Rudie’s Top 100 Video Games

Siren Blood Curse

PS3, Team Siren, 2008

Siren Blood Curse should have been the future of video games. What if I could play any chapter of a video game whenever I wanted from day one? What if I got the first chapter for free? What if the solution to a locked door puzzle is to just break the lock already?

It remixes and recontextualizes the original Siren into the Made for Americans adaptation. It needs to be more clear and concise, or the convolution goes right over everyone’s head. We’re dealing with a hell pocket dimension in a Japanese village in the 70s and the modern American C-rate television crew stuck in it. Time repeats forever. Breaking everything into twelve 35 minute long episodes lets me take the game in bites before bed. We are supposed to think about the episode excited to play more. Not just binge it.

Lost Planet 2

PS3/360, Capcom, 2010

Lost Planet 2 was given middling reviews at the time, which is fair because the reviewers played it single player. The game shines in co-op. No game since has had as incredible co-op design as Lost Planet 2. 

I played it in multiplayer multiple times.  I have had to wordlessly communicate and organize how to have everyone at their post on a speeding desert train to shift position of a giant cannon to fire at an enormous giant worm. When that shot successfully hits, I jump out of my chair and cheer. There are moments where my party of 4 is split and I only wish my teammates were with me. 

The game is joyous. I have a hookshot, just because. I shoot the glowing orange pustules on the alien bugs until they pop into piles of delicious orange juice. I collect skins, gestures, and Noms de Guerre from a gatcha machine. You learn what Noms de Guerre are.

Noobow

Game Boy, IREM, 1992

Noobow is fantastic. Noobow is about a candy mascot solving tiny puzzles. It’s like if Dizzy was good and simple. It’s by IREM. The music is only there to make me happy.

There is no violence in Noobow. It is a game for actual children. Food mascot games are never this delightful.

Tetris The Absolute: The Grand Master 2+

Arcade, Arika, 2000

Yeah yeah Tetris is the perfect video game. Duh. You ever played co-op single well Tetris with your closest friends and strangers? That’s the best cooperative spirit you can have. You really get to know your best friend of twenty years when you find out he plays Tetris completely different from you.

Firewatch

PS4/PC/Xbone, Campo Santo, 2016

Firewatch is a game for adults. I play as a sad-sack divorced man who takes a job as far from his life as possible to yell at teens. He looks for fires and fosters a friendship/romance with a woman who is also running away from her life.

I want a dozen games that are just this grounded in reality, a character study. There is a mystery, but it is unimportant. There is no final boss. You live with this loser until the credits roll. Or in my case, until the game hardlocked right at the end and I had to watch the ending on youtube. 

Which isn’t to say this is a movie to be watched. This is to be played. While the character is defined, I decide how much he gives in to his proclivities. In the secret Hinge Problems Best of the 2010s, this was number one.

ZeroRanger

PC, System Erasure, 2018

Back in 2018, ZeroRanger re-awoke something in me. I could love shooters and video games again. It is a joyous shooter that wants me to succeed. The Green/Orange/Black color palette is used beautifully. 

While it has obvious references to other shooter,s it also has mechanical/stage references that show a deep love of the genre. It is so inventive and surprising. It changes design and yet remains ZeroRanger. 

To even face the last boss requires a decision and sacrifice on the player’s part. The sacrifice is more symbolic in the history of shooters and more concrete in the reality of modern games. Beating the last boss releases a dozen positive brain chemicals that I am still feeling the effects of.

Rocket Knight Adventures

Sega Genesis, Konami, 1993

While there are many games that celebrate the Megadrive, Rocket Knight Adventures is my pick. It celebrates Yamaha sound-chip. It’s a Genesis game that uses all 56 colors at once. Konami really made some video games back then.

It’s one of the few secondary mascot platformers where I like looking at the animal. He also has a jetpack that leaves me bouncing across the screen in a manner I barely control. Like the best Genesis platformers, each stage is buzzing with what is a new and exciting gimmick. Again, Konami did this a lot.  

There are three sequels to Rocket Knight Adventures, none of them as good.  I bring this up because evidence suggests you can’t make a game better than this.

Death Stranding

PS4, Kojima Productions, 2019

Whenever I start thinking about people trying to traditionally review Death Stranding, I start laughing. This is a game where I spend the majority of my time walking from place to place over a blasted landscape it claims is America. Ghosts roam the earth trying to drag the living into tar. I am a man who cannot die, he just gets resurrected. 

Every death in this world is a literal nuclear level event. The whole world must stop and perform proper funeral rites to disarm the nuke that is the dead body. This game came out before COVID, and yet depicts a world where everyone is isolated and only the delivery man is the flesh and blood contact anyone holed up in their bunkers has.

Sometimes, when I am playing as Sam Porter Bridges “The Man Who Delivers”, I’ll eat shit mere feet from my destination, destroying my cargo. I couldn’t catch my breath from laughing too hard when this happened. I don’t have to look too hard on the internet to find someone saying this is “Bullshit”. If that ruined your fun with Death Stranding, you should immediately quit. I’ve played through this overtly long game twice, giggling the entire time.

Phantasy Star Online

Dreamcast, Sonic Team, 2000

I bought Everquest and Ultima Online at their cultural peak. I’d go over to friends’ houses and their whole family would be addicted to Everquest. When I finally got brave enough to try UO,I was instantly murdered and my starting equipment stolen. I uninstalled it.

The Dreamcast though? The Dreamcast is inviting. Look at that controller. That controller wouldn’t scare a toddler. That controller was designed to not scare up to medium-sized dogs. In Phantasy Star Online, I pull the trigger to change my verbs. There was a 5 language auto-translate system. It encouraged me to make universal symbols. In the future, we’d all be using BEAT time.

This is up there for the game I have played the most, ever. An arcade simple take on MMORPGS. Break it into discrete 20-40 minute levels. Only a four member party. A space setting with a buried lore heavy story if anyone can bother to find it. But I have loot to find. Every time Spotify spits a track from PSO at me, I realize how deep the game is in my psyche. I’ve refused to install the custom fan-PC servers for years because I know what it would do to me. I’d abandon all responsibilities to take down the giant worm Del Rol Le for a fourth time today.

DooM

PC, id Software, 1993

DooM is perfect. It is perfect in all its forms. I am talking about DooM the entity. That is of course DooM E1 which is a perfect hour of game. It includes the successive episodes. It includes DooM 2 which, let’s face it, is a level pack. 

DooM is about opening doors and shooting every demon I see. I’m in hell. There are a lot of demons behind a lot of doors. 

There is the Royal Oil of a million WADs waiting for me as well. All of this is DooM. The impression that I get is I could just give up on video games and just play DooM. All things considered, it wouldn’t be terrible. 

For more than two decades, there have been awards for the best new DooM stuff. The best part is that people get mad at these the way they do at any awards. Something somewhere got snubbed. There will always be more DooM to play or even just the ordinary DooM to revisit.

Next Up: Did you bring it?

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