Showbiz Pizza, for a buddies birthday, where each kid got a fist full of tokens, and four of us crowded around the Simpson Arcade cabinet. 

None of us had ever made it past the second mission. A third level was a schoolyard myth. "I heard it's in a blimp." "I heard it's at the Nuclear Power Plant."

It was this day, armed with the power of capitalism, that we all got to experience Springfield's Discount Graveyard for the first time together. And this would also be the first time we experienced what became a 90's beat-em-up staple, the elevator level. 

Xbox live released this briefly on their service and it wasn't until I had the power of unlimited continues that I realized this entire game is only about 35 minutes long. The magic of an arcade game you only could play a few times before you ran out of quarters was gone. You started seeing the seams of how they ripped money from unsuspecting kids allowances. Had I not played that version of the game, this likely would've been comfortably in the 80 range. 

184: Spider-man and Venom in Maximum Carnage

Year: 1994

System: Genesis

Roughly 14,000 beat-em-ups came out in the mid-90s era and only about 10 of them were actually any good. This was a gem. 

The sprites were maybe a little blurry looking, but if you crossed your eyes and just paid attention to the bright colors, this game looked great. 

It was fast, the combos felt good, and it was one of the first good comic book games we got. It was precious. Do you remember how cool it was when the first Xmen movie came out? You know, before we got 36 Avengers films? It was special like that. 

I couldn't afford comics and the internet was in it's infancy, so I had no clue why the hell Spider-man and Venom were teaming up... or what Carnage was, but I knew he was bad and I knew we had to punch him. 

183: Street Fighter 2

Year: 1992

System: SNES

My cousin got Street Fighter 2 for his birthday. Our only fighting game experience at this point was Mortal Kombat, but there started to be murmurs of a "superior" fighting game on the playground. 

Well, my cousin took the hit for us. He asked for and received Street Fighter 2, eating $80 of his birthday budget. 

Like everyone, we discovered jamming buttons to make Ehonda do his fast punches and Blanka do the electricity early. Then we tried to figure out how we were jumping off the walls with Vega and Chun-li. And eventually one of us would accidentally throw a fireball with Ryu and spend the rest of the night trying to recreate it. 

I never got good at these style of fighting games where all of the moves required half or quarter circles. I want to be good at it so bad, but it's just not a thing that clicked. 

I'll still pop a quarter into a faded arcade machine, quickly beat Blanka, and then lose to Ken with a smile on my face. 

182: Super Mario 2

Year: 1988

System: NES

There's nothing worse than the ending to Super Mario 2. To find out your entire adventure was nothing but Mario's dream... get bent. That's creative writing 101. Don't kill the protagonist for a cheap emotional reaction and don't do dream sequences. 

The main reason it sucks is because Mario 2 (Doki Doki Panic) is actually a really good game. The level design is varied, the puzzle aspects clever, and it has some of the all time best Mario boss fights. Throwing bombs at Mouser, the classic Birdo fights that end ever level, and Triclyde who tested your dodging skills. 

I'd usually play it safe and use the Princess hover power, not realizing there was some benefit to being able to pick items up and dig fast with Toad or jump incredibly high with Luigi.

It's a shame Nintendo has decided to distance themselves as much as they can from this world. I would love a New Super Mario 2 on the Switch. 

181: Simpsons Hit and Run

Year: 2003

System: Gamecube

Crazy Taxi is an incredibly addictive game. Now what if you opened Crazy Taxi up to a larger world and dropped a Simpson's coat of paint on it. 

That's basically Hit and Run. This is by far the best Simpson's game ever released. The driving physics felt great, the mission structure was chaotic and had a great balance of barely beating it, but feeling like you accomplished a great feat. And the voice acting was top notch, something you would hope for with a Simpson's game. 

It was a blast to drive around Springfield and see where all the set pieces actually fit into the city. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 200-191

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

Year: 2005

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

Year: 1996

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

Year: 2010

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

Year: 1990

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).

Top 10 of 2019

I spent nearly half this year traveling, so Switch was king. I'm starting to associate the Switch with traveling, more than a videogame machine. My PS4 is a relaxation machine, associated with a rare weekend at home with a hot cup of coffee.

This is a list of not just games that came out in 2019, but games I played in 2019. (AKA There may be some games that came out in 2018)

There's also a glaring game missing in Pokemon Shield, which was my second most played game this year under Assassin's Creed. Pokemon Shield did not make the cut. The collecting aspect is still fun, but I found too many mechanics annoying. (dialog prompts taking too long, annoying AI using the wrong attacks when teamed up with you and healing potions prolonging fights they will not win)

This is probably a damning testament to how I choose to spend my time.

But anyway... onto the games!