Let's face it people, we're in a recession. And if, like me, you enjoy the occasional video game: times are tough. We enjoy an expensive hobby (some might say luxury, but I wouldn't go that far) that's difficult to justify when money is tight, jobs lurk unseen down dark corners and financial woes are pounding baseball bats into their open palms and spitting menacingly. Fear not, gentle readers, for there is a vast universe of experience tucked away in little plastic squares. Little plastic squares that are, I might add, likely collecting dust in your basement. So blow the air out of your (S)NES or Genesis, use your old copy of Madden 2004 as a coaster, and let the glory of no more than 16-bit nostalgia wash over you. Note: For best results, serve in a darkened basement with one or two friends and a case of Mountain Dew. As a quick side note, several major titles were intentionally omitted from this list. There are literally hundreds of best video games of all time lists out there, so I have excluded obvious choices like Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, Chrono Trigger and the (main) Mario series in favor of marginally more unique titles hand-picked for ultimate nostalgia.
So, you want the challenge of Ninja Gaiden or the bloodthirsty action of Gears of War on a shoestring budget? Might we suggest Super C? Super C was Konami's 1990 follow-up to their classic Contra, and made a number of additions to the series formula. Particularly memorable is one of the final stages, when our gung-ho soldiers infiltrate an alien nest in a top-down view new to the series, trying to avoid creepy alien mouths rising out of the fleshy floor. The game, like most of the series, is punishingly difficult, and may result in a broken NES controller or two. Don't say we didn't warn you.
Tetris Attack, or as the series came to be known, Puzzle League, is the American release of Panel de Pon, a puzzle game where you travel from cloud to cloud via rainbows and rescue fairies enslaved by a magical spell. Sound awesome? Ready to quit slaying Covenant Elites and Locust Beserkers and rescue some Mother-Effin' FAIRIES? No? Fortunately for all us male gamers, Tetris Attack's North American release saw the fairies replaced with Yoshi and friends still cute, but slightly less suspect. While several versions of Puzzle League have surfaced since (including Pokémon and theme-less versions), the original SNES version is best, notably for its ridiculously catchy music. The gameplay in Tetris Attack could be described as the thinking man's Bejeweled. Instead of just swapping jewels in any which direction to line up pairs, you are given a set of cursors that only swap two blocks horizontally. Since, unlike in Bejeweled, not every swap has to create a set immediately, you are free to engineer elaborate chains and combos. In fact, you must the only way to defeat your opponent is to bury them under garbage blocks dropped from your more advanced efforts. All in all, no puzzle game has quite captured the speed and strategy of Tetris Attack, although many have followed in its footsteps.
This is it. The pinnacle of platforming. The perfection of one of gaming's oldest genres and the high point of Yoshi's career. Yoshi was introduced in Super Mario World (one of the aforementioned best games ever that I purposefully omitted), and was featured in less-than-stellar games like Yoshi's Cookie and the later Yoshi's Story. Yoshi stepped out from the plumber's shadow and in many ways surpassed many of Mario's previous adventures. Yoshi's Island is spectacular in several ways. First and foremost, the game's visuals were utterly unique and absolutely arresting. Imagine a Nintendo-weaned toddler scribbling on the wall blobby approximations of Nintendo standbys and new creatures amongst smiling flowers, stars and scribbles. Animate those scribbles with incredible amounts of personality, and you've got a visual style somehow not even matched by the game's inferior DS sequel. Second, the game managed to cater to casual gamers and hardcore platforming fiends alike. Less-driven players can dash through the fantastically-designed levels to each new world, while the more completion-oriented could diligently scour each level for its five flowers and twenty hidden red coins. Either way, level design was king. Anyone who has ever played Yoshi's Island will remember Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy as one of the most unique platforming experiences ever crafted. Finally, Yoshi's Island boasts many of the biggest and most inoovative boss battles of its or any console generation. From Hookbill the Koopa to Ralph the Raven, each ballistic boss battle was an exercise in egg ingenuity. And you don't even want to know what happens when you wake Baby Bowser up from his nap.
This NES classic might have slipped under many radars due to its unusual style, lack of identifiable mascots, and steep difficulty. Players take control of either Rattle or Roll, two snakes who are markedly unsnake-like brightly colored little gumdrops with forked tongues. Your primary goal as you advance through the isometric, cliffside levels is to eat enough tail segments and tongue extensions to ring the bell on the end-of-level scale. Along the way, you must use the strength of your tongue along with more traditional hop'n'bop tactics to overcome toilet seats and giant feet. Yes, toilet seats and feet, along with fiendishly difficult level design, are your primary obstacles to supreme snakedom. The game stands the test of time due to its outrageously unique concept, extremely catchy 8-bit music, and its drop-in-drop-out two-player simultaneous play option. Here is where the game really shines, as at any point your friend can turn the game from a solo excursion to a furious race to see who can gobble up the most little tail segments without getting stomped by a big, hairy foot.
No game on this list, perhaps ever, has generated more trash-talk than NBA Jam. While many flavors were available, the button layout and smoother animation of the Tournament Edition for the Sega Genesis make it the clear standout. Playing NBA Jam was a lot like attending the first ten minutes of a real-life basketball game, before your eyes got tired of the constant back and forth and you cheered when either team missed a basket for a change. In other words, NBA Jam distilled everything that was awesome and exciting about basketball to a simple, arcade formula that was almost as much fun to watch as it was to play. Forget rostering, drafting, season mode, any kind of team management, NBA Jam was pure adrenaline and excitement and all about the game. Easy to pick up, impossible to resist, and just nuanced enough to keep it interesting. Any discussion of NBA Jam would be remiss if it didn't mention the announcer. As one of the first console games to feature real, hi-fidelity voice acting, NBA Jam did not disappoint. Any child of the 90s will instantly recall phrases like He's on Fire!, potentially the most enduring of all video game references (only time will tell if The Cake is a Lie will surpass it). NBA Jam was an instant classic, and remains unsurpassed in the realm of sports games, despite a number of similar efforts, including the Street series of games. NBA Jam is long overdue for an update.
Ecco the Dolphin must have been a tough game to pitch to the Sega executives, fresh off the success of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game and looking to grow the Sega brand in demonstrably successful ways. So, their next move was a game about a dolphin? With little to no combat? No rings to collect? Ecco the Dolphin was a risky exercise in Zen gameplay, based on gorgeous sprite animation (always Sega's strong point) and the simple pleasure of being a motherfuckin dolphin. I never got too far into the actual game it took me forever to build up enough momentum to get Ecco over that first reef but the game's beautiful graphics, which look as good today as they ever did, and intuitive gameplay made this unusual title instantly likable.
It should first be stated that UMK 3 could easily be replaced in this list with Street Fighter II, but due to that game's near-constant re-release and virtual remake (in the excellent Street Fighter IV), UMK 3 remains decidedly more old-school. As the best entry in the series that first started the violent video game backlash (later exacerbated by Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt and Kill Your Parents 5: Home Sweet Homicide Extra Stabby Edition), playing Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 is an instant exercise in nostalgia. This was the game our parents didn't want us to play, and of course the game with the longest lines at any arcade. The home console adaptation brought all the Karnage of the arcade version with even more characters, the largest roster of the series in its original 2-D iteration. What keeps Mortal Kombat fresh even today is the series bizarre use of real people as models for its sprites. While this practice hasn't aged well, it is still particularly disturbing to pull a skeleton out of what is a real, albeit pixilated, ponytailed girl in a sports bra. Mortal Kombat was always brutal and fast, and UMK 3 honed that formula to perfection. Plus, you can turn your opponent into a baby. What more do you want?
Many gamers were extremely excited when Ubisoft announced that it was creating a new, HD version of Turtles in Time for Xbox Live. Many of those gamers came away with a bad taste in their mouth. It wasn't that Turtles in Time: Re-Shelled was a bad game, far from it it's easily one of the best values on XBLA. However, in the update to full isometric 3-D and updated graphics, TMNT 4 lost its soul. TNMT: Turtles in Time was everything that Turtles fans wanted out of a Turtles game, including deceptively complex battling that was challenging but not overly so, a rogue's gallery of villains spanning the classic cartoon's entire run, and an incredibly addictive point-system that rewarded those awesome throws into the camera with bonus points toward extra lives. Although the difficulty was a bit uneven (Slash on Hard still gives me nightmares), and the turtles skills were highly mismatched, TMNT: Turtles in Time is easily one of gaming's best titles based on an existing license. Skip the remake and dust off your SNES for the game the way it should be played.
Super Mario RPG was a strange one, to be sure. Squaresoft took Nintendo's Italian Icon and dropped him into an odd, pseudo-3d world full of strange new friends and enemies. Stranger still, Mario was even able to enlist the help of his old nemesis Bowser in an epic quest against a giant anvil? Super Mario RPG, precursor to the divergent Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi series of games, hid a deceptively deep RPG behind timed hits and polished it into an entirely unique gaming experience. Fans still clamor for a proper sequel in which Mario might be reunited with friends Geno and Mallow, but until then, the classic still remains one of the greatest nontraditional RPGs available.
It seemed like a joke when it was first introduced. The Sonic and Knuckles game cartridge was open on the top, and you could plug a different game into the top of it. While most games didn't do much of anything at all, plugging the previous entry in the series, Sonic 3, into the cartridge did something special. These two titles back to back joined together to form an absolutely massive platforming experience, full of lavish level design and big, brutal bosses. Of course, the trademark of any Sonic game is speed. Before the series made its dubious leap to the third dimension and lost basically everything that made it great (Sonic and the Black Knight? Seriously?), the little blue dynamo blazed through loops, spirals and corkscrews with an alacrity sorely lacking in any other game in the genre. Plugging Sonic 3 into Sonic and Knuckles unlocked the capability to become even more powerful by collecting each Chaos Emerald twice, if your hands were steady enough to beat the increasingly difficult mini-games. All in all, it is a huge, gorgeous platformer that should be played by any younger gamer who thinks they are a Sonic fan the series ground to a virtual halt after this one. There are literally dozens of titles that could have made this list. There are strong arguments that the 8- and 16-bit generations were the pinnacle of classic gaming, arguments bolstered by scores of re-releases of classic games for Xbox's Live Arcade, the Playstation Network and the Wii's Virtual Console. If you're lucky enough to own the original cartridges, why not plug them in and see where nostalgia takes you? If you're a newer gamer, many of these titles are available in some form or other for newer systems, like the aforementioned downloadable titles or in portable reincarnations. Either way, don't blow your food or alcohol budget on that overpriced, overdone shooter starring Marcus Mister Chief Fenix when there's so much fun to be wrung from those dusty little plastic squares.
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