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
For the past three years, I’ve kept a running tally of games I’ve completed in that calendar year on Twitter, writing up a short review of each game as I’ve finished.
(This has been a fun thing to do, hence why I’ve kept doing it.)
And for the third year in a row, at the end of the year, I’ve compiled a ranking for this blog.
This part of it is actually harder than it sounds.
The reason I keep doing the ranking, though, is I find it the most useful piece for anyone reading and deciding on which games they’d like to try on for size (or even revisit). A direct comparison between games in an “either-or” situation tells you what you ultimately need to know.
“Should I buy Metroid Dread or Mario Kart 8?”
“Which old-school Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is the best?”
Super Mario World is without a doubt, 100%, a stone-cold lock of an essential game – even though upon release, it wasn’t essential for me.
These sorts of distinctions are important in an exercise such as ranking games, because when you’re talking about games that are, for lack of a better term, essentially perfect, and you’re interested in determining an order of some kind, picking the nits and trying to dig for problems can be, well, a little fruitless.
Take Super Mario World as an example. Am I going to sit here at the outset and say it has microscopic faults that definitively prevent it from finishing higher on my list of retro gaming essentials, picking at stupid things like the color palette being slightly different or the gameplay not quite being the same as the previous games, or any other number of dumb, nitpicky things?
Nah, that would be boring.
It would also be dishonest. Super Mario World is universally beloved as one of the greatest platformers of all time, many consider it to be THE best Mario game of all time, and still others think it’s got an argument as the greatest video game of all time, period.
One of the greatest games of all time? And we’re going to try to find faults with THAT?
I fully believe this game to be borderline perfect, and that is the thing we should focus on: why it is so good.
And of course the real reason why I don’t have it higher than No. 23 on my list …
Well, that comes down to my personal story. And so here is my acknowledgement of how this ranking came to be.
Super Mario World Genre: Side-scrolling platformer Released: 1991 Platform: SNES Empire’s greatest game of all-time
And the how is covered right here. I went with Final Fantasy VII up high (No. 12!)* instead by the slimmest of margins, leaving Final Fantasy VI in the uncomfortable position of having to tumble down the list to accommodate my “no series repeats” criteria.
* One might have a problem with the FF7 choice, and that’s fine. I can only say in my defense that it was a REALLY close call.
Well, that criteria of no repeats, I decided, should only apply to the top 20. The rationale being, yeah, you want some variety at the very top, but gosh, if a game is great, it still deserves to be advocated for.
And Final Fantasy VI is undeniably great.
Final Fantasy VI Genre: RPG Released: 1994 Platform: SNES Electronic Gaming Monthly’s No. 9 console game of all-time
After knocking out an even 20 to begin this feature, I took a short break, but with the full intent of returning to writing about some of the very greatest retro video games that I believe everyone should experience.
This was partly because there’s a looooooooong list of games I think earn that particular designation. There’s a whole lot to play, and I have a whole lot of thoughts to share.
But also, more immediately, I have a number of games that earned a 10/10 that we haven’t even discussed yet.
I don’t think you can produce a list like this and leave off 10/10 games, right?
Which brings us to No. 21 on the list. And for full disclosure, unlike my Top 20, from here on I won’t attempt to avoid returning to the same series or characters. If you’ve been following along (or even playing along), by now you’ve experienced a pretty wide range of games, 20-ish different series, characters and so on (I say “-ish” because let’s be honest, there’s some crossover in Mario Kart).
Variety is the spice of life as they say.
That said, it’s alright to go back to something that works really well.
And Super Mario Bros. 3 works really, patently, definitively, absurdly well.
Super Mario Bros. 3
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer Released: 1990 Platform: NES Electronic Gaming Monthly’s 2nd best console game of all-time
It’s been two full years since “The Rise of Skywalker” hit theaters on Dec. 20, 2019, and boy howdy have a few things changed since then.
COVID-19 made its smashing debut a few weeks after that (well, not technically, but we became conscious of its impact at that point), and we continue to work our way through dealing (or not dealing) with that.
One of those impacts has been a decided lack of blockbusters making a gagillion dollars in theatrical runs. “Spider-Man: No Way Home” got a ton of butts back in seats in recent weeks (to the tune of $627 million domestic), but if you look at a list of the biggest money makers in the U.S. from December of 2019 until now, the list looks like this:
No Way Home Rise of Skywalker [end]
Rise made $515 million during its theatrical release, an objectively huge number. That figure ranks it fourth among Star Wars movies, about $100 million behind “The Last Jedi” and $17 million or so behind “Rogue One.”
Those numbers are meant to offer some context. A movie that was highly polarizing, much like its immediate predecessor, nevertheless made significant bank.
So, the natural follow-up question to that might be this: What made the movie appealing to such a large number of people? And why might it be worth revisiting today?
