Top 200 Games of All Time: By the Numbers

Top Years

Years with the most entries on the list

1. 22 games: 1998
2. 12 games: 1996
3. 10 games: 1994
4. 11 games: 1999
5. 9 games: 1993, 1997, 2000, 2008, 2010

And the years with just a single entry: 1983, 1985, 2020. 

I don't think this is surprising. I think many people consider 1998 to be one of the greatest years in gaming. 

It also happened to be the year I was getting paid decent money watching my brothers and I had unlimited time to play games. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 10 - 4

10: Age of Empires 2

• Year: 1999
• System: PC

Age of Empires 2 is the absolute peak of the real time strategy genre. All dozen or so kingdoms were balanced. You could win with the British or the Japanese or the Byzantines. It played like a fighting game, where you needed to learn what made your empire strong. 

And the buildings had scale. Traditionally, RTS buildings would take up roughly 4 squares to your characters 1 square. Well Age of Empires 2 had giant castles. Although not true scale, they made the game feel so much more realistic. 

There was nothing more satisfying than rolling up on an enemy with a half dozen Trebuchets or put in the cheat code and roll in with a missile firing Shelby Cobra. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 40 - 31

40: Legend of Legaia

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

JRPGs were coming out left and right. There was a seemingly endless stream of money for the JRPG subgenre. Hell, Square Enix alone could keep you busy for years. 

Legend of Legaia changed the formula a little. Instead of completely battling via menus, Legend of Legaia had this fun combo system. You would build up a spirit bar and then string together a combo pressing a direction representing each arm and leg. And if you choose a specific combo, it would do extra damage. 

The story is a classic, "young boy in a village must save the world cause some otherworldly force bonded to him." And you run into the sheltered girl and the combat monk guy and god on an adventure resurrecting these magical trees that hold back the evil. The sound track is great, the color pallet really beautiful and bright, and it doesn't overstay it's welcome like other games.  

Top 200 Games of All Time: 50 - 41

50: Hunter Hunted

• Year: 1996
• System: PC

Hunter Hunted is a game that I only know of about four people ever hearing of and less ever playing it. But it's a fantastic platforming adventure game that takes place in the post-apocalypse. 

Aliens have enslaved humans and these Minotaur looking creatures and make them fight for entertainment. You control Jake or Garethe Den (I'll let you figure out which one is the Minotaur) and work together trying to rebuild a car to escape the aliens. 

Every level has objectives and exits you must find. And the best part of the game is there are 20 or so co-op levels where you and a friend can play split screen and try to reach the objectives together. 

I still have a disk copy of Hunter Hunted, but in a terrible Twilight Zone like episode, no disk drive to be found. I check GOG, Steam, and the Epic Game Store at least a few time a year waiting to see if this gets added to the library. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 60 - 51

60: Wario's Woods

• Year: 1994
• System: NES

I bought Wario's Woods on a lark. I went into this awesome retro place (that unfortunately didn't last long) and just asked them if they had any games that were like Mario or Mega Man. 

The clerk sort of shrugged and suggested Wario's Woods, Yoshi's Cookies, or Bionic Commando. 

Bionic Commando was a solid recommendation, but the only thing Wario's Woods and Yoshi's Cookies had in common was Mario characters. And in my opinion, Yoshi's Cookies kinda sucks. 

Wario's Woods is my favorite puzzle game of all time. You stack different... I don't even know what the hell they are... woodland creatures? Trying to get a certain amount in a row. Some of them require diagonal matches, some require two clears, some require two quick clears, all while Wario sits at the top of the screen crunching the play area. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 70 - 61

70: Darkstone

• Year: 1999
• System: PC

Darkstone is more or less a Diablo rip off. But like a really good Diablo rip off?

It fed my need for more Diablo. But it also filled a sort of general need for a role playing game. There wasn't this overarching hell is spilling into the world. There were fully populated villages to interact with. 

There of course were randomized dungeons. Dozens of enemies and spells and weapons. 

Darkstone wasn't better than Diablo, but in a time where Diablo clones were everywhere, Darkstone stood above the rest. 

Top 200 Games of All Time: 130-121

130: Streets of Rage 2

• Year: 1993
• System: Genesis

Streets of Rage 2 is what all beat-em-ups strive to be. An attainable win. Tough. Tons of style. That awesome 1980's movie-punk character design. Smooth frame rate. Variety of moves. And I think ultimately the most important part of a side scrolling beat-em-up, great couch co-op. 

Streets of Rage 2 really kicked off a lot of the 90s attitude. You had some American Gladiator-ass names like Stone and Blaze and Max Thunder. You had a playable character on roller blades. The entire city seemed to be made of brick held together by graffiti and hilariously translated signs like "It's Like Boo" and "Do! Baseball."

The Top 200 Games of All Time: 150 - 141

See games

• 200-191
• 190-181
• 180-171
• 170-161
• 160-151

150: Grand Theft Auto IV

• Year: 2008
• System: Xbox 360

Grand Theft Auto never really sunk in for me. I hated driving, I hated gun fights, I hated racing, I hated staying fit, getting hair cuts, driving across town, getting murdered by the dumb physics, driving across the neighborhood, the final missions, and driving in general. 

I sort of lucked into Grand Theft Auto IV. I was grocery shopping at a Wal Mart around midnight and saw the huge line. I sort of thought, what the hell, let's see if they still have a copy. Well, the ended up splitting the line to open another register and guess who was second all of a sudden? This guy. 

I took it home and let it download all night long. And when I got home from work the next day, I started my journey. 

Don't get me wrong, I still hated the driving and the gun play was still bad, but I liked the characters. I wanted to see what the game had to offer. I saw it through and generally enjoyed it. There was still one of those classic annoying Grand Theft Auto final missions where you're driving while shooting, my two least favorite things combined into one 20 minute mission. 

Where I got the most out of this game though is the sandbox online mode. My two friends and I would load up, get weapons, and then choose where we were going to dig in and see how long we could outlast the cops. 

149: Dragon Quest Builders 2

• Year: 2018
• System: Switch

This is going to be the most shameful thing I say in this entire project, but I've never played Minecraft. 

I skipped out on it when it first came out because I wasn't doing much computer gaming at the time. And then by the time it was available on consoles, Notch turned out to be a terrible person. 

But I get it. Dragon Quest Builders 2 is an absolute delight. The towns people give you a request (build a bathhouse, build a barn) and as you fulfill their requests, the town gets larger and you get more tools. I spent way too much time in the second village area building and building and un-necessary building. 

If I had one complaint, it's that the combat gets in the way of my fun. I think you could completely remove that aspect and the game would be better for it. 

148: Army Men 3D

• Year: 1999
• System: PS1

This is the best Toy Story game ever made. No, it's not a licensed Toy Story product, but you played as the little green army men against the tan army men. Most of the game takes place in what seem like real battle fields, but then the tan army gets a hold of a weapon that can harness the sun's power and melt the green army. 

This game advertised to kids had a vast array of kind of complicated missions. You might need to sweep a mine field, or sneak on your belly into an enemy encampment, or drive a tank through an entire battalion of tan soldiers. 

The best part was the split screen two player deathmatch mode. One day in a particularly hard fought battle with my brother, I accidentally found a secret path up a mountain and outside of the map. But it was designed out. It wasn't like I clipped through the map where I wasn't supposed to be. There was a mortar up there and a Tinker Toy. When I picked up the Tinker Toy, it flashed "key." I spent the next year in a web ring with a dozen other enthusiasts trying to uncover what the keys do. We found two other keys in the multiplayer levels, but never figured out what they did. 

Finally, I got the idea to just email 3DO and a few days later, I got something from one of the devs. He basically said the keys don't do anything, they just thought it would be a fun Easter Egg. 

147: Jackal 

• Year: 1986
• System: NES 

Jackal was inspired by 1980s love affair of everything American military was cool. Drive a jeep around

with your buddy firing machine guns and grenades at everything. 

Your objective is to clear the enemy out of maps while rescuing POWs. This was actually the part I enjoyed the most, you could blow a hole in the side of a building and between 1-5 POWs would jump into your jeep. Then at the halfway point and end point of the mission a helicopter would land and allow you to unload your crew while dodging rockets coming from tanks and foot soldiers.

The immediate thing you'll notice is the striking color pallet. Your army green jeep is dropped from an airplane onto bright orange desert. 

In some ways this was a more intelligent 1942. The enemies felt like they were real people in Jackal instead of just swarms driving face first into your guns. 

146: Zork: Grand Inquisitor

• Year: 1997
• System: PC

There was an 8 year period, where if you were going to release a PC game, it was either a flight simulator (Tie Fighter), a point-and-click adventure (Maniac Mansion), or a graphic adventure puzzle game (Myst). Zork fell in that last category, except unlike Myst, it didn't take itself seriously. 

Zork is basically Harry Potter meets Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's an entire world where magic and wizards exist in a sort of modern sense. The jokes all poke fun at how stupid everything is. 

It did have one thing in common with Myst, some of the puzzles were impossible without just trying every object on every object. I would've never gotten through this game without Gamefaqs. 

145: The Unholy War

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

The Unholy War was a surprise. When I was broke as can be, I would buy used PlayStation 1 games

from Blockbuster. I had only seen advertisements for the Unholy War, but I couldn't really understand what it was. It sort of looked like a third person fighting game with monsters, but maybe it had some real time strategy elements?

And the answer is yes. It was a board game, where you could spawn more troops if you managed resources properly. And when you rode up on an enemy, the game would turn into a fighting game between the two chess pieces. 

This was one of the best two player games on the PlayStation. A game that flew under mosts radar, but should have been held up as one of the top games for the platform. 

144: Bust-a-Move 4

• Year: 1998
• System: PS1

There's two ways to have your match color/shape puzzle games. The ones like Tetris and Dr. Mario where the pieces drop at you or the ones where you shoot a piece at the board, like Bust-a-Move. 

I always preferred the Bust-a-Move style games. I felt like my brain handled the anxiety better and I was able to see patterns and combos easier. 

Bust-a-Move features our favorite dinosaurs, Bubble and Bobble, firing colored orbs toward the top of the screen, trying to knock like colors down. I played this for hours on the PS1. It was an addiction. 

143: Borderlands

• Year: 2009
• System: Xbox 360

Diablo, but a first person shooter, with humor, a cool art style, and split screen co-op? Unheard of in the

modern era. I thought couch co-op was dead. There were too many nights where a buddy and I would sit on the couch, intention just to have a beer before going out, and just scrapping out plans and getting Borderlands drunk together. 

The excitement of the random stat die everytime you picked up a weapon. Wanting to know what psychopathic boss was waiting around the corner. Desperately trying to sprint from the spawn point before you partner died. Untouchable fun for games at the time. 

142: Sid Meier's Civilization VI

• Year: 2016
• System: Switch

I'm a strategy fiend. I've been waiting for something to come to a portable system forever. Civilization was teased on the Vita, but ultimately we got a phone game port. 

Civ VI works better than it has any right to be. The switch controls are incredibly intuitive for a game that usually you are shortcutting your way around a keyboard on. 

This is a classic, "One more turn" game. You start counting your moves until the next upgrade is finished. And when the enemy is at your gates, you have to decide to finish out other upgrades or immediately throw every military unit you can crank out at the threat. 

141: Gladiator 

• Year: 1995
• System: PC

The wild west of the shareware period of PC gaming had me playing some really weird shit that a dude

in his basement programmed. I spent hours downloading a single 500 KB game from "FreeGamedemos.com." 

Most of those games were crap and I would end up deleting them immediately, trying not to think too much of the wasted modem time. 

Gladiator by Forgotten Sages was one of those rare winners. You had a budget and could build out a team of adventurers to fight an enemy army. It was four player co-op, and my two brothers and I would crowd around a keyboard, trying to get at the 9 buttons we needed to move and attack. 

Gladiator is available on the Internet Archive to play. However, the pre-WASD keyboard mapping strikes again. It's basically unplayable because Esc is used so often, which is also the key to exit the emulator. 

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. 

Spoopy Games: The Early Capcom Horror Games

Capcom went to the survival horror cash cow as often as they could after their success with Resident Evil 1. They were known for their beautiful pre-rendered backgrounds, stiff controls, 3-6 hour games, and campy voice acting.

There was a time where you could argue they were better at horror than fighting, something inconceivable in recent years.

And this, this is where my obsession started. The games weren't enough. I started buying Resident Evil comics (they are all terrible), Resident Evil action figures (really awesome), and even jackets with the Umbrella logo on them.

Spoopy Games: Random One Offs

As I've said, I was addicted to Resident Evil. I'd always flip through my Official PlayStation magazine looking for the words Resident Evil clone, I would write down the name of the game, and keep the list in my wallet for anytime I went to Babbages with some extra cash.

I ended up getting a lot of random horror games for the PlayStation 1 and 2. This learned behavior has followed me through to today.

Even though horror games have become more popular thanks to the rise of indie games and hot demos like PT, I still have fun hunting down the lesser known games.

So this list is essentially a mix of things that I didn't know were going to be important at the time and things that are still little known or played that have a special place in my heart. 

Spoopy Games: Silent Hill

With Halloween quickly approaching, I figured I'll do what every other gaming blog and site does. It's time to cram lists of spooooookkky games down your throats.

Today, I'm focusing on the Silent Hill series.

A series that got in early on the survival horror game and one that Konami seemed to keep it's hands off of through the first several.

Silent Hill's foggy town was often used to sell the PlayStation 2. It's demonic scenes and story line kept large portions of the mainstream away from it. It's influence has spread to both games and film, becoming more than a Resident Evil clone. Silent Hill is a survival horror pillar that will forever be talked about in video game history.

Ape Escape

Release Date: May 31, 1999
Played on: Vita

I started making real $5.15 an hour sort of money right at the end of the PS1's life and because of that, I made some questionable purchases with my newfound paychecks such as the four player dongle for the PS1.

This also meant that anytime OPM told me there was a must have game, I knew I must, and I would buy it.

One of those games was this game I had heard nothing about called Ape Escape. It was a revolutionary game that required you had a dual shock controller because all of the weapons were controlled by the sticks.

Until Ape Escape, I pretty regularly stuck with the d-pad for all control as I was used to it. (To this day, I can't play the classic Resident Evils or Tomb Raiders on the analog sticks)

Ridge Racer Type 4

Like a lot of people, the original Ridge Racer was one of the first games I played on the PlayStation 1. It was accessible enough, showed off the fantastic CD player capabilities of the system, and looked fantastic compared to other early 3D games.

... buuuuuutttttt, that came with the caveat of there only being one track (two if you count the reverse track, three if you count the little bit extra track added in expert) so it didn't hold much interest once you got first place. It mostly because the centerpiece of showing off why your PlayStation was better than a Nintendo 64.

I moved onto Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, Cruis'n World, and Test Drive 5, (also known as 1996-1998 my racing formative years), and even had a short flirtation with NASCAR 98 and it's paintball mode.

But nothing gripped me the way that Ridge Racer Type 4 did in 1999. In fact, I'll be bold enough to say, Ridge Racer Type 4 is my favorite racing game of all time.

Editorial: Fear Effect

With the Kickstarter launching for a new Fear Effect, I decided it was time to dust off the double jewel case and see if I still enjoyed the original, almost 20 years later.

It was a weird time in gaming. Japanese games still largely ruled and anime was incredibly popular on Cartoon Network. At the same time, to appeal to American's, a lot of games sort of had this injection of "attitude." It's something you can see in the top walk through on GameFaqs. The author really told that mom off. Many games felt like a Mountain Dew commercial with samurai.

I remember drooling over the advertisements in previews in the Official PlayStation Magazine as far back as when it was still called "Fear Factor." (Before the metal band, Fear Factory, threatened a lawsuit)