I am by no means a “Gamer”, I am now in my mid 30s and am more of a weekend dabbler where video games are concerned. In fact I still use the phrase “I clocked it” to say I finished a game.
Until I started writing this I actually considered my contact with video games to be minimal, then I thought about my VG resume over the years.
Strap in this might take a while.
My first direct contact with the world of video games came in primary school when my parents dragged me to the house of one of their friends, who had kids but they were far younger than me, so I prepped for an evening of waiting to leave, until…
The kids (both under10) dragged out an Atari system and plugged it in, causing my jaw to drop as they wrestled with a controller and this moved around on the TV screen in front of them! This was amazing to me (remember, this was less than a decade after I saw my first colour TV and told my Mum, “Mum, Big Bird’s yellow!!!” Still 30 years later her favourite story) and I spent the evening playing Asteroids or something similar until I was dragged away.
The next time was several years later, (this time I played it a little cooler but I was still majorly impressed) when the kid who lived down the road from me asked me to come around to play this game where little fat guys in overalls jump over turtle shells and climb ladders. I can’t recall the system but it cassette driven and took forever to load, we literally set the thing up and them went to grab food or run around for 5 minutes before coming back to play the damn thing for the rest of the night.
Hour after hour.
When I first got a job a few years later I bought a Nintendo system with my first paycheque from the toy shop directly across the road from my work. The system came with two controllers, a gun and the Duck Hunt game, which now seems ancient by comparison with what is available.
Over the ensuing months I bought Dragon’s Lair (pretty good), Golden Axe (Good) and some other games that now almost 20 years later I can’t remember.
Then I moved to another town, played sport every day and drank too much every night for 3 full years, and computer games were forgotten temporarily, these can be called the missing years for a lot of reasons, one of them game related.
To escape the clutches of the evil drink I moved to the city in my early 20s. After a year or so of sharing a house with a girl from my town I moved in with an old buddy from high school. We were young and earning money, had no steady girlfriends and a lot of spare time. To remedy all these issues he bought a Nintendo, I bought a Sega Megadrive, it took far longer to fix the girlfriend thing.
Now even though this is still 15 years ago with every generation of consoles (a generation in video games is 4-5 years) you could see the major jumps being taken, I still remember FIFA 95 or 96 (?) on the Megadrive when the commentators and crowd were vaguely synced up with the action, so when you scored the crowd went nuts in a tinny familiar fashion. I hate soccer, and I must have burned 100s of hours on that game, and annoyed everyone I played against with my “Brasssilll weeeeennnnsss!!!” chants for the hour or so after every victory.
My technique for FIFA and every soccer game until the game designers made the game too complicated:
Get the ball in the backline, short pass to the centre and have a guy dribble all the way down either sideline hammering the turbo / run button all the way (the only way you can be stopped is a slide tackle which sends the ball out of bounds for your throw in anyway). Once you get near the endline get some space to draw a line between the defender and the goal and cross the ball in, where you immediately start mashing the offensive buttons and hope that the cross falls to you, if a defender gets it slide tackle like crazy and intermittently hit the shoot button. You never know…
Let’s just say that scores of 8:1 to Brazil were frequent, leading to the defeated eventually saying “let’s play something else” or more satisfyingly “Why don’t you do something different?”.
* Did Wilt Chamberlain start throwing up threes because dunking got too easy?
* Has Roger Federer taken up swimming to see if he can be world champ in two things?
* Has Tiger Woods gotten bored with banging a supermodel wife and started nailing cocktail waitresses and chicks that wouldn’t rate a 6 out of 10?
What’s that about Tiger? Wow, they managed to keep that out of the press didn’t they?
The moral of the story is if something works, don’t change it until someone works out a way to beat you.
Further to this: TOG is the reigning champ of Mortal Kombat. Every version that came out we would tinker away with the various characters (MK3 had dozens) trying to pick a favourite, (I loved the yellow robot guy in MK3 who fired a net out of his chest). During this phase everyone would enjoy limited periods of success and the controllers would be passed around liberally while we all learned the new ropes. Once someone really got to grips with the controls of a certain character and started dominating TOG simply switched to Sub Zero and “Freeze, Freeze, Sweep, Freeze, Sweep, Uppercut, Freeze”. He even had the finishing move down just to rub it in.
There was never a more frustrating inevitability than TOG switching to Sub-Zero and offering the other controller around like a gauntlet. Still shits me now.
We wasted countless hours in that flat on FIFA, Nigel Mansell F1 and most of all a crappy basketball game where the players looked like Lego men, and after every defensive rebound or steal the entire screen froze while the court spun 180 degrees just so they could maintain a camera angle from the defensive goal, and some other games that were purchased and either not accepted or mastered quickly enough to make the regular rotation.
(The biggest waste of money isn’t the games you play but the games you don’t. Everyone who ever had a console knows of the games that were purchased and played for a short while before being set aside for something more familiar or just better, and never being played again. Hopefully there weren’t too many, video games aren’t known for being cheap.)
Then when my mate decided to “clean up his life and get his shit together” I moved again, this time into another shared flat with a few other guys who drifted in and out. I think there were three of us that actually lived there but there always seemed to be four or five guys there on any given night, weekdays included.
Unfortunately this lead to another (largely) blurry game free era of at least a couple years, where games took a back seat to alcohol, sport, (occasionally) chicks and alcohol.
Mainly alcohol.
That was until my sister’s boyfriend changed everything one weekend. Mark lived 2 hours away at the time and invited a bunch of us down to his home for some reason, mainly to get on the piss and try out this new thing he had bought called a Playstation. And did we ever try it out.
Allowing us access to the Playstation for a few hours was like giving a toddler a taste of ice cream and then taking it away. Of course the kid is going to immediately ask for more, and withdrawing the treat only exacerbates the feelings of loss and causes frustration.
So what ensued was four grown (but not mature in any sense) men repeatedly asking “When is Unky Mark coming up”, and “Call him and ask if we can have the Playstation for a while”. Eventually we just caved and bought one ourselves, and shortly after we discovered the best invention ever: GameShark.
(GameShark was a clumsy program that allowed you to shortcut the normal software restrictions imposed by Sony and play “Legitimate backups of games that we already owned”, (read: Pirated games).)
Now Bali is only a few hours flight away from Australia, and there is always someone heading that way, meaning these games were readily available, so over the next few years we played 100s of Playstation games, some for 10 minutes, others for days in a row.
If I were ever to write an autobiography the period from mid 1996 to the end of 1999 might look like this:
“Played Playstation, drank too much too often, somewhere in there had a couple of girlfriends…”
The Playstation 2 was released at the perfect time. By this time all the boys from the flat had moved out, mostly with girlfriends and some into other flats. Everyone still had surplus cash as we were all yet to take on 30 years worth of debt by buying a house, and in the year after the PS2 came out most of us managed to find space for one in the living room.
It was a bit of an odd era, given that everyone had scattered we no longer caught up daily to play games, but at least once every couple of months a bunch of us got together and had a PPP party.
Piss, Pizza & PS2.
A multitap allowed up to 5 players at once (and gets my vote for the best accessory invented in the era), the GameShark allowed us to afford all the latest games and everyone bought their own controllers and hooked in.
This went on for years. Somewhere along the line I won an Xbox through my work and immediately got it mod-chipped, and for 2 years I had a PS2 and an Xbox getting hammered every week in my home.
Then somewhere in my late 20s I lost the urge, I no longer raced home to play the latest batch of games, even though they kept coming and accumulating on my TV cabinet. The Playstation was reluctantly given away, even though I hadn’t touched it for 5 years. Time went on, and eventually I sold the PS2, multitap and games, and the Xbox sat in the corner gathering dust for months at a time until a weeklong binge, after which it gathered dust again.
(Re-reading that paragraph I realize it sounds far more dramatic and sad than it really was.)
Then an announcement, Microsoft was releasing the Xbox 360, and Sony the PS3 within months of each other. Even though I hadn’t touched a console in ages I immediately decided that I simply MUST have one, as the Xbox 360 had the benefit of coming out first that was what I purchased. I have now had the system for a few years and it has be no means been ignored, but playing games now is something that needs more preparation than ever before.
Gone is the era where I could turn on a game and within 30 minutes have it mastered, there are so many buttons on the new controllers and game-makers decide that each of them must serve a purpose, meaning before you can actually play a game you must first sit through 30 minutes of training. This on its own is bad enough, but for casual gamers it is a death sentence for many games.
Imagine spending up to an hour learning the ropes in a game, which button does what, which combos work in what situation and how to basically go about playing the game. You then spend a couple hours going through the early stages, developing strategies and becoming more confident with dealing with enemies and level design. At last you are ready and prepped to beat the game.
Then you save progress, and don’t play it again for two months…
There is nothing more frustrating than picking up a game that you can no longer remember and being forced to relearn everything, especially when you are half way through and simply don’t want to start at the training stage again. You are once more a rookie only you are dealing with expert level enemies, I lost count of how many times I gave up on a game rather than deal with the frustration of starting from scratch, and sometimes these were games that I really liked.
I am now resigned to playing “pick up and play” games, which effectively means that I only ever buy or even rent three types of games:
1/ Shooters. Nothing better than a straight-ahead shoot-‘em-up, right trigger is always shoot, and the left stick controls the view. Simple and enjoyable way to kill an hour or two without the slow learning process.
2/ Sports games. Repetition, repetition, repetition. 2 minute quarters, run, pass, shoot. NHL, NBA, Tiger Woods golf, even soccer sometimes.
3/ Driving games. Accelerate, brake, repeat. Drive in a circle or off-road, but you know within a few minutes you’ll finish the course and move to a similar one.
Lazy I know, but I don’t have the time or patience anymore to drop 20+ hours on something in order to become a master. I’d usually rather spend two hours watching a movie nowadays, or sport. Watching is just easier than playing, sad but true.
This list harks back to a period when I did have that time, and the desire (laziness) to waste countless idle hours.
Honourable mentions:
90 – 95
Duck Hunt. (Nintendo) Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega Megadrive) Raiden. Galaga. (Arcade)
All straight ahead platformers. Go in one direction jump and or shoot. Sonic switched it all up with great bright graphics and multi-directional worlds.
95 – 00
Super Mario Kart. (SNES) Resident Evil. Syphon Filter. Ape Escape. Mortal Kombat 2. (Playstation)
Super Mario Kart remains one of the best all time party games, anyone can play it and has a chance to win. The arrival of the shooter, the fighting games and the decent action games.
00-10
Far Cry. Doom 3. (Xbox) LOTR – The Fellowship of the Ring. Enter the Matrix. Onimusha 3 – Demon Siege. Devil May Cry. Legacy of Kain – Soul Reaver. Dynasty Warriors 3. (PS2) Wii Sports (Wii)
Games got a little more complicated in this era with the invention of the direction sticks and bumper buttons. Far Cry, Doom 3, Onimusha and Legacy of Kain accounted for literally weeks of my life.
Now the list….
The only criteria for the games that follow: they must be hugely fun and addictive, generally worked well with several people in the room either playing (or commentating), and they all enjoyed a certain level of replayability.
Above all else I just personally liked ‘em.
Also, I could pick any of these up now and start playing at a high level within minutes, even (perhaps especially) the games that are decades old.
Top 10 Video Games
Super Mario Bros.
You cannot have a list of great games and not include Super Mario Bros, and this isn’t in a “Night of the Living Dead is an all time classic as it paved the way for all that followed” way, even though it sucks by comparison now.
Mario Bros is as pick-up-and-playable today as it was 20 years ago. Sure it doesn’t have the bells and whistles as the current games do, but the game mechanics and basics are just as fun, if not moreso.
Mario and his cuz Luigi introduced several things to the world;
– the joy of shimmering floating coins,
– the unexpected benefits that can come from exploding bricks,
– pipes are your friends and can take you to hidden worlds,
– the benefits of eating moving mushrooms, and the need to stomp brown grumpy ones,
– the fun to be had simply riding a cloud,
– the dangers of turtles and their shells,
– the sheer ecstasy that can only be had sliding down a flagpole,
And most importantly…
– Why going right is the only solution!
And that is only on the first level! I haven’t even gotten to moving platforms, why floating ledges can be dangerous, why dinosaurish monsters are annoying and the perils of flameball spitting plants.
Super Mario Bros should be pre-loaded on every game console released, Nintendo or otherwise, as an example that cool games will always be cool, and that sometimes having the latest isn’t necessarily that important.
The Mark of Kri
Probably the least celebrated of the games on this list, and also probably the poorest selling, The Mark of Kri came out in the early dubbos on the PS2.
The game was elaborately designed, with amazingly well designed backgrounds, and cool animated characters. The cutaway scenes were brilliantly done, as pictures were literally painted in front of you while the voiceover gave you some background information, culminating in the final picture coming to life and allowing you to commence the level. It also had effective voice casting and a simple yet effective soundtrack.
You played Rau, a vaguely Samoan looking behemoth of a young man, hell bent in avenging something or other (I can’t remember exactly what, you’re always avenging something in video games).
The beauty of the game was that it taught you on the go, there was a quick basic tutorial early but most of the skills were drip fed to you as you progressed through the game, meaning you were adding a little a time instead of trying to absorb 63 combos and 20 buttons at once.
It was definitely more beneficial to use stealth on the enemy, especially before they became aware or your presence, but you could wing it through short sections and go in hacking and waving your sword around. If you completed a successful stealth move though you were rewarded with some truly magnificent and immensely satisfying kill animations.
By the end of the game you were wall hugging your way towards dozing enemies, waiting patiently while guards completed their rounds, and picking off sentries in tall trees with ruthless efficiency, all thanks to the various weapons accumulated along the way and the skills honed over many hours of gameplay.
I’m pretty sure that Tenchu came out after this, and that other games like the Metal Gear Solid capitalized on the stealth craze, but I never got into those games like I did with The Mark of Kri, I think even by the time the sequel arrived I was sort of “over it”, and nowadays my hummingbird wing attention span simply won’t allow me to commit to such a game.
But The Mark of Kri was most certainly one of the best few games of the PS2 era, it’s just a shame it wasn’t better known.
NHL 2002
I am a massive sucker for sport, but really only completely immerse myself in a few, cricket, NBA and AFL (especially AFL).
NBA Live and the NBA 2K games are a constant and from 95 onwards I have always had at least one of them each year, but in the gaming world AFL and cricket games have basically sucked.
Filling the void though are games based upon sports that I would never watch on TV or live if you paid me, including soccer, golf and NHL.
For some reason these horrible sports translate very well into the game world, especially NHL.
The year is an approximate, but whatever edition it was had me 100% hooked. The commentators were hilarious but as with all games that you play for weeks repetitive, the in game crowd noise was particularly immersive and got louder as the game went on, and the game hard enough that you generally couldn’t’ run up a massive score or win by a dozen goals, especially if you played the computer.
This edition also introduced the points system (to me at least), where winning games and performing new feats earned you achievement bonuses, in this case in the form of a special rewards section which gave you credits in the form of hockey cards. Now as I mentioned above I could care less about ice hockey, but I wanted those virtual cards, and I spent hours trying to perform the tasks needed or advance into the season long enough to get them.
If this was a game that was boring I would never have wasted my time, but NHL was awesome, it had the big hits, but you needed to earn them, they weren’t just given to you. The collision detection was so specific that if you mistimed the button or used the wrong line you would brush past or miss the player, meaning your defence was suddenly vulnerable, but if you hit the guy right you would often free up the puck and earn a shot of your own, hugely satisfying.
Tactics also helped on offense, as the old button mashing would rarely result in a score, instead the game rewarded passing and carefully timed slapshots, although setting up a power shot also caused the defense to scramble.
This meant that even though the score would normally be kept low by game’s end, the winner would normally be the better player and tactician. Of course I only bring this up as it was me 99% of the time, out of all the games on this list I can honestly say that I was head and shoulders above my peers for only three games, FIFA, Doom and this.
I wish they released this same game every year, without continually tweaking it for no discernible reason. As with the earlier FIFA game and Tiger Woods Golf I eventually even lost interest in the NHL games, but (let’s call it) 2002 rocked.
FIFA 96
This would be laughed out of the nerd convention if released today, but when released it was the shit.
FIFA gave you unlimited control of the soccer universe, as long as you were happy with one of 12 (or maybe 16, I can’t remember) teams featuring absolutely identical players, and one of three or four playing formations.
Everything else was standard but it didn’t matter, FIFA soccer was so addictive anyway that I knew every nuance of the game, the music, the crowd noise (which was ahead of its time) and the terribly stilted commentary.
I have already explained my strategy earlier but that isn’t important, I can even remember the buttons 15 years on…
Using the standard right thumb 4 button configuration: The top button was run (used often), the left button was cross, the bottom pass and the right was shoot.
Your left thumb changed directions and that was it, the recipe for hours of wasted time in front of the tiny crappy TV that we had at the time.
In the early 2000s the FIFA game changed, no longer could you run / cross / shoot, there were more buttons that needed to be used, so they introduced lob kicks and variations to the tackling system. For the newbies this might have been easily picked up, but for us dinosaurs that had been playing for years it was too much to handle.
Besides, by that time I had discovered a new game, also based upon a crappy sport, that would account for my spare time for the next few years.
Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003
Again I am guessing the edition here.
Golf sucks in real life, I have played it three times, the last two at Bucks parties and simply can’t get into it or work out why anyone would allow their free time to be consumed by it. But…
Tiger Woods golf rules, and for a 2 year period in the early dubbos me and three mates all owned the game and played it to excess.
At the previously mentioned P.P.P. events we would arrive at someone’s house, 6 pack in one hand, controller in the other, memory card in the pocket. We would load our personal golfer into the PS2 and trash talk our way through 18 holes, or skins, or nearest the pin, until we were either too drunk to continue playing properly or the taxi arrived, usually both.
The fact that three of us me, TOG and Mastah-Bydder (say it fast) all had built our golfers to near capacity alienated those in attendance that either didn’t have the game or couldn’t be bothered taking the time, as our super-hero golfers could out-drive them by 100s of years, putt from far further with accuracy and flop the ball from bunkers with ease.
It was a relatively long timespan for one single game to dominate, well over a year and perhaps two, but Tiger Woods Golf allowed it if you were willing. A game that gave access to over a dozen courses, each with a 3 or 4 day tournament of 18 holes per day that took literally hours to complete.
Then there were the challenges, nearest the pin, putting, chipping and flopping contests, each of which earned you valuable points to build your golfer’s skills; and that was before I mention the skins games in which you challenged first fake golfers, then advanced into the pro ranks and ultimately took on Tiger himself!
I asked Mastah-Bydder which edition he found best, his reply:
“It was the one just before they changed the putting stuff.
You know instead of doing the grid thing and having to be all touchy feely we had the whole 1ft right 3 ft down thing?
It was either Tiger Woods 01 or Tiger Woods 02 or Tiger Woods 03 or Tiger Woods 04 or Tiger Woods 05 or Tiger Woods 06, actually it might have changed in 06.
It wasn’t Tiger Woods 99 as this was on the PS1 and the US copy I got had the then never seen before hidden fantastic copy of the South Park – Kyles Mum’s a B&*ch. There was only a handful of copies as they got pulled pretty quick.”
So there we have it, my hazy recollection puts the edition as 02, so that’s what I am going with here, but suffice to say earlier this decade Tiger was better known as the guy on the cover of a plastic box, not a world famous golfer or a world renowned player.
Grand Theft Auto 3
Grand Theft Auto – Vice City was simply awesome and monopolized months of my life after it was released.
Grand Theft Auto – San Andreas was almost as addictive and kept me busy for quite a while.
Neither came close to the impact of GTA 3. The annoying thing about the old save methods with the Playstation is that it actually told you how many hours you had wasted playing a particular game when you saved it, in the case of GTA 3 that was over 140.
I remember starting out following the mission structure and thinking how great and wide open the GTA universe was, then the muggings and carjackings took hold of me and lead me to side missions and the various alliances or “career paths” that you could take.
The above 140 hours was also before me and the flatmates started having challenges where the primary goal was to build up your wanted rating as quickly as possible, then evade your pursuers for as long as you could without dying or being caught. The winner invariably ended up being hunted by choppers and the FBI, with the various onlookers in the loungeroom egging him on.
We never bothered saving the progress of these events but they must have added hundreds of hours to the playing time.
Now… this was before someone arrived home one day with a cheat code that when entered correctly dropped a large tank next to the character. Suddenly increasing your wanted level became much easier and within minutes you would be the subject of a massive police and FBI chase, the adventures were generally shorter in duration but far more intense.
Again no saving, again hundreds more hours.
Even with sports games where I have played game after game, season after season, I would never have accumulated so much time as when I played GTA 3, and even when we were doing much the same thing as we did the previous night it was never ever dull or monotonous. Ever.
The GTA games have been parodied so many times in skit comedy shows and attacked by public interest groups and politicians. All I know is they should never make a movie of the franchise.
If it isn’t me (or at least a mate) dragging some idiot out of his sedan or me blazing away at drug dealers with my uzi in a crowded street, it just isn’t near as much fun.
Burnout 3 – Takedown
I have never been a huge fan of driving games, though there are so many released each year that it was always inevitable that some would end up in my lounge room for sampling.
All the F1, Gran Tourismo and Moto GP sims left me cold, I have never been and never will be a revhead. I enjoyed the Need for Speed franchise more as an outsider, (although the first Hot Pursuit was a great multiplayer game), but again I never managed to get hooked for more than a short span of time.
I remember reading a review of Burnout 3 that went along the lines of “this is by far the best driving game of the year, and it isn’t like any driving game that you’ve ever played”, so I thought that sounded good enough to me to give it a shot.
Happy I did. Burnout 3 remained in high rotation and was both simple and complicated in the same breath, if you had only a few minutes to waste or if a mate came round and wanted to kill an hour the Crash option was there, (I can’t believe how many times we would be happy performing the exact same crash over and over trying to get a bigger score and cause more damage).
If you were on your own the longer races and career options were available, I know most games have these variations but they never seemed as equally strong as in Burnout 3, one or the other was generally the preference and the other was discarded.
Burnout 3 also spaced your upgraded cars just far apart that there was always a new one close enough to keep going, sometimes this caused me to tack an extra hour into the morning hours as I could see the next muscle car almost in my grasp.
The beauty of the normal racing option was that it rewarded you for recklessness within reason, so nearly hitting oncoming traffic while driving in the wrong lane was encouraged and gave you extra turbo (but I think they called it boost), and ballsing things up was equally amusing as you got to enjoy the initial adrenalin when you realized you fudged a little too far in the wrong direction, and then the slo-mo of your almighty crash.
Further to this even was the chance to create further post-crash chaos by giving limited control to your vehicle as it was still in the process of crashing so that you might steer the skidding wreck in the path of oncoming traffic or passing vehicles, ideally your best mate, leading to trash talk and exasperation, and if that isn’t what gaming is about I don’t know what is.
NBA Live 1999
Basketball is my favourite participation sport and the most rewatchable sport on TV.
The NBA is the best league in the world.
EA make mostly great games.
EA Sports make NBA games.
Can’t go wrong right?
Until the last few years no you couldn’t. The arcade version of NBA Live was consistently the most fun sports game for 4 or 5 years straight, then in the pursuit of “completeness” and accuracy the developers managed to lose me. When fouls were turned off and most rules bypassed a good game of NBA became like a US college game, it was all keepey-off, threes and dunks, and you could not possibly have more fun playing against a mate in that era.
The unfortunately in the early 2000s they decided that the purity of the game was being compromised (or something), no longer could you run around like a mummy simply pushing all in your path in order to get the ball (and there WAS an art to doing this by the way), you had to try a steal, and the problem with going for the steal was that when you missed your guy would almost always give up a layup.
Accurate? Probably. Fun? Not so much.
The push-push approach was at once the most frenetic and amusing method and when going against a similar minded opponent would always lead to high scores and generally tight finishes.
Much like a real NBA game.
Knowing your players was important, not to be racist but the white guys generally could hit 3s and obviously the tall black guys would generally go to the basket and finish with authority.
Much like a real NBA game.
Other skills to master included timing your blocks and rebounds (goaltending must be turned ON!), as minimizing layups wins games, and always thinking one pass ahead so that the open guy got the ball when needed.
Much like a real NBA game.
So although the arcade version apparently has little in common with an honest to goodness NBA game, I beg to differ. Re-read the above and you tell me how different it all sounds from reality.
Left 4 Dead
When L4D came out it wasn’t heralded as the next big anything, it more or less snuck into the stores. Now of course it is a juggernaut with a sequel that sold bazillions already and drew publicity through the amount of gore.
Within minutes or starting the game it is obvious that this meets all criteria, it is fun and easy to pick up and still very replayable. (Instantly a member of the best pick up and play party games, along with Mario Kart, Burnout 3 and sports games.)
In Left 4 Dead you are one of 4 survivors of a zombie apocalypse, and must work together to escape your immediate surroundings and find a safe house and ultimately an evacuation point. There are four separate scenarios to play through, each with at least 4 levels ending with the toughest evac level.
There a literally thousands upon thousands of zombies in this game, and once they see you or are alerted to your presence they immediately rush at you and attack often in massive numbers while you try to blow them away and ward them off (learning this move is a necessity). Setting off car alarms and being covered in zombie goo will also attract a swarm of zombies.
Occasionally you will go a minute with only a couple of zombies while you try to work out where you should be headed, the game is intuitive to this and randomly sends swarms of fresh zombies at you to deal with so you must always be on your toes.
This is the ultimate co-op game, if you go rogue and run ahead (as I always do) you run the risk of being separated from the crew and trapped by a special zombie, who lassoes you with his tongue and drags you until you choke to death unless someone else helps you. This is one of the strengths, working as a team and sticking together really does help, and realistically you actually stand a better chance of surviving if one or two of your foursome are computer controlled, as four human operated characters would be picked off like teenagers camping faster than you can say Friday the 13th Part 4.
Left 4 Dead is not for the squeamish but it is great fun, especially with two or more human players, and has the huge bonus of being fun even if you are just watching others playing while you wait for your turn.
(Left 4 Dead 2 is quite similar, although it has introduced the memorable “Jockey zombie”, who jumps on your shoulders and rides you like a horse until your life is exhausted. Absolutely hilarious if you are watching.)
Doom
Our winner…
Doom is the reason I bought a Playstation, it is the game Unky Mark first had when he bought the system when we became enamoured with the pretty colours and the ultra-violence.
I spent so much time playing Doom that by the end I could finish it on the highest setting with my eyes shut, I can’t say that about any other game I have ever played.
My thumbs were so in tune with Doom that I could pick it up now even with the old Playstation controller and bash out 10 levels without dying. I am positive of this.
There have been hundreds of FPS games enter the market over the last 20 years, I have played a great many of them and enjoyed a lot, Doom was the first and still the best.
Ghost dogs, ghost goats, phobos anomalies, killer tomatoes and grooblies, all names that make absolutely no sense to probably anyone but me and my friends that played the game. Sure each of those enemies had proper names, but when you strafe around a corner and come face to face with something new you say the first thing that comes into your head, and often that name sticks.
By the time Doom came to Playstation it had already enjoyed two versions on the PC, and both were included on the one disc, I played through them both many times, sometimes coasting through a level of two with only a pistol or better yet a chainsaw, just to see if I could. The levels became so familiar that I could tell anyone watching what was about to happen, and what I would do about it.
“And right… shoot him… turn left… shoot both before pivoting….wait… there he is… bang… now open the secret door to grab the armour…”
Never got sick of it.
Doom 3 came out with much fanfare on the Xbox. It was one of my main reasons for wanting one, and while it didn’t disappoint I actually was a little depressed at how clean and well designed it looked, and how it wasn’t all pixellated and a little blocky.
After all that is what Doom was and should forever be.
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So that’s the end of another list of “things that stole my youth”, stay tuned for the next, websites that I wasted too many hours scanning, or fantasy sports leagues that I spent too many hours each Friday arvo updating.
Now I’m off, I’m cranking out the achievements on Need for Speed – Shift, and I desperately want to start Dead Space but can never seem to get around to it.
I truly agree with your list, man!!!