I don't know if I've played a game that has gotten me as worked up as Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The only weapon you have is light and that light is at a premium.
You don't know why you wake up in a giant castle. And at first, you don't really know there's an evil lurking underneath. That is until the first time your torch blows out and all of a sudden, there's something going bump in the night.
And you dig deeper into the catacombs, you come across the water monster, one of the scariest scenes in games ever. My heart was in my throat the entire time. Eventually you make your way to the dungeon where things get more and more tense.
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.
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.
Release Date: December 13, 2002 / September 20, 2013 Played On: Wii-U
The 3D Zelda games only recently clicked with me. I always tried to start with Zelda 64, trying to understand the magic so many people experienced only to find the game really hard to stick with. It's one of those games that didn't age particularly well and runs on the fuel of nostalgia.
It wasn't until Twilight Princess that I truly enjoyed a 3D Zelda game.
I've made it my mission to go back and play some of the other 3D Zeldas to fill in this gaping black hole in my video game life.
I knew very little about Wind Waker other than the relatively young internet losing their shit over toon link. I vaguely remember my brother sitting feet from his SD TV, the hum of the tubes only drowned out by the uplifting adventuring music, sailing across the great sea. I remember briefly trying to track down a used copy for the GameCube around 2007 and finding that the price was above the original $60 for a used copy. But other than that, I knew nothing about Wind Waker before going in.
Nintendo recently announced that the Zelda Wii-U game that they kept promising would be Wii-U exclusive that was still coming... is now going to be cross platform. This essentially means we're going to get a Twilight Princess situation where the NX version isn't as good as it could be and the Wii-U version is going to be missing whatever gimmick the NX version has.
I have a Wii-U and a Vita. Both are probably the most depressed of fan bases in the mid-2010s. It's interesting to see how each handles it.
Vita
The Vita fanbase started getting really salty the first E3 that Sony didn't mention the Vita. I can't remember the exact year, but I think it was 2014.
I think Sony's marketing has long been the issue with the fans of the Vita.
The PSP fans were generally people that liked weird or Japanese games, were into home brewed systems, or wanted console experiences on a handheld. All three of these groups were very happy with what they got.
Well, Sony said the Vita would be almost as powerful as the PS3 and promised AAA console games on the run. Their first big marketing campaign backed Call of Duty: Black Ops: Declassified. The commercial had a bunch of teenager / 20 somethings dudes jumping around and fighting.
Generally the more sub-titles in a game title, the larger the dumpster fire it will be. And it was. This game was critically and commercially panned.
Another AAA third party title came in Assassin's Creed, but it was an incredibly boring adventure. They took the worst parts of Assassin's Creed, slowed the combat down a ton, and soon people weren't sure they ever wanted these games in the first place.
Well, it was too late to pull the plug. Killzone and Uncharted were already coming, so Sony doubled down on the "this is a console in your hands."
And a significant percentage of Vita owners bought the handheld on the promise that we would be seeing Drake's adventures, Helghast being assassinated, perhaps even a new Infamous or Grand Turismo.
Well, things went from bad to worse. We learned that Bioshock Vita was never going to happen. There wouldn't be a new Infamous. Hell, there wouldn't even be a second Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed.
Soon indie developers were put to the forefront of the Vita marketing. Some Japanese games like Freedom Wars filled AAA gaps. But the one thing we weren't getting was the AAA console games we dreamed of.
It was impossible to go to the internet forums and not see people throwing so much hate toward Sony. They felt abandoned, ripped off, swindled.
These are the same people however that spoke of how they put 100 hours into Persona 4, played through Uncharted 2-3 times, loved Gravity Rush, could not wait for Tearaway to be another bullet point on why the Vita is so great.
But they hated Sony.
I feel like an outlier. Maybe I'm just part of the silent and happy. Until I got my Wii-U, I sat on the couch almost nightly embraced by the warm glow of my Vita. I'd play through PS1 JRPGS while watching TV. I spent several hospital stays with Uncharted, Killzone, and Persona 4. I was happy with what I got out of my Vita.
I wish the handheld wasn't dying because it truly is one of the greatest devices I've ever used, but sometimes you have to let things go.
Sony made several missteps. The marketing being the obvious one, but they created what was supposed to be a "console" experience with two touch screens but no bottom triggers. This has recently filled the Vita releases with phone ports. And don't even get me started on the memory cards.
Wii-U
The Wii-U crowd reacted a little differently.
I think because they were one of the "three major consoles" this generation, they've been beat down by every non-Wii-U user for years telling them how much their console is inferior and how it's sales are the worst.
People that bought a Wii-U after launch knew that they would have to stay out of general gaming forums because it would just be punishment.
But the other thing Wii-U owners felt was that Nintendo would never abandon them. Until the news of Zelda being ported to the NX, the forums were still filled with people saying, "Nintendo promised us that if we just waited this would be a Wii-U only Zelda." Fans took the countless delays with grace.
And now they feel hurt. It's much less anger. Much more depression. It's like when dad goes out on a cigarette run and never comes home.
If you look at the Wii-U library, there are some insanely good games. New Mario Wii-U, Super Mario Maker, Splatoon, Zombie-U, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze... but half the library is filled with ports of Nintendo's Gamecube games.
I've killed the battery on the gamepad a dozen times playing Twilight Princess, Mario World, and Mario Maker on the couch.
I do wish the console had another year of life. I felt like I was just hitting a great stride, but at the same time, I've gotten many hours out of the Wii-U and I haven't touched large portions of the library like Pikmin 3, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, New Mario Wii-U, Wonderful 101, and Smash Brothers.
There's a part of me that wishes the internet was more widely used in the 90s. I'd love to see how the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast fans dealt with the quick death of their consoles. Or the couple hundred people that bought into the Virtual Boy learning that they would never see more than the 30 or so games they got.
It's a weird situation we have nowadays. We're more than happy to shell out more than a console for a new phone every two years, a tablet, a TV. But we have this expectation that our game consoles should be around for 7-8 years. Do we need to shift expectations or is the list of traditional consoles so close to be over that we just complain for the next couple years and get on with our lives?
