Top 200 Games of All Time: 170-161

See games

• 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: 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).