The Top 100 Games of All-Time.

[pinback]

If Portal 2 is allowed on this list, which I understand if it's not, I volunteer to make that my "guest review" like I did for Warcraft 2 in the first list. Except it will feature fewer pictures of my Korean roommate.

[pinback]

I haven't played it, but I am 100% certain that The Last of Us sucks dick.

By the way, I watched my wife play the entirety of TLOU and everything you said here is 100-- no... 250% correct. I would invite Lethargic to eat a bag of yak dicks but I already ran him off.

We should have a separate thread where I can comment on this thread without polluting it. Sorry.

Sorry.

[pinback]

Also Moonbase Commander better be on this. Sorry.

Sorry.

(But it better be on it.)

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

That was wonderful.

I cannot think of 99 games better than Portal. Portal 2 is one of them, but I'm pretty sure it's not on this list.

Yeah, like last time, I am trying to keep "series" of games together.

I actually got stuck on like the last test room, so it took another year before I went back and actually discovered the rest of the game. I guess I am bad at games. But I will always treasure my time with Portal.

It was definitely the best game in the Orange Box. Christ.

Ha, so I remember not getting the Orange Box and all three games together. I just went to the store and got Half-Life 2.

In re-reading the old thread, I stumbled upon why Half-Life 2 was not represented. It was because of the install, for the most part. I had 5 CDs and still had to authenticate through Steam when everyone was doing that. But it was also because "We Don't Go To Ravenholm" was the only good level that I saw.

So, just Half-Life 2.

Then everyone started doing Team Fortress 2 on Caltrops. I got sucked in. I had a good time playing TF2. But that's 2 of the 3 Orange Box games. I was determined to not buy Portal, because otherwise I made a huge financial mistake. (You got a discount if you did not buy them separately.)

I got a call from Jason Scott around Christmas of 2007. He pleaded with me to get the game and play it. I would think that it is very high on his list. I did play it and I remember that one of the happiest times of my life was that time between Christmas and New Year's, when there was silence and snow and cold and just me in my little office playing the great bits of Portal. For some reason, I always thought the music right before the shit hits the fan was not in the official Portal soundtrack. It probably is and I am crazy.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I haven't played it, but I am 100% certain that The Last of Us sucks dick.

By the way, I watched my wife play the entirety of TLOU and everything you said here is 100-- no... 250% correct. I would invite Lethargic to eat a bag of yak dicks but I already ran him off.

We should have a separate thread where I can comment on this thread without polluting it. Sorry.

Sorry.

I am sorry that Lethargic has not returned. He was the best thing about this BBS in years. I hold hope that he will one day return.

Lethargic has played more games than me. He would be my go-to go if I wanted to know if a console game was worth purchasing. All I really meant to say is that for as much experience he has playing games, I have as much experience reading terrible game reviews. I am the Lethargic of awful game reviews and game journalism. I didn't ask for this. It was thrust upon me. There's been a lot of games that got similar praise to The Last of Us and I would go and scramble and get the console and play this one game that should, from everything written about it, be a transformative experience... and see that it was marginally better than the story told in Duck Hunt.

[RealNC]

Counter-Strike should really be on the list. Seriously.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Counter-Strike should really be on the list. Seriously.

I decided to not put multi-player games on the list. The reason for that is because all games are more fun when you are enjoying them with other people. And if you don't have fun friends, your appreciation for multi-player games would be less than someone with good friends.

My favorite on-line game was the old Quake II hack called "Jailbreak." It was in the top 20 on the old list. It has since been removed.

I've also spent the last six years playing Diamond Mind Baseball with some friends in a baseball sim. The game itself outside of multiplayer is not that great. It's good, not great. So the MP game I love the most and the one I've spent the most time with aren't up for consideration, but I appreciate the chance to mention it.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

#99 - BRATACCAS (1986, Amiga, Psygnosis)



If this new list accomplishes anything, I hope that it will convince some people somewhere that Brataccas isn't a terrible game with a terrible interface, but a great game with an interface that is "only" bad.

The premise of Brataccas is that you are a genetic engineer named Kyne. You developed a way to engineer a super breed of man. The government wants this research to create a supersoldier, but Kyne refuses. He is framed for treason, there is a reward for his capture and Kyne travels to the asteroid of Brataccas for evidence to clear his name.

You are then dropped into a self-contained world filled with characters that have their own agendas, their own cares and desires. At no point does anyone give a shit about the well-being of the player of Kyne. It's surprising that the pages to the manual are even bound together.

Each "room" in Brataccas can have several different things going on. There are elevators, so that you can travel along the game's y-axis. There are characters to bribe. You can start a fight with almost anyone in the game, which was waay, waaaaay ahead of its time. The cops are trying to arrest you, sure, but they don't have omniscience. There are security cameras to disable, false leads, bartenders to get rumors from and a lone, hissing psychopath wandering around the asteroid that will try to kill you with his sword for no reason.

The room layout of Brataccas is compact and paranoid and uncomfortably put together. When you get arrested, you travel in real time behind the cop, who drops you off to the jail cell. You go through rooms that, when you start, you probably can't get to easily, meaning that the act of getting arrested in the game is initially interesting. (Years later, the act of getting arrested in the most famous series of games, GTA, simply cuts to a black screen. Brataccas was ahead of its time.)

There is a problem with the game, however, that every review addresses. Brataccas offers gesture-based mouse controls. And they are just as terrible as you might think with systems like the Amiga, Atari ST and Macintosh that used mice with physical balls.

It's terrible and inintuitive. This game would be famous if they didn't screw it up! You move forward by moving the mouse to the right, but then have to stop by holding the button and moving the other way. And you have to stomp that mouse. You have to slowly press down and move it the other way. You'll gesture to enter combat when you meant to jump. In a way, and I am admitting this is a stretch, the terrible gestures mean that you will randomly start combat with people minding their own business. Some guy that you might want to talk to might end up with a sword in the gut. It adds to the web of lunacy going on in the asteroid.

That said, when I played it on my real Amiga, I saw that the game lets you use keyboard controls. Great! I thought I would try that. And that's when the final mystery of Brataccas revealed itself to me: the gesture-based controls that everyone savages are actually better than the keyboard controls.

Brataccas is just a game that requires time to learn its controls. It's like Defender in that respect, it's just that with Defender you feel like a spaceship captain and every NES game in the world mastered moving people with a gamepad. Because of the gesturing it's a game of skill with the most wide-open sci-fi world of its time. The speech bubbles are all in caps, with bizarre punctuation. The graphics mode for the Amiga has you at 640x200, which is a very silly resolution to try to do anything in.

Brataccas is the best example that I can think of of an attempt at a simulated, uncaring world. And while I appreciate the quest arrow on Fallout 3 and BioShock, those games will always be a little less than they could be because they care about you in a way that Brataccas never will. It feels just as cold as life on an asteroid probably would be.

I guess I can also put it this way: when it comes to each game I've made myself, they always started in the design document phase as open-ended simulations where the player is dropped in and meant to learn and survive, just like (and even thanks to*) Brataccas. None of them have ended up that way because I haven't been able to achieve what this extremely goofy, yet charming, little asteroid-sim did manage to successfully accomplish. A world.

(*Specifically, the fact that you can start a fight with anyone in Fallacy of Dawn, and the one "CopBot" were inspired from Brataccas, along with the fact that I set Pantomime on a moon essentially the size of an asteroid.)

[AArdvark]

I wanted this game to be good so I watched some gameplay on youtube. All I can ask is if you've ever beaten it.


THE
INTERFACE OF THE DAMMED
AARDVARK

[RetroR]

I actually played Brataccas at a Retro Gaming event a few years ago and was hung up on the interface. Really, this is the only game / whatever that I think could actually be served better than the original with a remake or port.

[pinback]

Counter-Strike should really be on the list. Seriously.

I decided to not put multi-player games on the list.

I think you should rethink this, at least for games which are purely multiplayer, or where that's generally believed to be the entire point of the thing. And those should be judged as if you're always playing against a bunch of anonymous 14-year old douchebags on the internet. CS is just as good with the idiots as it is with your buddies.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

When things calm down again in a few weeks, maybe we should all try Counter-Strike some night. I've seen videos but never played it.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I wanted this game to be good so I watched some gameplay on youtube. All I can ask is if you've ever beaten it.

No, sir! I played a lot of it when I got the Amiga going in my old house and ensured that it was solvable. I am going to play every game on this list to double-check before announcing it, which will also be fun. I want to have a directory on my computer with all the fun, old games.

[Tdarcos]

I'd like to suggest the following.

SpaceWar - the 1957 game played on the TX-1 at MIT, that showed that computers could do more than crunch numbers and that there was something that your ordinary person could like.

Pong - the first serious attempt at making a game that was of interest to the public.

PacMan - Inky, Blinky, Winky and Clyde chased more than just PacMan and he did more than eat dots, he ate more than $7 billion, a quarter at a time.

Colossal Caves Adventure - which started a whole new genre and probably pushed more men into becoming programmers because it got them on the computer.

Wolf 3d which showed that it was possible to develop something radically different, and what happens when (even when it's accidental) what it means when users can create add-in content for a game.

Doom which gave us non-rectangular rooms, different lighting and a really immersive pseudo 3D environment.



Which reminds me of an unrelated item about the #1 thing that has pushed photography and the development of e-commerce on the internet including encryption and the ability to accept credit cards. I'll discuss that elsewhere.

[pinback]

I'm pretty sure this list is not open to suggestion. I'm also pretty sure this list is for computer games only. I could be wrong about that, but if I'm not, then Pac Man doesn't count.

[RetroR]

I'd like to suggest the following.

Here is a crib sheet for why ICJ's list is actually entertaining and worth reading:

1. He isn't IGN.
2. He only includes games that he personally experienced on an emotional and physical basis.
3. He doesn't shrill for products he "should" include, but doesn't know anything nor care about.
4. HE ISN'T IGN.

Retro

[Flack]

I'd like to suggest the following.

Here is a crib sheet for why ICJ's list is actually entertaining and worth reading:

1. He isn't IGN.
2. He only includes games that he personally experienced on an emotional and physical basis.
3. He doesn't shrill for products he "should" include, but doesn't know anything nor care about.
4. HE ISN'T IGN.

Retro

5. He doesn't think one of the ghosts in Pac-Man is named "Winky."

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

I'd like to suggest the following.

I enjoy suggestions!

SpaceWar - the 1957 game played on the TX-1 at MIT, that showed that computers could do more than crunch numbers and that there was something that your ordinary person could like.

I had that at #46 on my old list. However, it was a ... remake that someone did for DOS in the 80s. Here is my write-up of it on the old top 100 thread:

http://www.joltcountry.com/phpBB2/viewt ... 4220#34220

So, the game I played wasn't PDP Spacewar, but a remake that was enhanced. I realized that I loved the remake so much because I played it with my brother, the two of us on the same keyboard. It also had a lot of mystique because I was still learning DOS when I had that game. It is not on this list.

PacMan - Inky, Blinky, Winky and Clyde chased more than just PacMan and he did more than eat dots, he ate more than $7 billion, a quarter at a time.

Ms. Pac-Man is on my list. I try to combine games if they are really similar, like Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man, Ultima 6 and Ultima 7, and unlike Patty Flinger and everything else.

[Flack]

When we visited the Computer Museum in ABQ, the kids played Space War against each other on a PDP-1 and then Pong (which was hooked up to a projector).

"Good games are timeless." -Winky

[pinback]

In ABQ that is cutting edge technology.