A whole load of fast paced action-adventure games and fighting games got lumped together here in this part of the list. We’re also going to see one of the most recognisable movie/comic book characters ever.
And monkeys.
If you’re just finding the list, I suggest you start at the beginning and work your way along from there:
On to Number 40...
40 - X-Men vs. Street Fighter
Last time out I mentioned Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, and way back at #81 I mentioned Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Truth be told, both of those games, and this one, are all pretty similar and are kinda breaking my rule of not repeating games on the list. The thing is, they are all very special to me for different reasons.
There are many factors that make X-Men vs. Street Fighter my favourite of all the Capcom fighters. The first is that it was the arcade machine I spent the most time on as a teenager. Second, I was bloody good at this game. We recently got an upright arcade cabinet in work and I have been able to hold my own at this game on it pretty much every time I’ve played. Third - this game is just objectively excellent. It started the whole Capcom Vs. series and despite its smaller roster of characters compared to later entries, it just has the best balance of play and feels the most fun.
I love playing as Cyclops and Ryu, or Gambit and Wolverine, or if I feel like a challenge, trying to beat up people with Rogue and Juggernaut. The tag-out system, and the double-up super moves are the two most fun parts of this game.
You guys all know the Capcom fighting games by now, and you’ve probably played a bunch of them over the years. This one is by far my favourite, and beaten only by one other fighting game overall, which we’ll see in a few moments below...
39 - Worms Armageddon
Before that, let’s talk about Worms.
Worms is a piece of game design genius. You control four little worm units on a 2D battlefield, and must use a variety of projectiles, guns and tools to eliminate your enemies before the timer runs out and everyone drowns.
Worms Armageddon is my favourite in the series. I had it for the Dreamcast, but it was available for pretty much every system over the years. The beauty of this one is that you can play the whole thing with as many players as you like with a single controller.
The humour in Worms Armageddon was brilliant. The sound effects were hilarious and the weapons were unbelievable. Banana bomb! The Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python! The Sheep (which hopped along and exploded remotely!) and the Old Woman weapon are some of my favourites.
Games like Towerfall have come along since and done their own twist on the classic Worms formula. In my opinion, you can’t beat the classic series itself. If you’ve never played it, get some friends together and play whichever version is the latest one and you’ll have a great time.
38 - Soul Calibur
The best fighting game ever made.
I haven’t played most of the sequels, but the original Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast, and Soul Calibur 2 on Xbox/Gamecube/PS2 are fighting game perfection. There’s nothing too complex here. You need to beat the hell out of your opponent and bring their life total to zero. Do that twice out of three rounds and you win. Or, if you’re playing against me, line up Kilik and destroy me every single time. I can’t counter that guy for love nor money.
Soul Calibur was the first one-one-one fighting game that really did weapons well. The variety on offer was incredible too. Big, slow characters often had good reach and high damage, while fast characters would either have low reach and medium damage, or extreme reach and low damage. Each character could compete with any other. Namco absolutely nailed the balance in Soul Calibur, and enhanced the roster just enough with the second one to make it still fit nicely.
Namco’s fighting game masterpiece is up to its 6th incarnation now at the time of writing. I haven’t played it, but I’m sure it continues much of what made the original great. I would recommend the original.
37 - Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain
Raziel has out-evolved his master, Kain. So Kain has decided to break off his wings an banish him the the underworld. Have I mentioned that they are also vampires?
Soul Reaver is seeped in a deep and wonderful lore that goes back many games, but it is Raziel’s story that was by far my favourite entry in the long-running series. What Soul Reaver had that was unique at the time was that each level was actually in two states, a material realm version and the opposing spectral realm. Raziel could shift between each realm, enabling access to areas that he couldn’t reach otherwise.
Raziel’s quest for redemption was aided by his arsenal of weapons. Initially it’s just his claws, but soon you get a fantastic lightsaber Soul Reaver (sword) that runs through and impales enemies in creative ways.
This game was also a puzzle game at heart, with plenty of exact-same shape and size blocks that needed pushing, pulling, flipping and rotating into place to unlock doors and allow you to advance. This was very much a game living in the age of when Tomb Raider was the most popular gaming franchise on the planet, and it shows. However, most of what Soul Reaver did best was where it diverged from the rival title.
There was a sequel that followed on from the original’s cliffhanger ending and wrapped things up fairly well. There is hope that there will be another sequel some day, with a remake teased in 2018 indicative that there is still demand for the adventures of Raziel and Kain.
36 - Bayonetta
Bayonetta is a witch who is trying to destroy the angels who lord it over the mortal world. To do so, she must use her hair, which is somehow also her clothes, as a weapon, combined with gigantic high heels and twin pistols. No, I’m feeling fine. That is actually what this game is about.
What Bayonetta is best at is providing you with a playground filled with enemies to allow you to chain together attacks and combos in creative and explosive ways. Much like the old-school score attack games of previous generations, the appeal of Bayonetta is actually in replaying levels in an attempt to maximise your grade and score.
Bayonetta also has some of the coolest set piece level designs you’ll ever see in gaming. The opening sequence, where Bayonetta is falling from a huge height while navigating across pieces of falling debris, is over-the-top stylish action at its absolute best.
Sometimes playing this game can feel like you’re just mashing buttons, and that will work to a degree as long as you’re avoiding attacks too, but the only way to get through later stages is to learn when to drop back and rely on your pistols to hold a combo going, boost up Bayonetta’s multiplier, then unleash the best close-combat super moves you have.
This game initially seemed like it was style over substance, but actually, it has it all.
35 - Bioshock
Bioshock is the one of the most impressive works of art direction in video game history. Rapture, the under-the-ocean utopian dream turned nightmare, is an aesthetic and atmospheric wonderland. It becomes the perfect setting for this creepy and tragic story of how one man’s dream quickly de-railed into a sandbox for the worst of human nature.
The original Bioshock is by far my favourite in the series. Bioshock 2 felt like a weaker re-thread to me, and while Bioshock Infinite was interesting, it couldn’t match the underwater setting and Big Daddy encounters of the first one.
Bioshock is more than your average FPS game. A lot of your success will come from how you use the ADAM material that allows you to upgrade your skills. Another key aspect of how this all comes together relies on your interactions with the absolutely creepy Little Sisters, seemingly helpless girls who are loaded with ADAM material for you to harvest, if you choose to go down that route.
This game has a captivating story that is heavily reliant on not knowing the outcome. There’s a beautiful use of wordplay in the dialogue that will provide an “Aha!” moment for everyone playing. I won’t spoil it here. But Bruce Willis is a ghost. Check out Bioshock if you haven’t played it before. You can usually get it in a bundle with the others, but if you ask me, the first one is the only essential play of the lot.
34 - Cities Skylines
Just typing the name Cities Skylines is making me want to re-install this game. If you’ve ever played a city-building game before, you’ve probably either been bored after two minutes, or have spent dozens of hours creating the ideal traffic system or electricity supply for your residents.
I absolutely love Cities Skylines. It’s the kind of game that you can play to relax, and before you realise it, it’s the next day. The more famous Sim City is very similar to CS in a lot of ways. If you like one of these games, chances are you’ll like them all. I prefer Cities Skylines for a lot of little reasons, but mainly because of how beautiful your city is as you grow it.
You’ll either love it or hate it. I love it.
33 - Super Monkey Ball 2
Super Monkey Ball is another one of those games that originated in Japan and somehow was allowed to escape into the rest of the world. It was Sega’s first original game for another company’s console when it arrived on Gamecube in 2001.
This entry is for both Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2, both of which are very similar, but with slightly different mini-games. While I love the main mode in SMB, which involves rolling your hamster-ball imprisoned monkey around a maze full of drops, pits and traps, it is the mini-games that are the real draw and charm of this wonderful game.
Whoever made this set of mini games basically made half a dozen great games and put them all in the same box. The Bowling mode was pretty fun, and the pool table mode was also great, but I think if you find any Monkey Ball fan, the mode they’ll mention first is the parachute challenge. You roll your monkey ball down a huge slope, launch it into the air, then glide over a vast sea with tiny platforms to land on. The smaller the platforms, the more points you get. It felt like an extreme version of lawn bowling, or curling, but magnitudes more fun.
There was a recent Super Monkey release for the Switch. I might have to check that out...
32 - Batman: Arkham Asylum
Here it is, Batman: Arkham Asylum. The premise here is such a clever idea. Batman is tricked into taking Joker into the infamous institution for criminals, where he falls into a trap laid by Harley Quinn. The Asylum is under their control, and it’s up to Batman to restore order and escape in one piece.
Batman’s many gadgets and abilities are all here in some form or another (and the batmobile makes its appearance in the third entry in the series, Arkham Knight.) What is so fun about this game, aside from the obvious combat mechanisms, is that it’s actually Batman doing what Batman is best at: being a detective. Much of the game’s best stuff is when you’re analysing clues and piecing together the mystery of what each villain is up to inside Arkham’s walls.
I loved this game so much that I actually played it all the way through twice, and in my second play I collected all 200+ Riddler trophies.
The sequels are great to, Arkham City and Arkham Knight, but I bounced off Batman Arkham Origins for some reason. I’m not sure what it was about that one. Maybe I was just played out of the series by then and needed a break.
Asylum is the best one in my opinion. And it’s also the first one, so start there and work your way through them if you like it!
31 - Jet Set Radio
The Dreamcast had so many games that were blindingly original and massively under-appreciated. Jet Set Radio is about street graffiti gangs and pirate radio stations. Your role as a skater in this crew is to “tag” your art all over the town in place of rival tags, who will try to knock your ass out in retaliation.
Jet Set Radio came along a few years after the Tony Hawk craze was at its fullest, and I see it as Sega’s attempt to take that skate-score genre into a new direction. What they ended up with was way more than the sum of its parts. They were super smart with how they went about presenting this title. The gorgeous cel-shaded graphics were a pre-cursor to the style used by so many other games later. They offered the chance for players to create their own graffiti tags and use them in-game, which was a level of customisation unheard of in console gaming in the day. I wonder how many dicks people made on day one. The controls around tagging were also pretty fun, often using the rotation of the analog stick in a particular direction a certain number of degrees in a specified time, which felt curiously like you were holding the spray paint cans.
Jet Set Radio had a killer soundtrack and fantastic level design and as a package the whole thing was incredibly original. There was a sequel on Xbox called Jet Set Radio Future, which was also excellent and well worth a try. This is one of the best Sega titles and one worthy of a modern sequel some day.
Come back for another selection of games soon.
