Flack's Top 15 Games

[AArdvark]

Re: Leisure Suit Larry

I played this game for a half hour on a cray at my brother's workplace back before his company merged with Harris RF.

I thought it was pretty cool to play a game on a supercomputer.
(There's a story behind this for all to hear if it so pleases)

Re: Redneck Rampage

I used to have this demo from PC World magazine. I'd get the free demo CD from my brother when he got bored of playing all the first levels over and over.

not a very good game,actually.

Re: King's Quest

I tried this game for a couple hours and gave it up as a bad job. Never went back to it. It was just not my style


THE
STYLISH
AARDVARK

[RetroRomper]

#03. Doom 1/2

Retro Rompers #1 Video Game Firearm/Weapon of All Time..

The Double Barreled Shotgun From Doom

Doom has oft been used as the giant floating obelisk of video games in that after we gaze into its darkening surface, is it even possible to remember what came before? Praise worthy, okay, genre defining.. I'm as guilty as throwing that phrase around as anyone else but that. is NOT IMPORTANT. What is, is the arsenal that the game throws at you; the BFG left many a child stirring when they or their friends became enlightened as to what the three letters stood for. The chainsaw left itself indented in the memories of many a person after they took its ripping blade to a cyber demon, but these are merely side notes to...

The Double Barreled Shotgun.

No game, including Doom 3 nor any mod for any game currently in existence has been able to duplicate the perceived weight, psychological impact, nor the experience of firing off a shot, slugging in more shells, then quickly turning 180 degrees and shooting in the face a Baron of Hell half way through the turn. For me, in my memory of why I enjoyed the game, the gun holds itself near the pinnacle of my experience because of the way it was implemented and the near love that the game decries to it.

Arguably though, the game was not designed around the gun but that isn't the point; the point is, that the gun can easily become the game. Switching quickly between the single shotgun or pistol for long range, BFG for crowds, and the double barreled shotgun for everything else is a feeling that has not been duplicated. It is a sense of strategy and horror, of having a saving grace that is still a weakness as the shotgun is the one hit wonder; shoot it, the monster dies but you'd better RUN. Not only this, but the gun has a heft and feel that is borderline scary in Doom, making it a simple matter to imagine that this is a weapon that a marine sucked into the tenth level of hell would cherish.

The gun also related to the character: its about the panic the marine feels. Oddly, this is a lesson that ID was unable to remember for Doom 3; the weapon can easily and quickly be slung and fired with a satisfying note of firepower in the face of any enemy the player reacts to with their twitchy forefinger. Its a weapon of panic and of first resort, since from up close its a one shot, heavy damage weapon, the present threat is dealt with but the joke is of course that there are at least another seven behind this one and the reload time stops it from being the end all and be all. Its a quick reaction then a dance as shot after shot is fired with the reload taking a second and a half at least. The panic fills the game, the player is concentrating on the demon in front of them and wham... The WASD keys align so that the player walk into a corner and are slaughtered by hungry cyber demons who are then summarily destroyed by salvos of missiles from monsters unseen.

For me, these experiences are maybe the most memorable from any video game and since they coincide directly with the shotgun, my friends enjoy bringing examples of weapons from other games to my attention. "Hey Retro! This game has an AUTO FEED SHOTGUN" or "this pump action has a satisfying thud!" But all I do is nod and humor them, knowing that the greatest shotgun, the greatest weapon in a video game, and the only one to come so close to perfection that the tenth degree isn't even perceivable, is the Double Barreled Shotgun from Doom.

[Flack]

#1.5 GTA III/IV



(I warned you there would be cheating in the numbering.)

In the text adventure genre, there is nothing more frustrating to a gamer than confusing a game's parser with seemingly reasonable requests. Most programmers are smart enough to accommodate logical requests -- say, eating an apple ("You consume the apple. It tastes delicious.") -- but think outside the box just a little and the computer will quickly let you know in its own cold way that you are off track. ("I do not know how to juggle an apple.") Even worse is a phenomena known as "guess the verb", in which (typically due to poor programming) a game is looking for a particular phrase and refuses to recognize other similar phrases.

You see a ladder here.
> CLIMB LADDER
I do not know how to CLIMB LADDER.
> GO LADDER
I do not know how to GO LADDER.
> GO UP
You successfully climb the ladder.
> WHAT THE HELL?
I do not know how to WHAT THE HELL?.
> FRUSTRATE YOU TO NO END
I do not know how to FRUSTRATE YOU TO NO END.
> APPARENTLY YOU DO

For two decades this remained a problem; in fact, it happens in first-person shooters all the time. Why is it that Navy Seals cannot seem to climb over small fences? Why is it that elite members of our special forces must walk around small rocks? Why is it that the greatest snipers in the world cannot climb trees? No matter how great a game's graphics are or how intricate the plot is, the minute I can't "do" something that my character should be able to "do", the illusion is broken. Whatever alternate reality I was temporarily submerged in is shattered.

Grand Theft Auto I and II were okay games, but they were nothing like GTA III -- in fact, Grand Theft Auto had more in common with Super Mario 64 than it did with it's predecessors. Super Mario 64 gave the world a taste of what 3D could be like. In Super Mario 64 you could "go" virtually anywhere, but you couldn't "do" virtually anything. I suppose if you wanted to wander around the hillside forever looking at the trees and clouds theoretically you could, but it got pretty boring pretty fast unless you "stuck to the script".

But in Grand Theft Auto III, you could do both. You could essentially go anywhere and do anything. Sure, there were limits, but you had to search to find them. GTA III has a story mode, but the game doesn't force you to follow it; nor does it particularly care if you do. Despite being perhaps asked to transport someone or something across town, you are perfectly welcome to walk down the street, punch a hooker in the mouth, and steal the next car that pulls up. Did you know that you can get jobs in GTA III and earn money by driving people around in taxi cabs? That's like somehow being able to make Pac-Man leave his maze of dots and have him become a gardener or something. For some reason, stealing cop cars (while cops are still in them) never gets old. It immediately turns you into a wanted felon and eventually you can get the entire police department chasing (and shooting at) you. And when you finally get "busted" (or killed) you appear at the police station, where you can start the madness all over again. This has nothing to do with the game at all and yet I can do it all night long. It never. gets. old.

GTA III/IV is not without it's problems. The weapon targeting has always been weak (which is kind of like complaining that Michelangelo's David has a tiny wee-wee) and in the original GTA III you couldn't swim (a problem that was corrected in sequels), but those are minor chinks in the armor of a game that takes place in a real world. I swear to god, Liberty City is a real place. GTA III is huge and GTA IV is bigger. You can drive so many laps and walk so much around Liberty City that your memory will start to mess with you and you'll swear the coffee shop you visited or the flight of stairs you walked down on the way our of your apartment were real. The attention to detail is mind boggling. When you enter a car, you can change the radio station. Why can you do that? That's such a stupid, trivial thing to program into a game! GTA IV more than 200 music tracks that play across 20 different radio stations, 3 of which are talk radio. It's just astounding the amount of time and money that went into such a seemingly minor detail.

And it's fun to watch someone who's never played the series try to wrap their head around the concept of being able to drive anywhere, do anything, and assault anybody. Yes, you can carjack the limo. Yes, you can drive the ambulance into the park, running over civilians in your path. Yes, you can ride a helicopter to the top of the Statue of Liberty, jump out, and go inside. Yes, you can do a power stall until your tires explode. Before there was "an app for that", there was Grand Theft Auto.

Whether you're a fan of the game or not, the GTA series has forever changed our expectations when it comes to games. No longer is it good enough to simply draw a closed door in a game; now people want to do inside that room and see what's in there, even if it has nothing to do with the game's goals or missions. No longer will gamers stand for being stopped by short fences or small rocks. If programmers are going to put rocks in games, you should be able to pick them up and throw them. People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw dead hookers ... or something like that.

[bruce]

GTA: SA remains my favorite in the franchise. I love the expansive map, the no loading time between segments (like you get in GTA3 or VIce City), and the total lunacy you can get up to once you get the jetpack.

Bruce

[Flack]

I didn't mention San Andreas specifically, but yeah, that game rocks. Saints Row isn't bad either. I need to pick up SR2 soon.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

Ha, I had no idea they gave you a jetpack. I did recall that they started you out on a bicycle. Which was terrible.

[Flack]

Saints Row 1/2 are pretty awesome. At one point you have to rack up hospital bills by throwing yourself in front of traffic.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

These threads are so fucking great.

OK, question. QUESTION. Is any Saints Row game better than any post-GTA2 GTA game? Like, is Saints Row 2 better than Vice City or something?

Also, Flack, what is your take on the way GTA games allow you to save? What is your taaaaaaaake?

[Flack]

Saints Row is different from GTA in the fact that it's a bit more open in the order you can do stuff. Also, the weapons system is much better. They replaced auto-targeting with a manual aiming system, and you can shoot while you're driving, which is as fun as it sounds. It's much more gang-related stuff. I don't know, GTA is great, but in GTA4 I got tired of driving people's girlfriends around and doing stupid errands which is why I usually end up just stealing cop cars and driving around running over pedestrians.

GTA4 is better at saving than GTA3. In GTA4 you can save manually by going to your apartment or you can also autosave, which means you can usually revert back to right before you started a mission. That's a lot better than having to drive around for 10 minutes after restarting after getting killed for the 100th time.

The modern world of emulation save states pretty much killed how I feel about saving. With a save state you freeze a game at any time, save it, and can reload it at any time. That's how saving should work. Dealing with game saves shouldn't be a part of the game anymore, IMHO.

[Flack]

#01. Super Mario Bros. 3



The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) arrived on US shores the fall of 1985 -- seventh grade, for me. Bundled with every system came a cute little platform game called Super Mario Bros. While it wasn't the first platform game, at the time of its release, it was probably the best.

On the surface Super Mario Bros. is a good -- no, great -- platform game. The level designs are creative and challenging, the enemies can be difficult to avoid, there are puzzles ... that's what made it a great game. What made it awesome was the game within the game. Super Mario Bros. is multidimensional. There's a treasure trove of hidden things in Super Mario Bros. There are bricks hidden within bricks, secret tunnels ... just all sorts of crazy things. When I was in mid-high, there were kids who were revered for their physical prowess on the football field, and there were kids that were worshiped for their Super Mario skills. Seriously. Many of my friends who had been written off as dorks suddenly became popular by knowing how to get the fireworks at the end of each level and how to use the turtle glitch on 1-2 to get "infinite" lives ...

A few years later Super Mario Bros. 2 came out and I (and many other kids at that time) walked around school with giant question marks above our heads wondering, "What just happened?" At that time we didn't know that Nintendo had just taken another game (bonus points awarded if you know it was "Yume Kojo Doki Doki Panic") and changed the graphics on it to make it appear to be a Mario game. And even though kids are stupid it never really made much sense that Mario and his friends might go around pulling vegetables out of the ground and opening magic doors for no apparent reason. It was different enough from the original that I'm sure many people the Mario boon was over.

If you think about it, Mario as a franchise at that point in time was pretty weak. You had Donkey Kong (before Mario was "Mario"), you had the original Mario Bros. (which most kids in my school didn't even know about), and you had Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros. and Mario himself became the spokesman for the NES, and with that alone came the lunchboxes and the cartoons and the cereal, but I don't know that at that time anybody knew there would be a Mario franchise for like, forever. And after seeing SMB2, a lot of people saw SMB1 as a great game and SMB2 as a crappy sequel, and thought that would be the end of that.

But then came Super Mario Bros. 3 (SMB3). And while the mechanics of SMB3 were similar to SMB1, the game had expanded in so many ways. There's a spot in 1-1 (the first world and level of SMB3) where, after obtaining a brown feather, Mario can fly for short periods of time. Take off in the right spot on level one and you'll reach the clouds; at the end of the clouds, there's a pipe. Inside the pipe players found a big number "3", written out in gold coins. With a single number, the game developers were able to show gamers some of the new features of SMB3, and welcome old players to this new world. Everything about SMB3 screamed "more" -- there were more levels, more enemies, more challenges, more bonus items ... and more fun.

There are parts of SMB3 that are frustratingly hard. Very, very few of the enemies you'll face are randomized, and most of the levels can be beat eventually through trial and error and memorization. SMB3 is also pretty loose with the extra lives, at least in the earlier levels.

I've played hundreds of platformers over the past three decades, and there's something wrong with almost all of them. Some of them have "more" wrong than others, of course. Some of them down right stink. Some are good and some are great, but none of them are perfect. Even the best of the best have "something" that could have been improved; perhaps an enemy could have been harder here, or a level could have been easier there. And that is where the beauty in Super Mario Bros. 3 lies: it's essentially perfect. It is the yin and the yang, the ultimate balance in gaming. It's neither too hard nor too easy. Every time you die you know why, and see a way to prevent it from happening the next time. Kids can play it, grown ups can play it ... anybody can play it.

It is, in my mind, the greatest game of all time.

[Flack]

I have four or five games that got cut from the list that I'll be posting as honorable mentions soon. Gauntlet is on the honorable mention list.

[Flack]

HONORABLE MENTION
Guitar Hero/Rock Band

As everybody knows, tennis rackets are the "gateway instrument" between air guitars and real guitars. Tennis rackets are roughly shaped like guitars, and the tactile sensation of flicking your fingers across a racket's strings is more enjoyable than plain old mid-air strumming. As a kid, before I owned a tennis racket my pretend guitar-du-jour was a baseball bat. I played the pretend electric bat for a few months before finally acquiring a tennis racket at a garage sale (for the sole purpose of using it as a pretend guitar -- I had zero interest in tennis). By third grade I had graduated to a real (cheap) acoustic guitar, and before long my worthless uncle gifted me an old broke electric guitar. It didn't work (it didn't even have any strings), but was a hell of a lot more fun to play "rock star" with than any goofy acoustic guitar, tennis racket, or baseball bat (especially after a few coats of black spray paint.)

E chords are one of the easiest guitar chords to learn. You can master it in 30 seconds; learning it is just a matter of pressing a couple of fingers in the right frets. There's nothing particularly difficult or sexy about the technical execution of it, but when played on an electric guitar with proper amounts of of distortion and volume it's like having sex, winning the Super Bowl, and punching everyone who has ever been mean to you in the face all at once.

So do Guitar Hero and Rock Band give you that same feeling? In a way, I suppose, in the same way karaoke gives people their three minutes of cheers (or jeers). I mean, you're performing in front of other people, and that's kind of a rush, even if "other people" simply equates to all your other nerdy friends who also grew up playing the electric tennis racket.

There were several rhythm-based games around before the dawn of Guitar Hero. Most people instantly think of Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), but you also had Konami's Guitar Freaks and Drum Mania, which were definitely Rock Band predecessors. Because they were arcade games you got the thrill of performing in front of other people, but that also meant learning how to play those games in front of other people, and that can be intimidating. A few of those games made it to the home market, but none of them were terribly successful there. There were multiple DDR games (both licensed and knock-offs) with plastic dance pads that were greatly inferior to their arcade counterparts. Konami's Guitar Freaks actually made it to the home market, but in Japan. US gamers who went through the trouble of importing the game (and modifying their PlayStations in order to play it) found it full of Japanese pop music (makes sense).

But Guitar Hero got it right. Standing on the shoulders of Guitar Freaks, Harmonix and Activision took the thrill of being an American rock star and somehow bottled it into a video game. And people love it, or at least loved it. Put it this way; the first Guitar Hero game was released in November of 2005. That means Guitar Hero and Rock Band are both less than five years old, and yet if you know somebody who is into modern gaming of any kind, they probably have at least one plastic guitar stored away in their hall closet. We have several.

The first thing Guitar Hero did right was included a cool guitar. The original was a scaled down Gibson SC, but later you could get Gibson X-Plorers, Les Pauls, and Fender Telecaster clones as well. We've officially graduated from tennis rackets, my friends.

The second thing Guitar Hero did right was include some classic guitar tracks. The first game alone contains track s from Audioslave, Bad Religion, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Cream, Deep Purple, Helmet, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Jett, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Motorhead, Ozzy, Pantera, Queen, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Donnas, The Ramones, White Zombie, and ZZ Top. Sure they were cover versions, but they sounded pretty darn close to the originals. Later games licensed official tracks.

Rock Star raised by the bar by adding drums and vocals to the mix; Guitar Hero countered with Guitar World Hero. At this point, both series essentially interchangeable (in fact, most of the instruments on the market at this point work with both games). There are tons of spin off games as well, especially in the vocal/karaoke category. If you're a singer, you're in luck -- no longer are you limited to bellowing out tunes in the shower. Now you can bellow them into a plastic microphone.

Both programmers and bands saw the importance of getting real studio recordings into these games, a move that culminated in entire releases dedicated to single bands: Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Van Halen, and Guitar Hero: Metallica gave players the ability to virtually jam along with their favorite bands. Rock Band countered with Rock Band: The Beatles and Rock Band: Green Day. The Who and Queen are rumored to be working on Rock Band releases as well.

But back to my original question. Does standing in your living room and prancing around with a guitar-shaped piece of plastic really make you feel like a rock star? And surprisingly the answer is yeah, it kinda does. When your hand starts cramping while you're mashing your way through those rapid fire machine gun triplets in Slayer'S Raining Blood, despite the fact that you're doing it in your living room on toy guitar, yeah, there's a small part of you that kind of feels like a bad ass.

In five years, Guitar Hero went from being a single game to not only a multi-million (probably billion) dollar franchise, but a genre as well. I mentioned Rock Band and SingStar, but there are dozens of others (I've got DJ Hero sitting on top of my entertainment center) and new contenders coming out all the time. Will there be an end? Probably. But for the thrill it gives you, even if it doesn't last forever, Guitar Hero and Rock Band make the honorable mention list.

[AArdvark]

The only thing I ever liked about GH is that, with the proper adapter I was able to play several other games with the controller. Ever play Boulderdash with the GH guitar? I tried that and a few other games, Nothing spectacular but it was kinda fun.



THE
WINDMILL
GAME OVER
AARDVARK

[Flack]

I guess I should have why it was an "honorable mention" and didn't make the top fifteen.

Although it's a good idea and a fun game, it's also a one trick pony. If you've played one of these games, you've played them all. The only difference between them (other than the background animations) are the music tracks.

Also, while I think the plastic instruments are neat, after a while they just end up taking up space around the house.

Although I've yet to be able to see it in person, I'd love to check out this port of Guitar Hero for the Commodore 64.

[youtube][/youtube]

[pinback]

#06. Paradroid





While many modern games have staffs in the hundreds and budgets in the millions (I'm looking at you, Jonsey), in the 1980s it was not uncommon to see games, particularly computer games, written by one or two people. Because games could be designed, programmed, and sometimes even duplicated in someone's home, you ended up with a lot of weird and quirky and odd games being released. A lot of times those games turned out to be crap (games written by a single person don't tend to have a lot of quality control built in -- I'm looking at you, Jonsey), but occasionally, one of them would simply click. Paradroid is one of those games that simply clicked.

In Paradroid, you control a robot that looks a lot like a helmet. Your goal is to clear an entire spaceship of all evil enemy robots. Each robot is identified by a three digit number; the higher the number, the more powerful the robot is. Ultimately you will have to defeat the 999 robot. You, you floating helmet you, begin life as "001".

Enemy robots can be shot, but as a 001 you are no match for most other robots on the ship with your weak armor and firepower. Instead, you can opt to hijack you enemies by transferring to them. Transferring to another robot involves beating it in a mini-game where you must control more circuits than the robot you are battling. This takes place in a crazy electronic battle where you physically attempt to overpower your opponent by electronically attacking it in a fast-paced battle. If you lose and are controlling another robot, that robot will disappear and you will be demoted back to a 001. If you are still at 001, you will become unstable and explode in a few seconds. Such is life as a floating helmet.

The layout of each circuit is randomly generated, which means every battle is different. You as the player get to choose which side of the circuit you wish to play, so you never lose a battle because you were handed "the wrong side". Each circuit contains dead ends, voltage boosters, Y splitters and V splitters ... and you have about ten seconds to pick which side you wish to play. It's less complicated to play than it is to describe. Here'a a video to demonstrate how it works.

[youtube][/youtube]

It may sound simple, but the gameplay, especially with more advanced robots, gets very hectic very quickly. Nothing sucks more than losing to a higher robot and being instantly demoted back to a 001, leaving yourself quite vulnerable. Sometimes, the robot you are controlling with become unstable, at which point you will have mere seconds to find another robot to overtake, or risk exploding. Paradroid is a lot of things, but dull is not one of them.

Despite the game's simple and straight-forward goal, I don't remember ever beating it -- if I did, it's been many years ago. Like a few other great games, simply playing Paradroid is so much fun that winning takes a back seat to simply playing it. It's kind of like a futuristic version of Rogue, but with less potion quaffing and more lasers.

Paradroid was originally released on the Commodore 64, and that (in my opinion) is still the best version. It was also ported to the Amiga and Atari ST machines, but I haven't played either of those versions. Paradroid appeared on that all-in-one C64 Joystick thing released a few years back, so that's another place to get it. If you live in Europe, Paradroid was released for the Wii Virtual Console over there (but not in the states, because Mario hates you). There is also a fairly accurate free DOS version (http://paradroid.sourceforge.net) and a graphically updated version (http://paradroid.ovine.net).

FLACK WHAT ABOUT THIS??????????????

http://puppygames.net/droid-assault/

Puppygames's'es "homage to paradroid"!! And all puppygameses games are good.

[Tdarcos]

In the text adventure genre, there is nothing more frustrating to a gamer than confusing a game's parser with seemingly reasonable requests. Most programmers are smart enough to accommodate logical requests -- say, eating an apple ("You consume the apple. It tastes delicious.") -- but think outside the box just a little and the computer will quickly let you know in its own cold way that you are off track. [DELETED]
For two decades this remained a problem; in fact, it happens in first-person shooters all the time. Why is it that Navy Seals cannot seem to climb over small fences?

TV Tropes has a whole page about the typical video game problem of the Insurmountable waist-high fence. The whole idea of simple obstacles you can't get through is lampshaded in episode #172 of Concerned: The Half-Life and Death of Gordon Frohman:

Gordon: Locked Door, we have to go around!
Medic: Oh, uh, why doesn't he just shoot the lock off? He's got a shotgun, a rocket launcher and heck, he's got a foot!
Gordon: Shhh! You can't shoot through doors or kick them down!
Medic: What is it, a super door? We've watched him smash open how many crates with a crowbar? Sixty jillion? And yet a door is impossible to pry open?

[Tdarcos]

Flack gave up the Internet for a week. I hope you're all happy. I blame the terrible thi- ah fuckit


FLAAAAAAAAAAAAACK

What she doesn't know won't hurt her. Someday I will explain to her how VNC works.

Tell her it's like the bird in the camera in The Flintstones who chips out a picture of what he sees.

[Flack]

FLACK WHAT ABOUT THIS??????????????

I'll check it out, for sure. There are a couple of versions of Paradroid out for the iPhone right now, too.

[pinback]

FLACK WHAT ABOUT THIS??????????????

I'll check it out, for sure. There are a couple of versions of Paradroid out for the iPhone right now, too.

The primary difference, based on your description above, is that transferring happens in a second or two if you right-click on the enemy, providing you have enough "transfer points" to zap into the other droid. There is no circuit-board minigame. You earn transfer points by racking up points and collecting powerups.

If the minigame was your favorite part OH MAN WILL YOU HATE THIS.

[Flack]

I will hate that.