How has no one mentioned the best game ever invented yet? I honestly think if it wasnt for this game, we probably wouldnt have Wii, or else it would have been created a few years later then it was.
Focus: FFIV. It was so fucking hard when I was a kid, but I remember enjoying it so much. I downloaded it a couple years ago on an SNES rom when I was in college and enjoyed it just as much. You can't get much better. I still love this song. The FF series generally had some pretty epic music.
Duck Hunt is one of my top NES games. I'm still extremely upset that the gun doesn't work with LCDs and so I'm thinking about buying one again just so I can play. Growing up in the 90s, I had only my older sister's NES and Sega Genesis with a somewhat limited game collection. The only good games we had were first party Mario and Sonic games. Looking back, I was so young and bad at games that I don't think I've beaten any of these games without the help of Game Genie. Astonishingly, my NES still barely works once I wipe it down with rubbing alcohol and blow in it for an hour. The Sega was working about a year ago but has since died of AIDS or something so no more Sonic until I buy a new one. Out of all the awesome games mentioned already, I'm surprised nobody listed Dr. Mario. That game beats the shit out of Tetris any day. Not only was the gameplay amazing, but the theme music was so good that I still find myself humming it in my head. I think I'm a little dyslexic with it though because whenever I play it, my brain deliberately puts the wrong side of the pill on the germ monsters. Even so, I have a blast playing these games. Time to move the Xbox and plug in some NES.
NES: My favorite games were Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. I loved both of those games and dedicated hours upon hours to beating them both. Fucking love me some RPGs. SNES: Once I got to the SNES, along came Final Fantasy II (IV in Japan) and III (VI in Japan), along with Chrono Trigger. I also don't care what anyone says; in my opinion, Final Fantasy VI is the best Final Fantasy game ever. The villain actually destroyed the world half way through the game. It was awesome. Honestly, if you were going to trap me in a house and give me 5 classic games to play, these would be the five I would choose. I could spend months just playing through these five games again. I do enjoy action games (Contra and Mega Man games come to mind), but I was just a HUGE RPG fan. I do want to give an honorable mention to Crystalis. It was in the same vein as Zelda, sort of an action RPG, but it was an excellent and often overlooked game.
I wasn't allowed to play video games as a child. I only started playing Super Mario Kart in high school, long after it's heyday....so I don't think that counts. I was, however, allowed to waste massive amounts of time on this beast in the basement: My hefty princess, Galaga, was also my Dad's favorite arcade game in college. He used to dip out of his educational obligations and spend hours fondling that little red joystick instead. He ended up buying the arcade machine from the campus arcade after he graduated, and I'm eternally grateful that he did. It's beat up, scratched to shit, and the one of the speakers gets crackly if you go past level 30.....but it's still fucking awesome. Do you know how many Little League buttnuggets it takes to usurp Pinkcup's highest score at [insert CiCi's location]? It's really not a fair question, since no one has ever been able to do it. Ever. Do you know what's better than owning some little asshole who thinks that level 24 is, like, totally IMPOSSIBLE dude? Stringing three ships together and anticipating every nuanced flight pattern in all of the bonus rounds up to the 60's. A string of perfect-score bonus rounds (with the amazingly snotty DOO-doo-doo-DOO congratulatory chime) usually shuts up the little shit who was shouting "helpful" instructions at your elbow in the single-digit levels.....because, like, you're a girl and you aren't doing it right. Dumbass. God, I love that game. Edit: FINALLY found a picture that would work, but then it was huge. Put it in spoiler tags.
My father is an engineer, I was raised on this game and I loved it. The Incredible Machine I also played the old Aladdin Game for Windows 3.0 with the potions, Wolfenstein, Street Fighter II Turbo for Genesis, and some other DOS games I barely remember. I also remember breaking my 3rd party PS1 memory card in fury when it lost my save file for my FF7 game. SCREW THAT. I barely got to the second disc when it happened. I still haven't played/beat the game and I don't care.
I'll see your Duck Hunt and raise you Hogan's%20Alley. I played this long before I played Duck Hunt. I was one of the cool (and nerdy) kids who owned an NES before Nintendo started including the Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt combo cartridge.
To this day I'm not very good at video games. Much like Shegirl I was only really good at Centipede, and not the console version, only the arcade version with the roller ball thingy. There is one game though that I remember playing a lot of while in college, even though I wasn't very good at it, it was called Road Rash. This game was great! Not only was it a cool racing game, but you were encouraged to beat the ever-loving piss out of your opponents. Sometimes you just punched or kicked them, or if you could you'd rip a club or a wrench out of their hand and beat the shit out of them with that. Add to this massive amounts of beer and you've got something special. Good times...good times.
E...A....SPORTS. IT'S IN THE GAME. The NHL Hockey series for Genesis (Super Nintendo's sucked) rocked the shit. The gameplay was awesome, and once you had full seasons, create-a-player and trades added in 1995 that was it. I would play it until I passed out from exhaustion.
There are so many good memories in this thread. Someone mentioned Bionic Commando, I remember loving that game, beating it, and reading in a cheat book later that Bionic Commando is unbeatable. I guess he didnt know the trick to the final boss on that one. Super Spike VBall and Super Spike Dodgeball used to get played for hours with my cousins and brother over. But my I think my favorite game back then was..
I'm a bit late to the party on this one. Most of my old favourites have been mentioned, but there's a couple that have been missed. I got a SNES for Christmas in 1992 or 93 and it's fair to say it had a significant role in raising me. My sister and I played it regularly up until it was stolen in 2000 despite getting a PS1 along the way. A few years ago we came across one a neighbour was throwing out, and replayed Super Mario World almost to completion. Anyway: This was one of my favourites, and perhaps explains my penchant for hold 'em and roulette. The best part was when dodgy characters would come up and ask you to buy a diamond or give them money for their sick kid, and a few turns later they'd return with cash for your kindness, or you'd get a visit from the police telling you you'd been had. This: and I may have missed it, but: And we played this on our primary school classroom computer back in the early 90s. I'm tempted to get the ROM:
MOONSTONE - A Hard Days Knight Amiga 500 Loved this game, loved it. Recently downloaded it on PC, played for a solid 2 hours, was awesome.
I second everyone who mentioned NBA Jam, Contra, Street Fighter franchise, early non-shitty Super Mario games, the Donkey Kong Country series, etc. Those were all amazing. There were four other games that were my favorites as a kid; Your goal was to kill epic amounts of zombies, disembodied heads, skeletons, Frankenstein monsters, and finally, Dracula, all while listening to awesome music and gliding through crazy, diverse levels, like a floating dungeon with a chainsaw at the bottom, or a gory torture room. Civilization An awesome game about conquering the world by developing technology, building roads, irrigation, changing government, and finally, brutally crushing the enemy with battleships and tanks. An incredible amount of fun. Gay-looking box art aside, this was my favorite beat em' up as a kid, even more than the objectively superior River City Ransom and Turtles in Time people have mentioned. The astounding music, cool levels, and game mechanics were virtually hypnotic to me. I practiced this game so much, that while all of my friends would lose all 15 of their lives by Level 5, I could beat the entire game (7 levels) with only a single life lost. Unfortunately, it's damn near impossible to get through the final level without losing at least one life, especially since certain attacks (knives) deplete 60% of an entire life's energy bar. Still my favorite game to this day. Way ahead of not only its time, but virtually everything made since. Probably one of maybe two or three games I have played which I might consider "art".
In the spirit of Michael Jackson MICHAEL JACKSON'S MOONWALKER <a class="postlink" href="http://www.thesmartass.info/play/genesis/18961/Michael+Jacksons+Moonwalker" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.thesmartass.info/play/genesi ... Moonwalker</a>
The first computer game I can remember playing was Frogger on a neighbour's Commodore 64, when I was 8 or 9. The game came on a cassette tape. You put the tape into a player that was connected to the computer, hit play, and came back in 20 minutes once the game was loaded. A year or so later my parents bought us a Colecovision. We had several games but the only one I can remember playing fanatically was Donkey Kong. I don't recall playing much else until high school, where I became a Wing Commander fanatic. I loved that game. Wing Commander 3 and 4 were live basically action movies with game sequences. In high school I also became a addict of Microprose F-19 Stealth Fighter. I loved the strategy aspect of this game; selecting your ordinance, flying low and slow, avoiding radar installations, shooting down enemy AWACs. A single mission was a pretty major commitment in time as I recall. Along the same line, in university I started playing Jane's Longbow Apache and Lowbow Apache 2. The latter especially had phenomenal graphics for the time. Firing off Hellfires at night was a thing of beauty. A very technical game as I recall, encouraging actual tactics of using terrain for cover, hiding behind hills, popping up to expose the radome, selecting your targets and/or handing some off to your wingman, and then unleashing a barrage of hellfires. I think it was around this time that I started playing FPS. Like just about everyone my age, I played through the Doom and Doom 2 games. Never did play Wolfenstein for some reason, although I'm sure I was of liked it. But for me the Big Daddy of the first person shooters during university was Duke Nukem 3D. I mean, come on. A first person shooter with strippers. Strippers that you can tip, no less. Mutated cops become pigs. The running narrative by Duke alone was worth playing the game for. Made Doom seem silently boring by comparison. http://www.soundboard.com/sb/solrosin.aspx
Without a doubt, the game with the greatest LASTING POWER in video game history is N64's Goldeneye. Was there ever anything, including crack, that has been more addictive? Who needs to go out drinking with friends when you can stay home with beers and play this game for 48 straight hours: being cheesy, screaming profanities at each other and threatening violence for "Lookin' at my fuckin' SCREEN, bro!!!" Rockets in the Stack. Golden Gun in the Facility. That is all.