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Halo: Combat Evolved — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 44)

There’s a pattern you see with video games, which probably isn’t all that unique to the medium when you really think about it, but nevertheless, it’s something you see a lot of in gaming in particular.

An initial game in a potential franchise will launch, generally with pretty good “bones” – perhaps it’s got a great concept, or maybe it nails some element that can become foundational later on – but the thing nevertheless isn’t 100 percent on point.

Not yet.

The game has some rough edges, some problems, and some things you wish weren’t there.

We can guess that it needed more time in the oven. Or even that it was probably realistically pushed about as far as anyone could expect for a first crack at the thing. But either way, the end result is the same: It doesn’t have polish.

It was a proper idea, but it’s just not quite there yet.

When the sequel(s) come along, that’s when you see your desired refinement occur. Everything that worked about the first game gets built upon and expanded. Everything that didn’t work gets thrown out.

More of the good. Less of the bad.

What emerges is generally a better game than what you had before.

Now, there are plenty of examples of sequels that don’t follow this script — games that deviate too wildly from a winning formula, games that fail to improve upon what came before,* or worst of all games that were given to a team of developers who just weren’t up to the challenge of duplicating what made the entity special to begin with. These are your “disappointment” sequels.

* Probably the most notorious examples of this are your annual EASports-type releases of games that barely change what came the year before. You’ve gotta squint to see what’s been improved from one game to the next. “Hey, the rosters are slightly different … buy it now!”

But by and large, if you want to talk about some of the most successful sequels in history – universally beloved hits like Mega Man 2, Street Fighter II, Tecmo Super Bowl, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and Donkey Kong Country 2 (just to name a few) – those games didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. They built on what had previously been established, and they did so with brilliance.

A game comes out. It establishes a franchise. It’s improved in the sequel(s). And off we go.

Thus, we can say that in general, there’s simply a level of presentation and polish that’s present in a sequel that you don’t see in an original outing. The first game in the series is going to be a little rough or janky in comparison.

It’s the sequels that nail the concept.

And THIS is what makes “Halo: Combat Evolved” a remarkable game.

It sticks the landing on the very first attempt.

Halo: Combat Evolved at a glance:
Genre: First-person shooter
Released: 2001
Platform: Xbox
IGN’s fourth-best FPS ever

Shadow of the Colossus — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 43)

You’re riding your horse through a barren landscape, one oddly devoid of life.

Unsettlingly so.

A haze covers everything, muting all colors and hindering your ability to see things clearly.

This world is not our own. Moreover, it’s dreamlike … it doesn’t feel entirely real.

You’ve been directed to this task, of riding your horse to an unclear destination, by a thundering voice from the sky, speaking a language you don’t recognize (but which has still conveniently been translated for you so that you might understand at a most basic level).

Everything here is foreign.

The voice instructed you to slay a number of giants in order that you might save your female companion.

She was quite very clearly deceased when you examined her, but you’re unwilling to accept that. An option to save her has been presented. You’ve been given direction, and this is more comforting than having to slog through the fog with no sense of where to go.

You encounter a cliff, which necessitates leaving your horse behind, and you scale that cliff.

Up ahead, you see the outline of a structure within another cliff wall. Perhaps it is scalable as well?

As you venture closer, you are in awe as this structure begins to rearrange itself and come to life, towering above you into the sky: a colossus lumbering toward you, intent on clubbing you to death with its giant weapon.

You are in awe because this is completely foreign to anything you’ve experienced before in your life.

I outline the above scenario, cribbed directly from the opening moments of “Shadow of the Colossus,” because I think it’s worth understanding upfront that this game when it debuted was unlike anything else that had come before. And to date, some 20 years later, we still haven’t seen the game’s formula recreated in quite the same way either.

Its impact on the gaming industry stretches far and wide, as elements present here have inspired developers for two decades now. Trying to recapture those senses of awe and scale has been a favorite pastime of the industry ever since people first laid eyes on this spectacle of a game.

But despite its influence, is there another experience quite like this one anywhere else in video games?

I’d argue no.

And that, more than anything else, is why it’s considered one of the best games of all time.

Shadow of the Colossus at a glance:
Genre: Action-adventure
Released: 2005
Platform: PlayStation 2
GamesRadar’s No. 10 “best game ever”

Tekken 3 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 42)

If you’ve ever wanted to fight a panda bear, an animated log, an alien samurai, or a wrestler in a jaguar mask, boy, do I have the game for you!

The very first thing that jumps out at you when you encounter Tekken 3 for the first time is its completely wackadoodle roster of bizarre characters, some of the tamest of which are Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee knockoffs, who both happen to be completely over-the-top caricatures of their real-life selves (and are positively bad-ass). But yeah, those are the tame ones. More typical are the likes of an ogre demon, or an infirm senior citizen scientist, or a cartoon dinosaur.

Color, in this case, is not a problem.

In fact, it’s partly the point.

But let’s be clear about this: it’s not the ENTIRE point.

If it were, the Tekken series would have long since run out of steam.

Instead, the franchise has gotten better and better, to the point where it has become one of the premiere fighting series on the planet.

So, let’s get into a little of the how and why that happened while we dive into what is largely considered the most impactful entry in the series.

Tekken 3 at a glance:
Genre: Fighting game
Released: 1998
Platform: PlayStation
Complex’s Fourth Best Fighting Game of All Time

Metal Gear Solid — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 41)

This has the potential to be one of my shortest write ups yet, as the case for “Metal Gear Solid” is an absurdly strong one.

Put simply, this game popularized an entire video game genre, “the stealth game,” doing the concept better than it had ever been done before, while also making it a viable format for others to emulate.

So, what you have here ultimately is a quality game which is also an important and influential game.

There you go, case made.

(Naturally, what makes the game “quality” is subject to interpretation, which is why we bother with this whole series in the first place.)

Metal Gear Solid at a glance:
Genre: Stealth game
Released: 1998
Platform: PlayStation
IGN’s Best PlayStation Game Ever

Jalen Hurts was inevitable

As I was watching Jalen Hurts during Super Bowl LIX, it struck me that there’s an inevitability to his game that isn’t especially easy to quantify.

Hurts is listed as being 6-foot-1 and 223 lbs, and that really sounds like they’re underselling it. He’s a big guy on the football field, sturdy and seemingly capable of taking all measure of punishment a defense can deal out, as his short yardage exploits have demonstrated (Hurts has only missed a handful of games in his career).

Except, being physical is not really his game. He’s not a player who typically looks eager to initiate contact, and when you think of his highlight reel, the top plays don’t generally feature him trucking people with stiff arms and whatnot.

He’s fast, notably so, but not blindingly so, if that makes sense.

You’ll watch him play, and he’ll jump out at you as being just fast enough to burn a defense to the edge for 5-10 yards, but not fast enough or agile enough to turn that advantage into a 50-yard run (unless of course the defense isn’t sound, at which point, yes, like clockwork, he’ll gain exactly the yardage available to him).

Hurts has a good arm, but not the greatest arm. The ball generally gets where it needs to when it needs to, but there’s no wow factor to it either. Guys get open, and he finds them, with decent enough accuracy to get the completion.

He also misses throws, and he gets thrown off by pressure occasionally. And he’s gotten criticism for playing in “simple” schemes, as though making QB reads easier (and taking advantage of them) is a bad thing.

In short, he’s not the biggest, or the strongest, or the fastest, or even the most gifted or cerebral thrower, but here’s the thing:

He feels a little unstoppable.

My games of 2024

Whew, another year has come and gone, and with it, I’ve once again managed to check a bunch of games off of the old backlog (while adding a bunch of others to that same list … so it goes).

Every year, I list the games I’ve completed with a mini-review on social media as they are vanquished, then I circle back to rank them with a score at the end of the year. Games I’ve completed for the first time get their own mini-rank at the end, earning my “games of the year” designation. You can see those rankings below.

So prestigious!

Last year, I devoted some extra space to writing about my favorite game of the year, and I’d like to do that again here. Not so much to gush about how much I love it, but rather to get into some of the why and how it ended up at the top of the heap.

This year, that game is “Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration.”

If you’ve seen that game in the headlines or in your feeds of late, it’s because it just got a re-release with extra content and more games. Since I haven’t purchased this fancy newer version, I can’t speak to the entirety of that extra content and whether it’s worth the additional coin, but you can look it over here.

To my mind, however, the additional content is basically just going to be a bonus, because the original version of the game actually earned a 10/10 from me without it. As such, it was the only game to earn a “perfect” score from me this year.

Why was I so taken with it?

Because it gave us something new.

Super Mario 64 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 40)

Modern 3D gaming – particularly if we put aside the first-person shooter as being its own distinct category – owes a great deal of appreciation to many trailblazers, but especially two stupidly influential games in particular:

“Super Mario 64” and “Tomb Raider.”

The specifics of how we got to the point that those two games could be as successful as they were is probably a little too boring and certainly too technical (at least for me) to dive into fully. It’s hopefully enough to say that years of development led to advances in the technology (and even a few games reaching the market) that predated the dual releases of Super Mario 64 and Tomb Raider in 1996 (we should acknowledge that lots of people were working hard on this).

And yet, while all of that development was important, none of it hit with the force of my kids stampeding to the front of a dessert table quite like those two did.

1996 was a very big year.

The industry was NOT the same afterward.

And so, with that context, we can probably safely say that those two games are essential. They each, in their own specific way, offered the gamer of the mid-90s something new, and they left an undeniable impact on all of the 3D gaming that would come afterward.

Yes, there were other 3D games to land that year and in the years following. “Crash Bandicoot” gave Sony its own mascot for their new PlayStation, which in and of itself was no small thing, but if we’re honest, that game was also somewhat limited in its approach and also just not as popular as those other two.

In a similar way, no one today is pointing to “Bubsy 3D” as being particularly influential in this sphere, because we’re not crazy. (The game was VERY rough around the edges, the main character is generally reviled rather than adored, and it also didn’t sell super well.)

Conversely, we can speak to the fact that Tomb Raider was a well executed and well regarded game that sold over 2.5 million units in its first year of release, and Mario 64 was considered a landmark title by nearly everyone and sold about 3 million copies in six months itself.

So yes, those were the two biggies. And despite differing from one another in fairly significant ways, they deserve to be joined at the hip in these kinds of discussions as being important, influential titles.

Certainly, at the time, I recall vividly that each game was a “killer app” of sorts for their respective consoles.

Tomb Raider was on the Dreamcast and PC in addition to the PlayStation originally, though it came to become synonymous with Sony’s system (by design … Sony signed an exclusivity deal with Eidos for all of the sequels shortly after the release of the first game).

Mario, naturally, was strictly Nintendo, through and through.

As a result, gamers were presented with a distinct choice in the mid ‘90s. Go with the new hotness and the PlayStation, personified by one Laura Croft, the curvy star of Tomb Raider. Or stick with the colorful and playful “sandbox” cartoon-like stylings of Nintendo.

Having recently become a college student in 1995, it’s not difficult to understand why I would have gravitated toward Sony at the time.

Circling back to Mario 64 many years after the fact, I was struck by the depth of the controls and the craftsmanship that went into his first 3D offering. And yes, while there is undoubtedly some jank present, the game largely succeeds at its objectives in an impressive manner.

Much of the same can also be said of Tomb Raider, of course, and it deserves its flowers too. But as I look back at the two games and consider which to recommend above the other, I come back to a pretty simple equation.

Mario 64 is more fun.

So, let’s dive into why that is.

Mario 64 at a glance:
Genre: 3D platformer
Released: 1996
Platform: Nintendo 64
No. 4 on EGM’s Top 100 Games of All Time

GoldenEye 007 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 39)

“GoldenEye 007” might be the biggest conundrum (or at least the toughest call for inclusion) on this entire countdown of what I consider to be the most essential retro video games a person can play.

On the one hand, you have a game that is by many metrics among the most important games in the entire history of gaming. GoldenEye personified a platform – the Nintendo 64 – in a way few other games have ever come close to doing. It provided a template for first-person shooting on home consoles for essentially the next decade (and to some degree, it mapped out what developers are still doing today). And it was immensely popular, providing joy (and misery) to countless millions of people.

However, on the other hand, you also have a game that is virtually unplayable for many younger gamers, who upon playing it will almost inevitably declare it overrated and terrible and miss the whole dang point of why it mattered in the first place.

The reasons for this are easy to identify.

Firstly, it’s the general look of the game, which featured early-polygons that are fuzzy, colorless, and ugly and offer comically unrefined edges, creating the “blocky” effect that so many games of that era had.

“Oh hey, that guy looks like an extra from Dire Strait’s ‘Money for Nothing’ video!”

“Wow, that lady’s chest looks like Madonna’s famous cone bra for some reason.”*

* That these jokes are themselves somewhat dated does not escape me. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We all get old. I linked to the source material for the younger pups out there. Also, here’s a more modern version for you: These people look like less colorful Minecraft characters.

So yes, the graphics were super ugly. But that would be easy to forgive with good controls and … WELP.

Yeah, here you’ve got to contend with that wonky N64 controller,* early first-person “tank” controls that everyone has by now (justifiably) declared to be entirely inefficient at accomplishing things (you can’t aim or move quickly), and perhaps worst of all, critical stuff mapped to those silly yellow arrow buttons on the N64 which are annoyingly small and difficult to find in real time … which is unfortunately what we’re dealing with here – real-time battles wherein baddies are trying to shoot you in the face.

* The N64 controller is famously wonky. It features three prongs giving it the appearance of a tripod, those stupid tiny yellow buttons your fingers can’t locate without you glancing down at the controller (getting you killed in the process), and a cute little joystick for analogue control which is positioned squarely in the middle of the controller for some reason and baffles newcomers endlessly. The idea behind the whole thing is that you use the middle prong when you’re using the joystick and the left prong when using the standard d-pad, but that’s not intuitive, people constantly get it wrong, and the whole dang thing is super weird regardless.

In summation, the controls and visuals of GoldenEye 007 can best be described as “dated” and at worst be labeled as something akin to getting a splinter stuck under your fingernail.

You don’t want that there. It hurts. As a piece of a greater whole, it served a purpose. But now it sucks and you want it to go away.

These controls and graphics suck, and you want them to go away.

Thusly, encouraging people to play this is to invite scorn and misunderstanding.

And yet…

People LOVE this game.

I LOVE this game.

GoldenEye is an all-timer, and it represents a simpler time for so many of us, full of gaming, friends, laughs, continual virtual murder, and general hilarity. The flaws, such as they are, weren’t really flaws at the time, because nothing better existed to compare them to. It was just an awesome game.

So, the case for GoldenEye essentially comes down to this: Either we encourage people to play it knowing they simply won’t have the same experience people did in the late 90s, OR we let it be forgotten completely as us older people die off.

Morbid, I know, but that’s kinda the point here. What games shouldn’t pass away from our society’s consciousness. Which ones need to be celebrated and remembered?

GoldenEye, for better AND worse, needs to be celebrated and remembered.

So, prepare to have a nice, long splinter shoved up under your fingernail, because we’re doing this thing.

GoldenEye 007 at a glance:
Genre: First-person shooter
Released: 1997
Platform: Nintendo 64
No. 29 on IGN’s Top 100 Games of All Time

Pong — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 38)

My thoughts are going to jump all over the place on this one, and I apologize for that in advance. But as you shall soon see, this is absolutely necessary, because of the following:

The history surrounding the granddaddy of video games is rich and some of the most important gaming lore you can expose yourself to.
The game itself is stupid simple.

This dictates we’ll spend less time on the game itself and more on its context, which I think is appropriate.

So buckle up for a trip through the earliest EARLIEST days of video game history, a crap-ton of Atari trivia, a significant tangent into Breakout, and oh yeah, even some discussion of the game in the headline itself.

This, my friends, is “Pong.”

Pong at a glance:
Genre: Twitch arcade game
Released: 1972
Platform: Arcade
No. 34 on Next Generation’s Top 50 Games of All Time

Double Dragon — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 37)

Here’s a fun thought experiment.

If I were to walk into a random Dave & Busters or other arcade nostalgia pump station, and if I were to subsequently ask 100 people if they knew what “Double Dragon” was, how many people do you think would be able to answer the question in the affirmative?

10-20?

35?

Less than half?

Definitely less than half, right?

(I’m almost certainly not finding a functioning cabinet in said hypothetical establishment, either.)

As I scroll back through the first 36 entries in this retro gaming essentials list, I see about four or five other games I could probably say the same thing for: that the average person in an arcade, today, wouldn’t know anything about it.

But those other games are all genuine oddball weirdo games. They were never super popular to begin with. They were outcasts in an industry that perhaps never gave them their just due.

Games like “Air Zonk” and “Katamari Damacy” are relatively obscure treasures that I will go to the mat to in defending their honor – while also acknowledging that they were never especially popular or important to the industry at large, even at first release.

“Castlevania: Rondo of Blood” is a highmark achievement in platforming that everyone should get to experience, and yet it wasn’t released in this country.

Those games, put simply, are personal indulgences.

Double Dragon is … not that.

Released in 1987, Double Dragon was a side-scrolling beat ‘em up (or “brawler” as I prefer to call the genre) that set arcades on fire, going on to earn the distinction of being the highest grossing arcade game in the United States in both 1988 and 1989. It was eventually even made into a cartoon television series and a live-action movie, and its (many) ports to various home platforms (NES, Atari 2600, Master System, etc.) were all hugely popular as well.

If you were even moderately interested in video games at the time, you knew about Double Dragon. It was a certified blockbuster, among the most celebrated games in the industry.

But more than that, the game is also justifiably credited with popularizing the beat ‘em up genre, sparking a slew of sequels, copycats, and competitors who all wanted a taste of that delicious blood-soaked pocket change.

As such, it remains influential today – every time you see a new brawler get released, that Double Dragon DNA is likely in there somewhere.

Yet modern audiences rarely even give it a second thought.

So … what the hell happened?

Why isn’t Double Dragon talked about in glowing terms today as one of the all-time great video game properties?

Double Dragon at a glance:
Genre: Brawler
Released: 1987
Platform: Arcade
Highest-grossing arcade video game of 1988-89