Early Game

Early on Reyes is right: It’s all about XP. Kill as many monsters as you can, focus on XP boosting abilities and build up your stable of spells. A technique that has worked well for me is to prioritize monster killing every other turn so that you clear your highest total non-monster match on opposing turns. This allows your (hopefully) big matches to play off each other: Big monster match followed by big potion/coin/shield match, repeat. The reason for this is to get the most bonus matches possible per turn, understanding that especially early on you can easily absorb even several turns of monster attacks even without worrying about potions or shields since the monsters start off doing very little damage. The exception to this rotation is when a special monster appears at which point you almost always want to focus on clearing that monster because they give big coin and XP boosts and can do enough damage to give you trouble.

Upgrades early game should be focused on XP and damage boosting as top priority. Monsters always progress in strength as turns advance so you need to stay on pace with them in the damage department or you’ll find yourself overwhelmed by monsters you can’t clear every other turn. More often than not you should be able to match three skulls without a sword and kill two of them. If that’s not the case, you’re not devoting enough upgrades to dealing damage. Obviously XP boosting is important to maximize these early, easy kills into lots of skill ups. Obviously Strength upgrades are then the best since they grant both of these things together, and raw XP boost being second best. Reyes downplays the utility of base damage upgrades but I tend to think of it as a decent choice if there is no other XP or damage boosting option available on a level upgrade. Item upgrades granted from collecting shields should indeed never be taken for base damage (there’s always something better to put onto an item since you only get one) but given the choice between two cooldown upgrades and a cooldown plus a base damage upgrade, I’ll take the latter. If you can maintain a damage pace sufficient to kill three skulls unaided by a sword, you’ll rarely struggle to deal with regular monsters.

Your second tier of upgrades are the necessary defensive upgrades. I like to maximize the stats first since they offer two benefits each and the secondary benefits max out eventually and getting to that max fast is important for the later game stages. That means I prefer Dexterity, Vitality and Luck over the other choices, though as Reyes points out, don’t overlook Durability entirely. Given a lack of great upgrade options (which will happen from time to time) I would take Durability first, HP second, and base damage third. I disagree with Reyes about Life Leech since I think it’s always useful to do two things at the same time, it’s especially important if you choose not to select Heal as one of your spells since you’ll waste lots of whole turns collecting potions without this and if you’re focusing on keeping your damage output high it starts to pay off pretty quickly. Regeneration is secondary to Life Leech to me, but also useful if you decide against Heal and can be good in tandem with Life Leech. Never select either of these upgrades over Vitality or direct HP boost, however. Even at 15-20% Leech on a high damage output you’re likely to be getting less benefit in terms of survivability than pushing your max HP.

Some stuff to avoid, especially in early game: As near as I can tell the generic Cooldown upgrade doesn’t actually improve the cooldown on your spells, rather it bumps the current cooldowns globally by one turn. This is only directly useful in the edge case of having a spell that will prolong your life one turn away from cooldown and you can’t survive the current turn. Otherwise, skip it (though this is dependent on my estimation being correct that it doesn’t actually permanently lower the cooldown of all spells; if that is the case suddenly this spell is a top priority because it can reduce cooldowns beyond the max spell levels). Blunting is of limited usefulness in early game and Reyes seems to think it doesn’t scale well in the later game stages which is a good enough reason for me to avoid it, although as you start getting into later game it becomes much more useful to smooth out incoming damage especially from stubborn enemies who get stuck in less accessible corners, so probably around the time you pick your fourth spell you should start putting some Blunting upgrades higher in your priority list. Spikes is a tough call because I find its benefit to be minimal if you’re focusing on clearing out monsters to gain XP—by the time Spikes does enough damage to clear a monster you probably could have done it yourself several turns earlier. As Reyes points out it can be useful in helping with difficult special monsters but as I’ll point out below, if you have the capacity to wait out a monster and let Spikes kill it, you’ve either gone with Spikes as a core strategy or you hit kind of a stasis mode; in my opinion there are better ways to deal with annoying specials.

Spell Selection

Read Reyes’ breakdown for convincing arguments in favor of Dazzle and Teleport. Dazzle I think is good, but since it doesn’t directly clear board areas it isn’t great as a first or second skill. Better are the skills that directly pull groups from the board. Reyes recommends Repair and I agree with him on that front but he also suggests Skill Elixir and I’m not sure I’m with him there. The problem is that these skills have to be applicable beyond the early game and while tons of XP is great early on, it gets less beneficial later when survival becomes more of an issue as the monsters increase in power. I actually prefer Heal, which does the same thing but gives you the actual HP instead of XP. The principal problem with Skill Elixir is that it re-purposes health potions which means you not only don’t get health from them but you then have to wait for them to collect back on the board in order to replenish your health. It’s risky to assume you’ll have enough time to do that without wishing you had some of those potions back. I’ve played games where I actually got both, but with two “clear-out” spells devoted to the same resource you end up getting less of each for every cast since the tendency is to try and stagger their cooldowns. So I recommend Repair as a first skill and Heal as another collection skill but I would avoid taking it until the third or fourth slot since it isn’t as critical early in the game.

Your second skill should instead be some sort of panic switch: Your go-to spell to get you out of a tight spot. There are several, most of them focused on mitigating special monsters: Banish, Exorcise and Teleport are the foolproof ones, but also Counterattack and Freeze can be reasonable panic switches though only if you just need a single turn of breathing room. Less reliable panic switch spells might be Explosive Armor and Explosive Potion could work if you like to live on the edge (or Fireball and Slash if you really like taking risks) and a few that aren’t recommended but can serve the purpose if you don’t mind the decent chance that your tight spot isn’t aided by your fallback spell like Boost Damage, Disarm and Shatter. If you don’t mind sitting on Dazzle without popping it every time it’s off cooldown, it can be a middling panic switch as well. My favorite panic switch is probably Teleport because it can aid in multiple-special situations plus it guarantees you won’t go out of the oven and into the frying pan if a new special replaces a dealt with one. Exorcise would be my second pick only because you still can get some XP from the evaded monster where Banish is just a problem solver and nothing more.

The big question facing you is probably going to be Dazzle vs. Enchant for your third slot. Enchant is pretty fantastic in that it’s just a free upgrade, every time it’s off cooldown (and there’s no reason not to use it every cooldown). Yet, it has a very long cooldown that is even long when fully upgraded. My recommendation after fiddling with both is to take Enchant if it comes up relatively early in the game and then don’t bother upgrading it unless there is absolutely nothing else worth choosing. The few extra turns between availability aren’t really worth the wasted upgrade. However, if you see Dazzle first, take it instead (the side benefit to that being that if you don’t see Teleport for a while, you can still hold back on being aggressive with Dazzle and use it as a pseudo-panic spell).

Some spell combos to avoid: Skill Elixir/Heal/Explosive Potion/Mana Potion; Dazzle/Treasure; Dazzle/Golden Touch. Also avoid the Boost spells (Boost Armor/Boost Damage/Boost Gold/Boost Health) as they are nice but not as useful as their free-clear counterparts (Repair/Disarm/Treasure/Heal, respectively) and any of the more random spells which you can’t control: Earthquake, Fireball, Magic Sword, Slash and Trap.

It’s certainly a viable strategy to skip the second free-clear spell (Heal or Repair) and go for either Treasure Chamber or some kind of killer combo. If you’re already taking Repair and Dazzle, it might be worth considering swapping out Heal for Scavenge: Dazzle-Scavenge-Repair could be a poor-man’s Enchant. If you do select Enchant, you may consider taking Mana Potion instead of Heal to run through those a bit faster.

The key thing is to make minor adjustments to your upgrade priorities depending on what you decide to do spell-wise: If you aren’t going to take Heal, make sure you put extra effort into upgrading Vitality and Luck early in the game when you aren’t at risk of death from a few regular monsters; if you decide to use a secondary panic spell like Freeze, beef up your defense and focus especially on damage so you can maximize the extra turn.

Upgrading Equipment

Equipment upgrades should follow the same basic strategy you’re using for level upgrades: XP, damage, HP, defense and then everything else. However, be cautious not to upgrade to a piece that isn’t compatible with your previous enchantments lest you lose a hard-earned bonus. Likewise, if a new item has an upgrade and a secondary benefit that provides a free boost in another area (say a shield that adds +1 to damage but also happens to add +5% Life Leech), always take the double-upgrade even if they’re both fairly low priority improvements. Occasionally I’ve seen an item that grants upgrades in three slots, though I don’t remember seeing one like that which didn’t also come with a downgrade on something as well. In that case I still take the upgrades, since netting two is still better than just taking one, but note that a two-up item with a downgrade elsewhere is a net gain of one upgrade and only worthwhile if you deem the downgrade to be inferior to both ups.

Your second choice beyond a double upgrade would be any item that casts a spell on upgrade: I’ve seen items come with Enchant and you can’t beat having an upgrade give you another upgrade (the side benefit of which is you get to see two sets).

Just The Start

These are notes from my experiences early on in my career as a Dungeon Raider. My strategies are likely to refine as I try various things and compare notes with other players. I said up top but it bears repeating that this is stuff that has worked to a certain degree for me so far, but I’m interested in improving. If you have any tips or strategies, I’d love to hear them, either in the comments section or at ironsoap@tunnelsofdoom.org. I’ll try to update this and add more discussion as I continue playing.

One thing I’m most interested in hearing is what people’s strategies are in regards to waiting on the spells you want: Is it better to hold out longer to get the right combo or should you work with what you get? I also kind of glossed over spell upgrades which reduce cooldowns: Some games I try to max out the spells to churn through them faster, other times I focus on more immediately beneficial upgrades to stats. Thus far I haven’t been able to determine which is more likely to result in a successful game.

I’m also curious as to which class people are playing. I’ve stuck with the Ranger for the most part to this point as I have him up to level 5, but the arrows are infrequent enough without Volley (which I can’t see being a viable spell choice) to only be occasionally useful. I do have the Mage unlocked who looks like an intriguing alternative with his free (that is, non-spell-based) mana potions.

Koopa Division

1. Metroid Prime vs. 8. Super Smash Bros. Melee
12. Animal Crossing vs. 4. Katamari Damacy
11. Ico vs. 14. Psychonauts
7. Shadow of the Colossus vs. 2. Super Mario Galaxy

I’m not a fan of fighting games because they’re either these super-precise skill matches that I don’t have the patience for or they’re lunatic button mashers with no purpose and Smash Bros. is the worst of the latter. I also happen to think that Metroid Prime is a pretty significant achievement in game design so the choice there is easy. I don’t have much of a preference between Animal Crossing and Katamari, both are quirky fun for a little while but as far as I’m concerned neither holds a candle to Metroid Prime so flipping a coin I’ll say AC. I realize that Psychonauts isn’t a perfect game and there is a lot of love out there for Ico but honestly I never really got much aside from frustration out of Ico and I still think Psychonauts is criminally overlooked despite its near universal critical acclaim. Since I think Shadow of the Colossus is far superior to Ico, I’ll go with Pychonauts and then let Shadow represent Team Ico’s output.

My picks for the next round:

1. Metroid Prime vs. 12. Animal Crossing
14. Psychonauts vs. 7. Shadow of the Colossus

Alucard Division

1. BioShock vs. 9. Portal
5. Grand Theft Auto III vs. 4. Resident Evil 4
6. Fallout 3 vs. 3. Half-Life 2
7. Batman: Arkham Asylum vs. 15. LEGO Star Wars

Portal narrowly edges out BioShock because I have zero complaints about Portal which is as well-crafted and complete of a video game experience as you’re going to encounter in this decade or any other to date while for all of BioShock’s strengths it does have some notable weaknesses. The true travesty present here is that Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was given a reprieve and included in the initial round via community demand but then unjustly pitted against Portal of all things and, well, you have to admit that Portal has a decent shot of being the literal Game of the Decade. ED deserved a better fate. I find it hard not to grant RE4 the edge over GTA given that I simply prefer Resident Evil and survival horror over sandbox games, but I have to admit that other games this decade have improved on what RE4 did and the game itself was primarily great because it took a beloved franchise that was getting stale and brought it into modern times. Given what GTA3 did for gaming in general in the decade, it’s hard not to go with it. I grant Half-Life 2 the win over Fallout 3 even though I probably played Fallout more because at their foundation Half-Life 2 tells a better story (more effectively) than Fallout. Both have their gameplay issues, but Half-Life 2 is the superior game by a small margin. As for Batman vs. Star Wars? I don’t think either game deserves to be here, really. Batman is a great use of the license in a Metroid Prime-style game, while LEGO SW is a great use of the license in a simplified platformer. Neither game is particularly revelatory and both are strong for similar reasons, I give the edge to Batman just on the strength of the extraneous content—which both games have in spades—which in this case is more compelling.

My picks:

9. Portal vs. 5. Grand Theft Auto III
3. Half-Life 2 vs. 7. Batman: Arkham Asylum

Chocobo Division

1. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs. 8. Deus Ex
12. Plants vs Zombies vs. 4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
11. Lumines vs. 14. Peggle
7. The Sims vs. 2. World of Warcraft

The biggest struggle I have in the whole competition is Oblivion versus Deus Ex. Now, I put hundreds of hours into Oblivion and absolutely loved it, but it is hard to say that it is a better contender for Game of the Decade than Deus Ex that was so ahead of its time for so many different reasons. From the FPS/RPG hybrid that would later come back in games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Borderlands (or even Fallout 3 and, in some ways, Oblivion itself) to the fact that you can beat the game without actually killing anyone plus a brilliantly realized story that is far and away better than most of the current crop of “story-driven” games, it really was and is something special. Though it saddens my heart, I have to turn my back on Oblivion and say Deus Ex is ultimately more deserving of the title regardless of what my personal feelings on the matter were. Plants vs. Zombies is cute but no match for KotOR, and Lumines verses Peggle is like saying “do you prefer Peanut Butter and Jelly or Peanut Butter and Jam?” I’ll say Peggle for no reason other than that I played it more so it must be better. I guess. And I doubt any game that didn’t have a very strong case for being the top when the dust settles has a prayer against World of Warcraft which, regardless of your opinion of the game or MMOs in general, has to be on the short list since it’s second only to Minesweeper and FarmVille as “Game You’re Most Likely to be Surprised by Who You Find Playing.”

My Chocobo Division picks:

8. Deus Ex vs. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
14. Peggle vs. World of Warcraft

Bo Jackson Division

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 8. Soulcalibur II
12. SSX vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 14. Left 4 Dead
7. Rock Band vs. 15. Battlefield 1942

Fighting games again? I think the original Halo is good for what it did: Bring FPS legitimately to consoles, so I suppose it’s mildly worthy but at best a long shot. I’d argue that God of War which Soulcalibur beat out brought more to the table as a GotD contender and could have even claimed the spot from Halo, but given the options I’ll grudgingly go with Master Chief’s flawed first appearance. I similarly dislike being asked to choose between a meh racing game and a meh shooter that was mostly just a testosterone overdose applied to Resident Evil 4 but since I passed on RE4 itself I’ll have to give Gears the nod here. Left 4 Dead is a terrible addition in my opinion since even though it had some cool ideas and I had a blast with it, it never stopped reminding me that it needed a sequel or a whole bunch of DLC or something to make it more complete. Advance Wars 2 was better than the original and Jeanne D’Arc was better than them all but I need to give a shout to my turn-based strategy homies so I’ll say AW takes the title. As for Rock Band vs. BF 1942, obviously Battlefield did a great service to modern gaming by paving the way for big multiplayer action games but I think the decade will be more remembered for its plastic peripherals cluttering living rooms around the world than for a game that maybe showed what was possible to the next wave of multiplayer developers. Rock Band gets the crown. All in all, though, I think this is the weakest division by far.

My final picks:

1. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. 4. Gears of War
6. Advance Wars vs. 7. Rock Band

The Final Four

There’s no need to break down the elite eight so I’ll skip ahead to the final four (as I’d vote it):

Koopa Division: Shadow of the Colossus
Alucard Division: Portal
Chocobo Division: World of Warcraft
Bo Jackson Division: Rock Band

I think the shame here is that Chocobo is so ridiculously strong with Oblivion, Deus Ex and WoW while Bo Jackson is so weak. By itself Rock Band is a remarkable achievement and one that I think if you had described to me in 1989 I would have salivated over. But just ten years later we were already seeing the kinds of things arcades were doing (or had done and still managed to fail to make money) and I would have thought, “Moving that concept into the living room? Yeah, I can see that.” For all Rock Band and Guitar Hero and the like have done to make the last decade memorable for fake plastic party rocking, they’re really not bringing anything to the media space that wasn’t already germinating there in some fashion before.

As part of the “Are Games Art?” debate, Shadow of the Colossus certainly (and deservedly) gets presented a lot as evidence supporting the thesis. For this reason it deserves its place here, but as a game it suffers for its art because a lot of the play is, let’s face it, pushing up on the analog stick to move you from point A to point B. It’s an inspiring piece of deconstructive storytelling and and an effective use of the medium to evoke a mood without resorting to a lot of the other-format borrowing that passes for the same in other development houses, which does a lot to (hopefully?) inspire others to follow. And frankly not enough games bother with things like mood and tone and pacing. Still, games are meant to be played and since playing Shadow isn’t as fun as talking about Shadow, it’s close but still the third place finisher.

The great thing about Portal is that in many ways it does what Shadow of the Colossus did without even relying on the last trope Team Ico employed which is the unplayable cut scene: They evoked a mood and told a story without beating the player with any of it. Some games seem to be written for the least attentive person the developers can imagine and practically go so far as to write on the walls of the dungeon/castle/office building/space ship/whatever something like “YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE FEELING DREAD/TRIUMPH/TENSION/VICTORY/DESPAIR/WHATEVER NOW.” Portal, amusingly, does write on the walls but it writes atmosphere and it writes the seeds of stories and lets you fill in the blanks. Like a wonderful horror movie that doesn’t show you the murder but shows you the other characters’ reaction to finding the body, Portal shows you without telling you. Plus, they do so in the context of a joyous blend of physics tech display, puzzle gaming and mostly non violent first person action that is never not fun to play. Just when Portal feels like it might be wearing out its welcome, the game ends on one of the highest notes in gaming and completes the experience with the most satisfying and rewarding end credits yet. It doesn’t feel developed or designed so much as expertly crafted.

Yet, just when you think you can’t help but say Portal is the Game of the Decade, you have to think about World of Warcraft. The thing about WoW is that it isn’t particularly amazing. Like Rock Band it is more of an amazement to someone from twenty years ago than someone ten years back. Then again, what Blizzard does is rarely amazing in the sense that they’re breaking new ground. Rather, they take established settings and formulas and polish the edges until the whole thing is so glossy and smooth it creates a different kind of amazement more akin to “Why can’t everyone else make games this good?” The differences between WoW and Portal couldn’t be more broad: You have in one hand a tight, perfectly directed experience that wastes no single moment. In the other you have the most sprawling, staggeringly massive collection of high-quality content that could quite possibly never ever end. People who played the open beta of WoW are still grinding through instances and filling their social calendars with raids, happily immersed in a game that cost them $750 over the past five years to play. A rich RPG adventure to play through by yourself, an enviable social experiment to play with friends or to meet new people, World of Warcraft is really the antithesis of Portal in the same format.

So which game best defines the decade?

In the end I have to say World of Warcraft. “Game of the…” discussions are about the past and I don’t think any game better defines the last ten years than an epic online fantasy that tapped into both the social appeal and the human disconnect that may best describe the early 2000s in the years to come. While Portal may be a better game from a critical standpoint and it better represents where I hope games are going, it’s hard not to say that WoW matters more and that it is a better representative for what game developers and game players accomplished this decade.

Now we just have to see if the CG readers agree.

Actually, Einstein may have already talked about that. I’m not really a physicist, I’m just a gamer.

Ahem. Kongregate. Listen, Flash games are hardly new. Sites that feature a bunch of Flash games are established bedrocks of the online tapestry. And closed systems of imaginary rewards especially as relates to electronic games are also hardly unheard of. But Kongregate’s combination of a meta-game points system, user-submitted games and variety of titles makes it singularly compelling. Combine an accessible form of my favorite distraction, add an established addiction hook (see my year-long infatuation with XBLA Gamerscore points for reference) and add water. What sprouts, leafy and full, is a mind-gripping lock on my attention.

It would be one thing if the site contained just one or two games I liked. But the dangerous combination of tower defense titles, surprisingly rich old-school dungeon crawlers, strategic turn-based combat games, clever puzzle titles the likes of which you will never find on any PlayStation-branded device and the maliciously clever collectible card game tied closely to the already hostile points system and you have a place I can spend hours. And hours.

It’s not that Kongregate has no flaws, it certainly does. A plenteous selection of tower-defense variants and cookie-cutter platformers gives the site a certain redundancy and as cool as the collectible card game (Kongai) is in theory it’s implementation is by turns overwrought and too simplistic. But as something to do in lieu of make-myself-look-busy work and as a competitor with writing for my browser-time, it does it’s job well.

Too well.

In an effort to correct the flaws inherent in the previous list, I’m reprinting it here, updated and revised to include games I’ve played since and games that I’ve reconsidered. Note that my criteria may have changed somewhat but it still remains rooted firmly in games that I’ve played that I feel have delivered the best experiences. Some games I recognize for their base brilliance and others because I just played the heck out of it in spite of some perhaps obvious flaws. For the most part whenever a game has several iterations or minor variants, I chose the one that I feel is best overall which is not meant to diminish the brilliance of the others, but mark that a game can be refined over time and also can in some cases be reduced to less than its original promise. For example, I wouldn’t put the GameCube Resident Evil and the PSOne Resident Evil on the list spearately, I’d merely include the former as being the superior version of the same game.

Finally, it should be noted that there are several games which do not appear because my memory of them is lost in a haze of thousands of games I’ve played and while I recall their general brilliance, I can’t remember enough at my advanced age to know what made them so great. They are on my short list of games to re-play but their omission here is a product of the continual refinement of this list and not of some slight against them. The notable examples are Chrono Trigger and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Full list after the click.

30. Puyo Pop Fever – Often known by other names and with many variants, this game is one of the best multiplayer puzzle games you can find. It’s simple gameplay and addictive (or is that vindicitve?) versus attacks make it among the best non-fighting fighting games for two players and the new Fever mode is a flat-out hoot.

29. Twisted Metal II – Ah, Twisted Metal: The fighting game for people who don’t like memorizing hundreds of obscure moves. Never mind all that boring fisticuffs hooey: How about getting into a heavily armored car and racing around virtual cities, lobbing homing rockets and power missiles at your unsuspecting foes? Semi-destructible environments, crazy deep gameplay and the best split-screen multiplayer in any game makes for a game that has yet to be matched in terms of time consumption. This game has fallen significantly since last year (down 18 spots) not because it stopped being great but because I realized that as much as I played it, the motivations were more social than anything and that didn’t warrant top 10 consideration.

28. Eye of the Beholder – Classic PC role-playing with the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons license. Dr. Mac, Scott and I spent practically an entire summer listening to Metallica’s black album and fighting our way through swarms of giant spiders and kobolds trying to unlock the game’s secrets. The first-person perspective added some much-needed immersion to the D&D licensed games and the old-school dungeon crawl setting was perfect for passing a slow summer afternoon—provided you’re a pasty geek like me. Another long drop, but again due to the fact that the quality of the game deserves mention on this list but perhaps not so close to the top.

27. Metroid Prime – To say I was skeptical about this game that took a beloved side-scrolling action/adventure franchise and dared to make it not just 3D but first person is putting it mildly. But Retro Studios captured the essence of those original games precisely and made first-person platforming viable for the first time that I can recall. The sense of solitude and wonder that permeates the game is uncanny and the little touches like Samus’ face reflecting in her face shield when a bright light flashes or the droplets of moisture that mist up the screen when walking through waterfalls are just tiny examples of a game that was very good to begin with but elevated to brilliance through attention to detail.

26. Final Fantasy Tactics Advance – I admit to a weakness when it comes to turn-based strategy games. Standing tall among them is this gem for the GameBoy Advance: As deep as any disc-based game with a stellar combat system (with just enough randomness built in due to the Judge system) and a near-perfect class system that encourages all those OCD-inspired traits borne by role-playing gamers and strategy hounds. Any criticisms that could be leveled at this game stem from the so-so storyline and relatively bland characterizations.

25. God of War – This game actually got a five-spot bump up the ladder this year, mostly because of its relative strength compared to some other games that were ranked higher more for nostalgia than actual relative quality. Also God of War has influenced so many new or upcoming platform fighters that its true influence is only now being felt which was probably predictable but a testament to this game’s excellence.

24. Planet Puzzle League – A new game to the list, it earns its spot not only because it takes the puzzle game genre into a broader consideration and crafts an experience that is the sum of what came before it, but it adds clever features that take everything fun about puzzle games into consideration and lets you create an experience that works best for you. If you like the screw-your-buddy vs. mode of Puyo Pop, there is something similar here; if you want an actual brain teaser puzzle, you can do that; time attack is here; straight versus mode with no goofy power-ups and so on. It’s all here, in the perfect puzzle game package.

23. Galaga – This is the the game I can’t pass up in an arcade. Perpetually 25 cents to play, it’s like Space Invaders without all those sissy shields. Oh, and the aliens dive-bomb you and don’t just drop weak little slow-moving bombs on you. Plus the Galaga spaceship is roughly 400 times cooler looking than the boxy little turret thing from SI. It’s one of those games that has to be experienced in a dark pizza parlor game room (square footage: 4) with a pocketful of quarters and a determination to nab the high score spot. Initials put in when you achieve the goal? P-O-O, of course.

22. Mario Kart DS – Mario Kart games are staples. The fun, addictive gameplay is better than the most realistic Gran Turismo or Project Gotham Racing and the controls are simple enough for kids but deep enough for more experienced gamers to find challenge as well which makes it a great family game. I chose the DS version only because it is the only one with online multiplayer (wonderful fun) and retro courses from previous iterations. Could easily be replaced by DoubleDash on the GameCube which is just as fun but lacks online multiplayer.

21. Counter-Strike – Who knew a side project based on a second generation game engine could conquer the world of online multiplayer? Well, when you work in such subtle innovations as real penalty for death, team-based modern combat that actually encouraged teamwork, reward for skill and a development model that lent itself perfectly to being adaptable maybe it shouldn’t have been such a shocker.

20. StarCraft – StarCraft’s claim to fame? Merely perfect balance and a truly engrossing single-player campaign. StarCraft also offers a healthy dose of the coolness factor with some quality Science Fiction-y units (including a Human faction that is actually as fun to play as the less mundane alternate choices, Protoss and Zerg) that seem to have drawn some inspiration from Warhammer 40K. Not many games boast opportunities as impishly satisfying as rushing an opponent’s base with dozens of Zerglings followed by a swarm of Hydralisks spitting acid.

19. The Legend of Zelda – Other than the classic sound effect you get for discovering a secret door, the other thing that will always stand out in my mind about the original Zelda game is that surreal TV commercial they put out for it that featured a freakish guy looking paranoid and shouting out the names of some of the game’s enemies. “Octoroks!” But the game itself had so much to offer: From the gold colored cartridge to the battery save feature to the detailed quest that was the first I’d ever heard of that didn’t actually require going through entirely the way the designer intended. People would talk about beating Ganon with just the wooden sword. “Insanity!” I thought, but it was certainly possible. Still as playable 20 years after its release as it was back in the day.

18. Baseball Stars – If only—if only—they made baseball games this simply fun and ceaselessly entertaining as Baseball Stars these days. The semi-role-playing elements of stat boosting and team tweaking was ideally balanced. The lack of any kind of license actually worked in Baseball Stars’ favor. If only the battery save feature hadn’t been quite as cantakerous I might still be playing this game. Oh, and did I mention that the actual baseball game was incredibly fun as well? Modern baseball sims might get closer to the real game, but none touch Baseball Stars with a ten-foot pole in terms of raw enjoyment.

17. Tempest – For all the arcade gimmicks: The trackball, the bike handles, the two-seater racing wheels and the double-stick tank controls, none have had a game that matched their promise as well as Tempest. The game is simple, abstract even. But with a rotating knob and a single fire button there is a world inside these cabinets full of tension and action that many modern games never find.

16. Dead Rising – If you take a recent game like Prey and contrast it with a game from twenty years ago like Faxanadu or Maniac Mansion, you may notice once you move past the obvious graphical fidelity that one thing modern games lack is serious challenge. Take this old-school style challenge level and blend equal parts ultra-gory zombie B-movie, sandbox-style open-ended play, terrific graphics that take full advantage of the hardware and a cheeky, twisted sense of humor and you have a memorable game that may give Capcom’s own Resident Evil series a run for its money as far as zombie games are concerned.

15. Pac-Man: Championship Edition – The classic maze structure of Pac-Man is a pillar on which video games are built. Ms. Pac-Man made some obvious minor refinements and pretty much since then the name of Pac-Man has been stuck in those early 80s years. While Pac-Man’s significance has never been lost, his relevance has been in question for some time… until Pac-Man Championship Edition. CE is the first game to capture the essence of what makes Pac-Man a great game while at the same time offering something new and exciting. It’s a modern refinement of a classic rather than a hackneyed “re-imagining” or some similar nonsense. Pac-Man CE is Pac-Man only better and that means it has challenge, excitement, nostalgia and something precious few other video games can claim: Elegance.

14. Bionic Commando – “What do you mean, ‘I can’t jump’? Look at all those platforms! How else am I supposed to get up there!?” This is the brilliance of Bionic Commando: With nothing more than a funky physics scheme that made a grappling hook seem like an appropriate replacement for the genre-standard jump button, Capcom created a game that stood head and shoulders above it’s copy-cat relatives (Strider, anyone? Anyone?). A long, challenging quest with the first seeds of player choice, varied gameplay, a great item system and the second-most memorable boss fight (”Dude! It’s Hitler! And his face just exploded! Sick, dude!”) ever: It’s a certified classic.

13. Metal Gear Solid – I suspect that the old Metal Gear games from the 8-bit era were ahead of their time. They encouraged sneaking past enemies rather than killing everyone in sight (”Whaa?”) and offered so many power ups and weapon choices that most people just kind of scratched their heads when they tried to play the game. But the Playstation allowed the game to work in a way that made sense for what the Metal Gear series was trying to accomplish. The stealth-based gameplay was new and, surprisingly, exciting. But what made MGS so great was the subtle touches: Snake’s laser scope filtering through the fog; footprints left in the snow that alerted guards to your presence; the Sniper Wolf battle; the frequency key on “the back of the CD case” and, of course, the Psycho Mantis fight. As I played it I kept saying over and over, “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”

12. Planescape: Torment – The crazed, surreal role-playing game that everyone harkens as among the best of the isometric D&D licensed family is one I picked up on a lark: It was like $10 at Fry’s and had an interesting cover. Plus it said Dungeons and Dragons on the cover so I figured, “Why not?” But this isn’t some Thief/Mage/Fighter/Cleric dungeon romp: This is an intricate and dark tale of an immortal main character with no memory and a cast of increasingly bizarre traveling companions (including a floating skull and a burning corpse) trying to figure out nothing more than what the heck is going on. If not for the sometimes frustrating combat, it would be a role-playing masterpiece.

11. BioShock – For the first time since Half-Life, someone has created a game that really understands how to use video games to tell a story. It’s not a game that forgets what it is as an attempt to be some grand experiment in interactive narration, because it remains a delightful shooter at its core. But never mind the power-ups: Look at the architecture! Observe the cleverness of the setting and experience the tension crafted so deliberately out of the environment, out of the sublimely woven backstory, out of the position it places the payer within it. It is a game that asks hard questions but doesn’t answer them itself, it forces the player to answer. And why not? BioShock is only Half-Life’s lesser because it treads the ground broken by Valve’s earlier work and doesn’t quite deliver the final moments that a game of this scale and depth demands, but as you stand in a virtual world and gaze in wonder at your surroundings, feeling things less commonly felt while playing games than fear or excitement—things like remorse, awe and sorrow—you may forget for a time that Black Mesa ever existed.

10. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Occasionally a person will miss a game that is worthy of their attention. With my memories of Castlevania III standing firm as the pinnacle of the series, I somehow skipped Konami’s PlayStation gem. Everything that made Castlevania III a great game is here, but then you realize that is merely the thinnest of films atop a richer and more complete experience. SotN set the stage for every good Castlevania game to follow (mostly on Nintendo’s handheld systems) and even those excellent titles can’t quite recapture the precision with which this game is executed.

9. Final Fantasy VI – If you thought FFVII was epic, you missed out on FFVI/FFIII. I mean, what other game has an apocalyptic, literally world-altering event happen halfway through the game? This is the fantasy role-playing game that made people realize what was possible on consoles. The only bad thing about this game is the fact that its epic story was so popular that later Final Fantasy games (and actually later console RPGs in general) began to think that story could trump gameplay and we ended up with stuff like Final Fantasy VIII and X. Still, you can’t hold that against FFVI which did everything that it possibly could just right and did so without the aid of fancy 3D graphics or even non-game engine cut scenes. The impact of this game can be summarized with Kefka’s mocking, braying laughter that still reverberates in the skulls of my peers.

8. Nethack – Gamers like to mutter amongst themselves that graphics don’t really matter. We don’t play games to look at pretty pictures. We like the pretty pictures, sure, but that’s not why we play. Should we ever require proof of this, direct your inquisitors to Nethack. It’s the rare video game that requires imagination; it’s the curious crossroad between computer role-playing game and pen-and-paper RPG. Nethack can inspire fear with an ASCII character and triumph with a punctuation mark. There is so much to do and so many options for play in this game that it sometime even outpaces the most system-taxing titles of our current generation in terms of player choice and cohesive, permissive environment. I think if you compare Nethack to Oblivion, you may not find the multi-gigabyte monstrosity that is Elder Scrolls IV holds up in terms of available actions and believable interdependence between the world’s inhabitants. It seems impossible, but then again, so does Nethack.

7. Super Mario Bros. 3 – There was a time when all the cell phone stores you see anywhere that could even be remotely referred to as a shopping center weren’t peddling cell phones. The ubiquitous storefront venture of the late eighties was the Mom and Pop video rental store. This was before the big corporate chains crushed everyone out of business, and they were everywhere. In the little shopping center down the street from our house when I was kid there was one of these stores and they were renting something else: Nintendo carts. Someone who worked there must have either been a gamer or was just really ahead of their time because they not only carried video games for rent before most other people were even considering such a wacky notion but they also had a handful of imported titles from Japan. Among them was this insanely anticipated forthcoming title named Super Mario Bros. 3. Following up the fun but unusual SMB2 (which was actually a Mario-ized facelift of an unrelated Japanese game), SMB3 was hyped everywhere, including getting top billing in a feature film so having a chance to play it (albeit the text was in Japanese) ahead of its release was spectacular. The game was everything players wanted back then: Reminicent of the original console-bundled classic, offering plenty of new challenges, loads of secrets to find and perfectly tuned platforming gameplay. I rushed out and bought the game when it was finally released in the US and I’ve played through it probably ten times including several times after getting the facelift for Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES. It’s a timeless classic and deserves all the praise it gets.

6. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem – Good games are memorable games. Ones that stay with you… like Eternal Darkness. The game’s sanity effects that show blood running down walls, distorted perspectives, simulated program glitches and a whole assortment of freaky occurrences that suggest the game is playing you as much as you are playing it results in a game that sticks in your mind long after the credits have rolled. Multiple endings, a deep and engaging story inspired by Lovecraft’s mythos and strong gameplay round out the checklist of one of the best “adult” titles on the GameCube.

5. Resident Evil 4 – For all the things that Resident Evil did for gaming, it always had a little something holding it back. Whether it was the control scheme (pretty bad for most of them), the unlikely puzzles (RE:CV), terrible voice acting (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil 1), pointless story (ahem RE3) or unconvincing characters (RE0), it was usually very much worth the playthrough, but never a spectacular experience. RE4 fixed all that and added a healthy dose of extra gore, a strong story, engaging (and involving!) cutscenes, phenomenal graphics, sharp puzzles that never got too puzzle-y and plenty of extras to make it not just a great play but a great buy.

4. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – Like a lot of people, I was disappointed by the recent Star Wars prequels. I didn’t hate them, but they left me wondering, “Was my delight in the world of Star Wars merely a product of my young memory applying a sense of wonder that eventually became nothing more than simple nostalgia?” Playing through KotOR is direct evidience that there actually was something to Star Wars to begin with: It wasn’t just nostalgia. That Lucas lost track of what made Star Wars good to begin with is a topic for another time but fortunately the team at BioWare tapped into that sense of awe with a prequel to the prequels which draws the player into the world of Star Wars like no other Star Wars licensed property since Timothy Zahn’s novelized adaptations of what would have been episodes VII, VIII and IX. KotOR gets Star Wars perfect, blending enough new with the familiar and incorporating a wonderfully engaging story into a huge experience. There is so much here to praise: The Light/Dark paths through the game that make it one of the few role-playing video games that is actually re-playable; PC-style dialogue trees and detailed character interaction—on a console!; a smooth, good-looking combat system based on d20; really stellar character progression including Jedi powers that are introduced at just the right moment. I could go on. The bottom line is that if you like role-playing games or if you like Star Wars or if you like games that make good purchases (value-wise) and you haven’t played this game, seek it out immediately, I implore you.

3. Super Metroid – Everything that was good about the original NES Metroid remained in the Super Nintendo update. In fact, if they had only bothered to remake the original game with the new 16-bit graphics, plenty of fans (probably myself included) would have been perfectly content. Instead they expanded the game, added new power-ups, introduced a more complete storyline and laid out the game in such a way that 2D platforming/adventure reached its pinnacle early. This game stands testament to how to do a sequel right (stick with what worked the first time, know when to tweak or refine and give ‘em more of what they want) and even without the pressure attached from two previous, popular 8-bit adventures (Metroid II came out for the original black and white GameBoy) Super Metroid would have been a brilliant game.

2. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion – Bethesda’s epic, soaring role-playing game has but one defining characteristic that vaults it to the second best game I’ve ever played: It lives up to its own genre. Most computer role-playing games pay only very passing resemblances to real role-playing games. In many cases the differences between a computer role-playing game and any other kind of role-playing game are more in pace and exposition than anything else. For the experience they provide, most video games are as much RPGs as Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest and even then only in that you assume a role to play. Role-playing staples like Hit Points or fantasy settings are not definitions of the genre, merely conventions. What Oblivion does is allow you to truly pick a kind of character to be and execute, as you wish, that person’s story. Are you an elvish Alchemist? A cruel Orc murderer? A noble thief? Then carry yourself appropriately here, and so as you would if you existed in this realm, as this person. Accept only those tasks which suit you, undertake only the quests that you would if this persona were truly yours. You may change and you may bend to the path the game has in mind, but as an good GM will tell you, you follow the player’s lead.

1. Half-Life – Ever since games started, timidly at first, trying to tell stories along with providing opportunities for play they have struggled with how to do this effectively. If you stop the game and show the story you interrupt the real reason for turning it on in the first place: Essentially you inject a bit of movie into the game. For most designers this was an acceptable compromise. Reward the players with a bit of a break as we throw some exposition at them between boss battles (or whatever). This wasn’t much of a problem with older games which were always third person and whose graphics were generally anything but lifelike. Then came first person games with Wolfenstein (and others) putting players into the protagonist’s shoes. 3D graphics from Quake and a steadily improving market for video accelerator cards started making things look semi-realistic and this presented a problem for the story-in-game people: Players live through the action in this character’s shoes, do we pull them out of that state to show our movies? Half-Life solved the problem like no game before or, really, since: Don’t pull the player out of the character’s shoes. Somehow the writers of Half-Life managed to present a silent protagonist that didn’t strain the suspension of disbelief and using scripted events and a few load-time tricks they delivered the most immersive, emotional and enjoyable experience of any game I’ve ever played. I was literally frightened at times while playing this game… wandering through dark corridors with nothing but a flashlight to guide my way made my palms sweat. Each time I fell into any water my phobia welled up, rationalized by the inevitable Ichthyosaur attack. The conspiratorial tone led by the G-Man’s creepy presence was timed perfectly with the X-Files craze and the attention to detail was such that even later expansions like Blue Shift and Opposing Force fit perfectly within the game’s story and carefully crafted world. When the game was over there was always Counter-Strike which made this game the only real must-purchase PC game for a period of almost ten years. Half-Life stands alone as a game that does what so many others attempt to do but fail and in doing so didn’t forget that above all else it was still supposed to be fun to play.

During one of these arcade visits I recall specifically seeing a game in the same vein as the popular Dragon’s Lair which was neither that seminal title nor its largely indistinguishable counterpart, Space Ace. This mysterious game involved, somehow, car chases and some kind of gangster activity. That is as far as my memory went. I don’t think I ever actually played the game but it was one of those trivial items that inexplicably left its print on my brain like a steel-toed boot in mud.

Later, after the spread of the Internet, I located the game online and identified it as Cliff Hanger, but I had never seen it since that one childhood encounter. Until yesterday when I stumbled across a copy of it at California Extreme. I played it and it turns out it is as bad of a game as all those Dragon’s Lair laserdisc-based titles are, but it was kind of nice to draw a close on a particularly mystifying recollection. And I did finally figure out why the game stuck with me for so long: The failure screen (akin to the regenerating skeleton sequence from Dragon’s Lair) features a fairly grim depiction of a hanging. It flooded back when I witnessed it again yesterday as being something less than traumatic but something more than easily forgotten. As a lad of an impressionable age, the invisible fingerprint of that scene has manifested itself repeatedly throughout my life in my darkest of nightmares.

I only wish I’d gotten a better picture of it. I’d make it my desktop wallpaper.