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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

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

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

Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 35)

They say age is but a number, but I do believe that our age can come to define us in many respects.

For instance, age can be an important point of common ground. An indication of shared experiences. A garden for bonding.

This reservoir of a common language, both figurative and literal, which arises from those shared experiences represents an easier connection point. It facilitates communication and understanding.

Whether I yell out “Norm!” in a bar or start humming the theme song to “Mission Impossible,” my actions can elicit an emotional response in the people around me. That emotion triggers a willingness or eagerness to connect. And off we go.

Those things that we have watched, heard, read, and experienced differ from generation to generation. And while me aping “Star Wars” for my immediate family is going to yield positive results, the communication will inevitably be lost for folks who have yet to see it. And that – whether they’ve experienced a thing – is determined, at least in part, by age.

Super Mario Bros., the definitive pack-in title for the Nintendo Entertainment System, stands tall as an incredibly important title historically. We’ll get into some of the reasons for that shortly, but it is enough to know at the outset that this game helped define an entire industry, saved a company from near-death while vaulting it to the head of that video gaming industry, and launched a mascot into the sort of fame generally reserved for the likes of Mickey Mouse.

A lot of people know this.

I mean, when I wear a Zelda shirt in public, I get the occasional question: “What is Zelda?”

Maybe this is a meme I am unaware of, but mostly I take it at face value: people who don’t game very often don’t know what Zelda is.

Yet people who don’t game still know who Mario is. And that often cuts across generational divides. Most people can grasp the significance:

Mario and by extension Nintendo are super important/popular in video games.
This was Mario’s first big starring adventure.

That second point is of course muddier than it needs to be, as Mario had previously appeared in a number of other titles, but the modifier of “first big starring” hopefully adds some clarity. This game was a gigantic hit, and the game was about him, Mario.

And people can accept this thing, because they’re at least vaguely aware of the other games that have come along since.

Super Mario Bros. 1.

One.

It was the first.

Okay, I can understand that.

Even a non-gamer in their teens can probably accept these basic truths and connect with an aging gamer in his 50s and carry on a brief conversation about the topic, just through general historical pop culture knowledge and logic.

Where the age gap enters the discussion is when the “other” pack-in game for the Nintendo Entertainment System is brought up.

“What about Duck Hunt?”

And this is why I “cheated” by listing both games here. Yes, they’re technically both included in a single cart. They’re both included as pack-in games for the NES. And each game is provided its own optimal control device in the form of a standard d-pad for Mario and the light-gun zapper for Duck Hunt. But let’s acknowledge: these are two separate games.

So why list them both?

It’s really pretty simple.

I don’t think either game is as good on its own. And I further don’t think that I can ever truly think of one without thinking of the other.

For a certain number of people who lived through that time period in the 1980s, these two games are unfailingly joined at the hip.

And for those people, who lived the experience in real time, that is as it should be.

Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt at a glance:
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer / Shooter
Released: 1985 / 1984
Platform: NES
GameSpot community rated 9.1 out of 10

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 34)

As a grotesque, anthropomorphized moon threatens to collide with your world and bring about total annihilation, you, as the gamer, wrestle with the very real notion that you don’t know how to stop this, and moreover, that you’re not going to have the time to do anything about it anyway, even if you could figure out what that was supposed to be.

In short, you’re doomed.

And you know it.

Bummer.

Quite obviously, it is not a stretch to say that “The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask” is one of Nintendo’s darker creations, nor is it unfair to say that the game isn’t shy about throwing the player into the deep end quickly. The primary objective of the game, that of preventing this global apocalypse, is shoved in your face right away.

And it is added upon with still more to burden yourself with, as though preventing widespread death and devastation is … somehow not enough.

Whereas its immediate predecessor (and certified gem) “Ocarina of Time” started you out in the comfy confines of your personal home and community, introducing you gradually to external threats (with mostly obvious methods – and fairly introduced abilities – to overcome them), Majora’s Mask at the outset puts you in a vulnerable position alone on the road, makes you an immediate victim of a robbery and a curse(!), then leaves you with this hellish scenario of the moon colliding with your immediate location raining certain destruction … with just three days to try to stop it from happening.

Feelings of dread and doom overwhelm, to the extent few games have emulated before or since. We’re 45 minutes into this game, and we cannot in our wildest imaginations begin to understand how we’re going to get our heroic alter-ego, Link, through this one.

“Well, it’s been a good run buddy, but I don’t know how we’re going to get out of this one alive.”

“Me neither. See you on the other side, champ.”

Compare this to previous Zelda games. An enemy, even a grossly overpowered one like Ganon, is still just one entity. The challenge is easier to wrap your arms around.

Take down this bad guy.
Save the princess.
Win the day!

The threat in Majora’s Mask is more elusive, ultimately, and more conceptually difficult to process. Its scope is immense, akin to asking a person to solve a problem like world hunger or devise a method for ridding the world of cockroaches.

“Where do I even begin?”

Where indeed. The trick, which is revealed in those early moments (but only after a sort of dread-panic has taken firm hold), is that time travel once again comes into play, as it did in the previous game.

Here, it’s implemented differently, as a kind of looping dynamic. You can go back to the beginning of this hellish scenario as many times as you like, as it turns out, as a way of “buying” yourself more time.

But this is a true deal with the devil, Faustian in its intent.

Yes, you get a chance to restart. But it’s a return to the same initial feelings of despair that so overwhelmed you to begin with. It’s the same place, with the same people, with the same scenario. Played out, over and over again. And as if that doesn’t sound problematic enough – retraumatizing yourself over and over again – certain things you’ve done to rectify the problems in the world around you … well those reset as well. Progress is lost. You must begin all over again. And perhaps worst of all, once you reach a certain point in the time loop, you reach yet another level of horrifying understanding, and it’s that your first impression was actually correct:

The breadth of the task in front of you is simply impossible.

You cannot do it. There’s just no way to save everyone and fix everything. Some wrongs will not be corrected, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

In a sense, you truly ARE doomed.

THIS is the essence of Majora’s Mask. And it’s effing brilliant.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask at a glance:
Genre: Adventure
Released: 2000
Platform: Nintendo 64
Runner-up for GameSpot’s “Best Nintendo 64 Game”

Katamari Damacy — Retro Gaming Essentials (No. 33)

I’ve been thinking for some time now that writing this feature, my own take on THE Retro Gaming Essentials, is probably going to end up being a bigger spend of my time than I originally anticipated, more than likely topping out around 100 entries, give or take.

I’ve already got a list that I maintain that has more than double that amount of games under consideration, though that number – that of multiple hundreds – of reviews looks, quite frankly, daunting and unfun. The 100 number seems to be a good, sensible target.

And yet … it’s still ambitious. Each entry takes several hours to put together. So, that’s basically 100 relatively long think-pieces on games that, for the most part, have also already been written about ad nauseum.

One wonders if this might all be a tremendous waste of time.

But then again, gamers are getting younger all the time, and even genuine Grade-A bangers might need that little extra push from people like me to have the younger set move some retro games off their backlog and actually get to playing the darn things.

Regardless, there are certainly gems that will slide into a countdown of this sort that haven’t been discussed enough already, and giving those games more of an audience seems a worthwhile endeavor.

Video game preservation has become more and more of a topic of discussion, and with good reason.

Unlike other media, like film, the method of delivery with games is constantly becoming outdated. Yes, in movies you have film -> cassette -> DVD -> digital … and yet, those movies can be preserved via standard methodology of digitization and basically not be lost to time at that point. At least, it’s not a feature of the experience. It takes actual neglect/oversight for a movie to vanish from existence (at least at the studio level).

Conversely, when a game was released as an exclusive for an unpopular system or for a PC so underpowered you can’t even properly emulate it anymore, well that presents a problem. The ability to even play the thing will be called into question. Games will be lost and forgotten about. Things that were genuinely beautiful … will be gone. Possibly forever.

The oddball, less popular games therefore require extra advocacy.

Criminally underrated gems like Chrono Cross and Air Zonk deserve their flowers, and so to include them here, and to give them a little extra attention, is to my way of thinking, a good thing. Perhaps even an important thing.

Yes, for preservation and historical documentation purposes. But also because so much of the web seems dedicated to hate nowadays that spreading some love feels like a positive thing on its own merits.

Truly, everyone deserves love.

Even the weirdos.

Especially the weirdos.

Katamari Damacy is one of those weirdos.

Katamari Damacy at a glance:
Genre: Puzzle Action
Released: 2004
Platform: PlayStation 2
No. 13 in USgamer’s “15 Best Games since 2000”