Gaming Top Ten
“Hey Lee, what have you been up to.”
“Playing the new Grand Theft Auto, not much else.”
“So is San Andreas any good?”
“I just beat a guy to death with a 20 inch purple dildo and escaped in a helicopter.”
“So… good then?”
“Probably in my ‘Top Ten’.”
“Oh, what are your others then?”
“Um. I don’t know, give me a while to think about it.”
So, since I only really post to the ‘blog to let people know I’m still alive, I present to you my (pre-PS2) top ten video games:
10. Super Mario Bros 2 (NES)
Yes, that’s right, 2. The not-really-Mario one. Sure, I loved the first one, and the third. It’s just the timing of the release that makes the difference. While I could zip through SM1, SM2 was a challenge. I don’t think I ever finished Super Mario 3 – there’s something about save game features that makes it easier not to attempt a full play-through. The NES was my sister’s, so I only had limited access (I had a ZX Spectrum, but no old speccy games make the list. Not that I didn’t play the games, it’s just that I don’t rate them that high. See, I’m not a complete retro-casualty).
9. Tekken 3 (PS1)
Tekken 2 and 3 bleed together in my memory. Which was the one with the little farting dinosaur-thing? Three, right? Many late night, post pub challenges. Hwoarang was my usual character, Mokujin when I was on a running streak an wanted to take the piss. Of course, Soul Calibur 2 is a far better fighter, but I just haven’t clocked up the same hours. (See also Street Fighter 2 when visiting SNES owning friends.)
8. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (Adventure)
(PC/Amiga)
Sure there are other SCUMM games that I’ve loved, Sam and Max, the Monkey Island games, but this was the one I put some real effort into finishing. I first played it on a somebody’s “work” PC. I then went out and got the Amiga version. It came on 12 floppy disks and I had no hard drive. Mid-game load time were painful, it’s the sort of experience that trains you to screen sweep and try non-obvious object combinations in point and click adventures, ’cause flying to Greenland in real life would have been quicker that the disk-swapping required to get there in the game. While I would normally caution against time-travellers meddling with history, I think there wouldn’t be any harm in going back to the early nineties and telling me to buy a frickin’ hard disk.
7. Ridge Racer (arcade)
My lunchtime favourite, a sit-down cabinet at an arcade near my college. To this day I still use the unrealistic RR-style “power slide” in car racing games (foot off accelerator for a couple of seconds, then turn and jam accelerator down). Games that don’t let me do this tend not to be played. I suspect Burnout 3 does, but I’m waiting to finish GTA to try this one out.
6. Quake (Linux)
I got my first “IBM compatible” PC when Wolfenstein 3D was le jeux du jour, upgraded for DOOM (the network version a favourite out-of-hours at the college computer centre), then upgraded again when Quake came out. But by this time I’d switched to Linux, so PC gaming was out. Luckily, the Quake engine sourcecode from an X-Window version leaked into the underground, and an SVGA Linux port emerged. And thus an academic career was destroyed. (While the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack was great, I found that swapping the game CD for Prodigy’s Fat of the Land produced even better results.)
5. Sonic the Hedgehog (Megadrive)
There was a glorious realisation in 1991 when playing Sonic that, not only was it The Greatest Platform Game Ever, but that it was only available on a platform I actually owned. Ha, in your face Super Nintendo! Always bet on black! (With the exception of PS1 vs Saturn.)
4. wipEout 2097 (PS1)
The electro-soundtrack, the ”club” design, the graphics. Everything seemed so appealing about the original wipEout. Of course, the gameplay was a complete bastard. Then 2097 which combined all of the good elements of the original with a game that wasn’t so unforgiving. Plus the split-screen play was great – a few years ago I involved in a fairly evenly matched 2-player game of 2097 with a friend and my flatmate popped out. We continued with what seemed like seven or eight rematches, when my flatmate returned. “That was quick.” “What do you mean? I’ve been gone for twelve hours.” (See also wipEout Fusion which is just as good.)
3. Road Rash (Megadrive)
The two games that got the most light-night multi-player action were Road Rash and whatever that year’s NHL game was. One of my greatest video game wins ever was in Road Rash. I was behind the entire race until making a large jump, then flukily bouncing off the top of a cow into first place. “I bounced off a cow!” (Note that, while many of the cool elements of Road Rash can be found in San Andreas, there don’t appear to be any cows, a big minus.) I still feel the need to kick motorcyclists off their bikes as they pass me in real life. (I assume that’s as a result of playing the game rather than some latent psychopathic tendencies.)
2. Dynablaster (Amiga)
Of the many Amiga games I played on my friend’s A500, there are three we always came back to for multiplayer – Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, Speedball 2 (which suffered from giving the winner of the first match an advantage in the second, thus with two closely matched players the winner of the first match would likely win the rest). And Dynablaster (the European name for Bomberman). Two players on joysticks (or rather me on one of my Megadrive joypads, since they also used the same Atari joystick interface) and sometimes another two players sharing a keyboard. In terms of quick multiplayer arcade action this is the king. It was one of the main reasons I got an Amiga – the newly launched A1200.
Of course the bastard wouldn’t boot – one of the few games that was found to be incompatible with the A1200 (the seeds of open source advocacy are sown?).
I got to relive the Dynablaster glory-days at college when I compiled XBlast on the shared X-Window system. All the fun of the Amiga version, with the added benefit that you’re using computer and network resources that might otherwise have been wasted on academic research.
1. Tetris (Gameboy)
It feels like a cheat, putting Tetris as your top game. It feels like the acceptable answer. Uncontroversial. Not to low-brow, not too snobby games-elitist. Like a Miss World contestant wishing for world peace.
But I’m being honest. No other game, certainly no other puzzle game (the closest contender being Puzzle Bobble), got the same amount of attention as Tetris. I only ever bought three other Gameboy games, and even those didn’t get played despite burning through a planet-killing number of batteries. Then again, if you were using the proto-USB link-up cable Tetris was the only game you usually could play with someone else. These days, when I find a port on a phone, or interactive TV, or whatever, I’ll give it a go. But the magic’s gone now, just one well placed “straight” and I’ve played enough.
So, even though it’s number one here, I’d probably think twice about choosing it in a “Desert Island Discs” situation.
Incidentally, did anyone else call the Tetris-piece consisting on a single row, a “straight”. I referred to the pieces as “straights”, “bents”, “T’s” and “squares”. This once led to a hi-larious misunderstanding which I hope to incorporate into a video-game related sitcom at some point in the future.
