Here is a list of my top 10 FAVOURITE games ever! Note the word FAVOURITE. This is not a list of BEST games, but simply my FAVOURITE. FAVOURITE. FAVOURITE. Ok? Good! Also, please note that well, this isn’t really in any order, aside from the first one…
What on earth do I possibly say about this game that hasn’t already been said by millions of people in the last 20 years? In case you have been living in a cave in a coma under a rock for all that time, let me sum up the game in one word: INCREDIBLEAMAZINGSPECTACULARPERFECTION. Well ok, maybe I cheated a little there. One word just isn’t enough for it. It’s just THAT good. But this isn’t a review of the game, this is just me listing my top 10 FAVOURITE games. This is without a doubt my all time #1 favourite game. I played it on the SNES back in the day, and I still own a SNES and a copy of this game and still play it on occasion. Also own it on the Wii Virtual Console too (before I bought a SNES and copy of the game). I’ve completed it many times over the years, and when I say completed I mean 100%. All levels. All secret levels. All shortcuts unlocked. EVERYTHING. And for me to complete a game 100% is a rare thing indeed. A lot of times I just finish the main story (if that… so many incomplete games in my collection) and that’s it. But here, even after the last battle with Bowser, I always want MORE. So I find all the secret exits in levels and make sure I finish every last secret level no matter what. So many memories with this game too, from playing it as a kid, getting my dad to actually play it (even if he could only ever do the one level; the first…), which was a rare thing indeed because he never plays video games ever, to playing it with my best friend until early hours of the morning while we were at University and taking turns at doing a level each (which usually ended up with me finishing the levels for him because he sucks at platformers!). As much as I love the current 3D Mario games, even all these years on I still get as much enjoyment out of playing Super Mario World as I did when I was young. I could never get bored of this.
It seems that for every console/handheld I own, there is typically one game that I play more than any other, even if I play a handful of games a ton. This was THE game for me on the Sony Playstation. I got my Playstation for Christmas in 1997, and bundled with my console were 3 games; Destruction Derby 2, some unknown game I cannot for the life of me remember… and Twisted Metal: World Tour. I still own the same Playstation console, and the same copy of Twisted Metal. Even though I had a NES and a SNES as a kid, I never kept the consoles or the games. Whenever it came time to buy a new console, we would always sell our old one so we had some money to put towards the new one. Which meant that even though I know own a NES and SNES again along with my favourite games from my childhood, I was never able to keep hold of them for the entire time. And since I wasn’t THAT bothered about keeping hold of all my games even during the PS1 era, I tended to trade a lot of my games in for other games or in store credit, and occasionally cash. So Destruction Derby 2 has long since gone (think I bought a copy again for nostalgia sake a couple of years ago), and the other game I can no longer remember is also long gone… that makes Twisted Metal: World Tour my oldest game! And having it and the console to play it on uninterrupted since Christmas 1997, I guess it isn’t THAT much of a surprise that it is likely my most played game ever! When I first decided I wanted a Playstation rather than the N64, I did as much research as possible in the days of no internet to pick out the right bundle for me. Leading up to Christmas especially, different stores would have multiple different game bundles to choose from, and after looking at them all, studying the back of game cases to form as much of an opinion on the games as possible, and even buying the odd Playstation Magazine, I decided there was ONE particular game I wanted. The rest in the bundle didn’t matter to me. I wanted that ONE game so much. One of the magazines I bought had either a preview or a review of it, and it claimed it was, and I quote (to the best of my memory nearly 20 years later) “Sony Playstation’s answer to Mario”. One thing you have to understand is that my brother’s birthday is in November, and in 1997 for his birthday, he got an N64 with Super Mario 64. Back then, that game was REVOLUTIONARY. There was NOTHING like it. Eventually Rare would produce a handful of 3D Platformers for the system that were arguably just as good, but for non Nintendo gamers, you just couldn’t match that experience with any other game. So reading that line in a magazine made me want that game more than anything. The game? Croc: Legend of the Gobbos. So Christmas day came around, and I couldn’t wait to rip off the paper and get into my Playstation bundled with what I hoped would be Croc. To my disappointment… no Croc. It seems the game was rather popular at the time and the bundles with the game had sold out. So instead the main game with my bundle was some weird car game called “Twisted Metal: World Tour”, a sequel for a game I’d never even heard of before. How good could it be? Ahhh, to be young and stupid. Turns out Twisted Metal: World Tour wasn’t good. It was FANTASTIC. And I did eventually get Croc… and it SUCKED. Seems the gaming gods were smiling on me that day when my parents went to buy the console. I don’t even know if they did bundles with Croc AND Twisted Metal. I’m not sure if it would have been a game I’d have bought and played back then if it didn’t come with my console. The thought of that makes me shudder. I hope the old multiverse theory is a load of bull. I can’t imagine the horrors of another me who actually got Croc that Christmas and missed out on Twisted Metal. Poor bastard. Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah… TWISTED METAL. You choose between a bunch of characters each with their own unique DEATH VEHICLE designed for destroying everyone else. They stick you in various arenas around the world (destroying Paris still makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside btw) and let you fight it out to the death. After you defeat every arena, including some boss battles, your character gets the chance to wish for anything they want. And that’s where the replay value comes into play for the first time. You WANT to complete the game with every character in order to see their cut scene at the end and find out what they wish for and how it turns out. After that, the replay value is essentially the fact that the game is so damn fun you want to keep battling over and over and over again. And I still do that to this day. Hell sometimes it’s even fun to cheat a little. Hold down L1, L2, R1 and R2 then press up, down, left, right, right, left, down, up. GOD MODE. You can’t die (unless you drive off the edge of a building or something like that), and you get unlimited weapons (SPAM THOSE SPECIALS!!!). If that isn’t enough, maybe you should try pressing L1, up, down, left while on the character select screen. Just an idea hehe. There are other cheats and button combinations to try out, some are in the manual, but some are hidden in the levels! Dammit now I wanna play it again. SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO ME?
Online gaming and First Person Shooters aren’t typically my thing. These days the FPS market is oversaturated with a million Call of Duty and Medal of Honor games etc. A bunch of generic army shooters or generic space shooters. They just don’t do it for me. And online gaming? Half the time it’s filled with 10 year olds swearing and crying into the headsets because you killed them. At least that’s what the internet would have me believe haha. So for me to be interested in a FPS, especially an online one, it has to be DIFFERENT. And Team Fortress 2 is just that. It’s almost cartoony in its presentation, with colourful levels, sense of humour and crazy characters. Where else can you play as a big fat guy who loves his mini-gun and is obsessed with sandviches? Or a crazy, deluded fire obsessed *unknown gender* who sees the world as sunshine lollypop and rainbows? While the game is team based, and there are obvious goals and rankings etc… it doesn’t really take itself seriously. It’s FUN. And most of the people who play are all about fun. Sure, it can anger you beyond all belief when you are stuck on a team full of halfwits who couldn’t defend a point to save their stupid fucking lives and wouldn’t even last a minute if it wasn’t for you so why on earth aren’t they listening to your advice it isn’t fucking hard KILL THE OTHER TEAM YOU MORONS… errmmm… I mean… find a good couple of servers, favourite them, and you can have oodles of fun with this game. I’ve clocked in over 400 hours in around 3 years (thanks Steam for keeping count…). When you can play a game that long in such a short period of time, you know it has to be a favourite game of yours! Oh, and I completely forgot the best thing… IT’S FREE!!! On Steam for the PC, obviously. It is available in the Orange Box for consoles, but I honestly cannot imagine playing this on a console. It’s been around since 2007, so it doesn’t require that much graphics power to play, so there are no excuses! Play it now!
I still remember going to my local Game shop on my birthday with all my money to get me a Gameboy Colour bundled with Pokemon Silver! Yup, I got the handheld for one game and one game only. In fact, I hardly owned ANY other GBC games back then. Off the top of my head I can only actually think of one other I owned. Huh. Oh well, I can still honestly say MONEY WELL SPENT just to play the one game! I didn’t get into Pokemon straight away, so I missed out on the first generation games. But my best friend got Pokemon Gold and after seeing it in action, I knew I had to get it. Since my friend had Gold, I decided it would be better for me to get Silver, that way we can trade (or use the clone glitch) pokemon that were exclusive to each version. And that’s what we did. It’s funny, with smart phones and tablets and whatnot becoming more and more popular these days, every now and then I’ll see some youtube video showing how it’s effecting society, with groups of friends all getting together and just sitting there in silence as they communicate through their devices rather than actually talk to each other. Back in the day, that was me and my friend with Pokemon! Either I’d go to his house or he’d come over to mine… and we’d just sit in the same room playing our Gameboy Colours! Every now and then one of us would make a noise if we defeated a gym leader or captured a cool pokemon or our starter was finally evolving. Fun times. I clocked up over 100 hours on my original save… and then I started over again. Twice. So I could complete the game with each starter Pokemon. Unfortunately I sold my GBC and what little games I had for it so I could buy more PS1 games, but I have since obtained a Gameboy Advance and a copy of Gold (came with the GBA) to relive some of my childhood. Shame the battery has gone now and I cannot save it any more. Instead I just have to make do with a DS REMAKE!!! Soul Silver, I love you just as much. I’ve played through that version of the game at least twice too. And I will play it again more times in my life, guaranteed!
After my disappointment with Croc, I wasn’t sure I would ever get my very own “Mario” experience on the Playstation. Then I found Crash Bandicoot 2. It wasn’t quite the 3D open world roaming experience like Mario 64, but a lot of the elements were there! Jumping on enemies, smashing boxes, collecting stuff, boss battles, powerups (or rather just powerup; the Uka Uka Mask), challenging platforming, crazy enemies and plenty of different looking worlds featuring different gameplay. One minute you’re running through a forest, then the next you’re at the south pole (or something) riding on a baby polar bear, and after that you might be running from a giant rolling stone doing your best Indiana Jones impression! On the surface the game seems very linear; keep moving forward in each level, collect the crystal, and reach the end. Repeat until all 5 levels are done on each Warp Room, then fight the boss. Finishing the game like that can take me no more than a couple of hours these days… but that’s only about 1/3 of the game. The real challenge comes from collecting the GEMS. In every level there is a gem you can get by smashing every single box. There is a counter to help you keep track so no worries there. That seems simple enough, until they begin to ramp up the difficulty by positioning boxes over pits and spikes and water, which will instantly kill you unless you bounce off the box the right way. You’ll also have to hit a switch box to activate certain boxes, and even hit a switch to blow up all the Nitro boxes that kill you instantly if you touch them. Manage to do that for every level and… STILL not finished! Some levels have multiple gems, and there are a few coloured ones too. THESE are the real challenges. Hidden warp rooms must be found, that usually lead to extremely difficult levels that reward you with a nice shiny coloured gem. And in some levels you must reach a certain point without dying once in order to use a special moving platform that will take you to another part of the level to gain the gem. The platform has a skull and crossbones design on it, which tells you everything you need to know about what lies ahead. So once all the gems have been obtained, you must defeat the final boss yet again in order to gain the REAL ending. If you’ve played Crash Bandicoot 2 and 3, but only completed 2 with crystals, if you paid attention you’ll notice that the beginning of Crash 3 doesn’t make sense with how Crash 2 ended. Unless you completed it with the gems! Man, I remember spending MONTHS playing this game with my friend, each of us going through each level trying to find out how to get all the gems. We didn’t have the internet back then to guide us, nor did I have an actual guide. We’d go through levels collecting every piece of Wumpa Fruit, avoiding every single box, killing every enemy, exploring every inch of the level in hopes of receiving a gem at the end. Eventually we did it, and since then I’ve only ever been able to gain all the gems once. Maybe one of these days I’ll have another go…
You may have noticed I’m something of a fan of wrestling. Just a little bit. So naturally I’ve played some wrestling games here and there. Smackdown 2 might not be the BEST, but boy did I play the hell out of it back in the day. Hours upon hours upon hours. The gameplay was a nice mix of the fast paced arcade style games we used to get when it came to wrestling (In Your House and WrestleMania: The Arcade game being the best examples) and the new grapple system that the N64 wrestling games had pretty much perfected. This combination made for a lot of fun, as now you could hit your favourite moves easily and not have to wait half an hour for it to execute. And what could be more fun that having a match like that? Well… having a match like that in one of the INSANE amount of match types! Singles, triple threat, fatal four way, elimination, over the top rope, royal rumble, gauntlet, king of the ring tournament, tag team, table, casket, hardcore, street fight, backstage brawling, ladder, TLC, I Quit, cage… and my personal favourite; HELL IN A CELL. I could spend a lifetime just playing the exhibition mode! Helps that there is such a strong roster too. 2000 is my personal favourite year for the WWF, and this has EVERYONE pretty much. All the top guys are there; Undertaker, Austin, HHH, Rock, Mankind (and Cactus Jack. And Mick Foley. Was Dude Love there too? I forget), Kane etc and then the rest of the roster like Jericho, Benoit, Angle, Guerrero, Malenko, Hardy Boys, Dudley Boys, Edge & Christian, APA, Mean Street Posse, Big Boss Man, Viscera and tons more. We also got a stacked divas roster for the time as well with Trish, Lita, Tori, Ivory, Jacqueline, Stephanie McMahon, The Kat and Chyna. We even got people like Paul Bearer, Shane McMahon and Vince McMahon to play as! You could unlock a bunch of guys as well, like Billy Gunn (out injured at the time), Shawn Michaels, Mean Street Posse, some of the guys I’ve already mentioned like Cactus Jack and Mick Foley, Debra and others. On top of that, the create-a-wrestler allowed you to use body parts, theme music and move sets for people like The Big Show and Ken Shamrock who were cut from the game! Their heads aren’t in it, but you can put together decent likenesses of them anyway. In fact the game itself actually uses them! If you are lucky you’ll get a surprise appearance from one or both during a royal rumble or gauntlet match! Speaking of CAW’s and move sets… season mode every so often will place you in a gimmick match against a mystery opponent named after a letter in the alphabet. Beat him and unlock a move set, all of which are based on non WWF wrestlers at the time! Hogan, Hall, Nash, Goldberg, Sting, DDP, Jushin Liger, Vader, Bob Backlund and more! So many possibilities. So much fun. There really is nothing like going to the top of the Hell in a Cell and using a RUNNING POWERBOMB to throw someone off the side!!! I’m still always disappointed with new WWE games that lack some of the features the PS1 managed to throw into this game. That was 14 years ago now! Oh well, luckily this game is still super fun to play today so while it isn’t perfect, I can always set my PS1 back up and kick it old school as they say!
The first C&C games I got to play were on the PS1. Command & Conquer, Command & Conquer: Red Alert and Command & Conquer: Red Alert Retaliation. Me and my friend would spend hours in skirmish mode, building our armies (and possibly using money cheats…) and just waiting for the right moment to strike our enemies and CRUSH them. Years later, I got a PC. And was introduced to a whole new C&C experience with C&C: Red Alert 2! Building an army to crush your enemy was now twice as fun (hell, probably more), with new units, bigger maps and more buildings. Skirmish mode was still amazing fun, and the mode I have spent the most time on over the years, but the actual single player missions were also something I focused on more than I had on the 3 PS1 games I had. Lots of real video cut scenes with some crazy characters really added to the whole experience, and made you want to continue advancing in the game to see what the hell was going to happen next. And when you finished playing… you’d want to immediately start again with the other side! And if all that wasn’t enough, they even had online play. I only did it a few times, due to having a terribly unstable connection at the time, but it certainly was a lot of fun. My main strategy was build up a strong defence, using things like Tesla defence towers and Prism towers depending on which side I was using, as well as LOTS of air defence (as must have when you start turning up the difficulty!). While I was making sure my base was well defended, I’d begin to build my armies (yes, plural). I’d always have at least 2 teams (which could be assigned a number so you could switch between them at a moment’s notice), so I could send in the first wave of units to try and destroy as much as possible, then have a second team on backup, not too far from the enemy base who could come in and finish the job if need be. I’d always mix up what kind of armies I’d build. Sometimes I’d be sensible and have a mixture of infantry, dogs (to help counter the enemy infantry), rocket soldiers, and then my heavy hitting tanks such as prism tanks or apocalypse tanks. And then sometimes I’d build an absurdly large army consisting of nothing but infantry or prism tanks and see how well they could do on their own. Infantry… not too well. Prism tanks? More often than not, a group of these bad boys can eliminate the enemy by themselves! So many hours spend doing things like that. Fun times. And if all of THAT wasn’t enough, they released an expansion called Yuri’s Revenge, which added another set of units to the game and a whole new set of missions too! This was also the first game I ventured into the world of mods for. Eagle Red was my preferred mod of choice, and I think it might still be out there if anyone is interested. Adds a TON more units, and a crazy amount of new modes for skirmish mode, such as the ability to have access to technology from the Allies, Soviets AND Yuri! Plus an increased difficulty mode which I love.
What’s this? A HALO game in my top 10 list? For people who know me, and what games I tend to prefer, this is likely going to come as a shock. But then again, for those who REALLY know me (basically, real life peoples), this probably isn’t. I’ve mentioned certain games being system sellers, and well, THIS is the sole reason I bought an Xbox. My best friend got an xbox shortly after release, and of course he got Halo. At this time, I was still on PS1 games, so this was a huge step up. The graphics, at the time, we amazing. And the game just felt so BIG. These vast levels, usually filed with a crap load of enemies, all waiting to blow you to shreds unless you got to them first. And the music. Man oh man the music. Perfect. And while me and my friend would have a ton of fun playing co-op on the main campaign, it was the multiplayer mode than pretty much made this game a must have for me. We used to have what we dubbed as “Halo Days”, where a group of us would go to my friend’s house all day and just play the multiplayer mode. 4 on 4 split screen in some arena, as we all hunted each other down! Such fond memories of sneaking up behind people and smashing them to death with the gun rather than shooting them, or finding a hiding spot and sniping them as they struggled to locate you, or even just running up to someone, planting a sticky grenade to them without them knowing, and running away before they realise what you’ve done! Oh and one of my other friends being so terrible at the game all he could do is stand in a circle and look around!!! We still bring that up, almost 10 years later! Just don’t mention me and the tree. DAMN THAT TREE. One of the multiplayer maps happens to have a tree… and well, I was in a vehicle, and my friend was on foot running away from me. He got to the tree, and started to run around it, with me in chase. No matter what I did I just couldn’t navigate around this damn tree properly to kill him! It was a few years later before I could finally afford an Xbox on my own, but I made sure to get Halo with it! I even remember being so excited for Halo 2 that I pre-ordered it and got it before my friend who had the Xbox and Halo 1 years before me. Gotta say, Halo lost all of its magic for me with that game. The campaign sounded fun on paper, being able to control one of the aliens during certain missions, but I just never cared for it. And the multiplayer? Just didn’t have the same feel as the first one. That being said, most people who rave about Halo 2 tend to do so because of the ONLINE multiplayer. I could barely get the internet on my PC at the time, never mind on my Xbox! So while the rest of the series just hasn’t interested me, the first will still hold a place in my gaming heart!
Growing up in the 90’s was pretty awesome. So many great kids shows on TV, mainly cartoons, but one of my favourite things to watch was ROBOT WARS. Seeing homemade killing machines battling it out to the death. Such fun! As the show went on, the robots got better and better, and so did my love for the show. While there were some Robot Wars games released before this one… they all kinda sucked. Extreme Destruction though, did not. A good selection of robots to choose from, including my absolute personal favourite Chaos 2, and others such as Wheely Big Cheese, Behemoth, Razer, Hypnodisc, Thermador and more. Plenty of different modes to choose from too. 1 on 1, triple threat, four way, 6 way, gauntlet, sumo, football, and something with an exploding bomb you pass around. A bunch of different locations, not just the arena we see on TV, and each had their own craziness. A train station, where you could end the match by pushing your opponent into a train and watching it speed away, or better yet push your opponent onto the tracks while a train is coming! You can battle on top of a building (and push people off), at a nuclear missile base (and send the other player off on a missile), a ship (the waves make it impossible to move around) and even a base on MARS (antigravity!!!). A career mode sees you buying a robot and working your way through multiple matches on each level until you finally win, with the option to buy better robots along the way. Or you can create your own! Oh yes! My favourite feature! The more money you have, the better your robot can be. Pick from different strengths of armour for the chassis, whether or not you want wheels or tracks, what kind of power you want to use, and of course WEAPONS. Ranging from flippers (which unfortunately don’t work nearly as well as the ones attached to the likes of Chaos 2), spikes, saws, jaws of death (like Razor), axes, flamethrowers and even tasers that zap the power from opponents! You are allowed to have 2 weapons, a primary and secondary, as well as all the spikes your design can fit on. Again, the more money you earn in career mode, the better you can equip your robotic killing machine! I spend hours just having 1 on 1 matches with various different robots, either as Chaos 2 flipping my opponent around the arena (or even out of the arena, just like on the show!), Tornado who can push almost anyone around, Behemoth who definitely can push anyone around and even flip them in the right situation, or one of my many created robots, all designed for maximum damage. And causing damage is so rewarding, as bits of the armour fly off, smoke comes out (and becomes a thick black smoke when you’ve done a great deal of damage), and you can even disable wheels and knock out the power unit! The House Robots are in the game too, but I tend to find them a real pain in the arse and turn them off. You go anywhere near them and they fly out and attack you, and usually when they do, it’s the end for you. There are cheats that allow you to actually play as the House Robots, but tbh I prefer the selection you get and my own created ones! The game does have a bunch of problems, ranging from poor controls on the faster robots (Pussycat is impossible to control), a score system that only thinks aggression is attacking the House Robots (so I end up getting 0 if the time runs out because I have the House Robots turned off), and some created weapons not really doing their jobs (flippers suck and self righting mechanisms mostly just don’t work). Still, I have so much fun playing this game even today. If you liked Robot Wars back in the day, definitely look this one up. Make sure to get the PC version though, console versions didn’t handle nearly as well.
This is what a film to game should be. A great 3D Platformer, with levels all based on locations from the film. Great voice acting done by most of the people who did the film (a few characters are done by different people, but honestly you’d struggle to tell), great music (got the damn theme song stuck in my head now!), and scenes from the movie put in for the cut scenes! No animating the in game characters to do it! The Toy Story trilogy is one of my favourite series of films, and the fact we got a game of THIS quality based on one of those films makes me so damn happy. I owned this as a kid, then stupidly sold, probably to put money towards an Xbox game, then I bought it digitally on the PS3 a couple of years back… then bought the actual PS1 version again on ebay when I came across it super cheap! Not often I’m more than happy to buy the same game multiple times! In fact I’ve only done that with 1 other game that just missed out on being in my top 10 favourite games list (The Simpsons: Hit & Run). I can still pick this game up any time and play through it, though it isn’t exactly one I can finish in a single sitting! The difficulty does increase the more you play, with some of the Pizza Planet tokens being very difficult to obtain! I occasionally have flash backs to the construction yard level and elevator level that require a lot of precision platforming to reach certain tokens in high locations. The amount of times I’d stupidly fall off is insane! Yet I’d always begin climbing back up because dammit I just had to have that token! Even though like a Mario game, you don’t need every token to be able to finish the game, I don’t like knowing that there is still more for me to do. Definitely a game I always like to complete 100%!
Follow