Pyro II is an old OLD DOS game. You are a… a… big pink square? I guess you’re supposed to be a guy. And you trail this line behind you that is a wick. A few seconds after the level starts, the wick starts to burn. Scattered around each level (they are labelled with the names of famous buildings, like “The Louvre, Floor 2”) are bottles of fuel. You trail the wick past the bottles and when the burning wick hits them, they explode and burn the walls. You have to lead the wick past as many bottles as possible to burn as much of the level as possible before exiting the level. If you ever touch any fire, you’re done. It’s got a bit of the old snake games with the transgressiveness of a Grand Theft Auto.
porousnapkin – Starseed Pilgrim is a fascinating exercise in teaching a game through the game itself. I haven’t conquered it, but just exploring it is an enthralling experience. Also, you owe it to yourself to give the demo for Recettear a try. Genius little RPG that’s only half like any other RPG.
nijimeijer – Hope I’m not dashing any good feelings, but I think Toy Commander is by the makers of Little Big Adventure (AKA, Twinsen’s Odyssey), which is actually a neat little game (and sequel). Also by the guy who came up with Alone in the Dark, so that’s pretty good pedigree.
charmtrap – Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m going to guess that there’s a pretty cool story–or very fond memories, anyway–behind Planetfall being near the very top of your list. You have more Infocom games on your list than even I do! Also, you just reminded me that I need to try to get somewhere in Anchorhead again. Also also, yay Sanitarium!
I appear to have momentarily lost my mind. Minutes after posting the reply to Thraeg, my brain started jumping at all the other changes I’d have to make to his list till I was fully satisfied with it, and while I really do like his list a lot, I ended up detouring from it a bunch and in that process just wrote up my own damn 100! I cheated because I got to check the rest of yours to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
[ol]
[li]Okami[/li][li]Dark Souls[/li][li]Brogue[/li][li]Chrono Trigger[/li][li]Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup[/li][li]Shiren the Wanderer[/li][li]Spelunky[/li][li]Super Mario World[/li][li]Civilization IV[/li][li]Katamari Damacy[/li][li]Bastion[/li][li]Dwarf Fortress[/li][li]Hotline Miami[/li][li]PAC-MAN Championship Edition DX[/li][li]Proteus[/li][li]Rez[/li][li]Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney[/li][li]Noitu Love 2 Devolution[/li][li]Everquest[/li][li]Super Street Fighter IV[/li][li]Clean Asia[/li][li]Europa Universalis IV[/li][li]League of Legends[/li][li]Dawn of Discovery[/li][li]Xenoblade[/li][li]Vagrant Story[/li][li]VVVVVVV[/li][li]Super Smash Bros.[/li][li]Wario Ware[/li][li]Planescape: Torment[/li][li]Atom Zombie Smasher[/li][li]Super Meat Boy[/li][li]Mondo Medical[/li][li]Civilization II[/li][li]Frozen Synapse[/li][li]Persona 4[/li][li]Bayonetta[/li][li]Metal Gear Solid 2[/li][li]Shadows of the Damned[/li][li]Dragon Age: Origins[/li][li]Nox[/li][li]Waves[/li][li]Nidhogg[/li][li]Iji[/li][li]Super Mario 3D World[/li][li]Etrian Odyssey IV[/li][li]Elite Beat Agents[/li][li]Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3[/li][li]Prince of Persia (2008)[/li][li]7 Grand Steps[/li][li]Final Fantasy VI[/li][li]Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance[/li][li]Towerfall[/li][li]Super Hexagon[/li][li]Victoria 2[/li][li]Imperialism 2[/li][li]Super Metroid[/li][li]Shadow of the Collosus[/li][li]City of Heroes[/li][li]Bioshock[/li][li]Uplink[/li][li]Killer 7[/li][li]White Butterfly[/li][li]Knytt Stories[/li][li]Frog Fractions[/li][li]Binding of Isaac[/li][li]Final Fantasy XII[/li][li]Portal[/li][li]Sonic Generations[/li][li]Baldur’s Gate 2[/li][li]Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare[/li][li]Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer[/li][li]Diablo III[/li][li]Viewtiful Joe[/li][li]Settlers 7[/li][li]Bejeweled Twist[/li][li]Final Fantasy Tactics[/li][li]Chrono Cross[/li][li]Braid[/li][li]Jamestown[/li][li]Thirty Flights of Loving[/li][li]Mega Man X[/li][li]The Walking Dead[/li][li]Natural Selection 2[/li][li]FTL[/li][li]Castlevania: Symphony of the Night[/li][li]Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past[/li][li]Dragon Quest VIII[/li][li]Secret of the Mana[/li][li]Red Dead Redemption[/li][li]Skyrim[/li][li]Crypt of the Necrodancer[/li][li]Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter[/li][li]Starcraft 2[/li][li]Crackdown[/li][li]Unreal Tournament 2004[/li][li]Desktop Dungeons[/li][li]Beyond Good and Evil[/li][li]Dreamfall: The Longest Journey[/li][li]Ys: Ark of Napishtim[/li][/ol]
Before I made the list, I thought of myself as a more mechanically minded gamer. I tend to think of my favorite genres as strategy games and story-lite RPGs. Then I made my list and found the biggest contribution was games with insane aesthetics (Mondo Medical, Hotline Miami, Shadows of the Damned, Nidhogg, etc.).
I also realized I like JRPGs a lot more then I let on. I usually tell people I’m not a JRPG fan and play them rarely, but a good chunk of my favorites ended up being from that genre. I think I feel I’m not a fan of them because I have such a strong aversion to certain anime tropes (I can’t play any game in the Tales series at all, for example). But the JRPGs that don’t feel too cute anime I love to death.
And I ended up with more FPSs then I expected. Those games almost always make me car sick, but there are a few that felt worth the pain. I didn’t expect to have a Call of Duty game on the list, but I found CoD 4 very powerful when it released. It was probably the last heavily scripted game I played where the magic still worked on me.
Simply, Floyd is the best and maybe the only character in a video game that I’ve ever gotten somewhat emotional about at the ending of that game. In just a few lines of text they managed to bring him to life, in a weird sort of way. I had the same reaction to Floyd that I did when Bambi’s mother gets shot. Plus it was just an awesome game, good puzzles, great setting with loads of atmosphere…my favorite of all the Infocom games. Though I loved them all, really.
Anchorhead is definitely worth puzzling through, or even just going through with liberal use of a walkthrough. And yeah, Sanitarium! That was a random pickup off of a bargain bin table in the late 90s and loved it! I should try to install it again and see if it holds up.
Alright, napkin: Google tells me Mondo Medical and Clean Asia are cactus games, which are hit or miss for me (which is fine, considering what he’s like). Can you give a “You might like Mondo Medical/Clean Asia if…” statement for these? Also, a lot of you have Shiren the Wanderer on your lists. What is this thing, and do I need it on my PSP?
Also, you guys have me wanting to make my list of favorite console games. I would be lucky to make it to 50, though, because of my limited exposure.
How is Dungeons of Dredmore not even in your top 100? I demand your title be removed!
Isn’t Hex still in Beta? And it made your top 10!? I really need to play that game sometime.
I wish I had time to dive into this task. Traveling for business last week and this. Maybe when I get back for the weekend.
Some games I haven’t seen mentioned much surprisingly (but maybe missed on some lists): Papers Please!, Rage of Mages, Nox, Evil Islands, Kohan series, Betrayal at Krondor, Crusader No Remorse/Regret, Anvil of Dawn, geez I really need to make my list.
Actually, Betrayal at Krondor has gotten quite a few mentions, including yours, Spect. Someone tell me why you love it. I think I played a tiny bit of it way back in the day (maybe a demo?) and I don’t really think of it as part of the list of great classic RPGs. Am I just ignorant, or is there maybe something about it that makes it a personal favorite more than a popular one?
For me, I think it came out at a time when I was starving for more RPG games. It had a decent element of exploration in it, and finding a treasure chest was generally a very good thing, as supplies were limited, and a chest would often contain healing items and better gear. Especially the chests locked with riddles.
I believe it was also a very early 3D game, or something in the graphics made it very unique. My memory isn’t the best on these things.
I also recall the story being very good. Not so much fantasy, a bit more realistic.
You might like Mondo Medicals if you like David Lynch films and Antichamber. Where Antichamber expects you to trip through the solution to puzzles, Mondo Medicals seeks to actively deceive you away from the solutions (but the puzzles themselves are similar). Where Antichamber’s minimalist visuals are used to put the focus on how to solve puzzles, Mondo Medicals minimalist visuals are more to about the aesthetics of horror. Also Mondo Medicals probably only takes about 15 minutes to play.
You might like Clean Asia if you like punk / hip-hop aesthetics and Warning Forever. Clean Asia has an amazing soundtrack and a simple but intense (very punk) visual style. It plays like a shmup if you use one of the two pilots, but the other pilot plays as a melee character. You have to ram through enemies to collect their ship pieces which you can then use as a weapon to kill them with. It’s like Warning Forever because every fight in the game feels like a boss fight, but all the encounters are tightly designed not programmatic like Warning Forever.
Shiren the Wanderer was the roguelike that got me into roguelikes. It is most often compared to Nethack (and was almost certainly inspired by it) but the different ways you can use items is much clearer then Nethack. I played the DS version, and it had this cool feature where stories developed throughout each playthrough. So in one playthrough you would meet your brother in a bar, but your actions could inspire him to stop drinking so that in subsequent playthroughs when you ran into him he’d join you as an ally. The PSP version appears to be a port of the Wii edition. I didn’t like that game very much at all. It tries to combine roguelike gameplay with more traditional JRPG style story-telling and ultimately fails at both.
Ok, so this is my list! I took a looong time, since my specific constraints was to not look at lists. Force myself to work from memory. therefore, this are not necessarily the games I think are “best” (whatever that means, I dunno), but those who left a more lasting impression on me. It also means the list probably skews a little bit too much towards contemporary titles, and it probably includes games I’d dislike now but that at the time totally engrossed me.
Since the idea of "quality"is a little bit weird, I was not very strict with the ordering. The first 40 or so I feel very emotionally attached to, but after that the ordering means only the order I remembered about them.
1- Sid Meier Pirates!
2- A link to the Past
3- Final Fantasy VII
4- Wing Commander 2
5- Gabriel Knight I (II was better in some ways, but I stuck with me more)
6- Last Express
7- Castlevania Symphony of the Night
8- Blade Runner
9- Wipeour 2097
10- Fallout 2
11- Drod - Journey to Rooted Hold
12- SpaceChem
13- Starflight (the superior Genesis version!)
14- Dungeon Keeper
15- Day of the tentacle
16- Beyond Dark Castle
17- Lemmings
18- Bayonetta
19- ADOM
20- Phoenix Wright (I-III)
21- MGS 3
22- Tactics Ogre
23- Persona 4
24- Doom
25- Dominions 4
26- Crusader Kings 2
27- Another World
28- Tie-fighter
29- Total War: Shogun 2
30- P.T.
31- Operation Flashpoint
32- Minecraft
33- Rise of Flight
34- Shin Megami Tensei II
35- Esp.Rade
36- Chaos Overlords
37- Kuru Kuru Kururin
38- Elite Beat Agents
39- Super Puzzle Fighter
40- MDK
41- Thirty FLights of Loving
42- Dungeon Crawl (Stone soup now, but I started back then)
43- Battle Bakkraid (1CC’d this fucker)
44- King of Dragon PAss
45- Sim city 2K
46- Dark Souls
47- Theme Park
48- Syndicate
49- VVVVVV
50- Passage
51- Prince of Persia (original 2D one)
52- Super Metroid
53- Blazblue
54- UFO Enemy unknown
55- Warlords 276- Mass Effect 2
56- Shiren the wanderer
57- Alien vs predator
58- Ocarina of time
59- Valkyria Chronicles
60- Monkey Island 2
61- Civilization 2
62- Pax Imperia (NOT eminent Domain)
63- Winter games (Apple Plus version)
64- Tetris
65- Dracula X
66- Soul Blade (never could get into the sequels)
67- Super Mario World
68- Etrian Odyssey
69- Arkham City (to this day the only Open world game I have finished. SoM will be next)
70- Omikron the nomad soul
71- Lords of Midnight
72- Road to Moscow
73- Adams Family SNES
74- Z
75- Gran Turismo (the only driving game I’ve ever been able to get into but for WipeOut)
76- Cosmology of Kyoto
77- MFS (one of the simple, early B/W versions)
78- Quake (single player)
79- Micro machines
80- Super Star Wars
81- Alpha Centaury
82- The witcher 2
83- I-war
84- Flashback
85- The Walking Dead
86- Little big adventure
87- Deus Ex (the original and the new one!)
88- Whirlo
89- Advance Wars DS
90- Yggdra Union
91- Vanquish
92- Area 898 (Arcade)
93- Commandos: Behind enemy lines
94- Rayman Legends
95- Heartstone
96- To the Moon
97- World of Goo
98- Cybernator/Assalt Suit Valken
99- Mechwarrior 2
100- Cave Story
Guys, I’m loving this. So cool seeing eccentric choices and games I’m just not familiar with at all. I get that people hate the whole list-making impulse, and fair enough, but I think the real point is that we get to learn about new games (and a bit about each other and our past gaming experiences). Cool thread! I hope more people consider participating.
Hey, TurinTur, is that Dune game Dune II or the other game that came out about the same time that was kinda a weird strategy/adventure game hybrid following the movie plot?
Dune II is an obvious entry when important games are mentioned, but that would be a boring pick (and until C&C/Warcraft 2 they didn’t nail the genre). Dune I was a very interesting game, mixing adventure with the spirit of the book and a strategy layer that made sense with the lore. Dune II was more tangentially related to the source, and remembered later for being the father of the RTS genre, not because it was Dune.
I got this game because I was going through a phase when the TV show Law & Order just seemed cool. Probably some John Grisham novels were involved as well. My nerdiness seems to go through phases, and it went through a law phase before moving onto Civilization.
Anyways, its like a high school debate club, only instead involving lawyers. Using an FMV interface, your character is tasked with finding a person guilty of a crime that ranged from drunk driving to murder. Actually, range isn’t the right term. There are only 3 cases, two of which were drunk driving and murder. The game starts each case by outright telling you the suspect is guilty and what actually happened. The puzzle is proving it, with the rules being American courtroom procedure. First, you had to go around town and gather evidence and listen to witness testimony. The next phase was the actual courtroom phase when you had to beat the swarmy trial lawyer who would spin a yarn about misunderstandings and police who jumped to conclusions.
It had some wit and humor and the human actors I thought did a good job with the material. Or, so my memory tells me a decade after I last played. Still, I think I ultimately beat the cases by using trial and error (no pun intended) instead of what felt like good deduction. Unfortunately, the game didn’t give a great feedback of what you did wrong or right or where you could have improved.
In case anyone is curious, youtube had the introductory 10 minutes of FMV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Thk3ffEFwHg . Gives you a feel for the game, though no the gameplay.
Cool. I was hoping that was the one you’d picked. I remember liking it more in concept than in practice. It wasn’t mechanically similar, but it reminded me of Castles (one of my top games) for how it married a simple strategy game with story events. Or maybe Defender of the Crown is a better comparison? Anyway, cool pick. I’d love to try it again, just to remember how it worked.
Dungeons of Dredmor isn’t in there because… it’s really kind of shit. The title got assigned when I postedthe victory screen from the highest difficulty mode a couple days after the game came out, thanks to a combination of poorly balanced mechanics and my prior experience with other (much better) roguelikes. But that doesn’t imply any sort of endorsement whatsoever, and in fact finishing after only a few attempts (especially since actually doing so was a tedious process) is quite the opposite. I still think the idea of 1) design a good roguelike; and 2) leaven it with humor, nice graphics, and accessibility; is a good one, but they failed at the first step. It did get improved post-launch, but still not to a point that I would recommend it, and some of its design missteps are too fundamental to patch out.
If titles were based on accomplishments I’m proud of in games I actually like, mine would be a 6:34 speedrun clear time in Spelunky, 15-rune win in DCSS, S+ rankings in every level of DmC on Dante Must Die mode, completion of the bonus stratum and ultimate boss in Etrian Odyssey, or winning the first two Hearthstone tournaments ever held in the history of the game.
But titles are given at the arbitrary whims of The Toms That Be, so the one that happened to occur in a popular thread is the one that got immortalized (and misspelled to boot). So it goes.
Yep! Still rough around the edges and missing a bunch of its planned features, too. I was honestly surprised to find it rising that high in my list, but over and over, when I asked myself which of two games I got more enjoyment out of, the answer was Hex. Drafts in physical TCGs have been one of my favorite gaming activities for most of my life, but had dropped off as family and career left me fewer windows to take off to the game store for a 4-hour block. But Hex flawlessly converted that experience to a convenient online one with tournaments available at any hour, and paired it with an excellent card set and mechanical design.
Man, you weren’t kidding about the amount of overlap in our tastes, though! Out of your top ten, eight are also among my all-time favorites. Guess the takeaway there is that I really need to go find a copy of Okami. And there are quite a few more on there that I’ve made a note to check out soon.
Yeah, that was the first difference to really jump out at me in looking at your list. There were several games near the top of yours that I played and thoroughly enjoyed, but would have ranked in the #100-150 range since their main achievements were in aesthetics rather than mechanics (Katamari, Proteus, Rez, Shadow of the Colossus). Though I’m totally inconsistent in my mechanically-minded-ness, since I did include a few games carried by their writing or narrative rather than their mechanics (Torment, Curse of Monkey Island, Psychonauts, To the Moon).
Are you sure you’re not me from an alternate universe? I have a similarly conflicted relationship with JRPGs, where they were formative to my tastes in the SNES era, have since mostly fallen out of favor and conflict with what I hold as my gaming values, but still have a lingering hold on me. Though in my case it’s not about anime stylings, but how they can sometimes go so long between interesting/consequential decisions.
Kuru Kuru Kururin is self-explanatory, if you look a gameplay video (though it’s hard to find a good one). I don’t know if you know the new indie game Roundabout (sorry for the link, first review googled) but it’s a clone of Kuru kuru Kururin’s basic mechanics. Basically, it’s an action puzzle game in which you control a continually rotating stick (it’s supposed to be the blade of a copter, but whatever) and have to make it fit through obstacle courses thinner that it’s bladespan, so you have to move so the rotation of the blades synchronizes with your displacement. And then they throw wrinkles into all this by adding bouncers to change rotation direction and moving obstacles and stuff.It’s a really simple idea with very good level design and sense of progression. A puzzle action game of sorts, and a design I had never seen before, so it hit me in the face when I first tried it as something genuinely new. It’s really worth a try, I can’t see anybody not liking the game (though it can get frustrating on the later levels). It’s japanese arcade design at it’s best, pure, skill based and polished. It’s also interesting because despite its potential as a cool arcade/mobile game, there have been very few attempts to clone its mechanics (I once met a developer who is making a clone of the game who was surprised that I knew were the idea came from. I think that game is still unreleased).
Cosmology of Kyoto… Well, this is weirder. I found it while I was rummaging through HotUs in my teens. It’s basically a very obscure, very weird, adventure game based around japanese mythology. It’s made in Japan (I think) and it makes NO effort to explain itself to you. Which is great. It’s so weird and obscure it’s almost psychodelic. I never beat it (I think I never made any significant progress at the time) yet I found it enthralling and provocative, and I kept coming back to it. It felt like it meant something, and at the time, I couldn’t say that about a lot of games. It’s basically the very definition of a mysterious game. A game that you can’t really figure out, but that you still want to spend time with. That at the time I was not very fluent in English helped the mystique, I think. Definitely writing about it here makes me want to download and try it again. Maybe now I’m better equipped to unravel its mysteries. Mmmm. that an idea… (there’s a very concise but nice writeup about the game -spoiler free- here).
