More games! Today’s ten covers a wide spectrum of genres and gaming generations, from the 16-BIT era to mobile gaming and the PS4.
If you are just joining in and haven’t read the previous entries, check them out first:
And on to the next batch of awesome video games…
90 - Final Fantasy VIII
Eight. That’s my favourite one. To be completely honest, I haven’t played that many Final Fantasy games through to the end. VII and VIII are the only ones, and I marginally prefer VIII. I like the characters of VII, like Cloud and Barrett, but FFVIII as a complete game was a more enjoyable experience for me. Squall with his gunblade, the weird setting, the story line, and in-game card game Triple Triad all bump this entry to the top in this series for me.
I quite like the JRPG genre anyway and when FFVIII released, I was very deeply invested in a different epic RPG, so missed it originally. I went back to it ages later and really liked it. The familiar turns-based combat system I’d played in FFVII was there, slightly tweaked. The visuals were beautiful (at the time) and the soundtrack was incredible.
I imagine everyone reading this is aware of Final Fantasy in its many forms, and each of you will surely have your own favourite. Let me know in the comments which is your favourite one and why!
89 - Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
Mobile gaming is my world. I work for a game studio that specialises in making mobile strategy games. The industry has taken a pretty huge upsurge in both popularity and quality over recent years, and my mainstay title in the free-to-play space for the longest time was Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes.
The game’s mechanisms are around turns-based combat between squads of familiar Star Wars characters. You start out with a bunch of no-namers and Chewbacca and slowly earn shards of all the characters you would expect from Star Wars, like Han Solo, Rey, Darth Vader etc. The game’s tight economy on both resources (getting upgrade items for your characters etc.) and energy (how many fights you can do per day) is generous enough to allow you to play for free or speed up your unlocks of characters with some small investments.
The real joy in this game is putting together a team of characters that works well together. My favourite team is a bunch of Jedi that focus on healing, mixed with a couple that do huge damage. The range of possibilities is pretty wide, and the game has added a lot of new content over the last couple of years. Where I stopped playing was when they introduced ship combat, which felt like a whole extra game added on and the time commitment was insane. I’ve gone back to play this a few times and have enjoyed it each time. It’s a great game to lose yourself in for a while and enjoy the synergies and character powers. There’s a Marvel themed clone of it as well, which is basically identical but with Iron Man and the crew instead of the Star Wars characters if that is more to your liking. Well worth a play, especially if you like long-term progression in your games, especially on-the-go.
88 - Horizon: Zero Dawn
Robot dinosaurs vs. a girl with a bow and arrow. It’s the kind of elevator pitch I would expect my 3-year-old son to come up with. How Guerrilla Games managed to make one of the most emotionally captivating narratives in recent years out of that is testament to their incredible vision for this project.
Aside from the excellent story, and the endearing main character Aloy, Horizon hit so many beats with its progression of game mechanisms and slow ramp up of challenges that you wanted to keep playing constantly. The beautiful natural settings are breathtaking to behold, and then when populated with the mechanical monsters that are the heart of this game, things become mesmerising to watch.
Aloy’s AR headset that allows her to track the patrol patterns of the robo-dinosaurs is a cool little game gimmick way of explaining and incorporating the game’s UI into the lore, and coupled with the surprise origins of her character and how civilization got this this state, really tie the world building together nicely. Horizon’s combat is satisfying every time you sneak about and take down a robo-raptor or climb atop a larger target and rip its circuits out. Traps are great fun to place and lure your targets towards. Aloy’s skillset grows as you progress, with each enhancement feeling useful as the game throws curveball challenges at you, reinventing itself as it goes. There are a few more open-world games ahead of Horizon on this list (and many of them are much further up) but I was genuinely surprised and delighted by this game and consider it one of the best PS4 exclusives.
87 - Streets of Rage
Streets of Rage was bundled on the same cartridge as Golden Axe and Revenge of Shinobi on the Sega MegaDrive (or Genesis to my American friends) and was by far the most-played of the three games for me. Ask any fan of Streets of Rage which one is the best, and most will probably say the second one, but the sheer number of hours I put in to the first one makes me remember it more fondly.
This game is as simple as it gets. Walk from the left side of the screen to the right, punching and kicking the living snot out of anything in your way, and get to the end of the stage. Repeat.
Each level brings with it a bunch of unique enemies types to figure out, and the most exciting part: a police car special power (that you can only use once) that fires some kind of massive missile, barrage of hundreds of bullets, or a massively flamethrower at your enemies, killing everything on screen, except you, of course. Much like the Eagles in Lord of the Rings, I often wonder why Axel, Blaze and Adam weren’t just driving that squad car through the levels, removing all chance of their own mortal peril.
Streets of Rage is still a bit of fun today, best played as a two-player game, and had something that a lot of cooperative games of the time didn’t have: you could hurt your friends by accident. “Accidents” happened fairly regularly for me and my brother as we threw knives and launched huge diving kicks across the screen, often leading to a brawl between us rather than the thugs of whatever city the game was set in.
86 - Ikaruga
Dark Souls is difficult. Ikaruga is insane. You pilot a ship in a traditional top-down style shooter, but with the incredible design twist of colour shifting thrown in on top. If you are orientated as the white side of your ship, you’re immune to white projectiles. If you are black, you’re immune to black. At first, this is very simple as enemies only fire one colour bullet at you, but things get absolutely crazy once the screen fills with enemies and the firing patterns start to resemble geometric works of art that are almost a shame to disrupt as you blast the enemies away.
Ikaruga was a Dreamcast game originally, but only available in Japan (I think!) but revered as one of the best shooters ever made. It dropped on Xbox Live Arcade for the X360 about ten years ago and did not disappoint. Most of my time with Ikaruga was in 2-player mode, trying desperately to get to the end. I’m not ashamed to admit that I never completed the game with a standard number of continues. It was only possible for me once we unlocked infinite continues at some point. This game is tough.
I’m not sure what it is about the two-colour system that makes Ikaruga so much more fun to play than other games in the genre, but it just works. It’s by far and away my favourite game of this type and one that I challenge any of you losers to beat one day.
85 - Advance Wars
You can take your pick of the Advance Wars titles and sub it in here. They’re all quite similar and all very, very good. The original is my favourite, mainly for its elegant simplicity. You control an army of troops of various types and square off against an opposing force for control of the map, taking strategic positions that give you more resources to deploy extra units and hopefully, win the war.
What I like about this game is the whole board-gamey-ness of it. It feels like a computerised version of a tactical strategy board game. Everything is about positioning pieces, managing your resources and striking at the opportune moments.
There have been a lot of variations on this formula, but Advance Wars is one of the best. A recent game called Wargroove feels very like AW in a lot of ways and would also be a great stand-in today if you can’t get hold of a Game Boy Advance.
Intelligent Systems, the team behind this game, will be appearing again, much, much higher on this list.
84 - Saturn Bomberman
Bomberman was a huge hit in the early 90s, primarily on the SNES with Super Bomberman. The superior and therefore best game in the series is the Sega Saturn version, imaginatively named, Saturn Bomberman. For anyone too young to know what Bomberman is, the game is a real-time action puzzler, where you time the placement of bombs in a grid map, destroying walls and hopefully, your opponents before they do to you.
What made the Saturn version so good was that it improved every single aspect of the series and bundled it all into one game. The controls were sharper, and with accuracy so key to success in this game, that was huge. The single player campaign was beautifully designed, levels-wise and thematically. The different coloured dinosaurs had special abilities that all felt unique and useful. The multiplayer had the best levels in the series, improved on things like the conveyor belts, and added up to 10-player simultaneous play. This required 10 controllers and two multi-tap adaptors, so it was very rare to ever even see that many Saturn peripherals in one place, but it ran incredibly well and was great fun.
You can pretty easily find a bunch of Bomberman games these days, but since Saturn Bomberman, they’ve all been a step back in quality. Mega Bomberman and Super Bomberman are the closest you’ll find to a decent alternative, but the Saturn version is incredible and well worth tracking down on an emulator (or the console itself if you can find one.) A classic.
83 - Donkey Kong Country
Bananas! The original Donkey Kong (not on this list!) is very different to this amazing SNES platformer that came many years later. Donkey Kong Country, at the time, was visually the most impressive video game in the world. What Rare achieved with the SNES still boggles the mind.
Donkey Kong Country was so good because it knew how to have fun. The addition of a tag-along sidekick, Diddy Kong, was the first major design decision that made this game feel fresh and exciting. Rather than die as soon as an enemy hit you, Diddy Kong would take the hit, leaving you to fight another day. DK himself was only really good for jumping and pounding along, hopping into barrels and launching himself across the screen. The true masterpiece of design in DK Country was the level design itself. Hidden areas loaded with precious bananas were one thing, but introducing mine carts and other tricks were immensely exciting at the time.
DKC had a few really tough levels along the way too, with precision timing and complex jumps often leading to frustration, but with enough care and patience, every advancement felt momentous.
This game has spawned a whole load of fantastic sequels. Right now, if I was to pick one to recommend you play, other than the original, I’d say give Tropical Freeze a go. It’s readily available on the Switch and is a lot of fun.
82 - Metroid Prime
Nintendo are the masters of turning a beloved franchise of yesteryear into a revolutionary 3D masterpiece years later. They did it with Super Mario (we’ll get to him later) with possibly the biggest splash of technological-leaping in video game history in Super Mario 64, and on the Gamecube they unleashed the jaw-dropping Metroid Prime.
When this game landed in 2002, it truly felt like Nintendo could do no wrong. They took something that was iconic, adored and genre defining (ever hear of the Metroid-vania genre?) and turned it completely on its head, took it into 3D - and here’s the crazy part - improved it in almost every way.
In 2002 Samus was a joy to control on Gamecube. Looking back on it today, the control scheme hasn’t aged terribly well, with some adjustment needed for those of us spoiled by the precision afforded to us by the modern FPS titles. Once you get used to it, and start to unlock some of the cool “ball” abilities, Metroid Prime becomes a work of art to get lost within. The boss battles were cripplingly hard at times, and the only knock I have on this game, but I remember locking myself away with this game for weeks on end, and feeling that its Game of the Year status was wholly justified. I’m in two minds about whether or not this is a great one to recommend to people to play fresh today. Playing Metroid Prime Trilogy may be the way to go about it now. Or see if Metroid Prime 4 ever makes its appearance and go from there...
81 - Marvel vs. Capcom 2
Marvel vs. Capcom 2, specially on the Dreamcast, was one of two fighting games released for Sega’s amazing last system that I must have poured 100s of hours into, mainly losing to my friend over and over again, but I enjoyed every round as we battled. What made this one so enjoyable, like any good fighting game, was the game balance, the pace of the combat and the variety of its roster of characters.
Filling up your character’s energy bar to prepare for a super move was awesome. Geeking out at the chance to play as Wolverine, gambit and Hulk was one thing, but finding their abilities and moves fitting their comic book equivalents was so much fun.
Oh, so this is the first time where I’m going to break one of my own rules with the list. There will be another game that is kinda in this series further up. It’s not cheating. Honest.
Next time the list gets kinda puzzly, but with some arcade craziness mixed in. A rare appearance by an RTS will drop, and a criminally underrated PS1 RPG will show up.
See you then.