Rudie’s Top 100 Video Games

Earth Defense Force 5

PS4, Sandlot, 2018

This is video games. Shoot giant bugs. Collect giant candy colored boxes. Repeat over and over. Raise the difficutly and do it more. Try new weapons. Play alone. Play with friends. EDF! EDF! EDF!

La Mulana

Vita, Takumi Naramura, 2015

La Mulana is the most video game ever made. Everything is important. Everything is a clue. I must at one point, “Do The Mario”. Successfully playing it requires pages of handwritten notes. It starts to feel like actual research and archeology. 

Eventually I failed the game and looked up how to progress. I’d lost and broke my promise. That’s okay; I am not a world class archeologist exploring a cavernous ancient civilization and defeating dreadful terrible bosses. We’re all human.Still it is my failure. If I found someone that legitimately finished the game, I’d be impressed. If I found someone that tried for 20 hours and gave up, I’d still be impressed. It is hard to imagine a game that uses the player more than La Mulana. Maybe La Mulana 2, but that requires anyone playing that game for more than 45 minutes.

The World Ends With You (DS)

Nintendo DS, Square Enix/Jupiter, 2007

The World Ends with You‘s Japanese title is almost directly “It’s A Wonderful Life.” It’s the kind of title that should rattle in your head as you play because well, the English title is incoherent at best.

The original DS version is ideal. The game wonderfully uses the two screen simultaneously during battle as you have to balance the protagonist’s touch screen battle while their partner uses actual buttons on the top screen. It’s a wonderful balance of multitasking and using all the parts of the DS.

The story has stuck with me. The protagonist starts off as a mopey, standoffish teen who believes himself above it all. He grows into someone who believes friendship and earnestness are admirable traits. What a treat for a video game character to become a well rounded human being by the end. Then at the end you get to go time-jumping to try to change the plot to a true end. Which is a neat take on New Game Plus.

Pokemon Picross

Nintendo 3DS, Jupiter Corporation, 2015

First off Picross is fantastic because Picross is fantastic. It uses the perfect amount of my brain before bed. I just do a little then drift off. If I become good, I start rationing my Picross game. What if I run out? I don’t even look at the pictures anymore.

This Pay-To-Play Freemium Pokemon-flavored Picross I have played consistently for nine years. Since it was on my 3DS, it is certainly the first thing I do when I turn it on. I still haven’t played enough to finish it. I reckon I won’t for a few more years. More Picross for me, I imagine.

Nier Automata

PS4, Yoko Taro and PlatinumGames, 2017

Nier Automata is tragedy upon tragedy. In a melancholy wasteland of civilization, the children and successors of men eternally war with each other under false pretenses. The false pretenses fall away when a loved one is murdered and revenge is all they need to keep killing. Each side continually stresses that the other side isn’t human enough to feel remorse for killing. Anyways if I stop fighting, someone close to me will die.

This is on top of a fantastic Platinum Games battle engine. I can engage with it as little or as much as I like. As the game continues, more and more little wrinkles appear. There are shooter segments with breath-taking camera shifts. Just like the first, there is also Boar-Drifting.

The characters in Automata are full human beings with regrets, dreams, and secrets. The secrets and war are ruining their lives. They are human and will continue to ruin their own lives until they die. Reconciliation is one of the hardest human emotions.

Jak II

PS2, Naughty Dog, 2003

Do I like Jak II? I don’t know. I thought I did. I thought I liked it a lot. I tried to play through it last year. I loved how messy and chaotic the city is. The beautiful time of day and weather conditions catching a particular mission just right. 

The guards roaming the high walled metropolis will say regardless of location, “I hate the smell of this part of the city.” I found myself upon starting every new mission saying, “I hate this part,” based on my memory. I found myself still saying it when I was 70% of the way into the game. “Oh I hated this part,” I declared for the twentieth time. Did I like any of this game? 

I suspect so, because if anyone brings it up I am still inclined to say “Jak 2 is a hell of a video game,” regardless of my own lived experience.

Afterburner Climax

Arcade, Sega-AM2, 2006

I’m sorry if you’ve never gotten to experience the giant swinging cabinet of After Burner Climax. It was one of Sega’s last arcade audacious swings. It covered the area of a walk-in closet. I can still see one broken in Mikado. 

It’s Top Gun The Video Game if you don’t remember Top Gun that well. You blow up oil refineries and hit the afterburners through canyons all under the brave flag of Boeing and Grumman, long may it wave.

Ikaruga

Everything, Treasure, 2001

Each enemy is perfectly in place for me to react to. The game is made to be played on easy, then on normal, and an eternally far away day, on hard. At my personal highest leve,l it feels like dancing, perfectly in sync with the game on display. A death causes me to utter, “That’s my fault.”

LSD: Dream Emulator

Playstation, Asmik Ace Entertainment, 1998

How many games have “emulator” in the title anyways? Anyone is going to be intrigued by a PS1 game called LSD: Dream Emulator,  just like they would be by Pepsiman or Burger Burger 2. LSD fulfills its promise by having me navigate a fragmented series of environments. Each “dream” lasts 10 minutes and has me travel from psychedelic landscapes to blazing sun deserts to being chased by a black dog around a Chinese palace. It captures the floating logic of a dream. The low poly-texture heavy PS1 environs increase how abstract and of the moment it feels. It feels impossible that this was a commercial product. LSD is truly special.

Furi

PS4, The Game Bakers, 2016

Furi looks at the best action games that came before and distills it down to 11 boss battles. It makes me sit and walk along with the protagonist at his own pace as he travels between each one. It wraps it in a modern video game jukebox soundtrack and style. I would love a hundred games that are just as brief, stylish, and confident that I must play them as intended.

Next Up: Kyle, use the function keys.

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