Rudie’s Top 100 Video Games

Myst

PC, Cyan, 1993

The best selling CD-ROM game. My dad played through this. Your parents maybe played through Myst. My child’s father played this (that’s me.) It endured because normal people could play it.

It requires no dexterity. You just click on things and solve puzzles in vaguely threatening worlds. 

It is puzzles at its best, in that I am supposed to put the game down and play it while I am not playing it. It is a short game. It could still take you a month of messing and thinking. Beating it feels like an accomplishment. You need to take physical notes!

Dark Souls 2

PS3, FromSoftware, 2014

This is the black sheep of the Souls franchise of game products. I played it for at least a 1000 hours. I played it, hooting and hollering in multiplayer. My crew of friends composed confusing gauntlets for invading and summoned players to run through while we hid. It was the first Souls game with multiplayer that was both perfectly playable and filled with evolutionary dead-ends, locking multiplayer-focused areas on voluntary pathways. Those areas remained horribly empty through the months we played.

One of them is a hyper aggressive invasion area. Another is deliberately setting traps in service of the Rat King (who is good and just). Meanwhile, the whole world has a dreamlogic incoherent connection of spaces, more and more broken than it was in Dark Souls. Everything is failing, even the reality of location. Maybe everyone is lying. Maybe everything is already over. 

None of it is as good as Dark Souls. Advancing in the game is as arbitrary as everything. Discovering the final boss presents a “that’s it”.

Only the esoteric would say they like it and find it more memorable than an Elden Ring, Bloodborne, or Sekiro.

Silent Hill 2

PS2, Team Silent, 2001

As I write this, a remake of Silent Hill 2 looms near. Luckily when a remake comes out, it immediately destroys all extant copies of the original. I find the years have been exceptionally kind to Silent Hill 2. The weird acting and strange CG models all done by a single man only heighten the other-worldliness for me. I can easily see that if I took a step to the left, it would fall apart.

Silent Hill 2 takes the first game’s nightmare helltown and says what if the helltown was unique to everyone? Everyone’s hell is different. We all have our own demons.

How I play the game is quietly tracked in ways I cannot expect and it influences the game. No other game has so adeptly judged what kind of helltown the player deserves. James is a strange man and he does strange things.

It has stuck with people for twenty years because the whole game is littered with clues and symbols that this is James’s personal helltown. He didn’t make it, but maybe everyone in Silent Hill asked for it.

Sonic Adventure

Dreamcast, Sonic Team, 1999

Is Sonic Frontiers just Sonic Adventure: The Video Game? Yes! I love that game too. Sonic Adventure is a pile of barely contained ideas and hope from Sega, giving it one last shot. 

The level design completely falls apart because making Sonic levels is the hardest thing to do in games. The fishing game is a torture device, depending on who you ask. Chao raising is, well, boring. It’s all in there though. The facial animation comes out of nightmares. A large part of the overworld is moving stone eggs for obscure goals. 

On my three most recent playthroughs (as I return to this game time and time again), I got stuck in a sewer unable to complete a required new ability. After 40 minutes of screaming, I completed it effortlessly which is Sonic Adventure. For brief flashes, it is the game it was meant to be, Sonic Frontiers (2022). I love it for being a disaster. And Sonic outruns that orca. There’s a big cat named Big The Cat that loves a frog named Froggy. And running around Mystic Ruins (Sonic Frontiers (2022)) is fantastic. Open your heart; Sonic Adventure is alright.

Missile Command

Arcade, David Theuer, 1980

A game over in Missile Command means at the least the end of the world. On the arcade cabinet, it is loud, aggressive, and causes a knot to form in my stomach. We still live in the world where Missile Command could happen. The amazing thing is we live in a world where Missile Command didn’t happen.

They had Missile Command in the breakrooms of every NORAD station; irony and parody always fail against reality. As Arkanoid is to be played with a paddle, Donkey Kong with a two directional stick, Missile Command must be played with the trackball. It feels like calculating math. Firing missiles at other missiles is math. Eventually all the cities will be destroyed despite my best efforts. 

Maybe the brightest and most idiotic won’t save us. They somehow saved a lot of us for the last 80 years.

The Friends Of Ringo Ishikawa

PC/Switch, Yeo, 2018

I keep writing about Ringo Ishikawa. I keep finding it incredible. It is an open world Japanese High School delinquent simulator with all the rails torn off. I need to remember to go to school. I need to remember to eat. I need to remember your part time job at the video store on Tuesdays. If I don’t, I won’t get smarter, I’ll get hungry, and I’ll get fired. 

I determine who Ringo Ishikawa is. Though the title makes me ask “Who are the friends of Ringo Ishikawa? What are they like?” I exist to wander and explore the town Ringo lives in. I get in fights. Eventually, with effort or not, the credits will roll.

Chu Chu Rocket

Dreamcast, Sonic Team, 1999

The players need to guide mice into spaceships to escape giant cats. Get the most mice in the spaceship. Place the arrows by the corresponding button’s position on the controller.

One of the lesser talked about flash of genius moments on the Dreamcast. It is a game that uses all the controller ports. It wants the controllers in the hands of anyone regardless of their video game knowledge. Every novice midway through their first match discovers they can direct the cats into the other players’ spaceships, a massive mice loss. The match is over in 3 minutes, and desperate to be restarted.

If that is not enough, there are a hundred challenge levels, and endless modes. It’s a game that has been shamefully unported despite the fact the whole game is on a single screen and would take nothing to be reproduced.

Another World

Everything, Eric Chahi, 1991

This is the pinnacle of video game storytelling. A programmer trapped in an ever deadly alien world. He’ll die dozens of times before this brief game is finished. The puzzles are grounded. The other half of the puzzles are using a laser gun to make shields while under fire. He has to communicate with aliens across language barriers. With enough deaths and puzzles the credits roll. 

Nothing separates the player and the game. The player learns at exactly the same pace as the main character, with the added ability to try again and avoid a gruesome death. It shows just enough of the alien world to fill in all the details.

Metal Gear Solid 2

PS2, Konami, 2001

I can look a man in his eyes and know he’s a Metal Gear Solid 2 sicko at heart. He loved it when a game pulled the rug out from millions of players to replace their badass with a badass for a new generation, trained on video games, just like him. 

I do get my feet wet in New York Harbor with Solid Snake, but half a dozen reveals leave him at the bottom of the sound. The main area is solid Oranges and Whites. The sun slowly going down as I continue. Ever increasing echoes of Metal Gear Solid bounce in front of me. It ends with the verdict that the internet will have too much information and someone needs to cull and control it. The long cutscenes might have been a point as the player is left behind with the closing credits.

MGS2 is a game to be finished as the sky turns from black to gray, after playing it all night. The world waking up and you arousing from an information overload. “I guess I should get some breakfast,” I think.

Virtual On Oratorio Tangram

Arcade, Sega-AM3, 1998

To truly understand Cyber Troopers Virtual On Oratorio Tangram (VOOT) is to grasp the twin sticks as its preferred control method. , to hear “Get Ready” before “Into The Blue Sky” explodes into my ear drums. Lock-on is automated just enough that a few matches in, I’m making tactical decisions. 

Any chance to play VOOT is to be taken. Anyone who has been foolish enough to buy the twin sticks for Saturn or Dreamcast assures everyone it was a good purchase. The other home ports get the message across well enough. But making a mech dash around and spin to jump in the air and throw the grenade that eliminates my opponent’s final bit of health is unbeatable with two sticks gripped tight in my hands.

Next Up: The Final Ten

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11