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Ste's Eight Favourite games

Asked to come up with his eight favourite video games for a Retro Gamer article, Ste wrote far too much to possibly fit in the magazine, so the original text is posted here

Blimey, this is hard. So many games, so many great games, how can I pick only eight? Some of my favourite games are in series', or by the same people, but I don't think 4 Zelda games and 4 Mario games would make a very interesting list (although I could make a good case that they are in fact the best 8 video games ever), so I need some kind of structure to make sense of it all. I'll limit myself to only 1 game from each of the key platforms or hardware generations, and try to pick my favourite from each. And rather than simply trying to remember which was the best, I'll be a bit more scientific and think about which games I actually played the most. And as Tetris, Defender and Robotron are the 'givens', I'll miss out Tetris, which would probably be my 2nd favourite based on play time alone.

1. Home computers - Elite

This was the first game that ever kept my up late at night, past my bedtime. I'd heard about it for years; it was a game that all the rich kids with BBC Micros would rave about at school. The way they talked about it, it sounded amazing. I knew they were exaggerating though. When it finally came out on the Spectrum I was half expecting to be disappointed, but, you know, those BBC kids were telling the truth. It really was as good as they said it was.

I remember one morning in school, after staying up beyond midnight playing Elite, sitting bleary eyed in the tutor group classroom, and closing my eyes for a second. Wham! I was straight back into the game. I had the cross hair in the centre of my vision - burned into my retina it seemed - the scanner at the bottom, and police ships streaming out of a space station straight for me. I opened my eyes and I was back in the classroom, sweating. Closed them, and the police ships were closing in again. Open, back in the classroom. This carried on for most of the day, fading out by home time. But as soon as I got home, I loaded it up and carried on playing.

2. NES era - Super Mario Brothers 3

I think this is the best video game ever made. It may have dated a little by now, some of its ideas may seem a little tired because they've been overused since, and it doesn't have the gloss of Super Mario World, or the sheer familiarity of Super Mario Brothers, but this game has everything for me.

Playing it now its hard to remember, or its hard to explain to people who didn't play it when it was fresh, just how magnificent this game was when it was released. In terms of playability, game design, level design, polish, inventiveness, and sheer confidence, it was light years ahead of anything else being made at the time.

We had an import copy from Japan at Zippo Games so we were playing it before most people in the west, which perhaps explains why it had such a profound impact on John and I. We had no instructions, and there was no saved game or password, so we had to leave the Famicom permanently switched on in the office in order to play it through to the end. We had a communal game running; anyone in the office was free to pick up the controller at lunch time or after work to try and beat another level, and playing the game invariably drew a crowd of the rest of us, eager to see what great new gameplay ideas they'd come up with for each new level.

We had a minor setback after a few weeks when a cleaning lady kindly unplugged the machine she presumed we'd accidently left on, one bank holiday weekend, but playing back through the early levels was a joy, even though we hadn't discovered any of the secret warp flutes yet.

There were so many wonderful surprises in store. Bricks coming to life, the first time we saw the 'gambit' card game, reaching the giant world, the utter terror (I'm serious) of getting to the scary 8th world for the first time with its ominous music and complete change of tone. Best of all, without any English text or instructions, we didn't know that Mario could fly in the badger costume. We'd had the game for about a month, playing it every day, before we stumbled on the discovery that with the right run up and button press he could take off. Then, we tried it on the very first level and, low and behold, we discovered a whole new section up in the clouds above our head which had been hidden from us all along. A fantastic moment of discovery, and definitely intended by the designers as the level didn't scroll upwards, even if you went off the top of the screen, until you started flying. The English language versions spoilt this for everyone by putting a sign on the first level telling you how to fly...

3. SNES / Megadrive era - Super Metroid

I never really got on with Metroid on the NES. It didn't grip me enough to play it through to the end, and it felt a bit 'generic' or missing some magic ingredient compared to the Miyamoto games of the era, so I wasn't expecting too much from the SNES version. But everything fell into place with Super Metroid. I couldn't really point out any single feature which makes this game so good, in many ways its still a fairly generic and straightforward adventure game, but what makes it stand out in my memory is its sheer quality and class. Perhaps it was because I was making SNES games - almost direct competitors to this - at the time. I could see how much better this game was, in every department, to what we were working on. Everything felt finished; every feature, every graphic, every sound, every level felt like it was exactly as the developers intended it to be; there was no hint of anything rushed to meet a deadline, or cut out for budget reasons. It was that rare thing, a properly finished video game.

You could say its a clone of the Zelda formula where each new item or ability discovered by the main character opens up a new area of world which was previously inaccessible, which in turn gives access to the next item or ability, until you reach the end, but even when I was jumping through the same old cavern for the 20th time, looking for the ledge or hole I'd missed leading to a new section, it never felt dull or dry. The difficulty was pitched just right, it was never too easy, but I never got stuck for too long either. That's probably too difficult for today's 'mass-market casual' gamer, but for me, Super Metroid was a game that got everything just right.

4. N64 / Playstation era - Majora's Mask

I believe that one of the reasons why Nintendo make so many great games is that they have a very good method for developing original games, a method almost unheard of in the west. They work on the technology and establish the mechanics of the game in a separate phase to the creation of content. This means that they are free to mess around with play control, character abilities, add features or change features, or even remove them completely without worrying about ruining any of the expensive content which has already been created. Then, when they are happy with the technology, and have finalised the play control, they start to build the actual content of the game - starting at a much later stage than most western developers. This allows the content to perfectly utilise and showcase all the gameplay features developed, and allows the designers to concentrate fully on designing the game, not worrying about designing mechanics at the same time.

Majora's Mask took this technique to another level, as they already had an excellent finished game engine in place from Ocarina of Time (many people's favourite game ever), so could devote more or less the whole development cycle to game content, or developing tricks and twists to uniquely enhance their existing engine. The result is the best, most fully realised, original, interesting, and engaging single player adventure I've ever played.

There's a lot of talk in video games about making interactive movies, or how to integrate storytelling into video games, as a way to push the medium forward. Mostly I think this is a blind alley, or missing the point of video games. At their heart video games are not a medium for telling stories, although it is possible to adapt a video game to tell a story. Narrative is all about sitting back and experiencing what the storyteller wants you to experience. Whether the story teller is a movie director, an actor, a writer, a poet or a songwriter, you, the audience, are putting yourself in somebody else's hands and letting them control your thoughts and emotions for a time. Whereas video games are all about you, the player, exploring, experimenting, trying, and playing with a system. Narrative, with its twists and turns, surprises and revelations, story arcs and character development, is always going to a be an awkward fit with the more free-form, player-directed nature of video games. Majora's Mask, with its imaginative time travel mechanism, does something quite amazing with story, and shows an appropriate way for a storyline to be approached in the video game medium.

The plot is all there in the game, and was probably written at some point as straightforward a linear story, or series of interconnected stories, and could probably be written up as a novel or screenplay fairly easily. But the player is never forced to sit back and experience a period of storytelling. Instead, the player gets right in there and explores the story in any way they like - you can come at the plot from any angle, experience it in any order, repeat sequences again and again, catch snippets of dialogue here, uncover a mystery there, and hold up the whole thing like a 4 dimensional puzzle, twisting it around in your hand and looking at it from any direction. You can probably even miss out whole subplots on your journey to the end of the game, if you are that way inclined. This is what an interactive movie should be, and exactly the opposite of what failed attempts at 'cinematic' games like, say, Beyond Good and Evil try to do; gameplay, cut scene, dialogue, gameplay, cut scene, dialogue, and often meaningless gameplay sections which you either must beat to progress the story (so there's nothing else you can do but repeat that section over and over again until you do what the designer intended you to), or which failure to beat doesn't matter because the 'winning' bit happens in a cut scene so the story can continue regardless of your actions.

Then there's the game itself. Although this is perhaps the most original game in the Zelda series - the time travel forced a deviation from the usual formula - the more familiar dungeon and boss sections are all excellent, but the most striking element for me is the weird, unsettling spooky atmosphere. The eerie music is key here, and the game actually scared me in a couple of places. Not by shocking me with blood and gore, but by unnerving me with strange yet somehow familiar melodies and images.

5. GC / PS2 / Xbox era - Super Mario Sunshine

This is a criminally underrated game. Mario 64 was probably the most important, revolutionary 3D video game ever made, and as one of the first ever 3D console games it was in a position to influence the design and development of virtually every 3D game made since. There was no way SMS could even come close to being as revolutionary as its predecessor, yet that seems to be what everyone was expecting, and this excellent game is therefore considered a disappointment for the crime of not being the best game ever. For me its easily the best platformer since Mario 64. The void levels are as close to platform gaming perfection as we've ever come.

Its let down by a lack of levels (the same problem which Wind Waker, devel0ped around the same time, suffers from), and some weak level design and repetition towards the end, but that is to judge the game against the standards set by other great Nintendo titles. Compared to most ordinary video games SMS is a thoroughly entertaining, wonderful game.

What gets this game into my top 8, or makes it my top game for this era, is seeing the effect it had on my young daughters. For a period of around 6 months I'd come home from work every night and my eldest daughter (around 5 years old) would put SMS on, and we'd start playing together - her running around having fun, me doing any tricky bits for her - and we'd play it for a couple of hours at least, letting my younger daughter (around 2 years old) have a play as well. Then, more often than not, after they'd gone to bed I'd play it by myself for another hour or so, playing more seriously now - getting the shines, finding the blue coins, beating the void levels etc. And during this time it never got old, or boring. Even when I was running around the very first levels for the 100th time, getting the same coins, spraying the same baddies, and making the same jumps, I was enjoying it. It was fun.

And even now, every month or so the kids remember Mario Sunshine, stick it on, and we end up playing it every night for the next week . Definitely my most played, and most enjoyed, game of this generation.

6. Handheld consoles - Wario Ware

Wario Ware was released at around the time Nintendo were being heavily criticised, by video game fanboys at least, for no longer being the innovators they once were. They were resting on their laurels according to many, relying on old and faded franchises and doing nothing more than remaking the same games over and over again. That these old and tired remakes (including Wind Waker, Super Mario Sunshine) were some of the most enjoyable and technically accomplished games ever made, bursting with fresh ideas, and that with Pikmin, Nintendo were showing their commitment to developing odd and original games, didn't seem to satisfy the naysayers. Then came Wario Ware. A stupid idea for a game. 4 second games. 200 hundred of them. Why? What's the point? Have they gone mad? Have you seen how bad the screenshots look?

Wario Ware proved that the great video game innovators still had it. They still had the courage to take design risks, still had a culture which allowed strange ideas to flourish and grow. A game like Wario Ware would never be developed by a big western publisher. It would never get past the marketing department - it didn't fit into any existing genre, and there would be no sales figures for similar games to base their sales predictions on. Even if the concept got the green light, no western publisher would let it out with the crazy, half drawn graphics, the almost deliberately badly developed micro games. Perhaps that's unfair - so much of what's great about Wario Ware is its self-awareness as a video game, and its mocking of Nintendo themselves - there isn't another publisher in the world, never mind the west, with the kind of back catalogue and history that Nintendo have who could have pulled something like this off.

In years to come I think that Wario Ware will be seen as a massively important milestone in the history of video games. Its a video game about video games, and about the state of video games at the time it was made. I couldn't have existed 10 or 20 years previously. Sure, a game could have been developed then full of 4 second micro-games, but that's only a part of what Wario Ware is. And perhaps in the future, Wario Ware will no longer make any sense, even if the micro games remain fun. Wario Ware pokes fun at the insane development culture which has evolved in the games industry, where the number of artists on the team, the size of the budget, the shine and the gloss and the sheer volume of 'assets' in the product matter more than the gameplay. Some of the graphics in Wario Ware look like they were drawn in about 10 seconds. By the programmer. And they work! Production value isn't everything - gameplay trumps it every time, however its presented. Half the jokes in Wario Ware are private in-jokes for old-time gamers. The 4 second snatches of Nintendo classics like F-Zero and Zelda, the warped Wariofied Mario Bros sections, and even the old robot arm, are all hilarious. The messing with the player's expectations and forcing the player to unlearn what they've been taught in every other game they've played, all make playing Wario Ware an essential and enlightening experience for any long-time gamer.

And underneath all that, its just bloody good fun. I've had more genuine laugh-out loud moments playing Wario Ware than from any other game ever, and I've even deliberately missed my stop a couple of times to get a high score when playing it on the bus. I lost my cartridge at one point (it fell out of my pocket on the train), and I actually bought it again, even though I'd played the whole game through and unlocked every free game already, and enjoyed doing it all again a second time just as much, if not more, than the first time around.

7. Coin op - DoDonPachi

This was a tough choice, and I've picked a game that I never even saw as a coin-op, let alone played in an arcade. It was a tough choice because I couldn't pick a single arcade game which stood out above all the others, even though I love coin-ops. There is one arcade genre which hasn't successfully been translated to home computers / consoles, and that's the vertically scrolling shoot em up, so this genre represents pure arcade gaming to me, and DoDonPachi is my current favourite.

The video game industry doesn't have a good record of preserving its past. Back catalogue games are almost impossible to buy, and new titles from as little as a few months ago are often difficult to find. Whatever isn't a current hit, or a candidate for a compilation or budget release is discarded by a publishing industry which only looks to the future, ignoring its rich past. Its ironic then that one of the newest entrants into the games console business - Microsoft - has brought the history of video games alive like never before. I'm talking about a chipped Xbox. Not to pirate new Xbox games, or even to use as media centre, but to use as the ultimate video game resource. For a couple of hundred quid you can get an Xbox chipped, with a big hard disk fitted, and pack it with emulators for every console up to the previous generation, a host of home computer emulators, and best of all, the daddy of emulation - Mame. You then fill the hard disk with every ROM ever made for these platforms, if you can find them, and you have the ultimate video game archive at your fingertips. All this has been available on PC for years, but sat under the TV, with a controller (even the awful Xbox controller) makes it all so much more accessible, so much more immediate, and so much more playable, and so cheap. Thanks Bill!

Since getting my Xbox 'fixed' in this way I've been playing through hundreds (maybe thousands) of undiscovered coin-ops, and reawakened my love of the vertical scrolling shooter. I'm no good at them. I can't last very far on a single credit, and would never get on the high score table in an arcade, but even on free play, with infinite credits, I have nothing but pure pleasure in 30 minute sessions, before my brain's so fried I need to have a lie down. This is a game format which makes perfect sense in the arcade environment, but less so on a home console. There's no long term goal, no missions to progress through, no training modes or story modes or saved games, no live link up, no invitation to spend an all night session working out the puzzles, just an insanely hard battle against the machine which leaves you worn out after a few minutes.

DoDonPachi feels like the perfect example of this genre, although I could perhaps have chosen one of a dozen similar games from Atlus, Cave, Video System, Capcom PsiKyom Irem, Taito etc. It has the key ingredients of incredibly overpowered weaponry - giant toothpaste bars of energy bursting from your ship, too many enemies to possibly kill, an unbelievable number of bullets spewing forth in psychedelic patterns at speeds nearly impossible to dodge, beautiful but irrelevant backgrounds zooming past, and a pause for a breather at the end of each level before the awesome overpowered boss, the fight against whom can last for minutes at a time, and which I can only ever complete by saving up my whole-screen-destroying smart bombs.

8. PC - Everquest

When I finally had to give up EQ I'd clocked up well over 150 days online, which over the 4 years or so I was playing is a pretty hefty chuck of my waking life. But I need to rewind a bit first. As a kid I always wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons. My brother and I bought ourselves the basic game set, but were horrified to find that you needed at least 3 or 4 players to have a game. We didn't know anybody our age who was geeky enough to want to get involved in something as sad as this, so all we ever did was 'roll' and 'reroll' level 1 characters, read through the monster bestiaries, and imagined being one of those kids in ET playing D&D late at night, and eating giant floppy triangles of pizza (which were another thing we'd never experienced at the time!).

So I was always drawn to hack and slash or adventure video games as a way of experiencing the D&D games I'd imagined playing as a kid, but didn't have the mates for. I also had a fascination with the idea of 'muds' from the moment I first heard about them, but these were experiences only available to rich kids who had proper computers like Atari 800s, and modems and stuff - or people at university. There were no muds on the Spectrum! And I'd heard about the dark side of muds - the new level 1 character being killed in their first minute by another player (always a 'high level wizard'), so even when I could afford a computer and a modem I was initially reluctant to jump into what seemed like an unfriendly environment.

When I heard about Everquest it seemed like the perfect game for me - basically online AD&D, with mates supplied by the game, and with an emphasis on cooperation between players rather than competition. With no murderous high level wizards to worry about I bought the game (as 'research' I told my partner, little did she suspect, hehe!), and rolled a level 1 character (a dwarf rogue) that I would finally get to play.

The designers got so much right with this game. It was utterly addictive. The incredibly harsh penalties for death (you could lose up to a weeks worth of exp, and your corpse - containing all your hard-won items - was left at the spot where you died, requiring you to fight your way back, naked, to recover your gear) forced players to develop a high level of trust and reliance on one another. You built a network of mutual obligations to your in-game friends which kept you coming back night after night to repay a favour, or cash one in.

Then, by the time you work your way up to the highest levels, at the point where you would normally be getting bored of even the best game, you discover that the last 60 levels, the last year of playing, were really just an extended training mode for the *real* game - raiding! This is where a guild of players work together to take down the toughest monsters, often taking 40 or more people working together over several hours to beat very difficulty encounters. Just one person's mistake could ruin the fight, which might mean losing the monster to another guild and not having another shot for a week or more. When you succeeded, when you killed the dragon that you'd spent over a month working out a strategy for, which had wiped out all 40 of you three or four times over the last few weeks, it was an experience quite unique in video games. In fact, that kind of intense team effort, requiring the concentration and skill of tens people for several hours working towards a mutual goal, is probably something that not many of us outside the military ever get to experience.

The 'high end' game was even more addictive. Raids took time, several hours a night, and in order to gather a reliable raid force guild members were required to log on at set times. I used to come on at around 7pm, and play until about 12 or 1am, about 4 days a week, and was considered a bit of a slacker, or part timer, for only putting in such minimal hours. A typical raid might yield one or two decent loot items, so even if you got something great on your first raid you still felt obligated to attend 39 more just to return the favour to the people who had helped you to get something. And with at least 16 equipment slots for you to fill, new people joining the guild all the time, and new expansions to the game coming out every year, raiding started to turn into a job rather than entertainment.

I used to start playing after I put my baby daughter to bed, but as she got older 7pm was a bit early to be her bedtime. I continued putting her down at 7pm anyway, getting annoyed if she wouldn't go straight to sleep ("I've got a Temple of Veeshan raid starting in 10 minutes!"). We had another child on the way, and I remember distinctly the night my partner come downstairs at around midnight telling me that her waters had broken. I was in a great group in the Crypt of Sebillis. She phoned a taxi, and I told my friends in game what was happening. No problem! They all rallied round and organised a teleport out of the crypt for me in about 5 minutes, so I had time to log safely before the taxi arrived!

I should have stopped playing right then, but I think it was something like 6 months later before I finally had to give it up. Complete cold turkey for a couple of years. I'd barely touched a single other video game in all that time, but I'd got great value from my $12 per month subscription. I would have ended up spending a hell of a lot more than that in the pub.

 

Ste Pickford
4th July 2005

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