Top 25 Video Games Lists! v. CableX's "Worse Than My Top25 VG Music" (pg. 62)

[Outcrier]

Some classics there eh?  for Super Metroid, appeared on my top 25 too.

Now, i'm expecting to see Symphony of the Night because, one who loves Super Metroid shall love SOTN too

[Lynxo]

Maybe, maybe not. I'll update later today with three more games.

[Kwyjibo]

A bit late, but I have to give more praise to Duke Nukem. That's just one of the coolest games ever. The setting, the cheesy one-liners, the monsters, the strippers  , the weapons. I mean, the f*ckin' shrinking gun, reduce your enemies to small midgets and trample them to death. Sorry Doom, sorry Quake and Unreal and all the rest, you're all good ego-shooters but it's Duke that takes the cake. 

[Cyclopssss]

Anyone ever played Descent ? That game hooked me to videogames for good!

[Lynxo]

7. Curse of Monkey Island/Grim Fandango



Okay, so I may be cheating a bit here but darn it - I can't choose!

Both of these games are adventure games from LucasArts. It's the typical click and point game genre that LucasArts were masters off back in the day. I used to love these kind of games for the stories, the interesting characters and the often times really funny humor that they usually deployed.

Curse of Monkey Island is a pirate themed cartoon game, where you play as wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood on his silly adventures. The situations he finds himself in are often times hysterical! I've never laughed as much as I did playing this.



Grim Fandango on the other hand has a more serious tone, going more for atmospheric environments and a really interesting and well built world. But don't worry, there's still plenty of humor to be found here! Just looking at Glottis can make me laugh.



Both of these games employ a rather unique graphics style that still holds up well. Curse's 2D cartoon look looks great even today, like it's straight out of a saturday morning kids show. Grim Fandango's polygons could very easily have been really ugly. However, the game is clever enough to use it's blocky graphics to its advantage, most notibly by having large skeletons as characters.

While the characters and dialogues in Curse is more silly, funny and to the point, Manny Calavera of Grim Fandango goes for a more serious tone, trying to tell a really interesting story. What game I prefer really depends on my mood. But they're both really well made and fun to play!

(Also, I frigging LOVE MURRAY!!!)




6. Chrono Trigger



Oh man, this game...where do I even start? Made by the supposedly "dream team" of Square and Enix's employees, this game was hyped from the very start. But it still delivers!

It's the usual JRPG with turn based battles and random encounters. However, both of these elements have been refined so they do not appear that way at all, but rather seemless. Whenever you enter a battle, you don't get an entirely new screen - you see the enemy before the encounter and when the battle begins, you just draw your weapons and off you go! (According to an interview I saw a while back, this was apparently really hard to code and took a lot of time.)



The story is a rather straight forward one, employing time travel and characters from different time periods coming together to defeat the ultimate evil. But what makes it so good is the same thing that makes everything good about this game - the attention to every single detail! Every story is well told, every dialogue is interesting and/or funny. You really grow to care about the characters and the world that they live in.



And the frigging music! Oh my god, the music...I can't even begin to describe how good it is. One of the best soundtrack I've ever heard. I listen to the piano collections CD of the soundtrack all the time!

This game might not do anything new or extrordinary. But everything about it is so well-polished - it took everything that was great about the JRPG formula and took it to a whole new level! So awesome.





5. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim



Before this game, I had never played an Elder Scrolls game more than a few minutes. However, when I saw the trailers for this game, I got not only interested but so frigging pumped! I'm not sure what it is that I saw that suddenly made it so interesting but whatever it was, it got me to even pre-order the special edition of the game.

And man, it did NOT disappoint!



This is a open world RPG, with a big focus on the "open world" part. You can do ANYTHING you could ever want in this game. And not only that, every single questline, every single dungeon is fulfilling to complete. It's just something about the atmosphere and the environment that draws you in. It has this epic, big feeling to it, but still really open. Like it whispers in my ears how awesome it is and how much it wants me. Like a beautiful girl lying on my bed, telling me to come join her.



You can create any character you want, from a number of different races and factions. And even if you create a character whose base ability lies in magic, you can still skip that and become a melée character if you want. The game adapts to your playing style and allows you to truly play it any way you want to.

One day, I went off and join the Thief's Guild and became a thief. The other day, I saved the world from an evil dragon. And then I went off and joined the Dark Brotherhood. And maybe on the way I did something completely different and unrelated. Every single time you place a marker on your map and go off towards that location, you run into something completely different that you just can't help but explore.

I think my save file has more than a hundred hours on it, and that's all the needs to be said about this game really.

[Cool Chris]

LucasArts were indeed masters of the point-and-click. Just the other day I found on my computer "Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis." Fun memories of playing games like that and Monkey Island. 

[cramx3]

I think my save file has more than a hundred hours on it, and that's all the needs to be said about this game really.

A testament to this game is that I have not met a single person who has played it and not put in at least 100 hours.

[Bolsters]

I approve of the inclusion of both Skyrim and especially Chrono Trigger. dat soundtrack

[Outcrier]

I approve of the inclusion of both Skyrim and especially Chrono Trigger. dat soundtrack

Yasunori Mitsuda owning. And he continued to do that with Chrono Cross and Xenogears

[Sacul]

Chrono Trigger bored me to tears, and couldn't finish it. Too cliched for my tastes  .

Spent almost 200 hours on Skyrim - insane how addictive it is. The OST is gorgeous.

[Kwyjibo]

Back then Lucas Arts couldn't go wrong with their adventures. The Monkey Island series is an absolute classic and I remember playing the Curse alone in my room and laughing out loud several times, it's just so funny.

Grim Fandango has an interesting setting and a great atmosphere, the only thing that bothered me were the controls. Point and click just works better for adventures. Nonetheless a great game.

[Lynxo]

Back then Lucas Arts couldn't go wrong with their adventures. The Monkey Island series is an absolute classic and I remember playing the Curse alone in my room and laughing out loud several times, it's just so funny.

Grim Fandango has an interesting setting and a great atmosphere, the only thing that bothered me were the controls. Point and click just works better for adventures. Nonetheless a great game.

Yeah, the controls are definitly not that great. I remember trying to enter those damn elevators.  But that's really the only flaw I can think off.

[Crow]

I only ever played the first two Monkey Island games but they're pretty great games in general so I imagine this one is too 

[Lynxo]

All right, we're down to top 4. And now, I'm going to do two games per post. Also, I'm gonna have a short "honorably mentions" list before unveiling the number one.

4. Super Mario World II: Yoshi's Island



IT'S SO FLUFFY!!!!

There's something so faschinating about game changers. A game with a formula so revolutionary, it practictally invents a new genre or turns an existing one upside down.



Yeah, this game is not that. What it is, is a game that perfected the existing formula. This is an action platformer starring everybody's favorite Yoshi, on his quest to uniting baby Mario with baby Luigi, making this game a prequel. (By the way, why do Yoshis go around with saddles on their back? Are they all waiting for babies to drop out of the sky or something?)

The gameplay is similar yet completely new. Your goal is still to get your character from point A to point B. But instead of the "one hit and you're dead"-formula, you get something completely different - you carry baby Mario on your back and if you're hit, he escapes from you and you have to catch him until the timer drops to zero.



Also, Yoshi still has the ability to swallow his enemies. But this time, he craps out an egg whenever he do! (I really don't want to know the science behind that one. Get it? Behind?) And you can throw those eggs at your enemies to defend themselves.

This game just oozes creativity at every turn. How about large polygon doors falling on top of you? A flower that makes the entire world spin around you? A boss that grows in size, eats you and then you have to do the battle from within his stomach? You get the feeling that the developers just played with the graphics engine and created gameplay moments from what they could squeeze out of it.



And the result is amazing and one of my favorite games of all time.







3. Sonic 2



Speaking about perfection...how about the blue hedgehog's second entry?



The first one was a solid enough game and the third game was a BEAST of a game, I feel like the second is the only one where everything just felt perfect and well made.

Let's start with the amazing music. This game contains some of my favorite tunes of all time and opening track Emerald Hill Zone never fails to put me in a good mood.



Also, the graphics engine received a significant overhaul since the first game. It's looks sharp and colorful and the camera almost always catches up with you on your stupidly fast runs through the stages.

All the elements of a great Sonic game is here - several paths to complete the game, amazing bonus levels and fun boss fights (but perhaps just a bit on the easy side). I've completed the game more times than I can count and it seems there's always new paths to explore.

I really don't have much else to say - this is a really well made game. I love it.

[Bolsters]

Yoshi's Island is one of my all-time favourites aswell.

[BlobVanDam]

Two excellent 2D platformers.

I do prefer SMW slightly to SMW2, but they're different enough that they don't really need to be compared. SMW2 has lots of great little additions to the gameplay that make the game unique for the time, my only gripe is how annoying it is hearing baby Mario scream his head off. Also one of my favourite games.

And Sonic 2 is my favourite Sonic game, and another of my favourite games.

[cramx3]

Never played SMW2, but Sonic 2 is the shit for that series

[Outcrier]

Not my favorite games from these series but they both great nonetheless 

[black_biff_stadler]

Sonic 2 is fucking amazing.

[jingle.boy]

Never played SMW2, but Sonic 2 is the shit for that series

Word.

Played the shit out of that game in university.  I was always Tails, and man did me and my buddy get fucking pissed at each other if we didn't nail the bonus stages at 100%.  Many a drunk night (either pre, or post bar) were spent on that game in 1992 and 1993.

[cramx3]

Never played SMW2, but Sonic 2 is the shit for that series

Word.

Played the shit out of that game in university.  I was always Tails, and man did me and my buddy get fucking pissed at each other if we didn't nail the bonus stages at 100%.  Many a drunk night (either pre, or post bar) were spent on that game in 1992 and 1993.

Nice, although I must admit those bonus stages were a PITA.

[jingle.boy]

Never played SMW2, but Sonic 2 is the shit for that series

Word.

Played the shit out of that game in university.  I was always Tails, and man did me and my buddy get fucking pissed at each other if we didn't nail the bonus stages at 100%.  Many a drunk night (either pre, or post bar) were spent on that game in 1992 and 1993.

Nice, although I must admit those bonus stages were a PITA.

Even moreseo when you're shit-faced.

[Lynxo]

Time for the second game entry. This is going to be long.

2. Metal Gear Solid



Yes, the first one. I agree that for example, the third entry might be a technical better game. But if you take into account the times for when it was released, it was something huge, big and amazing. And most of all - unique in every single way.

Metal Gear Solid pushed what people thought was possible with 3D graphics and showed that the medium was capable of telling a deep and engaging story with compelling characters. I remember just sitting there in awe after every single cutscene, not believing what was happening in front of my eyes. And I loved every single second of it!



The story is a rather simple one, before it got needlessly complex in the later entries. You are Solid Snake, tasked with infiltrating a nuclear weapons facility on Shadow Moses Island, where a group of terrorists are demanding the US goverment hand over the remains of Big Boss. If the US refuse, the terrorists will launch a nuclear attack. As you expected, a lot of stuff happens on the island and you get to meet a lot of interesting characters, both good and bad.

What's most surprising about the story (at least for its time) was the themes it choose to cover. Anti-war, nuclear detterence and the human cost of conflict are all covered here. And yes, there is just as much subtlety as you could expect but it's still really impressive to see a game tackle real world issues and really try to tell its players something of importance. But yeah, to be honest, the script feels more than a little cheezy at times. I can still remember the awkward line "can love bloom on the battlefield".



At the same time, Kojima always seems to be super aware of himself, filling the game with just as much humor and fourth wall breaking as he continued to do in later installments. Can you even imagine getting to the Psycho Mantis boss fight for the very first time? A boss character who read your memory card and couldn't be beaten unless you plugged in your controller in the second port?

(My favorite fourth wall breaking moment in MGS is NOT those that people always talks about - about halfway through the game, you get captured and tortured. When you're in your cell, you can call up Naomi Hunter, who instructs you to put the controller on your hurting arm. The game then gives the controller a small rumble, which results in Snake muttering "thanks". So small yet so brilliant.)

Another unique thing about this game is the boss characters. Every time you defeat them, they all give these long speeches about themselves that Snake listens to with great patience. While it's a bit absurd that they all always seems to have time to tell their life story before they die, it also shows Hideo Kojimas wish to always flesh out the story and give motivations to every single character.



Also, the voice acting! Oh my God, it's so freaking good! I always got the feeling that the actors had really fun with the script and just went for it, and it makes all the character that much more rich and fun to listen to. My greatest grief with the fourth entry is that the voice actor for Liquid Snake couldn't return for story reasons. I love his over the top character. That's one thing that has hold up really well - I can name tons of modern games where the voice acting really bugged me.

I know many people critisize the Codec system, saying its a cheap way to have cutscenes without having to animate people. I disagree - at least for this game, the Codec allowed the game to include even more characters who were always there to help you. The fact that you could call anytime and get hints provided a great sense of importance to the mission.

The gameplay's biggest flaw is its controls - I got used to them at the time and didn't think they were that bad. But going back, it's the thing that has dated the worst for me. However, I love the radar system and the fact that you can see the enemies field of vision (even though that is really silly if you think about it). I love all the different weapons you have at your disposal. Also, I love the mini metroidvania-style the game provided, where there's many doors with new weapons and items you can't access until later in the game, where you've gotten access to the right keycard. It makes Shadow Moses feels like an believable place.



I gotta say, you own it to yourself to play this if you haven't already. This is a piece of gaming history - a game changer that showed just as many players as developers what power a gaming system had. And if the historical reasons aren't enough, the game's story holds up really well. It's avaliable on the PSN.

[ariich]

The first MGS was definitely fantastic and groundbreaking. Man I loved that game.

[cramx3]

I actually have never played a MGS game.  I know I am missing out, but just really never looked into it.  I guess with 5 out I should check it out.

[Outcrier]

Love the Metal Gear Solid games but never cared too much for the original PSX one because it wasn't the first i played and probably i couldn't go back to it after playing MGS2 and 3, which i love.

Still, huge respect for it as it was the template for some of my favorite games of all time.

[Phoenix87x]

MGS1 for PS1 is still my favorite of the entire series and in my top 3 games of all time. I really lost my shit when this came out and played it for hours on end.

[Genowyn]

Chrono Trigger bored me to tears, and couldn't finish it. Too cliched for my tastes  .

I hope you know this is the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" thing. Like, the reason it's cliched is that it created many of the cliches that later games use. Like New Game +.

That being said, Chrono Trigger only #6? Fail.

[Outcrier]

Symphony of the Night for 1# 

[Sacul]

Chrono Trigger bored me to tears, and couldn't finish it. Too cliched for my tastes  .

I hope you know this is the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" thing. Like, the reason it's cliched is that it created many of the cliches that later games use. Like New Game +.

The problem I have with the game are the following:

-Bland, predictable characters
-Dull plot ("Hey, let's save the world!")
-Boring combat system. Although I like how to combine several character's attacks into one, the rest is pretty straightforward. And, boss fights are endless and with little variety.
-Cheesy scenes here and there.

I would have enjoyed it as a kid tho. But since I played it last year, and my save is gone, I have no intentions of replaying it.

[Cable]

Chrono Trigger bored me to tears, and couldn't finish it. Too cliched for my tastes  .

I hope you know this is the "Seinfeld is Unfunny" thing. Like, the reason it's cliched is that it created many of the cliches that later games use. Like New Game +.

That being said, Chrono Trigger only #6? Fail.

I also did not get Chrono Trigger. I know I already said it in here, but I loved Chrono Cross. From what I gather, it didn't blaze any trails like CT. But those blazed trails of CT are not apparent to me. However, my RPG experience is basically confined in FF's and DQ/Warriors.

Solid choice on Solid. :-) Unless one of MGS2-5 is your top one, MGS1 should be the highest MGS game IMO. Haven't played beyond 3 though. 

[Lynxo]

1. Final Fantasy VII



The story of why I love this game is deeply connected to personal experiences and my own growth as a human being, so this will probably be long. And funnily enough, I won't talk much about the actual game but rather what the game meant to me. And you know, it's not like you guys need me to describe this game for you.

This game was released back in 1997, when I was ten years old. I can't remember exactly how old I was when I first played it, but probably around eleven or twelve. I was at a friend's house and after playing FIFA World Cup 1998 for 20th time, he showed me a new game I've never seen before. The cover was as simple as it was intriguing - no huge painting, no characters and no landscape. Instead, it's just the title with some kind of round object behind it. I later learned that this was a meteor and how it was relevant to the game. But I didn't know it at the time, and it's faschinating to me that a game that tries to tell and show so many things doesn't show any of it on the cover. It's like a statement: "My content is larger than any cover could ever depict, so here's just a logo, bitch!"

(After doing some research for this text, I discovered the american version actually had an entirely different cover! Before anybody points that out. )

We popped in the game and one of the most faschinating experiences of my lifetime started. I had never even played an RPG before, so this was new on so many levels for me. To say that my mind was blown is not entirally accurate - I felt like I was experiencing something I could not yet fully comprehend.



My buddy on the other hand got bored so I bought the game from him. And I played it and I beat it. And I played it again, this time with a walkthrough, and I beat it. And I did it again and again and again. And now, I'm going to try to explain why I did this, and why this game meant so much to me.

I was in many ways a weird and lonely child. Most important of all - I wasn't comfortable being a weird and lonely child, but I didn't know how to change that, nor did I know how to get comfortable in my own skin. So what did I do? I read books and I played video games. I participated in many forms of escapism, where I could turn off the outside world and be somebody else - experiencing wondrous things and meeting interesting characters. But video games to me had not yet reach its full potential - I loved playing games so much but reading books always felt like a much better way to escape the reality.



Final Fantasy VII revelead to me what video games could be, in a similar way that Metal Gear Solid did, only on a much grander scale. All its characters felt life-like and I could relate to them. I loved interacting with them and going on adventures with them.

Going through Cloud's story arc is what finally set the deal for me. Cloud is someone who's also not comfortable in his own skin. He has no self-confidence and doesn't believe in himself at all. Through a series of events, he ends up copying another person - a person he looks up to and who he wants to be. But in that process he losts himself and forgots his past and all the mistakes that he's made. And only by processing his past can he fully come to realize the person he wants to be - a flawed but very much human character, who has much to give the world.

This game taught me that it is okay to be yourself - that you are good enough. And most importantly that everybody has something to give to this world. The most important thing is to believe in yourself and be confident in who you are. Everybody can accomplish great things.

For teaching me that important life lesson, I will forever be grateful to SquareEnix (back then only Square) for finally releasing a Final Fantasy in Europe and for making it crazily ambitious. I'm not saying the game is perfect - far from it! It suffers from ugly character models in the fields and bad translation among other things. But for what it is and for the time it was released in, the game was huuuge and it's no wonder why it is on so many people's lists.

I hope that even if you don't agree with my number one choice, you can see where I'm coming from.

(And also, I'm super super hyper omega excited for the remake!!!)

[ariich]

We popped in the game and one of the most faschinating experiences of my lifetime started. I had never even played an RPG before, so this was new on so many levels for me. To say that my mind was blown is not entirally accurate - I felt like I was experiencing something I could not yet fully comprehend.

This is really similar to what I experienced as well. I had played an RPG before - Zelda: Link to the Past, but it was nothing on the same scale. I bought FFVII because I'd heard good things about it, but didn't really know what to expect and I'd never played anything this ambitious.

The thing I remember most of all was being blown away by how much the game and its ideas expanded as you got into it. In every game I had played up to that point, I knew from early on what the game was about and where it was going. So my initial reaction to FFVII was the same. You have these characters and this setting, in Midgar, and you're trying to blow up one of the Mako reactors. Once you'd spent a good number of hours on all that, and got past that point, it dawns on you that this is not the setting. This is only the introduction. It completely opened my eyes to the quality and depth of story-telling that you can get in video games, and to this day RPGs are undoubtedly my favourite genre of games as a direct result.

[Kwyjibo]

Although I'm an avid RPG player I've never played a Final Fantasy Game. If I were to rectify that, what would be the best game to start? I understand that there are several FFs around.

[Lynxo]

We popped in the game and one of the most faschinating experiences of my lifetime started. I had never even played an RPG before, so this was new on so many levels for me. To say that my mind was blown is not entirally accurate - I felt like I was experiencing something I could not yet fully comprehend.

This is really similar to what I experienced as well. I had played an RPG before - Zelda: Link to the Past, but it was nothing on the same scale. I bought FFVII because I'd heard good things about it, but didn't really know what to expect and I'd never played anything this ambitious.

The thing I remember most of all was being blown away by how much the game and its ideas expanded as you got into it. In every game I had played up to that point, I knew from early on what the game was about and where it was going. So my initial reaction to FFVII was the same. You have these characters and this setting, in Midgar, and you're trying to blow up one of the Mako reactors. Once you'd spent a good number of hours on all that, and got past that point, it dawns on you that this is not the setting. This is only the introduction. It completely opened my eyes to the quality and depth of story-telling that you can get in video games, and to this day RPGs are undoubtedly my favourite genre of games as a direct result.

Oh yeah, I should have mentioned that time when you first got to the world map and realized that Midgar was only the beginning. That feeling was amazing.

Although I'm an avid RPG player I've never played a Final Fantasy Game. If I were to rectify that, what would be the best game to start? I understand that there are several FFs around.

Hard question because they're not that great these days.  So if you're going to play one, you need play it with your retro glasses on. If the blocky graphics of FFVII don't scare you off, then I'd say that's an excellent introduction. If you don't mind classic 2D, then FFVI is another excellent game.

However, none of these are connected (except for the direct sequels called X-2 and the like) so you could really start anywhere.