Rudie’s Top 100 Video Games

PT

PS4, Kojima Productions, 2014

The best game that never was. Now talked in hushed tones and legends or the near-complete remake in Unreal you can download for free on your PC. 

Despite it being a demo. Despite it being of no stakes it captures fear. I don’t want to turn to the same corridor again. I don’t want to look in the bathroom. I am deathly afraid of something being on the other side of the glass. It knows what scares me. 

Each time I boot up my PS4 to return to it, I am impressed. It should be available. That it is scattered and locked and thrown away is a travesty. It will be studied in Horror Video Games for decades.

Vagrant Story

Playstation, Squaresoft, 2000

Yasumi Matsuno is a game developer name you can say and it means something.  He’s known for having tomes of world building and starting stories on chapter 4 and promising one day we’d get the rest.  His writing is so good it will shine through the shoddiest of 90s translations.  Thankfully, Vagrant Story’s English translation is quite good.

Vagrant Story is possibly the greatest video game ever made. I’d have to play it through about 15 more times to confirm. Even if I stumble through the whole game and arrive at Final Boss dealing 1 damage a hit, I’m only 700 HP away from Victory. And the game is only about 9 hours long.

I’m also not going to pretend to fully understand the battle system. It was good enough that I concentrated on only 1 of the three sub systems and I went all the way to the credits. If I’m fighting a Dragon, I just run under its neck and stay there.

Meanwhile the game is stunning to look at. A true pinnacle in Playstation art.

Bullet Witch

Xbox 360, cavia, 2006

Bullet Witch will be justified by history. It is six 45 minute long stages. The game is meant to be played on easy, then normal, then hard. Each loop I am more powerful. I am a witch with a broom shaped gun I use to destroy monster freaks. 

It has the spectacle other games dream of. I fight a giant sky whale from the top of a commercial jet. I launch a tornado into the middle of a city center destroying everything. I cartwheel past semi trailers being thrown by giant floating brains.

It’s also a stupid video game where I get lost and annoyed and have to find specific brains to remove video game barriers. It has me constantly traveling from point A to point B. I have NPC helpers I can choose to care about, whether they are useless or not. It is a video game that is beautiful.

R4: Ridge Racer Type 4

Playstation, Namco, 1999

Another game with peak PS1 aesthetic. Because of the way the AI works, it is not fair to call R4 a racing game. It is about driving. Each race starts with the other drivers blasting far away from me and I spend the race catching up while “The Best Driving Music™ ” plays. 

I’ve bought it a dozen times. Almost every time it was 108 yen. I’ll play 2 races at the drop of a hat. The actual game itself is maybe 90 minutes long. It expects me to play it over and over, because it is good. I can unlock 300 different cars if I was obsessive. I am not. I just want to race Helter Skelter again.

Killer7

Gamecube, Grasshopper Manufacture, 2005

Having played this in 2024, I see why I gave Grasshopper Manufacture so much slack for so many years: Killer 7 has 20 of the coolest things you’ve ever seen in a video game in the first 10 minutes. It also has devious video game bullshit. Stuff that makes me yell “you gotta be kidding me!” (not a question) upon learning “the solution.” It is infinitely confident. It is infinitely weird. It is mostly about Japan-America relations and power dynamics following WW2, how the leftist movements of Japan in the 70s collapsed behind a single party state that has ruled the Japanese political landscape for multiple life-times (see also the eventual assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe).

What Did I Do to Deserve This, My Lord?

PSP, Acquire, 2009

I’m specifically choosing the first one of this series of baffling and confusing names. I feel the first one is more organic and messy. Then they made it more of a video game, with each subsequent release still more or less being the same thing. Maybe you want these things corrected, but I don’t need that.

This is a game where I make a dungeon. I hope the monsters that grow and mutate and populate the dungeon are strong enough to stop the adventurers coming to my dungeon. If the heroes succeed, they drag my Dark Lord away and it is game over.

I never became a master of it. I never beat it. It to this day excites my brain on what I am doing wrong and what I could do better. I will never look at a guide for it. The game and my own intuition and judgment are enough fun.

Trauma Center 2

Nintendo DS, Vanguard Works, 2008

Trauma Center 2 is the second game about performing surgery with the Nintendo DS. It requires a steady hand and quick decision making. I’m on a time limit. This is a video game.

I’m going with the second one for tiny little improvements. You can of course play the first if a story about anime doctors fighting an anime disease while a pile of real medical terms is dumped on your DS’s top screen appeals to you. That still happens in 2, just a little bit snappier.

This is also DS gaming at its peak. Each section of the game is less than 10 minutes long if I don’t meet failure. It encourages me to go back and try to perform better on previous surgeries. The last few stages remain the most intense video game experience I’ve had.

Layer Section

Arcade, Taito, 1994

Shooters are always a suicide mission. This has never been more perfectly realized than in Layer Section. I travel from orbit around Earth deep into its core to destroy a computer. This computer has assimulated and destroyed all life on Earth and everything we know of it. I am the last human. This isn’t even revenge. It’s the last twitch by the corpse of carbon life.

Once a friend asked me for recommendations for games on the Sega Saturn. I suggested Gunlock, Layer Section, Rayforce, and Galactic Attack. She came back to me a few days later with a look in her eye, and I laughed. Layer Section is a game of many names.

For many years, Layer Section was one of the cheapest shooters on the Sega Saturn, despite its quality. I vastly prefer it to Radiant Silvergun. The dual-layer shooting feels just enough like a puzzle. Do I just slam the laser button, or wait till you have a full set of lock-ons for a stronger attack?

Each level smoothly connects as I travel deeper and deeper into the new rotten core of planet Earth. Through the scrolling screen, I learn just how much has been lost. When and if I arrive at the center , I’m ready to pull the trigger.

Mega Man 3

NES, Capcom, 1990

The debate rages eternal: Mega Man 2 or Mega Man 3. I go with Mega Man 3. I love it when video games reference their past entries. I love it when games recontextualize environments. Remembering past games through gameplay is a unique asset of the art form. 

I like that I can brute force the game if I am good and fast enough, until that is no longer an option. I love that I have to use the worst weapon on the last boss. I love that I can use a dog to bypass jumps, fly-through the air, or as a submarine; none of these tasks are inherently dog qualities.

Outrun 2

Arcade, Sega-AM2, 2003

Outrun 2, rather than reality, taught me the joy of gear shifting, as I drift around each corner going higher and lower just to maximize not just my speed but my time with the game. Those harder courses expect perfect performance. 

Outrun 2 is a driving game. My girlfriend wants to go far away and I’m ready in my Ferrari to take her. Every 70 seconds, I make a choice of wanting a harder or easier stage. If I pass smoothly around all the turns, I’ll see credits and Thank You For Playing in seven minutes. Sega AM2 made a game that was entertaining in itself.

The next year they’d make Outrun 2 SP which has 15 more stages. The home ports as Outrun 2 Coast 2 Coast would have all 30 stages and a bounty of challenges. They took what was a perfect arcade experience and added to it into a complete home video game.

Next Up: Hanging a frozen towel over a doorframe.

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