Ten Great Games

Someone recently asked me(in real life, even) about my favorite video games. This is something I've occasionally thought about, but the question set me to mulling it over once again. Here, in alphabetical order, are ten of my favorites. The ten? Maybe. For now. I always change my mind when I re-read these lists.

Frequently cited for Best Game Ever status is Chrono Trigger, an RPG made by a "dream team" of designers from Square and Enix. A simple but charming story leads you through time and space, searching for the cause of the apocalypse in 1999. Compared to the RPGs of its era(and most RPGs of any era), Chrono Trigger is sublimely elegant and streamlined. Battles occur without any interruption, characters team up for attacks, and strategy arises from the placement of enemies. The plot keeps you glued to the screen, introducing new hooks all the time to keep you from turning the game off. And just when you think you're finished, New Game+ is unlocked, along with a variety of new possible endings. Players who manage to defeat the final boss at the very start of a New Game+ are treated to a visit to the Developers' Room, where the game's staff offer a final congratulation.

It's a perfect peanut butter <-> chocolate situation. The "job system" of the classic Final Fantasy games was cast aside, replaced by a deconstructionist philosophy that reshuffled the relationships between abilities, characters and objects in each new game. Meanwhile, the designers of Tactics Ogre had come up with a wonderfully engaging battle simulation, hampered only by the lack of an interesting system of character growth. Overlay the job system on Tactics' gameplay, and the result is Final Fantasy Tactics, the most addictively customizable game I've ever played. I should also admit that the game has its flaws - plenty of them, in fact - but that doesn't keep it off my list, as I have probably spent more time playing this than any other game. Its GBA sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, is also good, fixing many of the flaws while unfortunately sacrificing some of the depth.

One reliable source of new ideas in 3D games has been the rolling of balls. There are two examples on this list - the first is Katamari Damacy for the PS2. This is one of those occasional bursts of mad genius that arises from Japan and demands to be experienced, like sushi, Ranma 1/2, and the head-mounted toilet paper dispenser. The game's opening movie is a stunning experience in its own right, awash in rainbow colors and entheogenic imagery. The actual playing of the game is simple but captivating. You are a small, green fellow with a canister-shaped head, and you roll a ball around that gathers stuff to it like a snowball gathers snow. Anything less than a certain fraction of the ball's size attaches to it, adding to its mass, and increasing the size of objects that you can collect. That's it, except that the objects are identifiable. Ants, pencils, toilets, cats, children, cars, houses, windmills, islands, rainbows, gods - all are objects in the game, and many of them react in some way to being chased down and captured. To transform an entire world of creatures and things into one huge ball of crap is a somewhat disturbing experience, but in a good way.

Probably the greatest franchise in gaming, the Zelda series offers an embarrassment of riches. It's a challenge to decide which title in the series is the best. Is it Twilight Princess, the most realistic and refined of the 3D games? Maybe Wind Waker, which resembles a vivid cartoon more than a game? How about A Link to the Past, the best of the old 2D games, with its classic take on the light world/dark world design? Since this is a list of my favorite games, I'm going to pick the original, the shiny gold NES cartridge, The Legend of Zelda. I'm under no illusion that this is a better game than its successors, but its antiquated charm holds a special place in my heart. I particularly like the nonlinearity of the first Zelda, and wish more modern games would embrace this sort of structure. There is a prescribed sequence to the game's dungeons, but if you choose to walk away from the set path you may do so. Zelda also famously offers a "second quest" with a reorganized world and completely new dungeons. In my fan's heart I mourn the fact that modern games are too complex to make this kind of bonus feature viable in today's game industry.

In video games, unlike other entertainment media, sequels are frequently better than the original. Such was the case with the classic Mega Man 2. The first game had some good ideas but exemplified the sadistic streak of early NES games, when difficulty was equated with quality. Mega Man 2 brought the challenge down to a fair level, still tough for newbies but not dominatrix tough. It also perfects the Mega Man concept. You choose what order to complete the stages in, and gain new weapons at the end of each. The weapons you get change the nature of the game for the remaining levels, adding a lot of strategy and replay value compared to other platformers of the time. As the series continued, diminishing returns quickly manifested in the enemy and weapon designs. None were ever again as good as Mega Man 2, nor were the graphics and music as inspired. Mega Man 2 was the pinnacle of the series, and arguably, the entire NES era.

Metroid Prime is an essential title for the Gamecube, combining first-person action with Zelda-like controls and a scenario revealed through discovered data, hieroglyphs, and sensor analysis, similar to Marathon. While its deviance from normal FPS standards is jarring at first, as it lacks the direction inputs to offer full look and strafe controls, once you get comfortable with the game it offers one of the most enthralling virtual worlds yet seen in video games. Having played one too many plot-heavy RPGs(and the one too many was specifically Xenogears), the optional scenario text in Metroid Prime came as a joyful revelation to me. Here was a game in which plot and exposition never came at the expense of gameplay. Sweetening the deal, the game has lots of potential for sequence-breaking, i.e. defying the designed path of events in the game for fun and profit. This accidental feature, partially "fixed" in later releases of the game and more or less expunged from the sequels, adds a great deal of challenge and replay value.

The short but sweet Ogre Battle series merges RPG with war simulation. Instead of leading one party of heroes through a world full of randomly occuring battles, in Ogre Battle you organize an entire army of warriors into groups and send them out to fight an opposing army. The N64 sequel, Ogre Battle 64, is a step up in depth and strategic detail from the original, making it one of my all-time favorites. The task of naming fifty to two hundred characters alone is enough to make me drool with excitement, and each time I start a new game I pick a theme, like mythological gods, or characters from other video games, to add a different sense of fantasy to the experience. Sadly, once you reach the final battlefield, there's nothing really left to do, so I tend to quit in the last chapter a little bit before reaching that sad moment.

I love when a game has bonus content well beyond the norm, whether it takes the form of secrets, cheats, bonus missions, or multiplayer options, or in the case of Perfect Dark, all of the above. It's a great action game, but it's the vast array of multiplayer possibilities that make Perfect Dark almost infinitely entertaining. The game features great weapon concepts like the Laptop Gun, which can act as an AI-operated drone, or the N-Bomb, which causes visual impairment. The maps are fun and full of secret passages and crawlspaces. The game's one flaw is its potential for lag, even with the N64 RAM expansion. Avoiding explosives and the rather superfluous Hi-Res mode helps to alleviate this downside.

The N64 was an ill-fated console that failed to compete with Sony's Playstation, but you wouldn't have known it from their launch titles. The PSX launched with... Um... What did it launch with? Toshinden? Whatever it was, it was unmemorable. Meanwhile, Nintendo had converted the most famous video game character of all into 3D, and the result was Super Mario 64. There's a joy in the movements of Mario in this game that has rarely been seen before or since. The various jumps and attacks that Mario is capable of make the game endlessly entertaining, despite its simple graphics and relatively small world. About once a year I dust off this game and collect all the stars all over again.

The Gamecube, on the other hand, was lacking in launch titles, with no big franchise offerings from Nintendo(Luigi's Mansion was a decent game, but more of a one-off oddity than a real Mario title). Who should come to the rescue but... Sega? Yes, perhaps Sega's last great offering to the world was Super Monkey Ball, a masterpiece of simple game design. Roll a ball from the start of a maze to the finish, move on to the next stage. The levels get increasingly complex and difficult as you go. That's all there really is to it, but like another arcade classic, Bubble Bobble, the simple but clever nature of the design lends itself to hundreds of variations. Bubble Bobble could trust its gameplay to carry it through minimalist concepts, like a floor containing only empty space, and Super Monkey Ball is able to pull off similarly fiendish twists, like a single platform with a rapidly spinning goal. The game manages difficulty level perfectly, with easy levels for beginners and challenges that ramp up gradually to the point of pure insanity. As a welcome bonus, Super Monkey Ball includes a variety of multiplayer minigames, including the best billiards simulation I've played. Super Monkey Ball 2 is also a solid game, although I prefer the first one.

art/life/game

A recurring issue of the day is whether video games qualify as art. Proponents point out that video games are clearly able to recreate art in any of its various forms, whether as film, music, painting, comic books, or even theater. Of course, the video game context changes things, which is where the naysayers come in. Games are defined by interactivity. Take away interactivity from a video game and the result is a very different medium, typically something like a computer-animated movie. If the audience has a choice in the outcome of the story, is it still art? Some have argued that the meaning of art disappears in this case. Another complaint is that games often offer not so much a plot as a laundry list of meaningless chores. Sort of like real life.

Let's go back to the beginning. Video games can do everything art can do and more. Even if we were to agree that interactivity destroys artistry(and it doesn't, but let it go) this point remains. Art is something that you get when you remove features from video games, or to put it more simply, video games are bigger than art. Art is a way for an artist to share his ideas about life, but ideas are ethereal. They don't have to prove themselves against the logic of the real world. Games are more real than art, with physical rules and cause and effect. Art is given significance by its distance from life, while games are trivialized by their closeness to it. Which then, are video games closer to, art or life? They are fictional, but they are a kind of existence.

A better phrase to describe video games is "virtual reality," and I think if we remember this label every time we talk about games vs. art, many things become clearer. Everything that goes on in "real" reality can be simulated in virtual reality. Our virtual realities still have practical limitations, such as the lack of full sensory input, but the only absolute distinction between virtual and real is that virtual realities will always be simpler than the reality that contains them.

Video games, then, are a bit like life and a bit like art. There's a recursive pair of aphorisms - Art imitates life, and life imitates art. Is art life? Is life a game? Are games an art? Video games both epitomize and irrelevantize the distinctions between these elements. Video games are art/life/game. There may come a time when humans forget that art/life/game was once three different things.

Shuffle Kerfuffle

I'm stealing this idea from the Onion. Ten songs on shuffle:

1.Play Dead - Bjork
Bjork's pretty cool. I guess people have opinions about her. I dunno. She's a great singer. This song has a funky bass line. I like it.

2. Blackbird/Yesterday - The Beatles
This is from the new Love album of mashups and greatest hits. I ignored the Beatles for a long time because I figure things that are that popular probably aren't any good. Turns out, they live up to the hype. Yesterday is one of the most enjoyable songs to sing along with.

3. J-E-N-O-V-A - The Black Mages
One of the best compositions from the Final Fantasy series, in rock form. I love the key changes in this. It keeps shifting up or down a minor third. Strangely affecting.

4. Chocolate City - Parliament
In Parliament's cool guy on the radio series, this one isn't as fun as Wants to Get Funked Up, but it's still cool. And it seems particularly relevant today - "They call it the white house, but that's a temporary condition."

5. jags minns inte - psilodump
This is one of many tracks I got from 8-bit Peoples. If you like the idea of music made with primitive video game sound chips, this is the site for you. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I love that sound.

6. Fugue #7777 - Asuka Sakai
In the video game Katamari Damacy, this is the theme of the King of All Cosmos. It's a funny synth-opera type of thing. I like having this piece of silliness show up in my shuffles, almost as much as Totaka's Song.

7. Slippery People - Talking Heads
I love Talking Heads, especially in their funky phase. I believe that David Byrne is the ultimate cool white man.

8. Lint of Love - Cibo Matto
My sister got me into this band, which is kind of like J-Pop made by Americans of Japanese descent. They have a unique attitude, and there's a lot of humor in their lyrics. I'd say Lint of Love is definitely their best song. It's both funny and musically strong.

9. Metal Man Goes Clubbing - Disco Dan
From the venerable Overclocked Remix. Like a lot of these game remixes, this one goes on a bit long for my tastes, but it's still great fun. It's almost impossible to go wrong with Mega Man 2.

10. Hanging In There - Ray Holman (Mannette Festival 2003)
Ray Holman is one of the greatest pan composers. In his lightning-quick panorama pieces, he packs more excitement into a few chords than some people manage in entire songs. And then he has tunes like Hanging In There and Since You've Gone that draw you in with impressionistic harmonies but get more emotional as they go.

Multi-Genre Video Games

Why yes, I am indeed seeing how many different topics I can post about in my first week of blogging.

Occasionally a game comes out that consists of two different types of game neatly pasted together. The results are usually quite memorable. You'd almost think game designers would try it more often, but I suppose it means a lot of extra work. I'm not sure how many games like this have been made, but I can think of three off the top of my head.

In Sunsoft's NES classic Blaster Master, you put on a spacesuit and drive a tank into a mysterious underworld, searching for a frog. Not a frog that turns into a princess or anything like that, just a frog. The main world is a sidescrolling platform game that's a bit nonlinear. Sometimes you'll find buildings where you can exit the tank and enter a Zelda-like overhead view. All the bosses are fought in this mode, including... more frogs. Big ones.

Also appearing on the NES was The Guardian Legend, from Compile. This time, the main world that you wander around in is the Zelda-style one. When it's time for action, the anime cyborg heroine transforms into a spaceship and flies into a 2D shooter remniscent of the top-down parts of Life Force. Less frog fetishization in this one. Maybe that's why I never liked TGL nearly as much as Blaster Master. It's still a good game, though.

The last example that springs readily to mind is Actraiser for the Super NES, made by Quintet. This short but excellent game puts you in the role of a vengeful god, cleansing the world of demons and eradicating every ecosystem that your worshippers can't cope with. There are no specific references to frogs in the game, but I guess we can assume from its stance on environmentalism that it's even less frog-friendly than The Guardian Legend. Anyway, the up-close-and-personal business of demon-smiting is done in a side-scrolling format, by your sword-wielding avatar. The grander scale of the game is seen in the simulation mode, where you and your cherubic lackey guide the development of civilization. Actraiser is probably the best of these three games, although it's also the easiest and shortest.

Am I forgetting some other games that would fit this criteria? Do they have frogs in them? If my frog ran away and fell into a vast underworld I think I'd just get a new one.