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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

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

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 13)

I couldn’t begin to tell you why The Legend of Zelda just wasn’t a bigger thing for me as a kid. I don’t know if it was basic indifference to the marketing (none of those gold boxes really spoke to me), a counter-culture “Why is everyone telling me to like this game?” backlash response, or just a general lack of exposure to the games themselves (I played the original at a friend’s house for about 10 minutes and “The Adventure of Link” at a different friend’s house for another 10 minutes … and that was it for me until the 2000s). But for whatever reason, I just sort of missed Zelda’s beginnings and really didn’t feel I was worse for that.

That all changed for me when I was able to play my brother’s copy of Ocarina of Time for the first time.

Within an hour or two, I was hooked, and it was because of the emotional connection to the material. It kind of sounds nuts to type it out, but yeah, so at the beginning of this game, a tree dies, and it’s a pretty big deal. From there, it’s a near constant stream of gutting reveals and little emotional experiences that add up to provide one of the most affecting games in existence.

This game makes you feel.

A fairly linear progression in the early going quickly gave way to an expansive, immersive experience. And yeah, I think as these games go, a lot of people would put Ocarina more in the “on rails” sort of play, as it does have a pretty point-A to point-B methodology to its story-telling. But the sheer scope of this story, and one’s ability to get lost in this world map (playing mini-games, riding your horse around, and even just exploring every nook and cranny one can find) exceeded basically every game that had come before (and certainly within the Zelda franchise itself).

I think this is a main reason the emotional beats hit as hard as they do — you really get pulled into the whole experience. And once you’re in, you’re susceptible to getting led down that emotional path.

Hook, line and sinker.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Genre: Adventure
Released: 1998
Platform: N64
Metacritic’s Greatest Game of All Time

Super Mario Bros. 2 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 5)

For anyone who has played more than a singular Super Mario video game, there is no easy answer to the question of which game might be your favorite or even “best.” The standard of quality is so damn high, that basically any answer is a correct one.*

* Anything other than “The Lost Levels,” anyway.

This should not be news to anyone, of course. Nintendo’s No. 1 mascot achieved his status for a reason, and that reason was absolutely his impecably designed games. I feel reasonably confident in saying that people were NOT clamoring for a fat plumber in overalls with an appetite for magical mushrooms to serve as their own personal hero/savior.

It was the game play that inspired the devotion, and finding holes in that game play in any particular iteration of Mario’s adventures is a pretty silly endeavor.

Yes, none of these games is perfect. But the sum of positives is so much larger than the negatives, it’s fairly pointless to dwell on the latter.

Super Mario Bros. 2
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1988
Platform: NES
Nintendo Power’s Top NES Games: No. 8

Mega Man 2 — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 4)

When Mario blew the hell up back in the mid-80’s for Nintendo, it sparked a desperate gold rush in the video game development community to establish their own mascot-worthy characters.

Some of these attempts were feebly bad, and we can all point and laugh at them to this day (We’re all looking at you, Alex Kidd.).

Others actually panned out. One of Capcom’s many tries at establishing a “face” for their company, Mega Man, was neither prioritized among their efforts (execs pushed characters like “Captain Commando” instead) nor even deemed worthy of an eventual sequel after his first game met a tepid response from the public. Famously, Mega Man 2 was only allowed into development as a side project for a small group of employees who felt passionate about the potential, and said individuals weren’t paid for their efforts.

What resulted was a labor of love, a game which defied all expectations to become a critical and commercial hit, and a launching of the character of Mega Man into the rarified air of such household names as Mario, Pac-Man, Sonic and the Belmonts.

Mega Man 2
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer
Released: 1989
Platform: NES
GamesRadar’s Top NES Games: No. 2