10 Bomberman (Various, but I especially like Bomberman Generations on the Gamecube). Yes, I'm talking about the multiplayer mode. Why should any gamer even start the soloplayer mode (I finished it)? No, the multiplayer mode is where it's at. Easy to learn, hard to master,and it beats Mario Kart in the offline multiplayer Schadenfreude department. Yeah, I said it. Bomberman is a better multiplayer game than Mario Kart. It would rank higher if the soloplayer mode was worth a nickel.
9 Metroid Prime Trilogy (Wii). Metroid was a great NES game. Metroid II for GameBoy was better. Super Metroid seemed like the zenith for a series, so good that they didn't release a sequel for
another eight years. And when the sequel finally came, it blew everyone away. Now I've got to say that I hate First-Person-Shooters with a vengeance. HATE them. But Metroid Prime did everything right. The controls were brilliantly intuitive, the graphics (for its time) were amazing, the music was pumping, and the countless secrets you had to search every nook and cranny of the overworld for added quite a few hours of gameplay. Then came the sequel, which was okay, but nothing spectacular, and then came Metroid Prime 3, which was almost another quantum leap because of the Wii motion controls. But to release the whole trilogy with Wii motion controls? Genius. Why doesn't it rank higher? There isn't much replay value. Once you've found all weapon upgrades, all missile expansions and energy tanks, well, that's it. Yes, you could do a speedrun, but you can do that with almost every game on this list, so that alone doesn't count. And while the music is impressive, it's not as catchy as that of...
8 Mega Man 2 (NES). Yes, it's 8-Bit, and it shows. The graphics are simple bitmap sprites, the music is just bloops and bleeps, but Mega Man 2 turned 8-Bit to perfection. From the catchy sounds to the charming Mega Man sprite... Wow. The difficulty is insanely hard, but with a bit of training, it's perfectly possible to beat each level. The robot masters were great and finding their achilles heels was immensely satisfying. In fact, this would be the best 8-Bit game on this list if it weren't for...
7 Duck Tales (whoo-hoo!)
(NES). Also by Capcom, I think even by the same developers team as Mega Man, Duck Tales is proof to this day that a game based on licensed characters
can be good. So what if Scrooge McDuck jumping around on his stick never appeared in the cartoon show the game was based on (nor in the comic books the cartoon show was based on)? It made for unique gameplay and great level design. And again, the music. You'd think that in a game based on a franchise with
THE MOST CATCHY THEME SONG IN HISTORY, it would be hard to come up with memorable tunes to compete with that.
And yet Capcom knocked it out of the park. As good as 8-Bit gets.
6 Super Mario Galaxy (Wii). The best game in one of the best franchises ever. The epic orchestral soundtrack, the huge levels, the challenging difficulty, the gravity gimmick, everything Nintendo learned doing the various Super Mario Bros, Land, World, 64 and Sunshine games culminated in one masterpiece. And they even found a good use for the Wiimote controls. No useless minigames, no carpal tunnel syndromes from trying to navigate the menu, instead we get intuitive gaming at its best.
5/4 Silent Hill (PS) and Silent Hill 2 (PS2, Xbox, PC). I have to name them both, but it's impossible to rank them, so I'm giving them two slots. Yes, 2 has better graphics and a darker story twist, but 1 has a man looking for his missing daughter, all alone in a world where everything is against him. Yes, the biggest hook to the game was lifted from Link to the Past. One world in two different flavors, light and shadow. But this is not a simple action-adventure. This is a horror game. So when "light" is already a foggy ghost town with rabid dogs and weird, twisted enemies, you don't want to know what "shadow" is. You want to experience it. Oh, and bonus points for the street names. All in all, the second best survival horror franchise in gaming history.
3 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox, PC). You know, I'm not a Star Wars geek. I liked the original trilogy, didn't like the changes they made for the re-release, hated Episode I and II, III is okay, but not even close to the original movies. In fact, I had completely given up on the franchise. And then I played Kotor. With its background ripped from the movies and the character development ripped from Dungeons & Dragons, it seemed like this sort of patchwork Frankenstein game, that everybody kept recommending to me. I played it, and I was instantly hooked. From the brilliant presentation to the likable characters, from the rich world to the powerful story, this game is brilliant. That it was one of the first to implement a good/evil scale and player decisions leading to two different endings based on which side of the force you chose was just the icing on the cake. This is how RPGs have to be done. Why aren't there more than this? Give me great stories!
2 Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem (Gamecube). Did someone ask for great stories? Meet one of the best stories in video games. And the best survival horror game ever released. A must-have for every owner of a Gamecube controller. It starts with the cliched haunted mansion and a girl vowing to capture her grandfather's killer, but very soon this turns into a captivating story spanning millennia (and owing quite a bit to H.P. Lovecraft), revisiting the same locations again and again. Add a perfect control scheme that lets you target certain body parts of your enemies (for that classic "shotgun lobotomy"), a clever way of using magic by combining glyphs you find all over the game, an epic soundtrack and, of course, the Sanity Effects. You see, the game has four different bars (three of them visible): Health, Magic, Stamina and Sanity. Over the course of the game, weird $#!+ happens to your player character. And that deducts sanity. If the sanity doesn't get replenished, weird $#!+ starts to happen to
you, the player. The camera angle starts to shift, weird sounds come from everywhere, and that's just the beginning. Don't spoil yourself by looking at youtube clips. Just play this game. At night. With the lights out. And your surround system cranked up. If you dare.
1 Tetris (Everything). Easy to learn, everyone knows it, highly addictive, has infinite replay value. You'll never be able to get
Korobeiniki out of your head. And you don't want to. Tetris is a game that you can give to everyone, from a six-year-old to your great-grandmother, from a casual gamer to
the most hardcore geek. Everyone immediately gets it. And everyone has fun. And what more can you ask from a game?
Here I go;
