When Nintendo announced that the latest game in its Legend of Zelda series, “Tears of the Kingdom” would release in May of this year, it wasn’t an absolute lock that the game would top my list this year, despite my obvious affection for its direct predecessor, “Breath of the Wild.”
I mean, yes, it was likely, but I was still dipping my toe in with a few other genuine all-timers for the first time this year, and there was no real guarantee I’d click with Tears anyway.
As it happens, three other games ended up earning a perfect score from me in 2023, “Super Mario Odyssey,” “Metroid Prime Remastered,” and “Gris.” Those three, along with Tears of the Kingdom, finished outside of my personal all-time Top 20 despite getting a 10/10 (the competition is stiff up there!), and all four games have been welcomed to my favorites list in the same general area.
You could say that they are brand-new neighbors now in my world of video game nostalgia and fondness. I give my highest recommendation that people play all four of them.
So, there was competition, and Zelda itself didn’t instantly become one of my absolute favorites.
But despite all that, Zelda finished on top of my 2023 list anyway.
The how and why is at least a little interesting (at least to me), so I wanted to devote a few extra words to Tears of the Kingdom: in particular how it takes risks, how it plays it safe, and how it fits into the overall Zelda tapestry.
Metroid Prime is a testament to the concept of “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
For the better part of a decade, the idea that a game like Metroid Prime could even exist stretched the imaginations of developers and gamers everywhere.
Could it be done?
A decidedly 2D concept, that of a large, atmospheric map that is gradually unlocked through the accumulation of additional powers acquired via backtracking and exploration, dependent upon tight, precise controls as well as highly specific memorization of not just enemy attack patterns but also more critically of the terrain itself … Metroid just didn’t seem like an easy thing to convert into a 3D space.
Also problematic was that Metroid, as a franchise, had never, not once, ever been a big seller.
We’re talking about a brand that had traditionally been outsold by such glorified tech demos as Pilotwings and Mario Paint (fine experiments in gaming to be sure, but not exactly the first games that roll off the tongue when talking about the greatest or even the most popular video games of all time).
Overwhelming financial incentive to engineer such a difficult switch-up just wasn’t there.
So, thusly, a 3D conversion for Metroid wouldn’t happen for a long time.
Eventually, of course, it did. But by the time Metroid Prime released on the GameCube in the fall of 2002 to glowing reviews, Nintendo had lost its stranglehold on the gaming industry to Sony and the mighty Playstation 2, thereby ensuring that Metroid would, once again, sadly not sell a gazillionty copies.
I think this is important to note, as Metroid, to this day, remains a niche property, appealing to a relatively small audience. This is despite the fact that:
Metroid games, by and large, are incredibly good. Like almost illogically good?
Metroid Prime should have been an absolute gold standard, Grade-A system seller.
On that second point, my contention is that Metroid Prime would have had every opportunity to find an entirely different level of success above and beyond the 2.84 million copies it sold had it not been married to a gaming system that consumers just weren’t buying.
Speaking from personal experience as a PS2 owner back in the day, I had little incentive to double-dip and buy a second gaming system. I, like many others, knew there were only so many hours in the day to devote to gaming, and also, I was poorer than dirt.
So … no GameCube for me. The temptation to go against this very sound logic was literally one game: Metroid Prime.
And that just wasn’t enough.
The GameCube, still utterly beloved by generations of Nintendo stans, finished third in sales (21.74 million units sold) during its generation’s heyday, behind the aforementioned Playstation 2 (155 million!), and the new kids on the block, Microsoft and their Xbox (24 million).
Xbox’s system seller was Halo, a game that very much deserves its flowers (while the Playstation 2 had too many “system sellers” to even count – that system’s library is insane!).
But Halo – to this day a monster of a property for Microsoft (perhaps its most important) with over 81 millions copies sold – was simply no Metroid Prime.
Was Halo excellent?
Yes. (It’ll absolutely make an appearance on this countdown at some point.)
Was Halo revelatory?
No. Not quite.
So … why didn’t Metroid Prime take off in quite the same way?
Well, we noted it being chained to a comparatively unpopular system, but beyond that, the game itself was a quieter, more thoughtful affair. “Cerebral” isn’t usually one of the first characteristics one might list when noting what mass audiences crave.
Nintendo as a brand was also no longer seen as cool or edgy in the GameCube era. Having hemorrhaged developers during the N64 days due to an odd commitment to cartridges (a commitment they dumped a generation later), Nintendo WAS at least trying interesting things with its main properties. Zelda was now a cell-shaded cartoon. Mario was wandering around a tropical resort with a water cannon on his back. Luigi had his own game, and it was very much unlike a traditional Mario platformer. Heck, even Mario Kart had a gimmick.
But some of those creative decisions alienated long-time fans while simultaneously failing to court new users. At best, some of that generation’s games might be characterized as colorful diversions (Luigi’s Mansion). At worst, they could be called actual missteps (Mario Sunshine).
But regardless, it felt like Nintendo was throwing things against a wall to see what would stick.
Or perhaps you somehow missed it even if you lived through it.
Regardless, I am here to tell you: “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater” was a whole mood.
There was a time when this game repped a significant piece of our world’s culture.
I don’t believe I’m overstating things when I say this. The skating scene was blowing up, this game was blowing up, and it all became the sort of thing that, while it was certainly juvenile and maybe a little bit silly, it was also the sort of thing that a LOT of people got into.
So, let’s set the stage a little for the younger folk (and the people who like to reminisce).
Way back in the fall of 1993, ESPN, not content to keep swimming through the bags of money they were already making through cable rights deals, made the somewhat illogical decision to launch a second network, because, well, who hates money, amirite?
They went with the novel name of “ESPN2” with its on-air personalities regularly referring to it as “The Deuce.”
Cute.
Now, backing up a smidge, I say the venture was “somewhat illogical” because only the tiniest of details – a giant, gaping lack of programming – was a potential stumbling block.
Oops!
Well, this lack of programming foresight encouraged the folks at ESPN to get creative about what they’d put on, which led to the creation of the X Games … as well as many, many jokes about scraping the bottom of the barrel for something, anything to put on the air. ESPN2 sorta became synonymous with airing ridiculous events that were decidedly not sports-related, barely sports-related, or maybe even (in the best case scenario) somewhat sports related.
Anyhow, most of it had a tenuous connection to “traditional” sports (or no connection at all).
The aforementioned X Games was a made-from-scratch Olympics-style competition for offbeat, alternative sports like snowboarding, motocross, BMX, and of course, skateboarding, that made its debut in 1995. And the X Games, despite its nature as a corporate creation with a limited appeal outside of a niche audience, grew in popularity over time.
These events, after all, were more sports-like than something like lumberjacking or billiards.
Eventually, people began to figure out there was money to be made in marketing to a demographic that was interested in watching what was essentially counter-culture entertainment.
“Eff the man! Buy more product!”
It was probably inevitable. I mean, there were sports drinks to peddle. What I recall most about that era, culturally, was that everything back then had to be “cool.” It was a requirement. It’s why video game commercials of the era were ridiculous and looked like this:
So OF COURSE the X Games became a thing.
And one of the biggest players on this brand-new stage was Tony Hawk.
Hawk, a professional skateboarder, was so popular that it’s probably unnecessary for me to have just typed that he is a professional skateboarder. In the same way that people know Michael Jordan is a basketball player, or Mario is a video game character, Tony Hawk came to be the embodiment of his entire sport.
You already know who Tony Hawk is.
But if you weren’t around back then (or very, very young), you might not understand that at least some of the reason the man is synonymous with skateboarding is the existence of “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.”
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at a glance
Genre: Sports Released: 1999 Platform: PlayStation No. 36 on Game Informer’s Top 100 Games of All Time
Life is like a hurricane, here in Duckburg. Racecars, lasers, aeroplanes, it’s a duck blur. Might solve a mystery. Or rewrite history…
“DuckTales,” the classic Disney half-hour afternoon cartoon that debuted in 1987 and ran for four seasons (though much longer in syndication), has shown a rare capacity for endurance that shows of its ilk rarely can even aspire to.
Don’t believe me? Sing the first couple of bars of that theme song in public and see if the people around you join in.
If they don’t, you’ll feel really silly, and that’s kind of funny.
But chances are, at least a few people will sing along (or at least crack a big goofy grin as you make a fool of yourself).
And with good reason, as the show, for a good number of Gen Xers, was a babysitter as they latch-keyed their way into their homes and killed time for the couple of hours until their parents got home from work.*
* Gen Xers are very proud of being latch-key and will bring that fact up on literally every occasion possible, in the same way that a vegetarian will always proudly tell you that they are vegetarian. How do you get a Gen Xer out of your house? Invite over their parents.
How good was DuckTales? Well, probably not as good as you remember. It leans heavily on other pieces of work and falls into simplistic tropes with dialogue that will mostly appeal to minors. And the animation itself isn’t ground-shaking either.
But that’s honestly okay, because a thing doesn’t have to be great to be important.
And DuckTales was absolutely an important piece of pop culture.
The show, itself a risk due to its heavy production demands for what might have been considered meager rewards in a traditionally low-viewed time slot, instead was immensely popular and paved the way for even more Disney afternoon animated shows like “Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers” and “Tailspin.”
In its own way, DuckTales can also be given some credit (or blame) for Disney’s ability to weather some lean years in the 1980s when the studio was having a difficult time finding success at the box office (prior to “The Little Mermaid,” that is).
The fondness and popularity for DuckTales eventually spawned a reboot of the show in 2017, once again for a few seasons, except this time it was objectively entertaining for adults. The test of time will likely be far kinder to the reboot in terms of actual repeat viewings, as the series, for any fans of the brand at all, is basically a must-watch, delightful and humorous and engaging. (It’s seriously THAT good … go watch it right now if you haven’t seen it yet.)
Of course, the reboot and all of the merchandise and crossovers and so forth and so on over all of the years … none of that tells the entire story, because the entire story wouldn’t be complete without an acknowledgement of the licensed video game that was developed and released alongside the cartoon in 1989.
That licensed video game, “DuckTales,” somehow became one of the greatest platformers of all time.
‘DuckTales’ at a glance:
Genre: Platformer Released: 1989 Platform: NES Nintendo Power’s No. 44 greatest game of all time
Like many other video game enthusiasts of the early 90’s, I received a free copy of Dragon Warrior with my “Nintendo Power” subscription.
(Bear with me here.)
Freebie games are now a dime a dozen (generally geared toward getting your money through add-on purchases after the fact!), but in 1990-91 when this promotion occurred, it was mind-bending as hell.
Console games back then, pretty much without exception, cost $50 a pop. Yeah, many games eventually went on sale, and yeah, there were some exceptions – like one-offs on the Genesis or most (all?) of the games on the pricier NeoGeo – but by and large, that was the default cost: $50.
So you had to be choosy. And I, like many other western gamers, wasn’t ready to dump $50 into a role-playing game.*
I had brain rot for action, you see. “Die Hard” and “Star Wars” were probably my favorite movies by this point (“The Blues Brothers” might have been a close third). Playground activities centered around pretending to club other kids with some sort of blunt instrument (or actually connecting on occasion … Sorry, Gary!).
Video games, by extension, needed to be fast-paced as well, yes?
Well, not always, as it turned out.
Because of the Dragon Warrior offer, I learned I could receive a free game if I subscribed to a magazine I loved already. And that was something different entirely.
I signed up in about 0.0003 seconds.
And thusly, Dragon Warrior – the grindiest of painfully grindy RPGs – became my definitive viewpoint of the genre for the next decade.
It was the first and last impression. The alpha and the omega. Nothing to see here, folks, this is all there is.
“Yeah, this is fun I guess, but what’s with all the boring, repetitive, unavoidable battles? I’m not playing another game like this.”*
* It is beyond safe to say that Dragon Warrior will NOT be making an appearance on this list. Yes, it’s historically relevant, and yes, I still have great affinity for it. But at some point, you have to ask yourself, “Would I honestly recommend someone sit down with this thing today and try to play it?” The answer with Dragon Warrior: Not unless I was playing a cruel prank on someone.
So when “Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars” came along in 1996, it couldn’t have been further from my radar.
And justifiably so on some level, because even though it is undeniably stupid to generalize an entire genre of video game because of just one game, that one game in question was extremely difficult to love.
I regret nothing.
Except…
Holy smokes, did I miss out on some genuine bangers for a really long time.
Thank goodness for retro gaming as an actual business and my own personal resolve to circling back to missed games as an adopted mentality.
Because Super Mario RPG is a downright joyful experience.
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars at a glance
Genre: RPG Release: 1996 Platform: SNES Complex’s No. 8 Best Super Nintendo Game
For anyone who has experienced the true greatness that is NBA Jam, that phrase should be all it takes to transport you away to a world of frenetic, over-the-top, arcade basketball.
It’s a world of dunks, steals, and hot streaks.
It’s a world in which putting yourself in the shoes of superstars like Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajowan, and Shaquille O’Neal (to name just a few) was a mere dollar away.*
* My memory might be hazy on this point, but I do recall the game costing more than the typical quarter or even 50 cents a play – I’m PRETTY sure it usually cost at least a buck to play – and that it was of great annoyance to me that this was the case. “Games used to cost 25 cents. Why are we now charging more? It’s outlandish and unfair!” Clearly, inflation as a concept had yet to penetrate my teenage boy brain.
It’s a world of impossible physics and ridiculous commentary.
It’s a world of insane levels of rubber-banding that could reduce the hardest of men to quivering tears.
It’s a world of fantastical cameos and easter eggs, not the least of which was a playable version of Bill Clinton himself.
In other words, this world, the world of NBA Jam, is the very best kind of world.
Buckle up, kids.
We’re about to go deep on NBA Jam, the most outrageous mainstream sports game our society has ever seen.
NBA Jam at a glance
Genre: Sports Release: 1993 Platform: Arcade No. 19 on Flux’s Top 100 Video Games
Granted, some of the worst offenders in that regard don’t really mind being galactically wrong. For them it’s not about being right or wrong. They’d prefer to make noise and get attention and the aftermath can be whatever it will be. Like a loud politician overpromising and under-delivering, the show is the show, and it is king above such trivial concerns as truth or decency.
But my point is that NO ONE is immune to stepping in it.
And I’d usually prefer not to.
What compels me to jump back in is a fair bit of conviction about where this thing is actually headed, and it’s not an outline or theory that seems to be getting a whole lot of traction right now.
More than a few people would call a “10” “perfect” and basically leave it at that.
And for most people, that’s fine and dandy.
But I subscribe to a belief that it’s a little more nuanced than that.
For me, a score of 10/10 isn’t an indication that a thing is actually flawless per se. It’s more of an acknowledgment of supreme excellence.
Think of it this way: A person can get 8 or 9 out of 10 questions on a quiz correct, but then nail the extra credit and still end up with a “perfect” score, even without a flawless performance.
Did the thing we’re talking about do what it set out to do in a special and exceptional way? And probably more importantly, at least to me, is how did it make me feel in the process? Thusly, a “10” is essentially the highest possible recognition or superlative, NOT a designation of perfection or flawlessness.
And can we acknowledge, at least a little bit, that perhaps nothing is perfect, and that when evaluating anything, it’s basically impossible to separate from that evaluation how a thing makes us feel?
How we react to a thing informs how we speak of it after the fact. And yes, that’s more of an undefinable thing, and yes, that complicates things greatly, but it’s not a thing we can ultimately avoid.
It’s how a game like Air Zonk can rank higher on this list than Ms. Pac-Man. One game is objectively more important historically and more universally well regarded and … well, tough cookies. Air Zonk makes me happier.
Chrono Trigger, our No. 26 game on the countdown (and another game that makes me happy), is a game that often gets lauded with the “perfect” moniker, and you can easily see why.
Its mix of story, characterization, game design, and enjoyment it engenders while playing are almost universally considered among the best in the genre. And moreover, it’s REALLY difficult to find anything to complain or quibble about here.
There just aren’t a lot of flaws in this game.
Does that make it perfect?
Not in the slightest.
It’s a wonderful game, and it should be experienced by everyone. That’s why it’s here.
But it ain’t perfect.
Let’s establish that now, so that inflated expectations don’t ruin the game for you.
Chrono Trigger at a glance: Genre: RPG Released: 1995 Platform: SNES GamesRadar’s “2nd best Super NES game of all time”
“What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets.”
“Die, monster. You don’t belong in this world!”
Early on during a playthrough of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, the gamer is presented with that exact exchange in absurdly over-the-top voiceovers.
The moment is memorable for its ridiculousness, and has by now, of course, been turned into various Internet memes.
The dialogue, however, serves as a helpful guide for what is to come.
“What is a man?” is hinting at the ambiguous nature of our protagonist, the anti-hero son of Dracula himself.
“A miserable little pile of secrets.” explains the nature or perhaps selling point of the game itself.
“Die, monster.” is the definition of Castlevania games in their purest form.
And “You don’t belong in this world!” provides foreshadowing for the game’s biggest twist.
Like the best James Bond stunts or the coolest action sequences in a Star Wars movie, the excitement here is explained before it is shown.
Was that intentional?
Who knows?
But the end result is the same: the game builds anticipation and sets expectations at the outset, and then delivers upon those promises in spectacular fashion.
(We also got a really goofy bit of dialogue out of the deal.)
This game, Symphony of the Night, is going to give you a traditional 2D Castlevania experience with a new, exciting lead character, a ton of hidden secrets amidst a sprawling space to explore, and a massive plot twist halfway through.
Once properly warned in the game’s prologue, the gamer is free to let the whole experience just wash over them.
And what an experience it is.
“Castlevania: Symphony of the Night” at a glance: Genre: Exploring platformer Released: 1997 Platform: PlayStation EGM’s “12th Best Console Game of All Time”
An intrepid gamer in the late 80s and early 90s knew that when a Konami game was booting up, this series of inputs would net the player a reward of some kind.
It generally came at the beginning of the adventure, and while it delivered to varying degrees depending on the title one was playing, the “Konami” code always signaled a new beginning or fresh start (though since the code never changed, it also inspired a feeling of familiarity?).
Probably more importantly, the Konami code represented the equivalent of a person starting on third base. It was a chance to beat the game (or at least gain the advantage) before the fight had even commenced.
It was also a fairly new concept for its time. Sure, you had Super Mario Bros. warp zones and other shortcuts available to you in other games, but generally not something you could do to affect the outcome of the game before it even kicked off.
And giving it a forbidden fruit vibe, it’s debatable whether the gamer was even “supposed” to use the code to begin with.
The Konami code, like the warp zones or other “cheats” that preceded it, was put into the game not to assist the gamer, but rather the programmers and designers who needed to get to later sections of the game in quicker fashion to do testing.
And it makes sense; putting these tricks into the game will increase productivity, so why not do it?
Once these cheats made it out into the wild, however, they were fair game for everyone to use, whether people were meant to have access to them or not. Not knowing made it almost illicit. Like, “Oooh, I’m part of the cool kids club because I know this thing I wasn’t supposed to know.”
Maybe this was a little silly. Despite public acknowledgement that the code only remained because of a lack of time to remove it, if we’re honest with ourselves, I think there was a wink there from the developers. Why would they keep the code the same from game to game if they positively didn’t want the end user to have it?
Moreover, the secrecy of the code evaporated fairly quickly. It eventually became so pervasive and ingrained in pop culture that it was deemed T-shirt worthy. It is a secret no more.
Regardless, this code made its first appearance in the 1986 NES port of the side-scrolling shooter Gradius – a very fine game with the code’s effect of course being beneficial (all power-ups attained) – but the code didn’t REALLY become synonymous with Konami or gaming in general until the release of Contra in 1988.
The difference here, with Contra, was significant.
Deliver those commands in quick enough fashion, and the player would be given 30 lives instead of 3, an improvement in odds so ridiculous that the entire context of the game itself is changed.
Instead of a brutally difficult game that allowed for no missteps whatsoever and required a thorough memorization of every step of the process, you’re left with a forgiving, breezy adventure that encourages repeat plays anyway (and said memorization that would occur a little more organically through desired – not forced – repetition).
“Contra is stupid hard and always has been.”
“What about the Konami code?”
“Well, yeah, okay, that made it easier.”
Presto, the entire game is different.
Not that it needed to be.
“Contra” at a glance: Genre: Run-and-gun shooter Released: 1988 Platform: NES No. 13 on Game Informer’s best games ever
